Back around 2009 or so...

Back around 2009 or so, Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends both came out in open beta and acted as a replacement for Dota. Since these were the first real alternatives to Dota, players generally gravitated toward HoN and it was widely accepted that LoL was casual trash. For a long time, HoN had a pretty stable count of 90,000 concurrent players during peak hours.

When HoN became pay-to-play with a $30 price tag, people abandoned the game because and that's when LoL really took over as THE f2p moba and the rest is history.

Do you guys think that HoN would have had a chance if it never went p2p and instead adopted the LoL system of unlocking and microtransactions? Let's say all things were equal: would S2 Games have been a competitor to Riot?

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maybe

It wouldnt have lost as much of its playerbase if it stayed p2p, but since LoL has a much lower skill barrier and knowledge barrier it would eventually still probably came out on top as the bigger MOBA of the 2.

Dota 2 might not have had as much success because of it though, probably depends if any actual pro scene developed around HoN

People would have dropped it all the same because:

1. DOTA 2 was around the corner
2. S2 are some of the biggest memeing idiot fuckups i have ever seen
3. HoN had no traction outside of europe and america

Obligatory
youtube.com/watch?v=3j1BQ7XFjLw

HoN was always pay to play and then eventually went free to play

but either way no, S2 is top tier incompetent

It would have done a lot better if it stayed free. It was a great alternative during the no-dota gap, and a faster-paced alternative to dota, too.

Reminder that this actually happened

No

S2 was ran by utter idiots that struck lightning and funded by gay porn money

No. LoL was more casual, you said it yourself. When has the more casual alternative not been more successful? The same shit would have happened.

That's less egregious than Tim Buckley designing a hero.

No because S2 didn't even have an actual marketing department.
They just had Maliken come up with some stupid shit that he thought sounds "cool" and hope that people will come to the game for it.

S2 fucked up because once they stopped porting and improving Dota heroes, they got some shitty OC heroes out. There was probably like 5 good OC S2 heroes but they all came out pre-2012 for sure.

>Monkey King
>Drunken Master
>Master of Arms
all great.
Cthuluphant was a fucking mistake.

Funny story: back then, I had never played or even heard of DotA. I initially considered HoN but because I was cheap the pricetag turned me away (especially since I didn't even know if I'd like it), and completely discarded LoL. Eventually a friend who played LoL wanted to play that so that's what I played for a couple of years until I quit because I realized how bad it was, and a year later I started playing Dota 2.

Yeah, then Strife exposed them for how awful they are at pretty much everything. It was League of Legends alpha graphics, voice acting by 2 or 3 guys from around the office, paragon's item system but even more pay to win, Riot's summoner spells but even more pay to win, and a cast of the most forgettable characters with the most dull spell effects in the world.

HEY EVERYONE I ALSO HATE POPULAR THINGS. DO YOU HATE POPULAR THINGS BECAUSE I DO. OOOH I HATE THEM SO MUCH PEOPLE WHO LIKE POPULAR THINGS ARE SO DUMB BECAUSE POPULAR THINGS ARE SO BAD

Ok now where do I collect my official Sup Forums-approval card?

>mod you'r ripping off played almost exclusively by underage thirdworlders
>LET'S MAKE IT PAY TO PLAY

The fact that HoN kept track of everything and make those stats public made the community even more elitist and close off than DotA. Being stat centric is fine for Savage when it represents how well a player does. You can play well and have bad stats in HoN because you don't play carries.

Definitely would've had a larger impact if it was F2P.
Fast-paced (even faster than Dota), a ton of unique and interesting heroes contrasting it from Dota 1, a decent UI.

Shame S2 were fucking retards.

>lol is shit
>dota2 isn't shit
You won't get arrested for calling them both shit

>HoN
>Popular
Pick one

mobas are a garbage genre but HoN was the best of the 4
glad I grew out of that phase

4?
We were talking about LoL, HoN, and DotA. What is this 4th one?

>walk into moba thread
>no one mentions the best moba of all

Heroes of the Storm

Seriously, try it, it's gotten 10 times better since launch

This will never not be hilarious

10 times better than 0 is still 0 friend.

