Another rage-post (with fair questions asked)

I'm very aware this is probably the 300th post that sounds like a bunch of complaining, but please hear me out. I'd like to describe my personal opinion on the state of this game. I want to give what I think is a fair summation of what the situation has been like from the beginning (well, Beta). And I also have a few genuine and legitimate questions for anyone who might have their answers. First, let me state two things clearly.

1) I have strongly supported Demigod from the very beginning, and I still do.

2) I'm not making this post to complain but rather to ask what I think are legitimate questions. I just want some honest, direct answers. I don't see too many among the mess of posts around here, and I'd just like some answers for the things I've been wondering about.

Now for the spiel. I'm just realizing this will probably be a long post and I expect the vast majority of people who click the link to get here will look at the length and be like "Whoah, I'm not reading that much, cya." That's totally understandable lol. I don't expect almost anyone to care to read this whole thing. I'm just frustrated enough that I want to finally write the things I've wanted to say, even if nobody will read them.

I preordered months before Beta 1 and have been reading around the forums to see what people have been saying about the game. Observations, questions, criticisms, all that. I like to see all the opinions and ideas people have. From the very beginning, from Beta 1 till now (and even still) I have had faith in this game and its developers. I respect GPG. Dungeon Siege is one of the most fun games I've ever played. Simple but addictive. I think DS2 was great too, so I trusted GPG knew what to do with creating Demigod. All the early signs looked good to me. Beta stages started simple and skeletal but with each next stage the game filled out a little bit more. Yes, there were bugs, and of course, a lot of unbalanced things and exploits. This is the first Beta I've ever been a part of but even I know that these things are par for the course in those early stages. The point is that the ideas were there and the gameplay had a lot of potential, and for months and months I was SUPER excited.

Release day. Wow. I don't need to summarize that. A lot of people on here were present for it. No more words need to be wasted describing it. Release didn't faze me a bit. This stuff happens. A lot of people blamed pirates. I'm one of those who believe that wasn't the chief problem. Stardock just did not foresee the load their servers would be taking. I forgive them. Nobody's perfect. Their system of connecting players was totally insufficient and just utterly unpractical. Everyone recognized this, including them. They admitted it. I respect Frogboy for apologizing time and again; most companies avoid doing that. They got to work looking for a better solution. This was not a game with a ton of funding and a big team working on it (as far as I've heard). It would take time for a solution to be found. People have been having connection issues from the beginning and it's taken a long time, but bit by bit the system has been modified to work better. I'm sick and tired of people saying 'nothing has improved at all.' That's just ridiculous. The reality is a lot more people have been able to connect. And it's still getting better. Yes, for some it's gotten worse again, but by and large it's all improving. I think a lot of people overlook the fact that the people who aren't having connection problems rarely write posts saying that. Of course you're going to see posts by those who can't play. But those who can aren't gonna just write a post saying that. I hope people keep in mind that there are far more people who are connecting just fine, especially now, than there are who aren't. And Stardock still tries to pay attention to individual problems with routers and setups and such. That's nice. You don't see too many big-wigs caring about individuals anymore.

Progress HAS been made. But there is a LONG way to go, too. Everybody here recognizes that. The bitching doesn't end on these forums. There's a lot of nasty useless talk, but also a lot of fair complaints. I've been one of the lucky people who haven't had any connection problems online. Never did. I never doubted tons of people had trouble, but I was thankful that I didn't have any issues myself. That said, the game's problems beyond connectivity still plagued me of course as they did everyone else. We're all using the same build; we're all experiencing the same issues. We've all seen the ability bug and all the other annoying and game-breaking bugs, and random crashes and stupid things that shouldn't be happening. Nobody's happy about it. I'm not either. I've been very patient. I've had faith in GPG and Stardock. I think they really are trying. This business about refunds is really admirable too. Who the hell does that anymore? That said, today I finally blew up. I've had crashes before from lobbies, and some in-game. Lobby crashes were usually due to me alt-tabbing, so I stopped doing that. Never wanted to risk alt-tabbing in-game, so I dunno what would happen there. But for the most part I haven't had too many crashes. The ones I HAVE had in-game though were very frustrating. It broke a fun experience in my day.

Today it happened again. First time in a LONG while. I was in a 2v2 on Crucible and my teammate and I were losing since the beginning. We were up against a Rook and Regulus that were working together pretty well. I actually expected my teammate to quit after a few of his deaths (as so very very very many do) but he didn't. That was pretty cool. I felt pretty sure we were going to lose, but I don't like to quit on a teammate who hasn't quit on me yet. So I stuck it out. And so did he. And holy shit. The tide started turning ever so slowly. They'd been slowly pushing us back and were now assaulting our set of towers just in front of our valor flag, but finally we got a couple key kills on them and we started to push out again with our reinforcements. I can't describe the next 15 minutes. They were insane. It was back and forth. All four of us died a few times. We were barely holding our own but at one point my teammate and I (can't remember his name) killed both guys and we sprinted out to recapture the artifact flag and we each bought mageslayer. When we came back to fight the game was really getting different, and we began to force them to retreat more and more and we got a few more kills in (we still died a few times along the way). It was just so intense. Oh, if anybody's curious I was a Beast and my partner was a Regulus. Eventually I got Ashkandor (enemy Reg had one too) and then we really picked up the pace and were pushing them steadily back to their towers and busting down tower after tower. It was so exciting. I tp'ed back to base for a few potions and more scrolls, then went back to join in again near their valor flag. We were just coming up to the Valor flag together, my teammate and I and I was feeling that epic comeback feeling rising up in me and then my screen blinked a couple times, my resolution changed, my desktop background came up, and I saw a giant box of text and read Unhandled Exception. I blinked myself. And then I sat bolt upright and ran my hands through my hair and groaned angrily the way I imagine cavemen did long ago. I was so fucking pissed. For a whole minute there I was angrier than I've been in a long time. Actually I was going to write this post hours ago, right after that happened, but I decided to force myself to wait and cool down and write something reasonable instead of a rant, because God knows we've all seen enough ranting on these forums. It was just so extremely frustrating to just suddenly be torn out of a game that had been and would still be so good. I only ever had one other comeback that was about as extreme as this one. This match was incredible. And suddenly, before I could see it through and feel fulfilled in achieving what I had fought so hard for for 45 minutes, it was just suddenly gone and I was staring at a bunch of text that to me equated to the computer saying "LOLOLOL YOU JUST GOT PWNED FOR NO REASON HAHAHA SUCK ON IT LULZ."

