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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Hon Volunteers jump ship

Buncha kids went the way of Warchamp7 and took off. They ranged from small son GMs to big champions like ElementUser who would go around fixing sloppy game bugs. In classic Hon forum style, their farewell was of course instantly hard deleted by infamous hentai enthusiast iGuy.

These volunteers were apparently tired of: S2s banning ppl without good reason and other abuse of power, S2 treating volunteers like disposable diapers, and the usual S2 hipocracy and cash-grabbing instead of aiming at long term success, etc. Where have we heard this shit before?

Everyone pretty much seems to agree S2 is steering Hon straight towards the dumpster. Get it together small sons. Without volunteers who will leak content and process my trolly Report A Player forms? Last game I let some kid borrow my bottle for 20 mins then reported him for item stealing even tho it was consensual. Kid got banned and I wasn’t even mad trollface.jpg get good small timer.

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