That's messed up right there. Stardock has taken a no DRM policy for all their games, figuring that all games get cracked, and it only punishes their legitimate customers while doing nothing to deter the piracy.
Hopefully this experience won't change that corporate philosophy. I pre-ordered this game, and have been enjoying it this week, haven't hit the multiplayer yet, but the experience against the AI is interesting enough, and real people tend to either be way too good at games like this (suspiciously so at times, as in they're utilizing lots of scripts to improve their response times beyond normal human capacity), or as soon as they see they are losing, they suddenly experience 'connection problems'. The greatest thing about games with good multiplayer support is that you get to play against other real people, and the worst thing about these games is that most real people (who are into online gaming) suck.
Here's what one of the developers had to say regarding the situation in his Day 2 Status report post:
Now, I do want to address something about the update that I’ve seen users talk about. We aren’t blaming piracy for the fact that the day 0 multiplayer experience absolutely sucked. The issue boiled down to us having put together a multiplayer infrastructure that was designed to handle around 50,000 or so connected users. If the game took off, we would simply add more servers as the load increased.
But what happened was that we ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers. Now, the roughly 120,000 users that weren’t running legitimate copies of the game weren’t online playing multiplayer or anything. The issue with those users was as benign as a handful of HTTP calls that did things like check for updates and general server keep alive. Pretty trivial on its own until you have 120,000 of them. Then you have what amounts to a DDOS attack on yourself.
My take away from that is that they are fairly pleased with the sales, they are about in line with first week expectations, but that they hadn't planned on such a huge amount of warez users hitting their system at the same time as their legitimate users. This problem was exascerbated by the game being released early by some retailers, which meant that over the weekend far more pirates had opportunity to download the retail version of the game than they normally would have anticiapted. Instead of being able to ramp up capacity slowly and deal with the initial onslaught of real customers, with only a handful of warez copies, instead they had an expected amount of 'real' customers, but also a massive flood of warez kiddies hitting their servers simultaneously, and that wasn't anticipated, so the experience for the 'real customers' was screwed up by all the calls on their resources by pirated copies of the game. That's why, as a general rule, it's best to let the developers shake the bugs out of the system for about a month before trying the online component of these types of games, and it's also why it's usually a bad idea to buy a MMORPG on launch, as well, capacity never meets demand at the beginning, and if you judge a game by the multiplayer experience you have when it first hits retail, you will probably be very disappointed (even though, that experience will likely improve within a few weeks). You are basically paying to be a 'beta user', and that's just the way it is, it's too hard to anticipate all that's going to happen, and it's too easy to patch after the fact with high speed internet, that almost all games ship before all the bugs are worked out (especially on the multiplayer end, which can't really be tested until release, given that in a pre-release beta, the number of users is limited).
About the game, it's an action oriented real time strategy game, focused on combat, with most of the resource gathering/territory winning components stripped away, it's been compared frequently to the Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients, but I haven't played that, so I can't say how accurate that description is.
You are given eight very different "Demigods" to play as, divided into two types, generals, who command a small group of other units, and assassins, which go it alone, but have major firepower at their disposal. In tournament mode, you play eight rounds, and the demigod that accumulated the most points becomes a god. The demigods are also divided into light and dark sides, and you are not only competing to defeat the demigods on the other side, but you are also competing amongst the demigods on your side for points awarded for most kills, most flags captured, most gold accumulated, and other such stuff. That means each different map, and scenario require differing strategies if you want to both win the map, and out point the other demigods on your side. It's an interesting twist in gaming mechanics, some demigods are better suited to earning points than others, and I suspect that there will be some rebalancing in future updates. It has the right mix of simplicity and complexity, no story, just action, and so far I find it pretty fun, with each match lasting less than 20 minutes, it's a game you can jump in and out of and you don't feel like you are going to have to sit down and play for four hours or more before you feel like you've accomplished something like what happens in some RTS type games.
The graphics are great, the sound is excellent, and the performance is smooth, at least on my PC, which exceeds all the recommended specs by a comfortable margin.
Enough writing about it, time to get back to playing, I haven't beaten the tournament mode with each demigod yet...
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