You can get a refund on Stardock games if they don’t work for you:

http://www.impulsedriven.com/support/return_policy.aspx

As a professional network engineer, I can tell you that NAT (and PAT, which is really what we’re talking about here) do introduce a lot of problems and limitations, and that P2P is a much more difficult architecture than Client-Server to design multiplayer games around. They’re not just incompetent, this is genuinely tricky stuff.

Most of the really rock-solid multiplayer systems we know (the big MMOs, Battlenet, Xbox Live, etc) are based around the company providing a big robust server infrastructure for client-server apps (then usually charging you recurring money for it). Hell, even bit torrent isn’t really 100% P2P, it needs tracker servers to broker the whole thing for you.

That said, clearly they should have tested for this. You can’t just put 20 beta testers on your company LAN and call it done. Obviously the testing needed to be more thorough before release, and as he says – they shouldn’t think of networking code as just something you can buy and plug in; it’s a crucial part of the game and should be treated that way.

But I think their response has been excellent. Admitting the problems, working on them, refunding for those that emailed in their complaints, discounts going forward, etc. I feel bad for Stardock taking hits on this one, but that’s them paying for the cost of their mistakes. I’ll be buying it down the road, and I’ll be happy to give Stardock my money when I do.

Blizzard says hello? When was the last time you failed to start a War3 game? When was the last time everyone got disconnected from a game of Starcraft because one person left?

You can’t use “well they had no experience!” as an excuse when there are 10 year old games that have done this perfectly. There is absolutely no excuse. I don’t really care WHY they messed up so bad, I only care that I spent money on a game that doesn’t work this far out from launch. I can easily say this has made me never want to buy a Stardock game ever again.

1. Because the game needs to synchronise after each timestep, if this fails you get a desync and people will have inconsistant views of what is happening

2. Because if they were connected through the leaver, as opposed to being connected to others directly, he has now lost his connection to the rest of the players in game.

And as for the “GPG have no experience” comment, GPG made Supreme commander, which used a p2p system effectively. The difference with demigod is that Stardock opted to use a 3rd party library called Raknet to do the multiplayer connectivity. It would appear Raknet, while suitable for many connectivity scenarios, falls on its face when presented with others, and not enough of the failure scenarios were uncovered in the beta.

Frogboy commented in IRC that DoW2, while not everyone’s cup of tea, got around this problem by using GFWL. So there you go…GFWL isnt a total pile of rubbish after all…

Basically their biggest mistake (one Wardell has admitted) was to not have a big open beta before release.

Obviously it would have been better if the game had shipped with everything present and intact, but I can’t help being impressed by the enormous degree of support this game is receiving post-release.

This sounds particularly interesting to me:
“what we would like to allow is for people to mod AI players (LUA) and then submit them online and let them compete to see how they do. This would encourage good AI modding. “