Anyway. You get the idea. A bunch of questions started going through my head. I'll try to put them coherently, because at the time they just flooded so fast and violently I didn't know which ones were important or fair. Please, anyone who thinks they have some insight to these things, please tell me what you think. Let's see...

Why do random crashes like that happen? I haven't had an in-game crash in a long while. Why then? Some extremely specific scenario happened, some series of events happened right in succession that the game didn't know how to handle and it died instantly? How does that happen? I did some Java programming a while back but I don't know how large-scale clients like this work. Can someone give me a general example of why this stuff happens? Why now after so long without any trouble? What could possibly have happened that game to make it crash that didn't happen in others before it? If I have no idea what I'm talking about and there's some other reason these crashes happen, enlighten me. I'm not proud. I don't presume to know much. That's why I'm finally posting these questions. I'm frustrated enough now to take the time to ask them.

This is the one that really bothers me. As soon as 1.01 was released people were clamoring about TONS of stuff that was still broken, and even some stuff that was now broken that wasn't before. Wtf? I actually noticed the update just minutes after it went live, and immediately started playing to see if anything was noticeably different. My very first game my question was answered. I was playing UB and the very first spit I tried on someone didn't work. I didn't understand what happened. As the game went on I saw the pattern. I made a post about it here (don't worry it's tiny and a quick read) so I won't waste more of your time describing it in this post. There were other things that were immediately obvious about this new build that were wrong that weren't wrong before. This is the kind of thing that boggles my mind. How the fuck do the devs not see this stuff if they're testing the build before releasing it? 1.01 was an important build. It's the first big one by GPG since launch. It's the one that was supposed to fix a lot of glaring issues. Everyone was waiting for it to finally get made and be released. I got a very clear impression that Stardock/GPG recognized that this build was important and that it was important to get it right and not to rush it out. There were a few signs. Last Thursday Brad said something in a journal about them having the build almost completed and said that he didn't know whether they'd release it tomorrow (Friday) because they wanted to test it more fully. Sounds good! Test away! Get it right! I assumed that because he said such a thing about Friday that it would probably come out on Monday if not Friday. Monday rolled along. Nothing. 'That's fine,' I thought. They must still have been looking at it. Fine by me. I'm patient. This build is big and very important. I'm perfectly willing to wait for it so they can get it right before releasing it to the community. I'm sure they'd like to avoid as much bitching about broken crap as they can. So another day of waiting didn't bother me at all.

Tuesday. I'd read Tuesday's journal and went on to play Demigod not long after the journal was out and the game already asked me to update. Awesome! It's out! I quit, open Impulse, update, and load the game. I get online and start a custom game. I play. And within the first three minutes of gameplay I run into an extremely obvious and glaring bug. See above link. I couldn't believe it. 'Seriously? That quick? I just started playing and already I hit a bug?' And this is a very monumental bug. And I went on forums soon after to see if I was alone. I wasn't. I read that the Sedna bug and others were still being experienced. Wtf? Seriously? How does this happen? I almost see 1.01 as a make-or-break build for a portion of the Demigod community because people have been clamoring about all these problems since the beginning and this build was promised to solve many of them. I fear that a fair number of people who were already really frustrated about the game will ditch it altogether after seeing that the build they hoped would solve their problems has solved a few, has not solved a few, and has made a lot of new ones. Again, I fear this. I don't want it to happen. I don't want people to quit on Demigod. I love this game. It is so much fun. But in a way I can't blame them too much anymore. I've always stood by this game. I hardly ever made posts, but when I read people losing faith in the game and GPG/Stardock I would silently say 'Aw, please just hang in there, they're working hard on it, they'll get it working right eventually, just give them time.' But now, after 1.01, it's very difficult for me to continue thinking that way.

I'm still going to play Demigod. I love this game. And I still believe it will get better. But I am extremely disappointed in GPG for releasing a build whose brokenness became apparent to me and many others within our first few minutes of gameplay. How do they not see these bugs if they tested before releasing??? I know they tested. I'm not doubting that. But how do they miss this? I just don't understand it. I'm not the only one who's disappointed. Many others are too, and I'm sorry to see that some are already saying they're fed up entirely now and are going to leave the community.

I apologize for the length of this post. It prolly got pretty redundant in a few places. I apologize for the cursing. I'm sure it doesn't help my argument when people see that. I apologize for the very pointed and fierce criticisms. I don't mean to offend anyone. I don't think I'm perfect and I don't think I could do a better job than any of them. If anyone could address some of my concerns I'd really appreciate it. And you can go ahead and flame me too (as I'm sure many would if they bother to read all this lol). I don't mind the flaming. I'm not perfect. I might be completely off-base and biased and unfair here. Go ahead and tell me. I don't want to necessarily hear that I'm right. I want to hear the truth. Cold hard facts. I want to get a more objective picture than my own inevitably skewed perspective on things. Please help me out.