Heroes of Newerth Open Beta About To Start 118
You may recall last summer when we discussed Heroes of Newerth, a title from S2 Games that's based on the popular Defense of the Ancients mod from Warcraft III. We passed out some closed beta keys, and there seemed to be a ton of interest, in part due to the fact that they have a Linux client. Well, if any of you missed it or want to see how the game has progressed since then, now is your chance — the open beta begins tonight (March 31). There's a countdown on the sign-up page that shows when you can register.
Be warned, the community is noxious (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a closed beta invite early on, but the community is angry, rude and just spoil the game.
Heroes of Noteworthy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This worth the news simply cause this is one of the few decent looking games for linux.
Any linux purist (i.e. someone who has no dual boot) who likes computer (as opposed to console) games should try this, yes all ten of you.
If not for any other reason then to encourage more developers to do this.
If more developers do this it will indirectly improve code quality, cause programming a multi platform game/software requires a certain level of code quality.
I hope linux and windows client here are developed separately.
I still prefer League Of Legends, mainly for it's more lighthearted design.
Re:Dota based game that already exists... (Score:4, Insightful)
And this attitude is exactly why people will play LoL over HoN.
Elitist attitudes are never welcome in any game. It's why I will play TF2 & DoD but not CS:S.
Re:Dota based game that already exists... (Score:4, Insightful)
I never said it did. Your attitude seems to echo exactly why I don't play. Your taking the amount of players as the quality of the game.
WoW has much more players than CS:S online, but I still rate WoW as a pile of dog shit because of elitist attitudes.
The more you struggle to justify the reason the play a game the more you reinforce mine (and many other's) stances toward games taken over by elitists.
Thank you for doing my job for me.
Re:Be warned, the community is noxious (Score:4, Insightful)
The reputation is well deserved, and it's not in "good fun". The problem is that DotA is designed in such a way that if one team get's a few kills in the beginning, they're almost guaranteed to win. It's impossible for the other 4 people on the team to compensate for the 5th bad player because he's feeding the other team such an extraordinary amount of gold and xp.
In most games playing 4+noob vs 5 is basically like playing 4v5, but with DotA it's more like playing 4v6 once you account for all the extra stuff the other team gets. And since people don't like losing, they get very hostile when they realize that they're in such a situation.
You used the example of a 5v5 basketball pickup game, I used to play those all the time and it didn't matter if one of the players was a noob, what's the worst that can happen? You're never worse off in basketball by playing 4+noob rather then 4 and eventually the player will learn. I've never heard of such a thing as someone insulting new players in conventional sports and if that's the norm in your neighborhood you should really consider moving somewhere where people aren't pricks.
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
League of Legends
Heros of Newerth
Demigod
League of Legends is by far the easiest to start with if you havent played the original DOTA. Easy matchmaking system, the ingame item system is very friendly to figure out what does what and how to scale items, way better then Heros of Newerth or Demigod. The developers have been very supportive of the game, theres typically a new hero added to the game every 6 weeks or so. Unfortunately on a hero release the character is usually over-powered but fixed within a week or so. Theres complaints about balance issues but thats because League of Legends is based on teamwork and not that one man Rambo which is seen in HoN or DOTA. A team that works together can easily take out the 5 man team that act like Rambos.
Demigod has fallen off the face of the map since the game was extremely buggy and multiplayer didnt work for several weeks after launch. Also, I believe the developers have only added 1 single hero to the game so far in about a year and a half of release? I gave up on this game after the developer wrote a four page paper about how they fixed the multiplayer and the steps they took, it was posted on Slashdot some time ago. They never really fixed it and it was still laggy and performance would drop late game when the creeps would over-take the map causing games to go to a crawl, crash, lag out.
Heros of Newerth is definitely not for those who have never played the DOTA style of gameplay. The crowd that plays HoN is extremely serious and will eat you alive if you screw around or suck. This is the games main problem because it really turns people away from playing it and its not the developers fault its a community problem. What I like about HoN though is that the game is way more stable then LOL (LOL uses a launcher which can crap out a lot) and its built on the foundation of competitive gameplay with features lacking from the other games, Observation mode, blind pick, one by one pick, etc.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Insightful)
I got a HoN beta key a few months ago and played for a month or two. Based on my impressions, the OP is spot-on in his observations about the community. It's actually most of the reason I don't play anymore.
To put this in context, I led a fairly hardcore WoW raiding guild for a couple of years, and played Magic Online semi-seriously for a while. I have a pretty thick skin. I'm very familiar with the concepts of nerd rage and sexual frustration made manifest over the Internet. It's worse in HoN than anywhere else I've seen it. The game's lack of a proper matchmaking system is partially to blame, but as the OP said, a lot of it does fall on the community.
For people who have never played HoN, it's a very complex game. There are almost a hundred characters to choose from, each with a unique set of stats and abilities. Compounding this, there are dozens of different items that you can purchase over the course of a game, and each character has its own "build order"--what the community considers to be the optimal strategy for playing a given character. Learning this for even a handful of characters is a massive undertaking, but many types of matches don't let you choose which character you'll end up playing, or even restrict the options that much. The rules of the game also very heavily punish a team for having one sub-par member--if your opponents figure out where you're weak and exploit it successfully, the balance of the game will tip very quickly.
The result of all this is that the game heavily rewards people who spend the time to learn it, and by the same token, severely punishes people who haven't invested that level of commitment. Which is great if you think HoN is your life's calling. But for those of us who play casually, well, you can only have your sexual orientation questioned in Portuguese so many times before you decide there are more constructive things you could be doing with your free time.
Long story short: HoN's community is unusually hardcore and unfriendly, and will certainly be an impediment to the game's mainstream adoption if certain issues are not addressed.