Takete.. obviously you haven't been around here much.. Stop your whinning.  They are getting it fixed.

Same for me.  The majority of the time I can connect to everyone, though it can take quite a while.  However, people tend to leave the games that are being formed too quickly, which pretty much means everyone has to start over.  I have yet to start a game after someone drops out of it.

This isn't really the issue. I'm also sure it's being fixed and when it is I'll also play lots and have fun. But it seems to me that there is a worrying trend going on in the gaming industry at the moment that the OP put his finger on pretty decisively. Namely, payed beta tests masquerading as released games.

Demigod isn't the first unfinished product to hit the market with promises of "don't worry, we'll patch it!". Perhaps the popularity of the MMORPGs are to blame? They are certainly known to be using the new pay for beta model more than others. AoC would be the main offender, Warhammer Online also falls into this category, albeit not as much as AoC. It has spread to other genres as well. Left 4 Dead falls into this category, they still havn't after 5 months or so added the last half of the maps playable in multiplayer as far as I know which they said they would do shortly. This is -Valve- doing L4D, not some underfunded garage studio.

Remember when WC3 came out back in -02? At least in Europe, I connected to an online game the day I got the game and was paired into my first match within a minute. All the content that was promised was there. It wasn't underdeveloped, the developers didn't have to apologize for a product that wasn't working as intended. It seems to me this is a thing of the past, and that's not very encouraging. Developement studios really needs to take more time for Q&A and stop rushing unfinished products. It's an insult to paying customers. Imagine this being done in any other industry.

 - "Wanna see the end of Teriminator 4? You can download it for free in a couple of months!"

 - "Want a working cd-player in your car? Yeah, the new model hadn't arrived when the car assembled. Get back to me in a week and I'll install it for free."

 - "I know our cable package promised 50 channels and you only got 30, we thank you for your patience while we're resolving the issue over a couple of months."

This wouldn't be koscher. And it shouldn't be when it comes to computer games either. But somehow, it has come to be. And it sucks.

/rantoff

The OP made a statement of his opinion, and did not ask for feedback.. Why do people feel the need to post a whole lot of ... umm... stuff, in the thread following it?

Actually companies releasing beta in a pretty little ribbon called a release has been going on since before eq1. There has also been a good amount of these that actually are never fixed. The company just states that due to other efforts and the lack of popularity/sales of this game we can no longer support it. This all started alittle after the stores quit refunding opened game software, which later expanded to all open media shortly after. There is a major lack of reprocussions or accountability in software so it will get much worse before it gets better. What there really need is some set enforcable standards on software quality before can be released for sales and accountablity.

This has been going on more lately though, with the arrival of the internet and widely spread broadband connections. This didn't happen on gaming consoles (and still is pretty rare, dunno how it is with the new generation of consoles, seeing as they actually have internet connections and can patch software) and it didn't happen as much in games during the 90s. You know, back in the time when you hade to cycle 16 3,5 inch disks to install 20 MBs of software. The good old days

Back then they couldn't say "Oh, we didn't know about -that-. We'll patch it soon, check our webpage for updates." There was more pressure on developers back then to get things working from the start. Also, the coding of games was arguably a lot easier and probably less error prone, this shouldn't be totally dismissed as the complexity of games is rising. But still, there aren't usually issues with complex code in these games. Left 4 dead lacked multiplayer maps. Demigod lacked a netcode tested in a real life environment on a large scale (this is all though hard to do, but its weird that -none- of these issues was seen in the beta or internal tests). Age of Conan lacked gaming content from lvl 40 to 80. I repeat, half the games content was -missing-. lvl 1-20 was polished to shine though, you can all figure out why.

In Sweden we have something called the General Reclamation Board (allmänna reklamationsnämnden) who's job is to process complaints from disgruntled customers and give them legal support and rulings against manufacturers if they've been sold merchandise under false pretenses. Obviously their jurisdiction is only national, but if they had the power to operate internationally I would have filed a couple of complaintes the last year or so on gaming software. Not saying that they should be able to operate internationally, it would be weird if they did.

But perhaps that's just what we need, an international Software Reclamation Board. So when someone promises you a cup of delicious gaming, gladly takes your 50 dollars and then gives you a half empty glass with watered down crapiness you can get your money back through legal channels. And they can get a reprimand. As things should be. Not sure if thats the best solution, or even a good one but if the trend continues it is going to be bad for the state of gaming as a whole.

EDIT: clarified some stuff.

I just thought of another pretty hilarious example. In Europa Universalis 2, you -could not save the game- in single player mode (this is a civ-esque strategy game) from the initial release. You had to patch it to get the save function to work.

On that would be awesome to have something like that here in the US. I could see tons of class action suits lol.

And the whole thing about games being arguably more difficult to code now adays, I know ppl have said this alot and it comes from the industry most likely. I really don't agree with it because back in the dos/apple prompt os (forgot what it was called) days there was not a whole lot of toolkits back then, well maybe toward the middle of win3.1 era, so alot more coding had to be done instead of just slaping a toolkit in place and calling api to tie into it. And back then every single game was released with little or no bugs. If a game had more than a couple of patches for minor things it was shocking to say the least.

I whole heartly believe the software industry had become a slap stick coding style due to toolkits verus quality. To call apis to tie into a toolkit is a whole lot easier than trying to code your routines and everything inbetween down to the driver level. I believe software developers need to have alot more skill back then than they do now adays.

I never worked in the gaming industry though, just quite a few beta tests, but I have worked in software development for many years for enterprise level software.

<edit> But I do have to put a disclaimer in. I whole trust stardock to fix these issues and for all the release stardock has produced in the past everything has been pretty solid. This is the first bad experience I have had with them.

For your information, I'm here since the very first beta and I'm quite sure that the connection issue havent been fixed properly and working for everyone. In the connection phase of beta they still cannot fix all the pproblems and it extended into the final phase of the beta as well. I admire the initiative of the design decision that want to make a better latency by using a P2P connection, but it seem like it doesn't have enough profit than problems to me. Imagine if it's designed to be server-client based from the beginning this wouldn't happen for sure.

And yeah OP saying that we're buying a beta game is kind of true. Since I didn't notice the changes from the last Beta build and the release build at all, except those balancing fixes and 1 more map. The graphic look the same we just basically got offline skirmish and offline tourney.

Well I kind of want to defend SD a bit since i like them, but the truth is this really look unfinished. You can say they will fix those all you want but it's unfinished in the retail box when released. Still if you are patient enough I can say you'll get a quality game from SD for sure. But yeah you have the right to whine and get a refund. This is truely an unfinished game anyway.

On side note, consoles game got better QA than PC games imo. Since they only got 1 publisher per console, either MS, Sony or Nintendo. And yeah they have to do QA for every release games. First the dev submit the game to the publisher then they do QA then get release. But most of the time these happen like 6 months before the release date and publisher always asking devs to fix and resumbit again like 2-3 times each game.