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Literally millions of people disagree with you. LoL is still one of the most popular online games now than a decade after launch. HoN was a critical and commer

Literally millions of people disagree with you. LoL is still one of the most popular online games now than a decade after launch. HoN was a critical and commercial failure at launch.

Bigpet 5y ago
Next you're going to tell me all the mobile free-to-play games are clearly the best games ever because they're "popular". Popularity and quality have a very tentative relationship at the best of times. When differences in barriers to entry and network effects come in, then quality has to at most just clear a watermark. So I'd say it's probably more likely "not bad enough to lose popularity" than it is "so popular because it's so high-quality"
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
So Solitair is the best game of all time? Cigarettes are more popular than cuban cigars and McDonalds is more popular that a Michelin star restaraunt.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  HoN and a "Michelin star restaurant" aren't the same kind of restaurant, and don't target the same customers, so popularity says nothing about their relative quality. Plenty of people, myself include, like McDonalds. Not many people think McDonalds is the best restaurant ever. However, comparing the popularity of McDonalds to other similar restaurants like Carls Jr or Jack in the Box would be a good indicator of perceptions of quality. LoL and HoN are essentially different versions of the same game, so popularity is a good indicia of the market perceptions of game quality. LoL has been popular since it was launched over a decade ago, and remains popular to this day, outlasting dozens of other e-sports games, indicating that the player base thinks the game is still good enough to keep playing it even in the face of competition from newer games. DOTA2, similarly has a large player base, indicating that a large number of people also find the game to be of sufficient quality and enjoyment to spend years playing. Both Riot and Valve earned hundreds of millions from their respective MOBAs, and continue to make large amounts of money from these games. In contrast, the abject failure that was HoN almost bankrupt S2 games (their followup MOBA, Strife, finally killed them off.) On a further note, I find it quite humorous that the parent to which I was replying accused LoL of being just a clone of DOTA, despite Riot actually putting a significant amount of effort into differentiating the heroes and combat. At launch, the HoN heroes were just reskins of the DOTA heroes.
  - gfody 5y ago
    a lot of us og dota players got on the hon beta around summer 09 and appreciated how it faithfully preserved mechanics to the point that a lot of your skills just transferred over - the graphics were beautiful and it really felt like an upgraded dota experience. the attention to detail was absolute quality. I played it for years and it still holds a warm place in my heart. it started going south with the switch to f2p, lame in-game purchases, and generally trying to emulate LoL's pandering to the wider/younger market. I tried to like LoL and gave it an extended trial but ultimately hated how they simplified the mechanics and the casual nature of it all. they obviously made the right choices for making the most money possible but they made the shitty version of dota. it just turns out there's a bigger market for shitty dota than proper dota.
    - gamblor956 5y ago
      So, you're basically admitting that HoN was just a reskinning of DOTA... IOW, HoN was entirely unoriginal and players might as well have just stuck with the original DOTA. And people did...DOTA on a given day had more players than HoN during its entire run. LoL may have simplified the mechanics of DOTA, but it did something new and fundamentally set the stage for e-sports as we know it. Complex mechanics in themselves aren't to be celebrated; a lot of what LoL did was to eliminate the pointlessly complex mechanics. Even the edit:[lead developer] of DOTA thought the mechanics had gotten too complex to be enjoyable for more than a very niche audience, which is why he streamlined a lot of them when given the opportunity to develop DOTA2 for Valve.
      - gfody 5y ago
        it's not a scandal, we were invited to beta hon under the explicit expectation that it was dota remade on a modern engine - and that's what we wanted as wc3 and bnet were awfully dilapidated by then. it's more than a reskinning it brought modern match making and stats and nice community features, etc. and I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers but I recall bnet becoming a ghost town once hon started to get popular not to mention the quality of the matches. from what I can tell hon had decent run - won plenty of awards, made plenty of money, it's not league of legends but nothing is even close to that. and apparently there are people still playing hon - they just released a client for M1 a few months ago.

