Battle.net... First introduced in Starcraft to the masses. At launch it was awesome. Not to say it didn't have problems, but in STARCRAFT it did some really cool things:
1) Chat rooms for everyone. Just create a new room, chat with friends, have a clan channel, etc. Cool.
2) Double click on someone and vuala, get their stats. Pantheon stats, Regular game stats. Etc.
Then Warcraft 3 came out.
3) Icons which upgraded as your rank upgraded. A sort-of show-off of your skill.
4) Tournament games. Matches you based on your rank to other players so you can play at your approximate level. Not to say this strategy didn't have problems, but it worked reasonably well.
And of course:
5) Always integrated into the game. Felt like a natural part of the game rather than a hacked on interface.
Now this was 1998 and 2002 (I think). I am NOT talking about any recent improvements in Battle.net.
Now lets look at Demigod and Implus' integration.
1) Friends list. This sort of 1-ups B.net. I think. I not sure if it had a friends list, I just can't remember.
2) A hacked-on single-room IRC chat. No pretty interface for making channels. Just a window.
3) No ability to just look at other player's stats. Gota go to the website, then find the player, and see their stats. A hastle if you not playing in windowed mode (I play in windowed since its the only way to not crash my computer when the game crashes, which is WAAAY too frequent).
4) Not integrated into the game. It is in no way a "part" of the game, it is something hacked on last minute. Or so it seems.
5) The user experience and community-making abilities are next to nothing. I can't end a game and tell everyone "hey get into channel "foo"" and everyone just clicks "join channel" and boom we can all talk and play again, rematch, make friends, whatever.
Impulse DOES have SOME advantages. Perhapse the only good features:
1) Friends list.
2) Notification when friends message you (though it would help to make some indicator that the messages you are looking at are old, with a red line below or something).
3) An IRC client. If you know IRC this is good, otherwise its a hastle.
4) Ability to chat and be in a game lobby at the same time.
In my opinion I had a lot more networking going on in B.net in 1998 than I do now with demigod. Simply because of the deficiencies of impulse.
Hope the dev team takes this as a constructive criticism and works on integrating impulse chat and so on, and making it a part of the game, integrate it, think about usability. I would hate for DG to come a dying game simply because of the inability to form good online communities (the game IS an online game after all).
