henlopen

Join Date 03/2009

Community Support

Hi, as an avid player of DotA, I know very well that it's greatest strength lies in the support from its community. People are involved, giving ideas, making guides, finding bugs, hosting games, making 3rd party programs to reduce lag, helping test and edit the map, you get the picture.

My question is, how much community involvement will there be in Demigod? Sure, there may not be a huge fan base at first, but if the game is good, and there are enough people in the community that want to help with the game, how much will they be involved?

Will our comments be weighed and suggestions implemented as they are in dota? Will new patches come out regularly and include hero and item changes/additions/balances based on community feedback?

I think this is something really important that makes a simple mod like DotA so successful. The community has embraced it. And the game makers breathe life into the ideas and thoughts of the players.

So surely, some freelance map editors like icefrog and guinsoo would be outdone in quality, attention to detail, time and devotion to the making the game fun by people who's careers it is to make games and have actual salaries. At least that's what I hope.

Now, I don't want this to turn into another demigod is not dota thread so spare us all the points you want to make. I'm asking if it's possible to get the kind of community involvement with demigod as you do in dota.

If this thread has already been created, sorry. I'm new here and I didn't find it when I used search.

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Well you can do a lot with modding currently. Pretty much everything is done with lua scripting.

Technically i think you could make a tower defense map.. probably even make the towers cast spells. Not sure if you can code AI for them.

However, there is no way to send your mod to someone connecting to your game. They have to install it manually.

Theres others that could answere better.. But the lack of being able to auto-upload your mod to people joining your game will hinder it siverely.

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Custom mod support will be added at a later time. Until custom mods is enabled like dota for warcraft3, there won't be much community support.

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in wc3 they're encompassed in the maps which is a great system..

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post realease probabbly.. but you could say that the open beta was a way to get the community involved

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i'm not really talking about mods as much as i am talking about the actual game. i think players should be allowed to continuously supply feedback on balance issues and new ideas to the game creators. kind of like a permanent beta. so the game is always evolving and getting better and you never get bored of it.

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Stardock and GPG have stated that they budgeted for a year of free post-release support, and both have been heavily involved in these forums looking for feedback throughout Beta. If you look at the Sins of a Solar Empire forums, also published by Stardock and with a smallish Dev team, you see that this didn't stop at release. I'm fairly optimistic about your chances, henlopen ^^

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and if demigod is successful hopefully continue longer than a year? i hope stardock and gpg listen to their customers. afterall it is the consumer playing the game. it should be made the way they want it. and a better game makes for better sales. everybody wins.

and i hope a full year of post-release support doesn't mean their just gonna release new demigods into the game without changes for balance. even though more demigods is not a bad thing.

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I will be very surprise if after 1 year, they have not announce an expansion pack. Looking at gpg and stardock's history, most of their games have 1 or more expansion packs.

Demigod looks to the type of game that can have yearly expansion packs. Their free updates or paid update/expansions will include everything like new demigods, new skills to existing demigods, new maps, new items, balances, etc.

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After a year they'll probably charge $10 per Demigod...

Who knows if they're going to add more skills, redo current ones, redo, fix, and add items for free rather than make people pay for them an expansion and divide the community.

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even with stardock's whole "gamer's rights" spiel i know money is still a high priority for them. people don't realize that constant patches based on community input is a goldmine for success. i can see them making a 30 dollar expansion pack with some extra items/maps/demigods and then leaving the players to figuring out the best builds and demigods and then its just rinse and repeat until the game gets stale. i hope they prove me wrong

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Quoting henlopen,

reply 10

You mean like with Galactic Civilizations II which has had dozens of pretty significant free updates (including Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 which was a free update released nearly 3 years after the original game's release) and is still regularly updated to this day?

Or maybe Sins of a Solar Empire which included a completely revamped multiplayer system for free in Sins v1.1 (not to mention the free updates prior to that?).

Now, in a game we publish as opposed to develop we work with developer Gas Powered Games on those updates but such updates have been baked into our publishing agreement with a budget towards them to ensure there are free post-release updates to Demigod explicitly to address balance, etc.

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that's nice.

please read this article

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3966/postmortem_defense_of_the_ancients.php

here's an excerpt:

In order for DotA to be successful, it was necessary to leverage volunteers in a significant way. The entire staff, including Guinsoo, was a volunteer. This afforded the team some interesting advantages that many companies (gaming or not) would definitely envy.

