We are doing the "hell" only thing we can do, suffering with no system to get into games with people we're getting to know in-game.  With Friends messages not working and chat pretty much same, tell me how is one supposed to play with "friends" unless they are already his real life friends on a different means of communication.  None of my RL friends play DG (or are much into games) and sure as hell I'm not gonna be adding random people to my instant messanger just to be able to setup a game.

Wanna know my experience:

1) Join PuGs (usually with "good-exprienced-no noobs" in name), get stomped with utter noobs on team.  Rinse and repeat.  Less than 40% stats.

2) Once in a while get a decent player to play with, add to Friends... learn that Friends list is useless and cant be used to communicate with them.

3) Start screening games, try to join games asking for good players and inssist on being in team with host or leave lobby.  Check stats on join. Pretty much never play in a "good player" game if you're on 2nd team.  Stats jump significantly.

4) After getting a good team for a game, continue playing for the evening with them.  Have fun stomping noobs that keep on joining your "no noob" games... Win ratio >90%

What the game needs in order to have any hope of changing current state is a way to communicate.  Channels where you can meet/talk with a certain group of people.  Not having a chat lobby as soon as you go into multiplayer is one of the worst design mistakes of the game.  Friends insta-message also must work flawlessly.  I already have some people I'd love to be able to join premade games with (or invite others to join ours), BUT WE SIMPLY HAVE NO WAY OF DOING IT!!!

Just look at stats - 90+% win ratio is unsustainable if good players/teams are matched with others with similar skill level.  Yet still most of top 100 players are having it.

What I'm trying to say is that in my opinion, one shouldn't subject oneself to that type of gaming existence. If none of my RL friends played, and I couldn't make friends with any good players by playing with them, and couldn't join or create a strong team by recruiting on forums, then I wouldn't play. I'm lucky and have RL friends that play this game, but this is the exception for me, not the rule. Almost every other game I've played I've had to start out with nothing, and build up social connections until I could join or form a powerful team. Demigod has relatively active forums, and conveniently forces people to use the same name they do in-game. I don't see why an enterprising new player couldn't use them to make connections.

What I do agree with is that good players do not play each other enough - many players have inflated records from stomping pubs and avoiding other good teams. Currently the ladder more reflects how many pubs a particular player has stomped, rather than how good he is relative to other players. 

Because it's not my job to fix the Friends messaging system.  I also dislike using more than 1 IM.  Additionaly, there is high chance that Demigod will crash when you alt-tab to use the external IM.

Then it's not just SDs fault, it's also your own for being so difficult.

Me and my friend always play premades, never even played a game without him
(gn always Trie V Trie )
lately we met some1 who we don't have on skype and we play with him a bit, everytime we talk to him BANG LEAVER so now we have to make him get Xfire or talk english all day cause hes norwegian and we're dutch

anyways, ANY TEAM GAME HAS PREMADES, how stupid are you making such a topic IN A TEAM GAME forum and thinking people WITH FRIENDS care, just cause you have no social skills in any aspect due to the fact that your a 12 year old kid just means you need to grow up, and start playing games when you get the ability to make friends (truely, its not that hard)

You forgot the most important one, team matchmaking!

The (playing) population is too low for matching by rank to work properly.  You need a fairly large pool of players or teams or you need to keep them waiting longer for a game.  The way auto-matching should be done (and usually is) is that the server limits elo rating difference when matching players and then increases the difference as time waiting in que passes.

Lets say for example it would be limited to 100 difference, so a 900 exp player would get at worst an 1000 exp opponent.  To compensate for a possible lack of players, the allowed difference grows let's say by 25 per minute in que.  So after 4 minutes of waiting in the que, that same 900 exp player would be allowed to match against 1100 exp opponent...  The longer you wait, the larger the allowed difference.

I think that many would agree to wait 10 minutes or more and get a good matchup, rather then get matched against the first next team that comes up.

note: the numbers are completely made up, I have no idea how it works in Demigod.

YES

I think you cheat too in that case

No, the OP said it's against the rules to have teammates you can depend on. This would not be against the rules.

Indeed, there's not nearly enough sarcasm in this thread given the OP.