Okay, I now feel confident in publicly saying that I think that the connectivity issues some have had is going to go away next week.

Here's what we've built:

1. If you open ports 6112 to 6200 and port forward them to your IP on your router (this is for people who are familiar with this stuff) you'll get what is called direct connect.

2. If you don't do this, we will try to do a quick NAT connect. This takes longer but works for most people.

3. If NAT fails, you will be connected to our Proxy server system. This is not going to be super desireable at first because the physical location of the Proxy server is going to make the difference between a good and a lagfest. When the proxy server is nearby (east coast US player for instance to the east cost proxy server) it's perfectly good. But, for instance, if you're in Japan and it uses a proxy server in Singapore, you're adding 200ms to your latency which can make the game a total lag nightmare. so this is clearly your last result.

Now, right now, the current version of Demigod uses a connectivity server that ONLY does option 2. That's because it was decided early on that users shouldn't have to open ports. This, IMO, should NEVER have been the first option because when you force even technically sophisticated users into this system, you end up having a LOT of unnecessary connections to these NAT servers.

...

Third, and this is where we need your help: The demo. We will be working with GPG on the demo but I was thinking of proposing that the demo for Demigod be multiplayer ONLY. Moreover, I would like the demo players to be able to play online with legitimate players. Here's where we need your help: What do you think would be a good way to limit this demo then in order to get people to still buy the game?