Check this post by Jah out:

Is it me or s2 games slowly removing elements of skill from this game the differential in skill between players is getting smaller and smaller not because players are getting better but because the game is getting easier and easier. The freaking entire game is turning into easy mode.

• Chalice- Mana maintenance; It requires a significant amount of skill to maintain ones mana so hes always useful for potential fights that can happen at anytime on the map. Before you couldn’t just spam waves for farm because hey what if a team-fight goes down. (This is also contributing to the mass tping that happens every-time someone ganks because hey now everyone has mana, spam creep camps/waves away no skill required.)

• Striders- Getting close to heroes; Before this actually required skill, it was an art getting close to enemy heroes while ganking you had to have good positioning know how players move. But hey now you have max movement speed so you can just walk up to the other team from the front you don’t have to go around the side or anything. Free 300gold haste rune for all support players.

• Extra assist gold- This has got to be the stupidest change S2 has made to the game since removing bombadiers 2 second ult delay. Before it actually required skill to maintain your gold to have money to place wards down. You had to control the amount of deaths you had and if you knew you were dying buying right before you died as to make sure your utilizing all your gold. However have no fear anymore you can die as many times as you want just tp every single time anyone on your team gets ganked just hit them enemies once(you dont actually have to be useful or stun or anything) and bam you will have instant extra gold. (Support players now always have money for tps as well, also contributing to the mass tping going on recently) I feel like this change is largely because of the 1600 players complaining in the balance forum of how support is really difficult and how they don’t have enough gold to place wards. Support is supposed to be difficult. Getting gold and maintaining gold is supposed to be a difficult task. However, now virtually every character in the game gets extra gold for doing the exact stuff they did before. Its very similar to the extra gold you get in easy mode. This is also a large reason why sandwraith is super strong now because hey just press the R button and you get assist gold for every kill(don’t worry your ult doesn’t actually have to help people on your team get a kill just ult for the extra gold)

These items only make the game easier, good players are still able to gank w/o striders/chalice/extra assist gold. They only increase the speed of the game among low skill players.

Notice that their is less and less tournaments…You guys are destroying the game by adding stupid “S2 changes”. How about you guys get some actual competitive players on your balance staff. It seems like the majority of the s2 development staff either never plays the game or sucks at the game. I don’t know if the s2 staff really understands that every single competitive player is going to leave for DotA 2 when it comes out at this rate. This is not an exaggeration I have heard so many players say this.

Honestly the only person on your guys staff that has any understanding of how to make a good competitive game is JohnnyUtah give him control of the development staff or start hiring people that do or your game will die.

Can’t disagree with this big nerd.  Once upon a time HoN was as big as LoL and DotA.  But now look at that shit, LoL sitting on 8x the player base with a game we know is so much shittier.  And even old man DotA coming up big with that release of 6.70c map.  Nice one, gramps.  You’d expect HoN 2.0 could contend with a 9 year old Warcraft 3 Custom Map BUT NOPE.

Here are the reasons that personally I think HoN is getting crushed so hard:

1. S2 makes essential changes much too slow — Matchmaking is great; it’s clearly THE way to play the game.  But it took waaaay to long to become a reality.  We WERE promised that at retail, not 6 months after; wtf happened?  S2 completely missed the boat.  Remember the whole spamming problem, which breaky’s been complaining about FOR A YEAR?  You could fix this in one afternoon with a few lines of code but it just _ doesn’t _ happen.  Players get fed up when all they are getting is some new soundtrack or junk new hero instead of important stuff getting fixed in any sort of timely manner.  By time S2 sees the daylight Dota 2 will be around ready shitsmash them back to last month.
2. S2 makes negative changes and doesn’t realize their mistakes – Removing vote kick are you kidding?  This is the cardinal example of NOT LISTENING TO WHAT THE PLAYERS WANT.  Ninety percent support the Vote Kick function and it gets removed and never comes back.  This is a joke.
3. Terrible business model – Look at the immediate drop off for HoN traffic between April and July 2010.  As soon as the game goes retail half the players stopped playing.  Aren’t games supposed to get more popular when they are finally released?  The “pay 30$ for the game” model clearly sucks and the League of Legends model is the way to go.  The game should be free and you ONLY spend money optionally in the shop.  You’ll make way more money with a 10x larger player base spending in the shop than with a tiny player base playing a one time 30$ fee.  This is something that  S2 finally realized and tried to pull off with HoN 2.0 shop, but again, it took them much too long and League of Legends already scooped up the market while HoN 2.0 comes along much to late to be relevant.
4. Zero Marketing — Word of mouth marketing doesn’t work when the people who play the game a lot are pissed off about it all the time.  League of Legends marketed their game the right way by hyping the shit out of their release with big time videos, massive prize packages for the ladder, and spending on advertisements.  You can’t visit a HoN website without advertisements for LoL popping up and you can buy the damn game in Target if you want.  That’s how you do it big and now Riot games is profiting.  This is a game that used to be smaller than HoN, but just look at that crush they put on it.

TL DR VERSION: JUST LOOK AT THAT GRAPH BRO IT SAYS IT ALL

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Tags: bad, crush, dota 2, HoN, jah, s2

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2011 at 3:34 PM by daggius and is filed under Op/Ed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.