>a decent UI
This is the main loss.
Valve's insistence on keeping the UI in Dota 2 just as obtuse as it was in All Stars is fucktarded.
>Lets have the UI take up 33% of the screen and show the bare minimum of valuable information
>why
>because that's how the War3 engine did it!

a better game

with a worse marketing team

f2p could've had the 'gone viral' aspect

also , it running on a toaster helps

also, BLC copied its lobby interface because itwas perfect.

lol still wishes it had a lobby interface half as good as HoN '09.

anyway, yeah.

hon is a great game
i dont think it had a chance because
it doesnt look as cutesy and cartoon (doesnt appeal to children and mid-teens-early-20s-females) which make up a surprisingly large subsection of the LoL audience.

obviously they would latch on to HoN if it was popular but it would never get to that point due to the more 'serious' nature of itself.

It really hasn't. No items makes it so every hero has one role and one role only. Too many gimmicks and the shared leveling system is just flawed outright, making it so it's even harder to win a game, forcing you to rely on allies more than ever which can be terrible especially in a moba.

I thought I'd count Dota 1 separately because millions of chinks are still playing it on their 2003 Dells.

It's so hard to get into that game because of this. Yet people defend this all the time!

>Actually made some intelligent improvements to the standard MOBA gameplay model
>They built a coherent universe for the characters to exist in, instead of doing it backwards like LoL

This game had real potential, I guess it just came too late to the party.

Was it S2, where their boss got owned so bad, he banned his owner and nerfed the hero he was playing into oblivion?

Their devs gave up. A shame really. I do play league as I have since it closed beta but Dawngate was fun as well. Much more fun to play casually than league. I needed another moba to fall back on when I get bored of ranked. But, sadly, Dawngate died out :(

Honestly, the best fun HoN ever provided was when it was DDoS'd and everyone got extremely butthurt.
youtube.com/watch?v=qErFO_SfTg0

you're outright dumb as fuck.

talents replace items in a better, less retarded way than spending gold at a shop. Lots of characters can do wildly different things depending on your build. Look at li li, azmo, kharazim. All three can go full offense, support or something in between. Way more flexible than LoLshit.

Dota 2 has better flexibility, but then you'd have to play dota 2. fuck spending an hour on a game you can lose, can fill that time with 3 hots games and have more fun.

The leveling system in Hots is good too, it forces you to engage in fights properly if you're down or play objectives if you're ahead. It also makes supports and non-combat roles not shit to play as.

The design of hots is great. Doesn't surprise me that someone who shits on it doesn't even play it

It's amazing how the HoN community was even more fucking cancerous than even Dota 2's or LoL's

HoN was something else

I kinda miss DROPPING G'S

G
G
G
G
G
GG

I have played it. I didn't like it. I'm going to think everyone who plays this game has your additude. Why would I want to play a game that I don't like? I feel like it's overly restrictive and way too forgiving for mistakes. What's your penalty for dying? You don't play for a bit? Oh dearest me. Why should I cs? Is it because when I kill a minion I have a chance to get healed? I get a tiny bit of xp? Wow. You don't have to be a dick just because I don't like a game. If you can't take an opinion dont go online.

it's all part of the charm

GG
NO
RE

AL
EX
IS
A
FU
CK
IN
G
NI
GG
ER

I played HoN since the beta. The reason it was abandoned was because the player base was incredibly toxic - even more toxic than DotA's! - and the devs did nothing to combat it. 90% - and I'm not exaggerating - of the games had at least one dimwit shout and swear at everyone else for the duration of the game. In practice those people rarely if ever got banned so they never changed their ways.

Another contributing factor is the ability to concede. You could concede a game at 15 if your entire team voted for that (or all but 1 in some patches). This lead to people trying to concede every game in which the opponent had any kind of significant early lead.

A third factor is the bizarre decision to show everyone's KDR and making it *global*, across all heroes. People who only played carries and gankers had a high KDR while those who played support had a low KDR. End result: far less people played support than in even the lowliest of DotA pubs.

