I would highly appreciate it if people would kindly read my comments fully, for I'm not going to defend a clear avenue of misunderstanding. I was pointing out that that I've seen MLG gamers on television looking a little more than heafty, and I was also saying that our society's social structure is contributing to the act of social canabalism.

So stop it with the "Stop saying hardcore gamers are obese and have no lives" because I never said those things.

My goal is to try and mainly think of a different method of a longterm multiplayer experience that goes beyond the short term quick-match ladder systems.

Furthermore, DotA does have a sizable following, but the hardcore element of it is small in comparison to the community as a whole. My focus, though I failed to mention it clearly, was speaking about the hardcore playing folk.

So please, stay on subject and stop trying to deconstruct my arguments by saying I'm stating things I clearly am not.

1. Directly quote me insulting the DotA community.

2. I never supplied a very clear illustration of my idea, and for good reason. I would very much like to explain these more clearly, but first I would like those responding to understand I have not, nor did ever intend to insult anyone. That is why I would like someone to point out exactly how my factual statements offend.

Note, this is bad in any and every form. Would be nice to put a plug on the gaming form of it at least.

Finally Slippery, the clear fact is - I didn't directly insult anyone. My ctritiques have been aimed at society itself, as it truly concerns me. This is a subject far beyond that a mear game, is goes well in the realms of the very fabric of the human condition. I'd very much like to focus on the game at this point, and how we can make the multiplayer experience enjoyable for everyone.

BigOne brings up some good points, but I'd also like to fully express my ideas on the subject because if anything can be worked on for this game at this point it is certainly the multiplayer portion as it doesn't make any radical changes to the gameplay itself as it focuses on how the game relates to everyone else on the internet.

My Focus:

Before I mentioned my father, he is a person who loves to game but he feels that he just can't keep up anymore. I'd very much love to enjoy this game with him, but I wouldn't want him to be completely put off by not being able to achieve victory from to time. No, I'm not suggesting we make the game as tame as a kitten, but what I am suggesting is trying to construct a way in which players who do not consider themselves hardcore, never will, and do not have time to - can still win tournaments. That is the foundation of my point of view, and I'd very much like to progress from there because that is not a bad thing.

Final Note: 

I'll move my further comments on constructive multiplayer systems to your new thread Slippery.

 http://forums.demigodthegame.com/332697

Hopefully they will give us more demigods downloadable soon after release.

what do you do in dark and light? never heard of the game. That sounds like a little like a game I play tides of blood were most of the people that play their play it because they dodn't like Dota. It's a nice community understanding to noobs is always nice.

But why is competition bad? Competition force you to improve yourself. It can be competition in video games, in life, at your job, in a sport, /etc. Competition is everywhere, but I dont think its a bad thing... its when you become "obsessed" with it that it can turn bad.

And its not only video games... I know someone who like mountain biking, and he neglected school because he was always training and preparing for the next race/competition. Competition is good but you (and only YOU) have to learn to set your priorities. Do you think we should ban mountain bike competitions because they keep ppl out of school?  Wouldnt it be better to educate ppl on how to set their priorities instead? And if they STILL want to compete, then so what? Cant chose for someone else.

So even your dad likes to compete, from time to time?

 Theres 2 different ways to do that :

1- Find a way to prevent the hardcore from playing with the casuals

2- Give both group an equal chance of winning.

Note that I'm not against a system that will keep the pros and the newbies separated. I think its a good idea, its not fun for a beginner to lose all the time, and its not fun as a "pro" to stomp beginners all day (it gets boring after a while). As long as the "reward" for the better players is higher (or else, better players would play in the beginner division for easy wins.)

I'm affraid #2 isnt possible, unless you purposely dumb-down your game. But would that make the game fun? And where do you stop? Should complete newbie beginners be able to win too? They should be allowed to have fun too, from time to time! See the problem here? Where do you draw the line?

If you want a game where everyone has an equal chance of winning... you are searching for a game where SKILLS doesnt matter. Then, why bother playing in a tournament (I think thats the point of a tournament : find the better player)? As soon as you are playing a game that is not 100% based on luck, someone, somewhere, will be playing it 24/7 to try to improve.

Brad has stated for the record that he wants this game to "be the counterstrike" of rts/rpg games.  In otherwords, he wants it to be embraced by competitive players.  Let's face it, the only way you can make a game totally accessible to everyone is if you dumb it down or add a lot of randomness to the game (or other contrived mechanisms which can completely turn the tables on a more skilled opponent).  If you do this, you will destroy any competitive essense in the game among the real "pros".

As far as seperating noobs from pros, you can put in checks and balances to encourage pros to play against other pros, but you can't stop a 'pro' from making a new account to stomp all over noobs.  If you try to counter this by making a system where people only get one account, that may really discourage experimentation and "just playing for fun" since people will be so concerned about their one and only win/loss ratio.  

In short, suck it up.

edit: furthermore, people who devote themselves to master a game *SHOULD* be the ones who win the tournaments.  People who don't play much or don't have time, shouldn't be able to match up against them (unless they're some sort of prodigy...).  Do you think beginner chess players should be able to beat grand masters?

They also said that for tournaments they would match worse people against each other or do 5 noobs against 2 pros. So i'm guessing their wont be any competition with all bad people but normal games will. When I say normal game custom games arn't one of those.