Literally millions of people disagree with you. LoL is still one of the most popular online games now than a decade after launch. HoN was a critical and commercial failure at launch.

Bigpet 5y ago

Next you're going to tell me all the mobile free-to-play games are clearly the best games ever because they're "popular". Popularity and quality have a very tentative relationship at the best of times. When differences in barriers to entry and network effects come in, then quality has to at most just clear a watermark. So I'd say it's probably more likely "not bad enough to lose popularity" than it is "so popular because it's so high-quality"

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

So Solitair is the best game of all time? Cigarettes are more popular than cuban cigars and McDonalds is more popular that a Michelin star restaraunt.

gamblor956 5y ago
HoN and a "Michelin star restaurant" aren't the same kind of restaurant, and don't target the same customers, so popularity says nothing about their relative quality. Plenty of people, myself include, like McDonalds. Not many people think McDonalds is the best restaurant ever. However, comparing the popularity of McDonalds to other similar restaurants like Carls Jr or Jack in the Box would be a good indicator of perceptions of quality. LoL and HoN are essentially different versions of the same game, so popularity is a good indicia of the market perceptions of game quality. LoL has been popular since it was launched over a decade ago, and remains popular to this day, outlasting dozens of other e-sports games, indicating that the player base thinks the game is still good enough to keep playing it even in the face of competition from newer games. DOTA2, similarly has a large player base, indicating that a large number of people also find the game to be of sufficient quality and enjoyment to spend years playing. Both Riot and Valve earned hundreds of millions from their respective MOBAs, and continue to make large amounts of money from these games. In contrast, the abject failure that was HoN almost bankrupt S2 games (their followup MOBA, Strife, finally killed them off.) On a further note, I find it quite humorous that the parent to which I was replying accused LoL of being just a clone of DOTA, despite Riot actually putting a significant amount of effort into differentiating the heroes and combat. At launch, the HoN heroes were just reskins of the DOTA heroes.
- gfody 5y ago
  a lot of us og dota players got on the hon beta around summer 09 and appreciated how it faithfully preserved mechanics to the point that a lot of your skills just transferred over - the graphics were beautiful and it really felt like an upgraded dota experience. the attention to detail was absolute quality. I played it for years and it still holds a warm place in my heart. it started going south with the switch to f2p, lame in-game purchases, and generally trying to emulate LoL's pandering to the wider/younger market. I tried to like LoL and gave it an extended trial but ultimately hated how they simplified the mechanics and the casual nature of it all. they obviously made the right choices for making the most money possible but they made the shitty version of dota. it just turns out there's a bigger market for shitty dota than proper dota.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    So, you're basically admitting that HoN was just a reskinning of DOTA... IOW, HoN was entirely unoriginal and players might as well have just stuck with the original DOTA. And people did...DOTA on a given day had more players than HoN during its entire run. LoL may have simplified the mechanics of DOTA, but it did something new and fundamentally set the stage for e-sports as we know it. Complex mechanics in themselves aren't to be celebrated; a lot of what LoL did was to eliminate the pointlessly complex mechanics. Even the edit:[lead developer] of DOTA thought the mechanics had gotten too complex to be enjoyable for more than a very niche audience, which is why he streamlined a lot of them when given the opportunity to develop DOTA2 for Valve.
    - gfody 5y ago
      it's not a scandal, we were invited to beta hon under the explicit expectation that it was dota remade on a modern engine - and that's what we wanted as wc3 and bnet were awfully dilapidated by then. it's more than a reskinning it brought modern match making and stats and nice community features, etc. and I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers but I recall bnet becoming a ghost town once hon started to get popular not to mention the quality of the matches. from what I can tell hon had decent run - won plenty of awards, made plenty of money, it's not league of legends but nothing is even close to that. and apparently there are people still playing hon - they just released a client for M1 a few months ago.