If they title the games as premade, no-one joins.

why does no-one understand this

They're not. There aren't any organised teams they can easily set up a match with so they're going to play with the casual crowd.

Seriously, I've hosted and been part of a created Premade titled game and sat there for 20 minutes. Throughout that time we'd get the occassional person who would join just to tell us how stupid we were for noob bashing?! It was funny in a sad way, but the point is that we never got to play anyone else.

I think I've had a grand total of 4 games with my friends vs a random premade team.

Also, this is not a competitive community. It has competitive members, but as a whole it's not very competitive. Once clan support and better team matching is implemented, I'm sure it will skyrocket.

Healer, your posts are incoherent and your objections are misguided. Nevertheless, I suppose I could be bothered to crush all of your objections (and Lemminkaeinen's) in one fell swoop: 

A competitive community is one in which there are a large number of players dedicated to improving themselves to reach higher levels of the game, and who look forward to proving their excellence / superiority by defeating other players who are trying to do the exact same thing. In a team game like Demigod, this would take the form of several hundred "premade" teams all ferociously battling one another for supremacy on a team automatch ladder, supplemented by weekly or bi-weekly official bracket tournaments supported by GPG/SD, further supplemented by player run leagues and clan wars. The constant and tense battles lead teams to reach higher and higher levels of play as they encounter tons of opposing teams executing a wide range of tactics. Before long teams figure out what things work better than others against competent oppoents, what things counter those things, how various DGs synerigize, how to counter those synergies, and so on and so forth. A metagame is born. 

Does this sound like Demigod? Didn't think so. 

SoFFacet, that was my point. That the competitive community won't be formed when premade teams endlessly noob stomp.

There is probably a dozen or so pre-made teams with records of something like 100-2 or so. I don't understand you guys stomping noobs for hundreds of games. It seems almost insane - like someone playing on the easy difficulty over and over and over again never getting challenged. What do you get out of it? Why don't you arrange matches between the top teams?

Do you not read anything I type? I told you why. Besides me and SoFF there is no one even attempting to play others. The ones who do want to play can't even form an entire team. It's not worth the effort when it's so hard to do.

Communication is the main problem atm between teams. I would love to play other premade teams of our skill level, but I have a busy life and can't dedicate a huge amount of time to hunting the other teams out. Not to mention with only a handful of other teams willing to work to fight other teams, it's hard to find a time where both teams will be able to get online and play.

With clan support and team automatch settings, we'd be able to all just log on and hit "3v3 search". The system would then attempt to match us according to individual ratings and overall combined ratings.

Of all the premade players to accuse of intentionally noob stomping, you accuse me. I, who sign my team up for anything remotely resembling good competition within the times we can make. I, who stake out the custom game lobby looking for premade games. Yeah ok. 

The lack of a competitive community here is pretty much GPG's fault, not the premade's. There are "premades" in every game - they are required for the competitive community in team based games, and for the most part none of them enjoy noobstomping. What is the differentiating factor here? No team automatch, no replays, no clans. No method or system for good players to play good players. This is GPG's fault. 

Go make a pre-made with you and two friends, and only play against only pre-mades for a week or two. Come back and report to us your findings and how many games you played, it should be very enlightening for one of us.

I predict 2 and 1/3 games.

The situation in demigod right now is you can get challenged only
in 1 on 1 games (and maybe organised tournaments for 1 on 1)
because it needs different tacticts than team ver team games
or maybe playing random team games.

Demigod is 4 month game. There is lots of players but nothing
is organised right now for tournaments. Maybe after the demo is out
and some new content there will be a lot more players than now and
than you can start thinking of team competition.

If you call your self a competitive player you should be bored after
30-40 games with your premade games not caring only about your stats
(which mean nothing) and look for challenge as i've said at the begining of this post.

1v1 is silly, its not what the game was designed for at all. Organized team vs Organized team is challenging, but as I/others have been pointing out, the game does not have adequate mechanisms to allow that. Specifically team automatch. 

