By the time you have connected to everyone, the game will already be over unless it's a really early quit.

its difficult to join in progress because you would have to deal with the connectivity issues of the game already.

there would also have to be major overhauls where games in progress are periodically pinged by a server asking about them, who is playing in the game etc. 

when a player drops they would have to contact this server, get a list of games, it would assumably filter only games you were recentley in.  the amount of memory demand on the server could be large (what if the server pings every 30 seconds and you dropped 10minutes ago if 300 games are in progress it needs to keep 36,000 entries and sort through them) its going to have to sort through every game listing for every game that has been played in the last hour requiring a server cycles (not to mention god knows how many people will be accessing this list).

then you have to connect to all players, load the map, receive the game state (which would be changing as you receive it and load) assume control over a DG. find your DG was controlled by AI and has thus fed the enemy team, get abused by your team-mates and promptly RQ.

there is a reason not many developers choose to implement something such as this is an RTS. when it is much simpler to agree to start a new game.  if your net is so bad that it can't stay connected for 60minutes without dropping consider finding a new ISP.  although the feature sounds nice its kinda like calling up mazda (GPG & Stardock) and asking them to provide a service (joining in progress) to you of bringing a new wheel out to wherever you may be instead of talking to the mechanic about it (your ISP).

the only way to get past having the overhead of something like that would be to allow anyone to fill the spot of someone taken, or to set game passwords for every game that are written to the HDD (cant store in memory because of crash) on launch and automatically entered when trying to join.



so because other people are running their computer off a diesel generator (exageration etc) or something and constantly crash we should re-work our source code for them? i understand that there is the occassional unavoidable crash everyone experiences and although these are annoying they won't turn anyone (sensible and enjoying the game) off demigod alone.  the developers job is to ensure connectivity and decent performance to reccomended specs for a user with a decent net connection and a computer able to run the game. 

as frogboy stated, they were working so hard on their connectivity issues because 1) some people could not connect at all and 2) some people could only connect after fiddling with their router/settings.  1) was obvious in need of fixing however 2) he did not like because it was not common amongst gamers and worrying for less computer literate people.

this is one of those ideas that is nice on paper but easier said than done. especially once the game code is already complete. 

 

It's probably not impossible, but I would think it's not feasible and unjustifiable. It would constitute too much of a change to warrant the risk with little returns.

It sounds very nice yes, but like you said, it's doubtful to happen.

I would think that 99% of the suggestions posted on this forum will never be implemented. Doesn't stop people doing it. its something i would like to see added so thought i'd do a post regardless of the chances of it happening.