All those changes sound reasonable. I would also like for Pantheon matches to hide the choice of enemy demigods. This is how other competitive online games do it - like Street Fighter IV - and it means that even if there are bad matchups, you can't just pick a character solely for that purpose.
Allowing auto-attacks to continue while TB/Queen are changing forms would make hybrid builds a lot more viable, without having to muck around with specific skills. The only skills that strike me as obviously underpowered are Compost and Yeti. There are a bunch of skills whose higher levels don't do nearly as much as lower levels, but I don't think that's a bad thing; it encourages people to try out a lot of different skills.
Very good point being made here - the EXTERNAL balance between demigods in 2v2 or larger is quite good, with the Queen as the only dubious character. Even if Queen is OK in the abstract, having a Skill Character and a Noob Character is one part of Street Fighter that I'd like to avoid. On the other hand, the INTERNAL balance between skills for a given demigod, or between items in the shop, deserves some fixing. I think Regulus is the gold standard here, as you can build him several di
I started using Impulse just for Demigod, and I must say the "choose either beta or release version" functionality has impressed me greatly. I'm excited to fire up a beta version and see whether everything is fixed!
This sounds exactly like my current situation - a bug that everyone was confident we'd fix in a couple minutes - and now it's still "one more build and it's done."
What kind of mod support does Demigod have? I'd be willing to hack in a tutorial if it's possible. :-P
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I really disagree with the whole tone of this patch. Nerfing things is always going to be less fun, and make the demigods feel more "samey" than it would otherwise. The most dynamic kind of matches are where everyone is doing crazy things and coordinating. Increasing cooldowns, mana cost, etc. on all these abilities means more seconds of just sitting there passively attacking each other, which is no fun.
My votes for how to configure a Demigod demo: 2 arenas - 1 symmetrical, 1 asymmetrical 3 Demigods, including at least 1 General (this worked well for the OMF:BG demo, and prevents a bad matchup from ruining your entire demo) Very limited access to artifact shop and favors (say, 3 items from each are available) Multiplayer with retail users, so they can see what they're missing Single player, skirmish mode only, with all the demo restrictions A t
@fixmyfavor: Favor points are nowhere near a #1 game-breaking issue compared to dropped connections. Here's a counterexample. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (launched last fall) had a similar problem: points were not earned, reset to 0, etc. Everybody switched to custom games and it went on to sell quite well, and even kept a community around for the patch that fixed the issue several MONTHS later.
This is a truly excellent post. I wish all developers had such clear explanations of what went wrong, why the system works as it does, and what's happening to fix it. Network problems are opaque at the best of times, and load-related issues are worse, so I wish GPG+Stardock the best of luck in finding a solution from what are often extremely vague user complaints.
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