Well, as a reply to frogboy, i see people get proxied all the time. Perhaps somesthing wrong with their internet provider or so, but proxie isn´t fixed.

You might say that people get connected to "their" proxy server in their part of world, never the less. It´s not working.

It is a lottery to let proxies play with you, sometimes ok, but most of the times it lag the shit out of people. Most people have not all the time of day to play, and if proxie/lag hell breaks loose Demigod works at 25% speed.

One round and gaming night is over two ours later.

Instead of turning off chat, if you've got an overbearing personality on your team, just do the opposite of everything he says.  At least it would make your experience more entertaining.

Agreed on the last 2 points.

Maybe the issue is more with the loading of "Casual game" to imply something like peggle or bejeweled. In that respect, DG certainly isn't a casual game.

I think your design philosophy makes DG a "Casual game" in the sense that it does not seek to draw the hardcore crowd of HoN/DotA, but rather those people that played those games and enjoyed their style, but didn't enjoy the difficulty level/intensity/complexity. I think DG succeeded in creating gameplay that does exactly that, and labelling it as more casual/easier than DotA is fairly accurate as long as you avoid the aforementioned word loading.

Personally, I joined the DG community with the release of the demo - as I suspect many others did as well.  I have been loving it ever since.  I also haven't had trouble finding games to play, although finding *competitive* (equally matched) games is much more difficult.  I do believe that with some tweaks to Custom Games that allow players to engage in their own match-making, many who may have briefly turned away from DG due to initial bad experiences will return.  New Demigods will also do a world of good for this game, as well as replays, clan support, and forthcoming mods (alternate game modes, UI improvements, balance tweaks).  At the risk of sounding overly optimistic, I think DG will undergo a resurgence this fall - esp if Stardock successfully advertises these new features/improvements.

Let me first say that I like both LoL and HoN.  I like them partially because they draw off a particular demographic of Demigod player that will never be happy with the kind of game we're looking to make.

On the risk of speaking for my friend Mike Marr at GPG, Demigod, as it is today, is the game we wanted. That's not saying it couldn't be improved (see my complaints on MP stats, lobby stuff, and item balancing) but those are things that can be addressed.

For me, that Demigod has 8 Demigods is a feature not a bug.  There is NO way I would ever have supported there being dozens of Demigods.  I would like to see more maps though and it's something we're going to try to get.

The game mechanics of Demigod are ideal IMO. My one request would be that flags give powers too (i.e. additional spells) and such but in the bigger scheme of things, it's not a huge thing.

But I don't see Demigod as being for the "casual" crowd.  

As for the size of the MP community, I think a lot of people (I know a lot of people myself fall into this) they want Demigod v1.2 or at least v1.19.

If you get more maps, please get 3v3 map like cataract.

Yep.  While Leviathan, Zigurat, etc. are beautiful and all, 3v3 on Cataract seems to be the optimal size for this game.

I've had awful MP experiences, always kicked around because of the mess my connection status become.

It's painful to find a suitable game, and in my short experience, people quitted the game before it ended, because after sometime there is no reason to remain fighting. SP is good, but got old quicker than i thought. It's been sometime since i don't open DG.

I don't regret buying DG, Stardock and GPG are good people, and from my point of view, their game delivered what i expected, i just don't see any bright future with this messy connectivity, which "bottleneck" the users. I personally can't make the MP to run well, i recognize my hardware is old, but new games are cheaper than new hardware, so i moved on, bought some new games and now i'm waiting for 1.2, to have some fun with new characters.

Demigod is not a casual game because it is not forgiving to the casual player.  Put another way, one bad player on a team screws that team over.  Two experienced players cannot carry a casual player.  If they could, this game would be a bit friendly.

But here is the kicker, the game also does not adequately address the needs of the competitive player - predominantly because there is no robust match making service for teams.  Premades have a horrendous time finding a competitive game.

As to population, Frogboy has better access to the numbers than I have.  But, the server stats webpage definitely shows a decrease in the number of players in my time slot.  A month or so ago there were about 2100 people reported as being logged into DG.  Now I get about 1400.

Proxies work fine. You can see people's pings in the lobby beforehand and what you see in the lobby is what you get in the game.

Back when proxies were broken you could still have a good game with them so long as you paid attention to your ping before the game started. If the ping was low with everyone it was fine, if it was under 200 to everyone but one and it was 1500 to that guy, the game was going to be terrible.

That issue highlights something that I think would be just generally useful even when proxies aren't involved, and that's if some kind of flag indicated when a person had over 300 ping to anyone, not just to you.

The proxy issue was in part so dramatic and generated so much paranoia about proxies because the poor proxy connection was invisible to everyone but the two proxied players. It really put the burden of checking connectivity on the shoulders of players who had no idea they should be looking for it.

This.

8-10 Demigods with various skill builds is enough. Personally i'd better play game with 8 heroes, that have variable skill builds, rather then a game with 50+ heroes with, hmm... no skill builds. But Demigod needs more items to make item builds more variable (because constant banded->unbeakables->nimroth->vlemish for almost ANY hero in any build (except ooze UB, that skips mana items) is pa bit annoying).

I think 8-10 DGs is enough as im not that interested in learning 50+ demigods and their different skills and how to counter them. With less of that i think i can think more on strategy, movement and so on. I think thats where real strategy comes to play.

Its easier to know your enemy with less DGs to learn, and its easier for a beginner to learn to play.