please, please, PLEASE!, make a little effort to make what you write readable if you want any answer

It's a good thing I don't have a lethal combination of ADD/Dyslexia to read a few paragraphs...

He's 110% right. Spent thirty minutes in a game trying to finish off two players who obviously didn't know the game. One of them was a Vampire Lord, and the other was an Unclean beast. My partner and I were Regulus and Oak. 90% of the game was spent outside their citadel killing their towers or trying to backdoor their portal, just to have the vampire lord come in and drop his sandstorm (I have no idea what its called, but thats what it basically is if anyone here plays dota). The Unclean would come in and survive for a bit, then they'd run to their tower. Over, and over, and over again. The entire game was an absolute domination of them. It takes, WAY too long for a landslide victory to slide...I guess you could say.

The map was Crucible. From what I remember of the other maps, the citadel was always in front of the crystal that regenerates you, but on this map it was perpindicular from the entrance to the citadel to the citadel itself. They could just chill in base and whack us all day, and we'd have to retreat. We could NOT kill them, and sat in their base farming creeps because there was no faster way to level without killing them to out DPS the regen crystal.

I'm still playing this game and don't even know all of the demigods/maps yet, but I already have suggestions:

1) The healing crystal needs to be moved significantly farther from the citadel, so when players get low life, can't just sit in base and rely on it. If they get pushed back that far to the point they can't move past their citadel before dropping to critically low health, they should just be dead.

2) Respawn times need to be longer.

I already played two other games that took hours because we were still learning the game, and came back from having all of our towers destroyed to pushing everything into their base and wrecking it. We seriously lost the first tweny minutes but we won the next two hours, only because it was impossible for them to make the final push.

I don't mind it this way. Gives you time to Adapt to the other player's strategy. I had this problem playing against a friend ( I was oak) So I sold all my gear up'd the creep and followed a big group of them till we clashed with his demigod, then I hit him with the dearmor more dmg debuff and the creep helped me grind him into dust. I know it may of not worked in your case but I think this is something that should stay. ps still like the smilies

Does this not seemingly make it impossible to come back once you're behind? If the other team gets some lucky kills on you quickly, you're suddenly gone for 4 hours, they are just going to steamroll your base. Sure it makes things quicker, so you don't have waste your precious expert time, but what about the new people trying to learn the game, how are they supposed to if they spend the entire time looking at a respawn counter?

Not everyone feels like grinding a game against AI for hours on end, games are supposed to be fun. There should be more work put into designing a decent matchmaking system that avoids matching strong players against incredibly new players to combat this, rather than adding strange handicaps to people who as it is don't know what they are doing.

Not to mention if this game gets competitive enough such as DotA or so, there isn't just "Pros" and "Noobs" there are people that play DotA regularily, but not religiously that would get stomped by the more expert players. Should they really get penalised because of their lack of dedication to the game? The game seems to be designed to give players falling behind a chance to catch back up, rather than having matches determined in the first 5 seconds.

Ultimately, the game is brand new so there is going to be a vast majority of these steamroll type matches, because anyone that didn't play the Beta is a complete noob. How about before having a complete cry over the fact that people who only just bought the game can't chain together combos, you let the game catch it's stride.

Game has skirmish for Noobs lol go practice. I like the grinding thru defense's so If my team is loosing I just dump all my gear and buy cit upgrades or purchase the invinci orb and catch the invading army half way up and clog the pipe and buy time. To me the game is fine as it is and allows strats to compensate.

Basically I'm saying grinding thru gives a chance for a back and forth match instead of just steam rolling. ITs no fun to me to start a game and get mowed over because the other guy has some super fast start strat.

I think when a team is Controlling the map (holds all points) there should be some significant bonus (I'm uncertain if there is already a bonus for controlling), but also a penalty if they lose it, for example while Controlling, reinforcements move and spawn 50% faster, but any reinforcements on the map die or get armor penalties or something if you lose control for more than X amount of time.

The problem with this is the relative difficulty and times taken to gain full control, since most maps have portals/gold mines close enough to the citadel that by the times you steal them you will already be attacking it, however it will make the endgame of curbstomp games pretty much instantaneous, as the enemy will be quickly overrun by huge amounts of creeps.

Actually they already kind of have a method of doing this, using the tower upgrades in your Citadel.  However, I agree that the towers should also get stronger based on the strength of the team.  HOWEVER, do NOT based it on Demigod level.  Instead, base it on the team's War Rank.  Teams that are performing poorly fall behind the others in War Rank, so if one team is way ahead, the towers would be weaker than what they would be if the other team had kept up with them.  I'd say make them the same strength they are now for rank 6, the first 5 levels being weaker (level 1 would have VERY weak towers compared to now, to force the team to protect them more right from the beginning of the match), and then the last 4 levels being stronger, so the towers don't fall like cardboard to level 20 demigods like they do now.  Even at level 20 the towers should still prevent at least a little bit of a threat.

I don't think ramping up respawn times will help.  If anything it'll just make it worse for the newer player.  You still have the issue of not being able to successfully attack towers unless you reach a certain minimum level.  The mechanic used to address this really needs to be such that if you're unwinnably behind, you die really fast and don't have your towers dragging out a game that's already over.  Towers are what's causing this imo and they need to be addressed somehow, the question is just how.  Maybe a subtler change could be tying reinforcement spawn rate to the number of flags you control?

EDIT:  Several people have posted since I started this post(hit the post reply button and went afk for a bit).  I actually agree with the guy that said it's better to tie tower strength directly to warscore and have them much weaker.  That's a better indicator for performance than demigod level and I can't remember why I didn't mention it in the original post :/.

@ delVhar For controlling a majority of the map your war rank increases a ton faster.  Tower strength kinda sorta does scale with war rank. (health and dmg upgrades at cit) To me this part of the game is fine. Even with a horrible back and forth game I was in, I havn't been in a game that has taken longer then 35 mins.

Perhaps if one team is dominating well and good for X amount of time, they can call a match wide vote to declare victory (or vice versa, the team being dominated can issue a surrender). If enough people vote, the match ends and is recorded. If there is not enough votes, the game keeps going. If it's obviously a lopsided match, most people will probably be happy just to get it over with in good faith, I imagine.

If you don't like getting steamrolled, just quit?  If it's a pantheon game and you want your measly 10 favor...just hide in a corner and let them win.  The game isn't meant to have flash victories.  Also there is something to be said for being cautious and sticking near towers and gaining Exp and grunt kills.  I know that curb stomp matches are no fun at all, but if you don't play against the best you won't learn their strategies and how to counter them.  You just hit an unlucky as hell matchup, but maybe next time you will have some more skill and experience under your belt and it won't be a one sided game and it'll be fun.

I haven't really played any better players yet, I think I've only lost once. Then again, I've never stepped into the pantheon because I didn't realize you couldn't switch forces. I also don't trust having a record thats maintained by random pugs that can F games.

Oh well, hopefully they'll implement the new pantheon soon.

how about a % increase in dmg against towers whenever u defeat an opposing demigod to speed up the win rate. this bonus dmg lasts for the amount of time it takes for the person who died to respawn again.

just an idea from a person who doesnt own the game but hopefully it makes enough sense for this purpose.