Been checking out HoN.... I shoulda become a warcraft freak a long time ago...

 

I'm gonna get Warcraft and Dota Expansion as soon as my wife will let me LOL. I spent my gaming butget on DG, and need to justify more $ for another game that is not a birthday or christmas pressie.

I will move to HoN.... Until then ya getting sick of the waiting game, I never win the waiting game, always come back to waiting.

Is HoN still in Beta testing? How long do I need to wait to get my greedy hands on it?

Depends if they update it regularly after 1.2 comes out.

When 1.2 comes out...

I know. Nubby said, "I'm calling bullshit on that number. 1400 players and only 24 games going.... yea right.". I said why there was an odd discrepancy between players online and number of games. Since games are much larger than normal, in a normal rts there would probably be 100 games going not 24. I never compared players in games and games in progress.

Ah, well yes, but it doesn't matter if you compare players online with players in games or games in progress. The players online number is simply way too high, no matter how you look at it. According to those numbers ~88% of all players online just hang out in the game after the login screen doing absolutely nothing.

I don't want to play the devils's advocate here (and I like DG), but have you seen the player counts of HoN lately? It is an unfinished, unreleased game in closed(!) beta state and in this very moment there are more than 25 000 players online and almost a thousand games. 1500 players = nothing.

i thought i read elsewhere that the players online # was people on impulse with demigod installed. so people playing demigod and people with demigod installed but not playing and impulse running (and playing another game or nothing at all).

it's pretty easy to figure out roughly how many people are actually playing at once by multiplying # of games, it's closer to 150-300 (25-50 games  x 6 average players) than then 1500-3000 which shows up in the players online #. number of people in games is definitely down though, hopefully 1.2 will help.

 

 

 

No, that's what we (the community) are suspecting. A Stardock employee explained it like I did before.

 

The actual number of players that are in games are already tracked. You don't have to "figure it out roughly" .

HoN a direct clone of DotA (and they have admitted so openly). It therefore gets its playerbase directly from DotA/WC3 too - which is an exeptionally popular game (you will find only SC comes close to rivalling this).

Any RTS that is not WC3/SC will probably have about the same (if not less) amount of players as Demigod. HoN/LoL are exceptions as they take directly from wc3 player base which is already huge.

Yah dota is a very very popular game,

when i was playing data on garena, a program like gameranger, there were about 500,000 people playing on it pretty much all the time.

And, of course, HoN has a ton of people playing the *free* beta clone of DOTA.  How many of them have paid for it yet...

I expect HoN to sell quite well, actually.
It's DotA, but with prettier graphics and some different maps, so it has an already established fan base and players who can migrate from one to the other and retain their basic skill level.
I grew tired of DotA some time ago, so HoN has no appeal to me of any kind. Same with LoL. Demigod is a different take on a similar idea, and I prefer Demigod to the rest. That's my preference - to each their own, really.

Looking at server stats now... aparrently 1028 people online, 3 in the 1 game lobby up, and 48 in game.....

 

so 51 people actually playing with 1028 "online"

So out of 1000 people worldwide logging in, only 4% are playing...... 51 people in the world playing the game..... and it gets less every night.

having a pull...

The Dawn of War 2 beta had an average of 8,367 unique users playing Dawn of War 2 throughout the beta each day, and an average of 25,335 matches occurred between the 1st and the 14th of July.

 - source

That was the "opt-in" beta for those who already owned the game, not the open beta before release.

I think DG is below average for player numbers, just like SupCom was. The FA community is still alive and kicking though from what I can tell (the boards are pretty active) because SC/FA offers something fairly unique for online RTS. DG's long term survival depends on it providing something different to HoN/LoL, not on it being a better version of the same thing.

In other news Valve hiring the original DotA creator could be awesome, I'm keen to see what they can add to the strategy genre having stuck with FPS for so long.

 - source

I tried both HoN and LoL, and prefer LoL.  Check it out if you get a chance.  I think the official launch is late this month or next, it will be free, though will rely on in-game sales of stuff (that are not necessary to do well).

I live in the eastern US but am in the European beta.  I play in the evenings, sometimes until midnight, which is around 6am for western europe, and my wait is typically under a minute to get into a 10 player game (and I have not once experienced any kind of lag issue).  HoN has the best match-making, but I give better odds to LoL than DG on improving what they have.

Lukas_a_79, I have some beta keys for HoN, let me know if you wanna try the game and I'll PM one to you.

BTW, Demigod is so much better than HoN, too bad theres no one to play. If only we could convince half the HoN player to come to Demigod, our problems would be solved

 

That's exactly what I'm saying. I remember the first week/month we could easily see 12-15 custom game and now, we can see 2-3 games even 0 sometimes! I'm constantly checking the http://www.demigodthegame.com/opengames.asp site and I'm figuring that the pool of players is decreasing continuously...

Like someone else said, about 50% less of players, is it big or small..? In my opinion, it is a lot considering that the game didn't sell as expected...considering a 50% off coupon in July if I'm correct!

 

now under 1000 players online... gets less every day..... I've given this one up for dead now.

Maybe I'll catch some of ya on DotA or HoN

Bye Lukas.

Hm, well it's no wonder the players in games are slowly decreasing. It's the sum of all those small annoying things that still exist in Demigod, plus, more importantly game breaking bugs like the desync that (apparently) always happens when the announcer says "The Forces of X control the map!". A bug like that is really killing the motiviation to play for me . I really want to play, but what's the point if there is a high chance that the game will desync eventually. Well unless both teams simply do not take control of the map at any time (i.e. always let the opposing team have at least 2 flags? Or do you need at least 3 for the announcer not to say that?)

When playing yesterday, no one desynced when a team controlled the map. I don't know where you are playing, but I played for a long time yesterday and only ran into one desync (which I figured wasn't the netcodes fault, but probably the player and his crap internet's fault).

Yeah, despite the desync issue, I still convinced myself to keep playing yesterday. We had two additional games on Cataract, both of which had the announcer say "The Forces of X control the map" and nothing happened, thankfully. Since 1.19 I think I had 7 Cataract games of which 3 desynced immediately after the announcement. The issue definitely exists and there are plenty of reports for it. It's just that the exact additonal circumstances are still not clear yet.

 

Desyncs can be caused by a couple of things (even deliberately... though I think one of those things got fixed in 1.19), but the map control desync is just something that occurs frequently. A bug like that is not very unusual or unlikely. Back in the days of Supreme Commander for example, after one of the earlier patches (or even with the retail version) a desync was caused everytime a transport of any player reported "transport is full".

Demigod doesnt really desync more than other games do in my experience. It does occasionally though....and I think a lot of them are intentionally caused.

Hopefully Stardock/GPG are aware of these