I highly doubt the demo will do very much for boosting activity. If the mechanisms for supporting team competition had been there from the start, things would be fine and there would be far more teams around at this point in time. If they had been immediately added after launch, the situation could have been salvaged, and teams would have stayed. But here we are, 4 months in, still no team automatch, no replays, no clans, no working friends system, and up-front admission from SD that these are not the current priorities. You can't implement this stuff later and expect people to come back. They will have moved on to other things. GPG killed the prospects of a competitive atmosphere around here long before that could get off the ground - and thats what this entire thread is about. The OP insinuates that DG is a competitive community and that is the root cause behind the "crappy community" - claims which are patently false. 

As I've been saying, we do all we can do to play challenging games against other premades. Or at least my team does. I think I've played 13-14 meaningful pre vs pre games since I started playing about a month ago. Its just hard to get pre vs pre games, given the complete lack of support to do so that GPG has given us. 

, Interestesting answers soo far, i guess the conversation deviated a little from why a competitive community is full of jack asses to "Is Demigod a competitive community?", i guess thats my fault, for me being a person that have not played a lot of multiplayer games i think of competitive games as game where you compete and train heavly to become better and beat other people, wich i guessed other people did here, i did that to a ceartain extent.

I reject the notion that the people within the game are being jack asses just because demigod lack certain features, people will always find something to complaint about.

On the the Premade teams issue i believe that premades are good for the game, as premade teams rise the competitive scene for the game, yes a lot of noob bashing will be happenning but in the end the level of play will rise, and i think it needs to rise quickly before GPG starts making balancing changes to please an inmature community.Bottom line premades and custom games should be the standard and random team matches and skirmishes should be the way to go for people who wants to learn, noobs and stupid people do too much noise compared to intelligent and mature people so i guess we just have to elar to hear the important stuff and filter all the other BS.

Less than 1% of the people who play Demigod really understand themselves in the first place....that is why the path they walk only leads to waste...

The people who pretend that they are true gods, are the most unbalanced... These are the people who rate themselves as pro and judge the new as

noob... The strong prey on the weak, and such is life.  It seems that even in cyberspace we can trace life...

To understand this way of thinking you must start at THe Beginning...

It's the butterfly effect of certain individuals.

Take this survey, and figure out what is going to happen.

I) You are level 2 Erebus on Cataract Dominate. A level 3 Sedna and Oak are moving into your lane. Your partner, a UB, is on the other side of the map. You should.
a] Withdraw, and notify your teamate 2on1
b] Withdraw and say nothing
c] Walk up to Sedna, snack her once, turn into mist... AND THEN FUCKING DIE!

II) You are a level 3 Erebus now. A level 4 Sedna and Oak are moving into your lane. Your partner, a UB now level 5, is on the other side of the map. You should.
a] Withdraw, and notify your teamate 2on1
b] Withdraw and say nothing
c] Walk up to Sedna, snack her once, turn into mist... AND THEN FUCKING DIE AGAIN! Then tell your team mate you didn't just try and win a 2on1 against higher level and higher equipped DGs... with mist, when he asks you not to 2on1.

III) You are still a level 3 Erebus. A level 6 Sedna and Oak are moving into your partners lane. He is a level 6 UB who just toppled the corner tower. You move into his lane to assist. He says "OOM, run" You should.
a] Ask WTF "OOM" means
b] Do what he says.
c] Run towards Sedna and Oak. Cast Mass Charm 1 at the start of the battle. Turn into mist.... FUCKING DIE AGAIN. Yell at your partner for abandoning you.

IV) It is the end of the match. Your partner says "GG" when their counter is at 9000, and your is at 7000. You should
a] STFU NOOB, that's still pretty good considering you died 3 times in 10 minutes. Try not to draw attention to yourself.
b] Say GG, apologize to your partner, realizing you lost the match.
c] Yell at your partner to all, and say the match was lost at III because he didn't stay and fight. Boast about how you win 90% of your games and that you had the skill to carry through said battle to victory.

v) You play DG and live by the motto "If you die, you are wrong... learn why". You are a mostly easy going guy. Occasionally you'll ask people not to 2on1, it's not like you say stuff like "OMG rape cakes, stop dying... if you can't obviously your dad beats your mom infront of you which is why you are such a fail". You never concede, because you believe it's fun to let people savor their victory. You just experienced the above team mate. You should.
1] Come to the forum, lay some smack down on the obviously wrong posts and be despised by the people who don't get it.
2] Come to the forum when you are in a bad mood, lay some smack down on FrogBoy and get banned.
3] Post something like this.

