Is A Constructive IRC Dev Chat Feasible?

Yes.

No.

The limited time constraints ensure you can't answer every question which usually results in anarchy on the chatroom as people who think their questions are important get pushed to the side while others as what they see as stupid questions get asked. Eventually people get annoyed and start to butt in anyway in an attempt to get heard and slowly devolves the experience into a slanging match. Add to that the dev's won't release anything important, "classified" or provide accurate answers to critisism so generally skirt around answers and it just increases the problems.

You'll look over a transcript of the conversation and realize it was a complete waste of time.

And if you're wondering why i say this, i've seen it happen a dozen times on various MUD's when the games makers hold these realtime conversations in the games...always ends up the same without fail.

If you want a chat, go onto the IRC channels Stardock uses constantly. A trickle approach is more likely to get answers than a barrage from thousands of users.

how about putting up journal for people to post these most pressing questions... then narrow it down to something like 6-8 really good ones that can then be answered either over and IRC press release or at the developers discression.  i think the point is that the community want to talk to the developers at GPG.. not SD who are acting as middle men.

I said to use mute for a reason.

And yes, we want communication with GPG.

Oh, i assure you every conversation like you mention i've been a part of also had muting in place, still ends up a mess. You'd be better off doing as Scottish said and having a thread where people can ask questions, then have Stardock vet them and select the "best" 10 or so and pass them forwards, but even then you'll end up with a lot of people getting pissed who think their question was more valid.

Its a very unworkable situation when you are dealing with hundreds, never mind thousands of people.

how about making it VIP... say 10-20 top contributers from the forums have a nice sit down with dev's.  this way the questions get answered and if anarchy does insue then they only have a small group to controll (or mute).

We don't want to talk about balancing. We want to talk about features.

It's entirely feasible from a general point of view (we've done them before for GC2, Sins, etc, where the main channel gets muted and moderators gather questions from a second channel), but whether one would be productive with Demigod at this point is hard to say, given the tone a lot of people tend to be taking of late.

There you have it, guys: It's all YOUR fault.

I do not think its fair to generalize the community kryo. There are some great people on these forums who can articulate their opinion well. We care enough about how great Demigod is and could be.

You could PM the sensible people, there's probably about 20 or so that would take you up on it I'd imagine.

I think the modders in particular are likely to have some specific questions, while the rest of us are interested in more general questions regarding balance, features and timelines.

Whatever format Stardock/GPG would choose I still want this type of constructive conversation. Lets keep this thread bumped with other people who would appreciate this conversation with the devs.

100% agree... with the community being overrun with trolls, flamers and down right rude people its important for constructive communication (even if it isn't directed at the idiot majority)

Use it as a marketting tool and arrange the chat through xfire, they host dev chats and advertise it through xfire. Their chats are as controlled as much as required

Out of interest the way xfire does it is they have a devs chat room which is read only and a communal one. You post questions in the communal one and then the devs answer in their area. This allows control to stop the devs room getting out of hand

Anything would be nice. These forums are not entirely filled with flamers/trolls.

Honestly I think that saying the forums are full of trolls and unproductive is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just ignore who needs to be ignored and ban who needs to be banned and continue the dialogue.

xsive_death, why do you come to this site? i dont care how rude this sounds: every post you say is negative. none of them are good. none of them. please stop, if you hate this game, think it fails, don't want to try and fix it, just leave. i already have been just ignoring your posts, hopefully others do or at least notice how your posts are harmful

as for a chat. it seems like a good idea but I think it is better suited for beta's or huge updates. I think stardock and gpg know what we want

Well that's what we want to talk about. Huge updates.

As in the 2 additional Demigods.

Replays.

Modding. What can we expect?

Impulse's big update and how it affects Demigod.

Can we realistically expect any new maps?

Prep questions ahead of time, post them, let the devs/stardock take a look ahead of time, and they can remove any caustic types ahead of time, invitation only.

Is the friends list going to be imporoved in the near future?

Is team automatching expected any time this year?

Could kryo or Yarlen maybe relay this idea to Frogboy? Unless there's someone else in direct communication with GPG.