You’ve been rooped

Are you sick and tired of playing in your MMR bracket? Do tedious tryhard games bring you down? Do you hate it when a scrub fails with a carry?

I have a solution for those problems, and it’s called rooping. What is rooping you ask? Well sit down young man, put on your favorite turtle neck and listen up.

Rooping is the act of purposely losing a game to get people mad. This in turn gets your rating lower so you have a low rated legacy account to stomp noobs.

Why not just call this throwing? Well you see, if you use the word throwing in chat people can report you. So you use a slang word which only your inner circle knows what it means. Sadly when this article gets published, you can no longer use the words roop or rooping or rooped.

Credit to the semi competitive player Zetpro for this word, in his native Swedish tongue it means gay anal sex without lube.

Missing spells and getting your teammates killed is fucking comical. Your teammates get really mad when this happens, it’s pretty hilarious. The chat can get pretty funny as seen here:

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New heroes & items just increase HoN’s Barrier to Entry

Everyone should be in favor of having new players joining HoN.  New players create:

1. More people to play with & faster queue times
2. More attention from sponsors allowing for bigger tournament prize pools
3. More monetary incentive for S2 to support the game better

Now let’s talk about the major barriers-to-entry, e.g. what keeps new players from joining HoN and sticking around (TLDR below):

1. Money
2. “Shitty community”/It’s hard to learn

The first one, Money, is very important, and it’s something S2 realized late in the game when they finally made HoN free-to-play last year.  For many players it just wasn’t worth 30$ to play HoN, especially when there were so free alternatives around (League of Legends, Dota, etc.).  Making HoN free-to-play was a great move by S2, because it re-opened up the door to a bunch more players they could only get with a free game (kids w/o credit cards, casuals, and cheapos).

In the second item, I have combined “Shitty community” and “It’s hard to learn”, because I think they go hand-in-hand.  Many people claim HoN’s shitty community is the #1 reason people don’t play it, but I don’t agree with this.  Being a shithead and blowing off some steam online is a lot of fun, and as great a reason to play HoN as it is to avoid it.  I’ve heard from plenty of people that they started playing HoN just because they wanted “put ppl in the dumpster” or “get kids mad”, etc.  Things like the Badass Announcer and Smackdown taunts are only there to confirm that this game is all about berating and humiliating your opponent.

People are going to get ripped on if they play shitty no matter what, and frivolous efforts to improve how people act like the “Making a difference” signatures are off target — the real way to solve this issue is to make the game easier to learn.

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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.