I would bet most.

People who know Stardock already know Stardock didn't develop Demigod or its connectivity code. Stardock is the one who made the decision to publish Demigod and made the decision on what NAT program was used.

Someone compared Stardock to Flagship studios (makers of Hellgate).   Flagship Studios didn't publish Hellgate London. Electronic Arts did. 

The difference is that when something goes wrong with something released by Stardock they seem to have a fanatical habit of taking blame and trying to solve it.

To continue with the analogy, when Hellgate London had problems, it's not like EA jumped in and solved it. With Demigod, Stardock would have surely been within their legal rights to toss the Demigod connectivity problems over to Raknet or Gas Powered Games. But instead they brought in their own development team to fix them. What other publisher would do that???

That's why there are Stardock fan boys. Because if you buy something with the Stardock label on it, you know they will go to ridiculous lengths to make good on it.

disclaimer: i haven't complained about there handling of the situation at all. in fact i've praised their open communication style. I'm also a frequent Stardock customer. I own Galactic Civ 1 and 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire, and now Demigod.

Demigod is the first game I've seen Stardock publish with a multiplayer component as large and complex as this. even if you had bought games from Stardock before you wouldn't have experienced these kinds of problems simply because multiplayer connectivity wasn't a big deal in those games and the multiplayer communities were/are tiny. 

Alot of companies badly fumble multiplayer game launches. The entire history of the MMO genre (whethers its MMORPGS like WoW and Everquest, or MMOFPS like Battlefield) is filled with humiliatingly awful launches full of connection problems. Most games that are played online either tap into an existing big infrastructure like Battle.net or Gamespy or Windows Live or they try to do something new and independent (like GPGnet or Impulse reactor). Its not surprising that when you try and do something new and different you have some growing pains. 

I think the players who are complaining do not have enough perspective, experience, and/or patience. If they only find existing systems acceptable then they are condemning the gaming industry to be nothing except the products of a few monopolist companies (Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft primarily). We need to have patience and show support for the new guys like Stardock or else we'll never get the variety of content that we would like to have. 

wish i lived in your world full of flowers, peace/love and understanding. the fact is stardock realsed a horrible flawed multiplayer system, and got understandable flamed for everyting as they should have been.

a large number of online games experince big issues at launch but i had expected a more polished connection system after they had a beta, this was obviously a mistke from my side.

"show patience" this i think is the worst ting to do, complain loudly and maybe they will fix it. keep quit and you will be ignored by a larger % this is my guess atlest no facts supporting this that would stand up to closer scrutiny. the goal is not to be polite, the goal is to get a structure bent on making money spend money on "fixes". complaing is the logical thing to do not very effective but better then nothing.

this is my first stardock game, have not complained about it on the forum except indirectly. i have sent mails to SD to help me with techincal issues; not very helpful but did get more then copy/pasted drivel. as the connection issues were so insanly large i did not see the need to complain to make them aware of them.

I'd just like to point out that although stardock published the game, the multiplayer network code is part of impulse.  What that means is that stardock DID do the networking. GPG focused on the actual game programming.  Much of the design was also done as a collaboration between stardock and gpg (this is evident by Brad talking about several of his game design sit-downs with Mike Marr)

To that flagship/EA comparison, that's not quite accurate because EA had nothing to do with hellgate except give them a bit of QA resources and a bug tracking program.  EA didn't give them any game-critical code.

Networking is hard as hell to do well, and for a smaller company like Stardock who focused on single player games up till now, it's not that surprising what happened. 

When Brad mentioned that a month was an enternity to debug and fix the network code, alarm bells were going off in my head.  I'm not saying Brad is a poor engineer (far from it!), but it looks like they didn't consider all the various edge cases properly when designing the architecture.  Problems like pirates issuing server-gets, exponential connections, too many sockets opening for many routers to handle, etc, would have been avoided by companies with more experience.

I never buyed before a Stardock game (GalCiv and Sins are not my favorite types of games), but i know that they were only responsible only for the NAT program and the Impulse Reactor (ingame chat and friends list). But, and that's a big but, they were also the publisher and the publisher has the right to set the date when a game will be released and finished. Demigod was poorly tested and QA, so this is the fault of the publisher, Stardock. My 2 cents.

What happens next, it's 95% in the hands of the people from GPG. Maybe SD will add some more features to the ingame impulse interface (i hope!), but that's all they can do, as far as i know. And that's why i'm worried about, GPG are just like 99% of the devs out there, they are not known to support their games long enough. They allready work on Dungeon Siege 3 and SupCom 2, so they look pretty busy in the future. Imo, if they can't continue the work on DG in the future, what should they do is release the SDK of the game and let others make content for it.