Yikes.

Pretty sure being P2P made it take a massive hit. I remember playing during beta and being devastated when it went P2P because I was too poor. Most of my friends just moved on to LoL or waited for D2. By the time it went back to being F2P, it's player base was already diminished and waiting times got too long.
Then again, I play from Australia so the player base was already small to begin with.

>dropping Gs
holy shit this is a blast from the past haha

I played HoN only to pass the time until DotA 2, and have no regrets about the move and events.

I think the game was doomed from the very beginning.

HoN had more like 250k players at peak hours. Was a great game.

Yeah, but compare that to DotA2 and LoL.

To be fair that announcer was fucking amazing

I do not understand the implications implied by your dank meme.

Neither do I my friend.

Story of my life.
>always play suicide
>generally bad kda
>attempt to pick a carry or go mid
HURR DURR 0.7KDA MID GG

Besides doing a few mistakes like the 30 dollar price tag and the EA for heroes that got dropped relatively fast it was a great game, and trying out dota2 made me really angry that they decided to keep the shitty limitations of the wc3 engine as design features

Also I liked the cancer community and much faster gameplay

No, HoN never had a chance, this is coming from someone who played for 4 years. DotA had name recognition and Valve had the money to produce a better game. S2's dev team are egotistical cunts that take community feedback as an insult. They let Monkey King in the game without nerfing him for a year, they thought Solstice was fine, they had a suspicious pattern of releasing OP heroes behind a temporary paywall and then nerfing them once they became free. The game's meta NEVER CHANGED for an entire year, heroes like pebbles, moon queen, and tempest were top-tier picks for multiple years without change.

With that said they had some pretty cool ideas like Flux, Bombardier, Master of Arms, etc. Also taunts were the coolest shit, it's something I wish dota2 had.

>Numberphile memes
Wut wut?

>I liked the cancer community
what

WHats the problem with spending over an hour on a game and then lose it if you had fun? call it gg leave and play another.
In low skill games generally take long to finish cause retards don't know when to push, so that's that.

I still do this

A game like HoN could've never been as big as LoL because of it's steep learning curve. Mechanically speaking, League of Legends is a kids game compared to HoN/DotA.

Also S2 was awful at balancing the game. Forsaken archer, Monkey king, etc. But at least their unique heroes were a lot of fun, like Chipper.

Yeah. Hell, DotA still needs better tutorials. It's still hard as shit to get into for new players.

>Forsaken Archer
>Good
user..

I prefer the fist of sol, the dumpster or the crying baby, always fun to see people ragequitting after it kek

>Do you guys think that HoN would have had a chance if it never went p2p and instead adopted the LoL system of unlocking and microtransactions?

Nope. It died because, despite your retarded analysis, LoL is actually a different and more fun variant of Dota and succeeded despite its cancerous F2P monetization model

When LoL came out, most people were tired of dota and LoL was something new but also familiar but without the tedious bullshit of dota.

When dota2 defacto came out (as in, when keys started being sent to everyone), HON died.

Have you even tried the tutorial? It's okay.

I'm talking about FA when she first came into the came. Literally the most broken hero in the game for months.

They have neat ideas but can't balance for shit. Almost every hero was literally broken on release with monkey king and silhouette being the biggest criminals. Tremble was my favorite but god was he op with his pet. You could be in 2 lanes at once and tp anywhere wtf

I also liked the cancer community.
Watching people dropping taunts, chat macros, camping that guy who think he's hot shit till he ragequits is amazing

I wouldn't call the F2P model of LoL cancerous. It's won many awards and is considered the best F2P model currently. Valve makes money mostly off of their crate system that's in all of their main online games, and from things like compendiums.

Gulity pleasure I guess?