Yah Thats why maybe tournaments for noobs not to be offensive have non money prizes like your icon can change. This way people won't try to get in them because why lose to get a differnt icon.

they could also make it after enough wins u get new possible icons that way if u purposly lose alot of games your actually being really stupid because all u get is a new icon and u could also get a new icon by winning games. Also why would people brag that they beat noobs lol its just saying your a good noob.

Buffs armor, increases hp regen, pbaoe 5 second disable ulti, stealths entire team, line of sight from trees, buy a radiance.

Also, what's going on with this quote thing? Looks fine to me

Some good arguments from both sides here and I thought I'd put my two cents forward.

First of all, I'm certain that the Devs of the game have and do take a lot of attention at DotA mostly because this is a game which has evolved for over 4 years now through a very open environment. Good ideas were kept and bad were discarded organically (that is, simply by people's preferences). The result is a game with a lot of interesting gameplay and diversity from which to get an wealth of ideas.

If as a community those DotA experts promote ideas which could be of much use in DG, then it's likely we'll see implementations.

Diversity

The number of skills on the two games has been compared based on the number of characters and I think this is a valid point. But what you need to remember is that 8 skills on a character in play tactis is increasing the possible combos exponentially. In DotA as you level up, you can have 6 possible combinations of skills per character (assuming sticking to 2 main choices until you max out) and since after one point you can't level up one skill anymore and must switch to the others, in the end game the diversity of a build drops off. That is why you need a lot of characters to give it diversity.

As you increase the number of skills however the pairs options are much more. For 5 skills you have 10 pairs. For 6 skills you have 15 pairs and for 8 skills you have 27 pairs. I don't know how many skills each DG will end up having but if they have 12, then the possible tactics increase amazingly.

I do think that DG should avoid merging the end skills at the end game (as it seems to do now when one reaches level 25). I think that by allowing end-level chatracters to become "experts" at their selected build or diversify would increase the porential customization and play of each character. Thus I'd like to see the main skills increasing to 6, 7 or even 8 levels with possibly 2 "super" effect on that path, say one on level 5 and one on level 8 which give you an incentive to go all the way. The later levels of the skill should have increases and effects designed to punch through tanked out characters full of 12k items. An alternative would be to reduce the level cap but I think it would be better to give more options than less.

Perceived Superiority of DotA Quality over DG

It's unnecessary to say that DotA has existed for over 4 years now and as a result it has had an huge amount of time to improve and round out. Being community driven does not harm either since it allows hundreds or thousands of minds to cooperate with ideas and coding. On the other hand it is completely unfair to complain that DG looks unfinished, unbalanced and unpolished now and/or extrapolate that it will keep being like that in the future. It seems that since people paid for taking part in the beta, they forget that it is still a beta. We're probably not seeing even half of what the future will bring and that is because the devs are doing the very progressive thing of asking for player input while they are still in the development phase.

I think GPG should take a lot of note in player ideas as certainly they would give them concepts they did not think about. There's no better time than now to setup a brainstorm site and see what your audience wants.

But even if on launch date the game is still lacking in depth compared to DotA, Stardock has already proven that they value future support and will provide future patches and content for free. Galactic Civilization is a testament to that.

On tournaments and brackets

Some have mentioned that having brackets in tournaments means that people will prefer losing a few matches so as to continue being in a low bracket. But as SupCom has shown, there is also the way to separate your brackets by points. Simply matching people will ones who have +/- the same amount of win/loss ratio will defeat this "tactical loss" strategy (nevermind that I do not think that tactic makes any sense as if you ended up losing naturally too much in the higher bracket, you would drop again without meaning to)

Community

The reason why DotA has such a success in features is because it is crowdsourced. There's no chief above and no developer team they have to beg. I think that DG MUST give enough modding tools and capability to create a vibrant community around it. Part of the success of warcraft 3 and half-life was in how moddable they were. Give the people the tools to create new demigods (even if they cost 10k, btw where did we get that figure?) and they will do so. Give them the ability to create new items, new abilities, new maps and the like and then you will see unbound creativity.

The power of modding is that it allows the players to make the game they want to play and experiment in directions the devs didn't think about. If there's anything that DG owes its whole existence, that is to the modding scene who first thought of AoS and DotA and proved that they can be popular and there's a market for them. I think that if DG cares for them, any lack in the actual game will be able to be ammended.

Negativity

One last thing. I think both sides of this argument need to stop seeing the other as the enemy. Jinx and the like are not here to bash the game, their posts are because they want it to be as enjoyable as DotA is to them (note that I'm not saying "identical"). It is wholly wrong to bash them for doing constructive criticism when you should be encouraging it. We have a unique opportunity to imrpve the game "while the iron is hot", let's not waste it with assuming that everything will be perfect and shouting each other down.

On the other hand, criticisms need to be tempered in the knowledge that the game is still in beta and we're not seeing the whole picture. There's no point in ranting about "8 skills" when we don't know how many the end result will have. If there is a concern then state it and ask the devs for some info. Let's make criticisms that are actually valid.

That is all

Post 100.  Eat it bitchez!!!!

(To get the intended humor it is hopefully to visualize a 15 year old emo boy or girl.  Sorry couldn't resist this one.)