Kim Jong Il big Cry Fest

Riot rolls out $5M of Season 2 LoL prize money

Oh snap, looks like Riot didn’t want to be the small son on the block.  They just answered Valve’s 1 million dollar Dota 2 tournament with a big money drop of their own:

The League of Legends Season Two prize pool will feature a record setting $5 million prize pool!

The money will be funding prizing for local, national and international tournaments to foster and grow the League of Legends eSports scene. For starters, the new season will feature weekly livestreams of our ongoing regional tournaments in North America, and across both European environments, so stay tuned for more information on these broadcasts and to see a lot more of League of Legends enthusiasts like Phreak, Rivington III and Nikasaur.

HoN moves to a complete copy of LoL’s free-to-play system — finally

HoN moving to free to play is definitely the best decision S2 could make. There are no real drawbacks for people who have already payed the 30$ to play, the “legacy” account holders, and it will surely lead to a bigger player pool and more exposure for HoN, which is something the game sorely needs. If S2 is guilty of anything, it is adapting too slowly and taking too long to implement this much-needed change.

A few months ago, we griped that while S2 has the best game, they react too slowly to obvoius demands and subsequently fail to make HoN the success it should be. The time it took to swap to free to play system is certainly another case of this. Looking at the above plot of traffic to HoN’s website, you see clearly a big mistake was made around 15 months ago when HoN moved out of beta and began charging 30$, immediately losing about half their players and opening the door for League of Legends to take over the genre. Sure, S2 needed to monetize their game, but this was clearly the wrong way to do it. Since HoN’s retail release, S2 slowly made changes to their model to mimic LoL’s: a shop where you can buy extra things like avatars, unlockable things with silver coins, reducing the price of new accounts, and so on, none of which had any success at increasing the HoN player pool whatsoever.

Finally, today FREE TO PLAY is released , a complete copy of LoL’s rotating hero system which has been so successful:

Q. Will I need real money to play?

No. You will have access to a Rotating Hero Pool of 15 heroes and will be able to play without paying a cent.

This free to play system is exactly what HoN needs: a level playing field to compete with LoL for popularity. Perhaps now the better game can finally make a comeback. Let’s hope S2 keeps their servers running smoothly without another huge ddos shenanagin or other problem. And we’ll see if the 3-5 months of free to play before Dota 2′s release is enough for HoN to set up some sort of foothold before another portion of its player base is scooped up.

S2 Catastrophic Hardware Failure takes HoN Down indefinitely; League of Legends servers get slammed as HoN players head on over

From honstatus.tumblr.com:

HoN Downtime 6/21/11

During our scheduled maintenance period this morning we had a catastrophic hardware failure across a number of systems including some of our backup systems. We have the capacity and ability to recover from this failure. However, due to the extent of this failure we cannot provide an ETA on when service will be restored, we will continue to provide you updates as they are available to us.

We apologize, we would like to play just as badly as you would.

HoN Server Maintenance 6/21/2011

We had an initial maintenance scheduled today from 7:30 AM GMT -5 until 8:30 AM GMT -5, we have since extended that time frame to run until 3:00 PM GMT -5 we will continue to keep you updated.
Posted 10 hours ago

Milkfat says he will be the best LoL player in 90 days, gets free LoL hookup; community gets pissed, rips on him; Riot renigs gift

Milkfat publicly bet he will be the best League of Legends player in 90 days time on his new blog.  Others beg to differ.  Shikyo ripped him on Starcraft forums saying,

“Milkfat actually was barely mediocre at HoN(was in a competitive top 10 team but the scene isn’t all that big and he imo wasn’t anything special). Also I’ve never heard of him in SC or WC3. Saying that he won’t even become decent. Just overhype over an average player.”

Consensus is that Milkfat just hops around between games, becoming proficient and hyping the crap out of himself before finding a new conquest.  He is also a hall of famer for gayest picture on gayorfrench.com.

The LoL community was up in arms about Riot Games hooking Milkfat up with 450,000 free Riot Points (RP) and Influence Points (IP), which are what you use to unlock different heroes and skins in the game, and normally take a player lots of money and time to get.  Apparently Pendragon’s no stranger to preferential treatment and hooks up his friends all the time.  In this case its for a ex-HoN player who’s sure to make plenty of noise about himself and convert players (cha ching).

After all the tears, Riot had to take the points back to save face and topics on Milkfat are being mass deleted from LoL forums.  Cute stuff.

Milkfat forges on.  Does he really need 90 days?