Milkfat puts Hon in the books

If Milkfat wasn’t a legend before then he truly is one now. He battled through exhaustion, nosebleeds, wrist pain, vomiting, and relentless chat trolls for a solid 76 hours and 30 mins, knocking out 88 tmm games to beat the world record for continuous strategy game playing by over a day. You can’t really appreciate the magnitude of this till you go through your normal day, go to sleep, wake up, repeat 3x, and keep checking back the stream to see he is still going and hasn’t stopped. There was something comforting about knowing you could always check in on this nerd and he’d be there.

Milkfat always has had an uncanny ability to bring people together, and this event was no different. I got to meet breaky and Phil & some of milkfats friends. This event in general was a great chance for Hon players to meet up. I wanted to come earlier (than 3AM sunday) and meet more people, but after the Odyssey LAN (which ran late) I was stuck on the 91 fwy since some drunk guy flipped his car and was p much dying on the pavement and they wouldn’t let anyone thru, so had to put the car in Park and take a big nap on the highway for an hour or so.

This Mission Viejo Howie’s Game Shack is really nice. Huge place like 100+ computers, really easy to get to (you get off the 5 freeway and ur there), easy parking, inside a ril fancy shopping center, etc.; hope to see some more Hon events here.

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Warchamp calls out Diva, Maliken, Honcast in big cryfest

TLDR version:

Warchamp, a global moderator claims:

• he’s quitting after 3 years of volunteering since it has turned into a shitfest
• community contributors made the game great and many were hired by S2
• Diva’s design decisions suck and his control over all design stifles its success
• Maliken is the main problem with Hon and his greed-motivated decisions ruin it
• Honcast is a monopoly because of S2′s support and Breaky & Phil suck at the game & therefore suck at casting
• Hon is just a cash grab now

Full version (read while crying):

As of yesterday, I am no longer a global moderator for Heroes of Newerth, I was forcefully removed from the team without even getting to post a goodbye. After 3 years or more of volunteering my free time to a game I loved, I eventually became too disinterested and inactive to warrant maintaining the status. As such, I think it’s time for a nice big post. I warn you now I’m a terrible writer so I’m probably just gonna toss out a wall of rambling.

The Beginning

When HoN first entered beta, I got in relatively early through a friend. I was never a big dota player but I had played it ocassionally and had heard about LoL being in development (And expected terrible things simply because of the name). I enjoyed the game and ended up participating on the forums, including making a big mega thread at one point filled to the brim with hero information.

Eventually, as I do with most games, I started tinkering with the game files and I created a simple mod that put all the DotA names for items next to the HoN one in-game. It was crude and imperfect, but it got the job done. With that, mods for HoN were born and an incredible and talented community began to thrive, leading to the later creation of the mod manager. Shortly after I made that first mod and released it in the “Interface” section of the forums, it was altered into a modding section with me as the moderator in charge. Around this time, S2 was still a small indie company, with only 20 – 30 people total with nearly half of those being the artist team.

I joined a moderator team along with a number of other really cool people that I’m friends with still to this day. Most of them are listed on the credits page in the ‘Moderators’ section.

Looking at that list, I wanna quickly go over a couple of them.

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Twitch.tv’s Partner Program ads: daring you to get Adblocker

Twitch.tv’s COO was just on Reddit, where he bragged they were the first streaming site to use commercial breaks, in their partner program. These commercials seem like a major mis-step. The 30 second long, full-window commercials, especially the pre-roll ones, are so invasive and annoying: you can’t X-out the commercials if you’re not interested and you can’t watch the stream until they are done playing. They’re basically an open invitation for viewers to get an adblocker plugin fast.

I don’t get how Twitch.tv thinks these are a good idea. People who watch gaming streams are computer nerds and if they don’t have Adblocker already, they at least know it exists. A Google search, a download, and 5 minutes later they have it installed and never see an ad again. All it takes is for them to get annoyed enough. Then Twitch doesn’t even make money from its less annoying ads, which get blocked out too.

It’s hilarious because if no one sees ads, Twitch’s revenue is zero. Adblockers are the number one threat to their success. Yet here they are basically encouraging people to get them by throwing up insanely invasive commercials.

YouTube almost never has these kind of commercials and they are the #1 video site in the world. They have tiny banners at the bottom of a video you can close, and sidebars that don’t stop you from watching stuff. Partners get a share from these banners, where on Twitch they do not.

People on the internet don’t have the tolerance for a 30 sec commercial. This ploy is destined to fail. Being less annoying, like YouTube is, is safer and smarter long term.

S2 Balance Team (SBT): Setting the story straight

A letter to the editor; Raynarr writes in:

I see a lot of shit about how terrible SBT is on DRD. I would like to clear the air surrounding SBT. I was there from the very start and know the shit storm surrounding SBT.

