I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong. And after that comment I made it became clear that my perception of the population of the community was in error.
On Stardock's side, I pretty much have an infinite budget when it comes to doing things on the game code-wise. The challenge is making sure it's economically feasible for GPG to make changes on their end to get what people want.
I read these posts and I wish I could talk more openly about things but too often people get stuck in this myopic vision of how things "should" be.
We all love Demigod. We know it's a great game. And I think we all agree on what things would make it even better.
But at the end of the day, it's a product. There's no way around it. Most companies aren't like Stardock. I own the company, it's highly profitable so I have a lot of flexiibility in doing things that don't necesarily make the best short-term business sense.
The things we at Stardock want to do for the game come from our desire, as gamers, to make the game meet its potential. But the business justification to do so is shakey. We have a long-term agreement with GPG to keep updating the game but we always have to be conscious of the costs. Just because we're willing to do whatever for Demigod doesn't mean that GPG can necessarily do the same unless there's a business justification. I'm not speaking for them. The team at GPG are my friends. They're not just my business associates or something, they're my friends. So I don't want to abuse that friendship to try to make them do things that don't make sense.
So a lot of the solutions we come up with we try to do in a way where Stardock finds a way to do as much development of it as possible.
So for instance, it would be relatively easy to have the pantheon tend to match friends with friends when matching people up because we can do that on our end. It's a different thing to go to GPG and ask them to pull guys from SupCom 2 so that they can build some sort of team-match up UI.
Now, you guys can talk about how things shouild be done in some ideal world but those of you who want to see real world changes to Demigod need to try to come up with ideas that can be largely implemented by Stardock if you want to see them actually happen. It has nothing to do with "caring" and everything to do with the weird culture that exists at Stardock about games.
I don't think I can put it any more candidly than that.