>fun
Not an argument, what you mean is, more casual so stupid girls can pick it up and play more easily and drawing in horny teenagers to the game by watching them play and creating a big community full of shitters

Yeah I have. I play the game regularly since I'm happy with my rank in LoL. Tbh, all moba have pretty shit tutorials. DotA2 at least tried to make their better (which they succeeded in, but not by too much imo). Idk what it is with Moba's and tutorials. Anyway, I've been playing Dota2 for about 2 years now and I think the biggest issue as far as Getting into it has to be how snowball-y it can get. Once you die 2 times it can be very hard to get back into the game if you are new since you lose gold, lane xp, and lose gold from the creeps. Plus certain heroes snowball like crazy, flying ahead of everyone and just stomping any lane they want if they roam with too many kills.

They stole the looks of quite a few heroes. I got into the beta and remembered when they fucking released Zeus from dota 2. Don't lie.

Yeah, girls are so stupid, haha. Beer and sports hahaha.

HoN was only good during closed beta, devs were doing regular updates based on community feedback, people were surprisingly mature and helpful (for a moba game at least) once they realized they can't just make new accounts for free if they get banned or flagged as leavers, and most people who played actually cared about the game, community and seeing the game develop since everyone put their own money into it.
Then the game started getting shittier and shittier, S2 started caving into demands make by little kids who never even played original Dota, they broke 90% of promises that made people support the game in closed beta, they started releasing retarded heroes, and f2p was just the final nail in the coffin.

She had her patches

You don't have to be smart to show cleavage in streams and get 1000 dollar donations while playing a adobe air game

LoL f2p shit is much worse than dota 2 though

Yeah, but I couldn't resist saying beer and sports.

>Dota2
>Not f2p
u wot

user, I think he means that he knows that dota2 is f2p even though lol won many awards he believes that dota2 has a better system

Well yeah. Riot has this setup since the game started because they were a growing company. Valve didn't have to because they were making millions already off of many games + steam. I can't really deny that having every hero for free is better than having to unlock them.

HoN was turn to shit because it was supposed the be DotA 1.5 but since they got no competent balance team it got fucked.

This is how "MOBA" games can maintain their players interest.

What about the feeling of achievement when unlocking eveyr hero user ;^)

Oh, and the other reason is DotA 2.0 came out.

Well, I was going to say it does give players something to work towards. And that it's easier to learn the game when you have less champions to worry about right off the bat. But yes, it feels great getting a champ when one comes out (or when first leveling up)

tbqh, HoN had the best system overall, but many retarded decisions made by incompetent decision makers leading to them shooting themselves in the foot is what made HoN be the least succesful out of the 3.

Both LoL and Dota2 are trash for different reasons

people dropped it because the devs fucked shit up and then did a big fuck you rent to the whole community for asking them to fix it

I liked that S2 and Blizzard just didn't give a shit. S2 knew the community was pure cancer, so everybody could shittalk all game long and nothing would happen.
Valve and those lol faggots on the other hand think they can somehow control it, so everybody is a bastard but in a passive aggressive way, instead of in an all out flame war way.
Also midwars was the shit

Yep, maliken

Who DOTA Imba here?

My absolute biggest problem with it is that youvliterally have to choose between a new champ or a decent runepage. Why runepages even exists and not free is annoying as hell.

I know right! They're so stupid. Luckily Riot stated recently that they will be redoing the rune pages so all we can do is hope that they get fixed. Hell, all they would really have to do is drastically cut the prices of the runes and I feel like they could be better.

Uhh HoN was doing great during beta and p2p, it went to shit when it they made it f2p.

valve has already said the next big thing their redoing is the UI it just hasnt been on their radar cus a few whiners dont matter when lelmillionsofplayersanyway

How the fuck they gonna redo the UI when people already bought most of latest HUD?

That's sounds like an initiative to get sued.

Millions? You mean like 2.5 million, right? We don't have a large player base compared to league.

I play small matches against bots every 6 months or so just for nostalgia. Hearing the hero lines is great fun.

Dota has about 12~ million monthly unique players, about 600k average and just under 1million peak each day.

League is bigger, but they don't release numbers anymore, so we don't know how much bigger.

Way a lot bigger than dota 2.
Judging by the recent riot scandal and one co-founder said that this years alone Riot made 1.6 billions.

Well I had no idea we grew.