I have played many (!) video games over the past 20ish years. One thing that bugs me a lot about demigod is that you guys just did not care enough about some simple but yet important things. One in particular that I want to adress is the whole interface and "infrastructure" of the menus regarding the community. So in fact it's not so much about the game itself, but more about its "surroundings".

With demigod we have a some sort of DotA like game which has some unique parts about it, but the genre is the same and the people it adresses are the same. On the one hand there is the casual gamer who just wants to log in on evenings after work to play a fast skirmish and have fun. On the other hand there's the competitive player who couldn't care less about skirmish. This whole issue may become clearer with the following example:

When I started playing Counterstrike, all I did was joining so called public games; meaning I scrolled through the serverlist and joined games with a nice ping and many players. That was my whole "ritual" for a long time. But one day I found more interest in the game, the community grew, people started forming clans and so on. So my gaming pattern changed and buddies and I met in special chat rooms on quakenet (IRC) and organized gathers/fun wars and so on. We joined online leagues, talked about strategies etc. You could say the game became more competitive for us and from that time on we never set foot on a public server again.

Demigod right now is only about "public playing" - joining a skirmish or custom game to have a little bit fun - even Pantheon is in my opinion part of that category (at its current state). Many people who are reading this will think: "Dude, the game's been released for like a week. DUH!" Yes, you are right, but still there is nothing (!) to communicate, to find people, to gather up and so on, ingame. People will have to do that via external chat programs or programs like GameRanger. Sorry, but your little chatbox is just not enough

I don't ask you guys to reinvent the wheel. Just look around. How did Blizzard handle this with Battle.net, what did Valve do with Steam? You have this ingame Impulse menu - something very similar to Steam. Use it! Create a user-friendly environment. I start the game and I don't feel like being part of a community. The only thing there is that stupid chatbox. Create a more sophisticated chat system with many channels  etc. where people can look for and find other people who share the same interest. Organize tournaments. Make it possible that someone can invite others to his game via the chat by just right clicking his name and selecting the appropriate "command". It should be possible to just switch between chat or community menus in general and the game all the time by just pressing shift+tab. Pimp up the friends list so people get a message, when friends join a game if they want to join that game as well. These are just examples.

Just look around, compare to other games and create a community friendly "infrastructure". I believe there is a big and quite nice community out there. Don't force us to find ways of communicating outside the game because the game right now doesn't offer that much regarding this issue. It feels like the community is scattered all over the place and it's your job to create a nice platform for us.