Chapter 1: Pre SBT

Before SBT there was a separate test client. Available to anyone and with no NDA it was a gong show. Games hosted on the client were linked to Retail client. So playing a stats game would record normal stats including leaves. Because no one wanted their PSR to be affected by testing all games were hosted in No Stat game format. The problem was that people would leave if they didn’t get the new hero, ruining the game and thus no testing occurred. The other option was to have a 5v5 all the same hero. As a result testing never happened and S2 knew if they wanted to take Beta Testing seriously they would have to substantially change the way they approached testing. SBT had started.

Chapter 2 : The Anghkor/Sadfish Era

So S2 decided to make Beta testing exclusive, bringing in a new forum in the private section and a client with an NDA attached to it. People tried out and got in, and slowly SBT grew. Vinthian was in charge of it all with his 2 peons Anghkor/Sadfish getting S2 Junior staff and running the show. But right from the start there was obvious concerns with SBT. No new heroes were being released, games were played simply to test bugs or how abilities interact. At the same time inner rage was building. Sadfish would rage and throw a game at moments notice. Turnover for SBT members became enormous as no one could stand testing with the ragers. Constant ragequits/callouts make the atmosphere toxic. Test games became few and far between and the first iteration of SBT had failed. Sadfish and Anghkor were relieved of their duties as S2 junior staff and being in charge of SBT. S2 took over all responsibility.

Chapter 3: S2 and the Competitors

S2 started running all SBT games. Instead of really recruiting new blood they decided to help out they would mass invite every player seen as “Competitive” These players would simply read the patch notes, post complaints and ask for changes. Rarely would any player actually log on the client to test things in a game situation. Competitive players demanded changes, that they thought were the best for the game. Competitive players added nothing to the game. None of them could think outside their bias (Except JoshP). But new heroes were being pumped out every 2 weeks with 5-6 to test on the client. Games were happening but many of the SBT members were inactive. S2 was tired of the way things were. The players who are supposed to care most about the game had failed them. SBT was about to have another rework.

Chapter 4: Mass removal and revamp.

To start about 90% of SBT (Or around 200 members) were removed, including me. 2 new players were put in charge. New blood is constantly being recruited, and there is a quota on how many games each tester must play.

So when you bitch about all the SBT players being trash, and no changes to balance happening. Don’t look only to S2 and say they have failed. The players have failed them.

LoL nerds reaching for the excuse book after Chu big bury

After this big bury, the fat sons are little piling over here by the thousands and crashing our crap web hosting.

Just look at some of these small son whimpers over at their forums:

“he was #1 for like 20 minites”

“Didnt Chu play when all of the top players were at dream hack……. If so i dont see much here to warrant any attention nor call him a good player.”

“no one cares about solo queue so he shouldn’t think he’s mastered the game”

Bro chu is insane at gaming.  Just accept it.  Only took till page 2 of the thread for one of their own to sort this one out.

Guys He topped the ladder with Maokai No one does that. No one tops the ladder with Maokai

There is merit to what he is saying. Him climbing the ladder in 1 month just proved his own point. Try climbing the Hawn ladder in a month, see how far you get.

The next 20 pages of the thread boiled down to kids admitting LoL has terrible gameplay because of the flash ability ruining everything and then calling DRD trash HoN fanboys.  Funny thing, you can’t even say HoN over there — it’s actually censored — so Lolnerds have to call us Hawners.

Kids lets set this one straight though, since we ain’t no S2 fanboys.  LoL is trash game supported by a solid company that takes care of their shit.  HoN is a solid game supported by a trash company that has no idea what’s going on.  So take your pick.

You’ll probably have more fun playing HoN, but at the same time you’ll get a headache from random server lag, games not recording, massive regular downtime due to DDOS attacks having their way with the servers, TMM games failing to load, Valkyrie model disappearing at random mid game, random flickers of hidden wards/heroes in fog you’re not supposed to see, bugs in new heroes that take weeks to fix, a buddy list that is full of blank names that it doesnt let you remove to add new friends since there’s now a cap, a vote kick system that doesn’t work since it requires the other team’s approval to get rid of a griefer on your own team, and countless other glaring mishaps that boggle the mind and frustrate the loyal player.  This type of shit wouldn’t last two seconds at Riot where each issue would be tossed in the dumpster one by one until people were getting a quality product again, even if it was a hopelessly boring quality product that feels like you’re playing Gunbound with 12 year olds.

Just this week S2 managed to break games from recording and couldn’t figure out how to fix it for 2 days.  When [S2]Idejder works on code he literally just slams his keyboard like the cookie monster until the problem fixes itself.  No wonder shit takes so long.  It’s a fucking disaster over there, people.