Welcome to this week’s Heroes Herald, the weekly Heroes of Newerth column that insists you all wear flame-retardant suits before picking up this amazing game.
Heroes of Newerth, or HoN to the cool kids, is the latest DOTA-clone from S2 Games. Plenty has changed in HoN from its Warcraft 3 based forbear from gorgeous graphics, fantastic engine, low-lag netcode to a fully featured stats system. Sadly, much has stayed the same and HoN has also become infected with the awful DOTA community.
Generalisations are a terrible thing so right now let’s just go with the fact that I’m a terrible person because I’m sticking by my statement. Now, to begin my rant with another statement: I love HoN. I love HoN so much I cancelled my WoW accounts since I muscled my way into the Closed Beta.
As much as I love HoN I have come to realise that it is a truly epic task to enter and become a happy participant of the HoN community without being flamed, yelled or cursed at within your first 50 matches. 2 weeks ago I was so shocked I had to disconnect from a public 5v5 SD (Standard Draft) game – a newbie with no more than 5 games under his/her belt was being blasted over voice chat – everything from racial slurs to remarks about their mother and it went on and on.
S2 went to great lengths to implement a leveling system so that noobs (and pros alike) can find their counterparts. Ideally, this would ensure a healthy and competitive game for all parties; but in reality there is a strong contingent of players who sit slightly below the line of “pro” and shamefully label their games as noob and then proceed to “pubstomp” (public game stomp – I think its rather self explanatory). It really starts to get ugly when you have two “really good players by not quite pro idiots” (herein known as “wankers”) on each team and the noobs are literally flamed so hard it would make them want to uninstall the game because of their, expected and totally acceptable, lack of knowledge. With the latest 1.5.0 patch pushed out a few days back, S2 reworked the PSR (Personal Skill Rating) system and this may alleviate some matchmaking problems.
Personally, I do not see a light at the end of this community-tunnel and I have taken it upon myself to coach newbies, over the built-in voice system, to ensure they grow and learn to enjoy the game as was intended. I challenge all upstanding HoN players to do the same. At the end of the day, all of HoN’s bells and whistles are only as loud as the community plays them.
Reybz is a 400+ game Closed Beta veteran of Heroes of Newerth who will shed honest and an occasional brutal light on this ever-growing title.