Really.. with so many people running around like this... it's hard not to fuel the fire.... you'd go insane if you held your tongue on some of the crap you see from this community.

You want DG to be a nice community... the learning curve has to go way up. It needs to be turned based. It needs to have 50 DGs, and about 1000 items.... then it will take 5-6 years for smart people to figure the game out and munchkins will not play. :)

Games typically appeal to an immature audience in general.  A lot of my friends are gamers, and I have noticed one thing in common with all of them... they just have nothing better to do than sit home and be immature because they know if they ventured outside, that someone would run 'em over with a very large pickup truck.

That's right!! I'm waiting at yer front door!

If the two hundred (or whatever) best playes all have 90%+ win records then they obviously aren't playing against each other. Furthermore, I see at least one or two premade teams waiting for noobs to stomp in the custom games list each time I log on. These two facts lead me to believe that you guys (meaning the 200 top players, not your team specifically, SoFFacet) aren't actually doing everything you can to battle each other.

Perhaps putting "premade" in the title leads to 20-minute wait times as some people keep saying. I haven't tried it as I have no mic and no Finnish friends who are into competitive computer games. But if it indeed takes 20 minutes to fill up, then that means that most of the premade teams actually avoid logging on to such games, which in turn leads to my original point.

Yes it is perfectly apparent that premades do not play eachother enough, which is indicative of a non-competitive community. However, you keep misattributing this fact to the premades themselves, whereas my posts have explicitly been about explaining that this is resultant from mistakes GPG has made (no team automatch, custom games counting, good xp gain from noobs, host leaving cancels results, etc). "Premades" are present in almost every game, and are always the driving force behind the competitive community, so I highly doubt there is something magically different about the premades in DG. The differentiating factor here is the complete lack of competitive support from GPG. 

 This is why I get so frustrated at a lot of pugs on the forums, they have no experience in premade play in Demigod, but still seem to be armchair experts in playing Demigod with a team/friends, and competitive play.

 Whereas most premades have played as pugs at sometime in their Demigod life, yet quite a few pugs still get pissy when premades act as if they might know more because they've experienced both sides of play.

Also you definately don't need a mic to be a cohesive premade, it just helps quite a bit. It's certainly not an excuse to not try playing as a team.

Lol arm chair experts, that is hilarious.

it would if this had been implemented prior release. but when this comes an year later there won't be enough people for a christmas candle.

even now there far to few players for demigod to have any chance to survive the this year. well, of course there will allways remain some players, but for a break through it is... well it is too late, sadly!

Do you read your posts before you click "Post Reply"?

I certainly don't, curse the edit history.

First of all, before I answer, thank you woppin, for providing actual reasons unlike others in this thread! Much appreciated. Also, thank you for being polite and not condescending or denigrating uselessly.

If your team was hosting and a single guy from a premade came along with two randoms asking you to kick the randoms so that his team could join, would you? I sure hope so. I also hope that soffacet, wickedbear and itchy's teams would.

Especially if the game is titled as "premades" but also if you title it "only really good ones" or something to that effect. Of course you probably should be polite towards the ones you kick but if they really are very good players (as they should be joining your appropriately titled game) they should understand.

Are all/most non-forum-posting premades somehow way more cowardly than you guys? An honest question, mind you.

I play always at the mercy of the host but I can't recall a single time they have disconnected in an unsportsmanlike way.

But those randoms are noobs! The match will be a boring stomp. I'd rather play one good game than two quick stomps. I believe that you would, too.

Most of the time when I open the Custom games view I see at least two and often three or more premades hosting games. If one of those didn't host but rather joined an already open premade they would have a good match.

Aye, this is true. When you have a team of three or four EU people for example, there is a very real chance that one of them doesn't have a great connection to the US.