As the team manager, Guinsoo has no trouble motivating volunteers to spend time working on something they were really passionate about. Everyone wanted the game to be popular and successful for no other reason than that they wanted to work on a popular and successful game. This project was clearly not "just a paycheck" to anyone on the team.

There were also no business requirements, no deadlines to worry about, no business model to be mindful of, no marketing team, producers, or executives who had to be kept in the loop. This allowed the team to focus purely on gameplay, without having the overhead of project management, daily standup meetings, sprint planning meetings, and so forth.

Having such a small team with only one leader also meant that iterative process could happen at a much quicker pace. Rapid iteration and content releases is one of the cornerstones of the success of DotA.

After the discovery of a bug in the morning, a patch could be released by the afternoon, simply by uploading a new file to the distribution website. Once posted there, new versions quickly propagated to the playerbase. A new piece of content or a new feature could be implemented and distributed overnight.

The entire development process being controlled by a small group of people also meant that the design team usually maintained a completely unified vision.

All development was done by a group of friends, and the traditional company politics that we all know and love would rarely come into play. This also meant that releases could be tightly controlled without the risk of leaks.

will the development team for demigod have the kind of passion and commitment that the editors of dota had for the game? it's every gamer's hope that they do.

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It seems to me that you are asking kind of a pointed question. No matter what the response, Gas Powered Games / Stardock is not a community based project, and as a result, I'm sure their answers will fall short of what you are asking - even if they say exactly what you want to hear.

As Frogboy has pointed out, the best thing you can rely on is Stardock's history with games, and their support that they have maintained for them. I imagine that the support for Demigod will be no different, and may even be greater than what Stardock has done historically if Demigod is a success sales-wise.

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Interesting read, Henlopen - that exerpt is on page 2, did you happen to read the rest of the article? It seems mostly to deal with the various infrastructure shortcomings and mod limitations faced by the developement team and DoTA community.

I can't speak for the devs of Demigod, but I can tell you that many of the problems listed on page 3-5 of that article have been eliminated from this game. It's hard to have the passion and commitment of a true fan when you have a family to feed, but every update GPG produces is going to be built upon a much more sophisticated and complete foundation than DoTA had, imo.

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yes i did read the whole article. that's why i'm very excited for games like demigod and league of legends to come out. and i also want both games to be very successful.

now bear with me, i don't want this to be a LoL-Demigod-DotA-you're-comparing-apple-to-oranges thread,

but i posted this same exact thread in the league of legends forum and the first response i got was this:

"Here's a link to the FAQ page: http://www.leagueoflegends.com/pages/faq

And here's a quote from the FAQ page:
"The community will play a fundamental role in the development of League of Legends. As a member of the League of Legends community, you will have an unprecedented voice in what new game features are created and implemented. We want to hear your coolest ideas for new Champions, new game play features, and whatever else is on your mind! Come to the Community section of the League of Legends website to join the discussion on our forums."

And here's a quote from the front page:
"Participate in the creation of League of Legends through our Suggestion EngineTM the community will have an unprecedented voice in what new content is created and implemented into the game."

And here's a thread where the game developer directly asked for suggestions:
http://forums.leagueoflegends.com/bo...read.php?t=664

Check all this stuff out, should answer your questions."

that was more along the lines of what i wanted to hear. naturally, this is because the makers of LoL were the editors of DotA in the article i linked previously.

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Again, interesting. I'm not sure what to tell you, henlopen. The devs here do have a proven history of massive support and community feedback relative to the industry at large and have provisionally committed a year of free updates (with Sins of a Solar Empire there were 10 or more major updates in the first year), but it does sound like the LoL devs are attempting to take it a step further.

Will LoL devs be able to work within a new company infrastructure with the same responsiveness they had as a mod team? Will they be able to design an engine from the ground up that outperforms what Blizzard had already given them? Will they be able to balance the no doubt titanic influx of community ideas with the need to produce a working game?

If they can make it past the bumps in the road every startup encounters and the ones that are specific to their case then I think LoL will be a successful game with potentially more community feedback than Demigod. But we are looking at two projects on the far far end of a spectrum here - monolithic corporate indifference is balanced uneasily at the other end.

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