Standing behind your product is exactly what FrogBoy is and has been doing.......

I own Galactic Civ 1 and 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire, and now Demigod.

I don't understand how frogboy can claim to hate Multiplayer when Sins was good at it?

I have purchased a fair (alright, large) number of items from SD. I also have connection issues that I have voiced concern over. So, the implied correlation does not seem to work. I do have the utmost respect for Stardock, the rate at which they are bringing to the fore a brand new multiplayer system is astounding, but the multiplayer "as is" is...problematic. I enjoy the progress reports, and I find the tone refreshing. What makes me consfused is while Frogboy is free to call a spade a spade, when a productive member of the community does so they are banned. A strange blemish on the otherwise sterling Stardock reputation.

well to be fair.... it isn't like stardock is unique in their dealings of problemsolving and updating their games. Other smaller gameproducers do the same. Keberos, the producers of Sword of the Stars(awesome game) are a small game producing company and they listened to the gamers and patched up the game nicely.

for a small company that wants to become big needs a good ears to geat a steady base of fanboys/girls to sell their product

I'm pretty sure Frogboy and the SD team took personal offense to Warhawk's comment, since if I recall correctly, he was implying that the SD crew were liars that weren't standing behind their product when Frogboy and company are working 70 hour weeks to get the game running in prime condition. Frankly, I don't know any company-owned forums where you wouldn't get banned for posting personal attacks on company employees. They don't want to put up with that crap, and it's well within their discretion to ban offenders.

I would have been as offended as hell if I were at SD and read those comments. Stardock's the one bailing out the game that they didn't make on the principle that they're the publisher but I can't think of any publisher, ever that has done what Stardock is doing.

It's obviously hyperbole and that player is frustrated by multiplayer not working (for him).

I'm happy that I've been pretty lucky and haven't had too many problems.

Hey guys, let me clear a few things up.

Stardock is the publisher which means, no, we didn't develop Demigod. 

BUT...

As the publisher, all final decisions are made by us.  Therefore, EVERYTHING that goes wrong with a game is ultimately the fault of the publisher IMO.  The buck stops with the publisher.

A lot of people have heard about Stardock "developing" things in Demigod.  This is true because once we saw there were problems, I pulled people off of Elemental and Impulse and assigned them to Demigod in order to resolve problems faster.  More people with more know-how = faster results. 

Like many of you, I've seen games come out where there are problems and people end up waiting months and months for solutions.  I don't consider that acceptable.

Now, with the case of Demigod, we thought it was done. Or, to use your analogy, we thought it was cooked to perfection so to speak.  

But as a publisher (or developer) we had never developed or released a peer to peer multiplayer centric game before. The closest thing toa  MP centric game we've done is Sins of a Solar Empire which has an online population that tops out at around 300 people in a weekend (compared to 5,000+ for Demigod).  So all our assumptions came out to be wrong.

There is no excuse for the situation people have been faced with.  All we can do is our best to rectify things as quickly as we can for as many people as possible.

Demigod is a long-term game though.  It's not something that's going to disappear. THat's one of the advantages of being MP centric like it is.  People still play counterstrike years later.  

And Stardock will make sure there's a good MP population to sustain it one way or the other.

This kind of attitude is the reason I love you guys.