We're putting up Beta 2C as we speak. Just 2 business days after beta 2B.

Now, before anyone asks, YES we are working on adding binary patching support into the game and Impulse so that these updates are much smaller.

So what's new? Here is a partial list:

1. Password obfuscation is in! Yay! So is tabbing between controls.
2. Various display issues corrected.
3. Sedna got some balancing
4. Citadel upgrade costs increased
5. Flag control multipliers enhanced: If you have 60% of flags, your war score increases by 2X and if you have 75% of the flags, it goes up by 4X.
6. Lots of work done on multiplayer connectivity (see below).
7. Audio quality controls added.
8. Some arena tweaks
9. Some sound and voiceover tweaks

So let's talk about multiplayer here because there's a lot of misconceptions about how it works.

Demigod is a peer to peer game (as opposed to client server).  That means that each player has to be connected to another player for it to work which can be pretty challenging. If you've ever played a game where you couldn't host but could join, you can get an idea of our challenge: In Demigod, all players are, in effect, hosts.

So why was this done? There are many reasons for it. For one, it tends to reduce lag between players and in a game like Demigod where timing is important, reducing lag is a big deal.

So what is the problem at this point?  Right now, a player creates a game, someone tries to join and until those two players are able to connect, the guy joining is staring at the "connecting" screen.  But then, someone else tries to join, now both the people are waiting at the connecting screen until all 3 are connected to each other.

So let's say right now there's a 50% chance that player A and B won't be able to connect.

If it were a 1 on 1 game, that would mean you could join half the games. If there are 2 people in the game, that means there's a 25% chance you can connect (50% of 50%).  If there are already 3 people in the game, that means there's a 12% chance you'll be able to connect.  You see how this gets bad in a hurry.

So what if we get the connectivity up to 90%?  So 9 out of 10 games with only the host you can connect to.  What if there's 2 people in? You're already down to 80%. And so on. 

So what can we do?  Well, that's what we're working on.  Right now, I'd say we're at over 90% connectivity in less than 10 seconds and 95% in less than 20 seconds to connect to a random person. But given the current UI/experience we give users, even if we get it to 99% (which is our goal) we need to provide more feedback to the player and more control.

On our tests yesterday, what would happen in a typical 6 person game is that there'd be one player who just couldn't connect in a reasonable amount of time to the other players.  Right now, the result would be everyone but the host would be staring at a "connecting" dialog.

What we need to do is A) Provide feedback so players can see what's happening and ideally let the host kick out the player who just can't seem to connect to everyone else.