3 ms·

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 ju

by 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.

by gfody 5y ago

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.