You have no idea what you're talking about Jinx on this part.

I think people have every right to be ticked off at the state of the Demigod launch.  

Demigod makes use of a lot of libraries and some of those libraries use other libraries.

You may have noticed the Raknet logo at the bottom of the page. That is where the NAT handling is.  Raknet handled the connection between players and then hands it to Demigod for the rest of the game.

When it became apparent that there were scaling issues that could not be easily (or quickly) resolved the Impulse team was re-assigned onto Demigod to write a nearly completely new system.

And let me say, what has been developed over the past 3 weeks, largely from scratch would normally take 6 months to do but people worked insane hours in order to make it happen.

Stardock was certainly involved in the design of the game to be sure. But our involvement on the network connectivity only extended to choosing the library to handle the NAT connections between players which has subsequently been redone.

Umm.. sorry I am such a noob - I expected a game I purchased to work. If I had as much experience as you stardock fanboys then I would know then I was just forking over money for something that shouldn't be actually expected to perform.

As the game developer, Stardock made a decision between building code in-house or saving money/time by buying a 3rd party solution. Part of that decision is an understanding that the 3rd party code is out of your control and if you run into issues, you may have to build you own code anyway. You also understand that extra testing and preparation is needed to ensure that the 3rd party solution that you saved money on actually works in the context of what you are trying to use it for. Most importantly, you understand that it is your name at stake regardless of how the 3rd party code performs. Users really don't care that you saved a few bucks by purchasing 3rd party code when something with you brand name on it flat out doesn't work.

Image buying a Honda. They hand over the keys to you and you try to start the engine, but it does not. The guy just stares at you straight-faced and says "well, we didn't make the engine, somebody else did, you understand, right?". Are you just gunna be like "oh, gotcha.. well, that's cool. I guess I'll be on my way then.."?

to extend the car analogy:

you buy a car but the engine has a transmission flaw. the car company issues a recall so you bring it in to the dealership and they offer you a trade in for a model that doesn't have a transmission flaw or they offer to fix the transmission flaw for free but the car will be in the shop for 2 weeks. 

thats the real situation. 

I love how even Raknet isn't taking responsibility for this lol: http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/forum/index.php?topic=2406.0

regarding "fanboyism"

if you're not a fan of Stardock what the hell are you doing here? what kind of person has so much built up aggression and so many anti-social tendencies that they have choose to spend their own time participating in a community that they don't actually like?

there's a huge amount of immaturity in this attitude. why would you dislike a "fanboy". what kind of person are you that you don't like people who like things. "liking things sucks man, its totally uncool to like things, showing support for the people who make things you like sucks even worse." do you even listen to yourselves?

this is one of the strange dark sides of the internet, the way it brings out the sociopathic tendencies in so many people. if you don't like the company or the community what the heck are you doing here? it makes you feel better to talk trash right to their face? would you do that in a school cafeteria? sit down at a table full of kids you dislike and insult them to their face? would you do that?

and don't get caught up in hysteria. exactly 2 people have been given "mandatory refunds", both of them for saying things that were beyond the pale insulting towards the Stardock professional team. imagine the car dealership situation again, what if you walked into the dealership and started shouting insults at the salesman and everyone on the show floor. would you expect to be treated nicely or would you expect them to call the cops and have you taken away? 

use your head and understand that this is one of the most open and lightly moderated forums you'll find anywhere. also learn to appreciate that the level of service and good faith communication you get from Stardock is miles ahead of any other games publisher. 

No. It's not really Raknet's fault either. Ultimately, it's still Stardock's fault. An open public beta would have found out this problem.  

It's like launching a website that worked great when you had say 1000 people on it but completely crashes when you have 10,000 people on it.

Even now, today, this second, we are still dealing with the scaleability because we still have to rely on some pieces that haven't been replaced yet which creates connection message lag and such.

We are NOT saying Raknet is garbage.  On the contrary, Raknet is quite excellent and I recommend it for many things.

What I am saying is that Stardock and GPG failed to test the scaleability of the system with Demigod. A big open beta would have quickly shown the problem.

Blaming Raknet would be like playing a 3D library for not being able to handle 10,000 high polygon models on screen at once due to not ever trying the 3D library with more than 1000 models on screen.

WTF does this have to do with common sense. FrogBoy is the CEO of stardock, right? He comes on here telling how he has 4 groups of developers working on the game.. that would lead me to believe that stardock is the developer.

Regardless of who did what, the plain and simple fact that this game runs like garbage, and the package says "StarDock". You stand behind your product, not write a bunch of blog posts about how everyone should feel sorry for you.