S2 breaks Alchemist Bones

In an attempt to normalize gold gained from creeps and neutrals over time, S2 accidentially released a patch this afternoon that gives Alchemist Bones such big outputs as 900 Gold for a Vagabond Leader, 650 for a Minotaur, and 680 for a Vulture Lord. April Fools isn’t for another couple months, small sons S2.

Any time you transmute a jungle creep for the first time in a game it dumps the jackpot on you. Kids are rolling out 650 gpm Predators. Big Glaciuses are showing up with bones too. And unable to help himself, Moon is getting each of his 27 smurf accounts banned one by one for bug abuse.

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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S2 has “Get On My Level” Taunt on the way

After satisfying DRD fans with the the big dumpster taunt, S2 is going after the Moonies with a new “Get On My Level Taunt”.  It’s either that or a “Neva Eva” taunt, which in itself makes no sense and is therefore highly unlikely.  GGGGG

MoonMeander is BACK. No longer MannersMeander

After days of abstaining from HoN, and being well mannered to avoid bans even in his own home.

PAINTITGOLD’s nerd story of the year (deleted on S2 forums)

The entire story begins with NASL.

The entire first part of this – up until dreamhack winter and compLexity is an E-mail I sent to detonator, the head of tournament organization at S2, in order to try to get him to recognize the unfairness/bias we’re dealing with. It was originally a letter I wrote in week 2 of NASL to which I received no reply. There’s many logical inconsistencies and examples which are vital here.

Hi, I’m PAINTITGOLD from CompLexity, and i’m expressing the opinion that our team holds.

I want to voice our concerns for NASL. I wish to make this clear as possible. As such, new/important points will be bolded, and skype chat will be in italics.

Prior information:
Let me clearly state that when we as a team, sign up for tournaments, we sign up as a USW team. We sign up as a US WEST team because we have two players from the absolute most west land you can live on. Hawaii and British Columbia, Canada(Jah, and Tarano respectively). We also have a UScentral player and two Canadian USEast players. We choose USWest as our home server because it’s the best team decision for us, as Jah AND tarano both get 250+ ping on European servers, whereas everyone else sits at 150-190. Not only is it the best TEAM decision, but it’s also been proven throughout other tournaments that it’s the fairest decision, and in competitive play, fairness should obviously be a top priority as a tournament admin. When the rules say that “fairest ping” decides server issues, the “fairest” ping has always been in our favour.

Part 1 – came two weeks ago when we played MSI in NASL.

First and foremost I would like to explain that we were under the pre-tense that our games against europeans were all going to be played on USEast, because we’re a west based team, and it was acknowledged throughout the skype that we’re not only a west based team, but Jah also lives in Hawaii, and Tarano lives in Vancouver(both being farther from the east coast than Europe is.)

Example:

[10/2/2011 5:47:13 PM] Josh Amos: [Sunday, October 02, 2011 5:38 PM] Matthew “jaH” Penaroza:

<<< [Saturday, September 03, 2011 7:48 PM] Nick “breakycpk” Caras:

<<< ya
obv the team that came to mind when we talked about itw as col and jah`… but basically s2 is paying to host servers simply for this event
and to also host a USW just for them… just ya
hopefully it can manage with USE— Nick “breakycpk” Caras, Saturday, September 03, 2011 7:48 PM— Matthew “jaH” Penaroza, Sunday, October 02, 2011 5:38 PM

As such, we brought it up in game against MSI, and we asked Breaky to come into chat and confirm to MSI that what we were saying is indeed true. As per our request, he came in to the game and confirmed that we DO indeed get 3 US east games, however, they get hellbourne twice. This is something that we agreed upon(although Zaku may have seemed to disagree in game chat, he doesn’t have the opinion of our team.) This is in the chat parser, and can be re-confirmed with availability of the replays, given that we get the lobby chat. I’m telling you the full story so that all blanks are filled in completely. Let me make this clear: one would assume that this would no doubt set precedent for our games against Europeans in the future. This is the most fair route because the ping averages are the closest by far. Our west players have a 250+ average on European hosts, overall the ping averages in comparison are just more even/fair. I’ll move more into this later when it becomes more relevant.

So moving into the actual issue of problem #1

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