AWKWARD ZOMBIE

HoNs having their 2 year anniversary tonight, so at 9 pm? est, their having a 11 day free trial for everyone. just wanted to post this for anyone wanting to try this game.

I might try it out.

it's free so talk about it.

zephyr is still as awesome as i remember.

I'm thinking of downloading it. Anything I should know?

I just can't stand people yelling a me to quote"disconnect from the match and uninstall your game you noob" I realize that I'm no good at the game but thats a little too extreme.

venonat you traitorous whore

Between its spam advertisement on the League of Legends forums and this, I've lost any respect I might have originally had for HoN and its development team. They're desperate for more players and they don't care how they get them anymore. I won't think less of anyone for enjoying the game, but in my opinion, they've ceased to remain competitive with Riot.

I wonder if when HoN goes down RIOT will buy it?

Can't imagine why they would. The game violates many of their design philosophies and it's not like they would benefit from owning a second MOBA even if it didn't. I could see DotA 2 attempting to buy out the development team, perhaps. Maybe even just for the opportunity to use some of their existing character designs (which weren't ripped from the original DotA, at least).

Yeah, about that.

They're not desperate for players at all.

460,000 unique active players and 526,000 total paid accounts
30,000 people playing at any given time with daily concurrent peaks of over 50,000 players
40% of active player base logs in every day
90% of registered HoN accounts are active

Found this statistics at Game Informer, they aren't exactly hurting for customers, but with the imminent release of DotA 2, there just trying to beef up interest in the game.

Anyway, I've been massively enjoying the game so far. All the heroes are varied and unique, any one of them can crush if played correctly, hundreds of strategies that an organized team can pull off, not a particularly harsh newbie environment since you are only playing with other free accounts until lvl 5 or bought some currency. One of my gripes is how slowly silver coins are accumulated, although this amount increases every 5 levels (and I'm only lvl 2 1/2) so the more expensive heroes won't be a big problem later on.

I actually love how there is no mastery/rune-page system in HoN. Whenever you start a match you start with equal footing as other players. Only your decisions in game will alter the outcome and I like that.

Also voice-packs are hilarious.

That's still a fraction of the number of people who play League of Legends. If that's the standard they're trying to compare to, as it used to be, then they've lost the numbers race for sure. Also, the pending release of DotA 2 in no way justifies spam advertisement on a competitor's website or pandering to popular figureheads in order to expand their playerbase. I don't even care why they want more players; their methods are simply unacceptable.


Many of the varied and unique heroes are exact copies of existing characters from DotA, sometimes even right down to their names, as I understand it. Even ignoring that, variety and strategy are elements of any successful MOBA. In fact, here's a video I made recently where I swap places with an enemy so that they can't hide behind their creeps in order to avoid a projectile that will pull them to its caster. This is a strategy that exists in DotA, HoN, and LoL. The execution is basically identical across the board. Things like strategy, variety, and balance are requirements, not features. Small minorities in each community will always complain that they aren't good enough, but the success of each game makes a strong argument against them (not to imply that LoL is more balanced or complex than HoN - I'm not touching that subject with a 50 ft pole).


Runes and masteries may make a difference, but they are nowhere near as significant as your in-game decision making. The very idea that being a higher level than another player will mean the difference between victory and defeat in a game of LoL is ludicrous. Just to name a few, individual skill, team composition, and communication are all going to overshadow something as relatively small as runes and masteries.

They'll make your character better. What you do with that character is still entirely in your hands.


Yes they are.

Didn't know it was illegal to advertise.

I'm not trying to get down on LoL, I played around 650+ games of LoL alone. I know what you and Nasus did there, I'm not a complete nood. I played a lot of DotA too, so even thought they are ported into HoN, it's still refreshing to see classic characters like Behemoth and Valkyrie again. I loved all DotA heroes ('cept maybe Bloodseeker), and seeing those heroes back with brand new S2 created heroes is a nice change of pace from LoL.

And it's nice to not to have to invest heavily in runes and rune pages, and focus on heroes. Hell, even most skins are "free" if you farm up enough for them.

Also just crushed with Flint, shit so cash.

If you did anything wrong, even once, you were instantly yelled at by people who take the game way to seriously. now that it's free I'd consider playing it again, assuming there'd be more people to play with and the atmosphere will become at least a bit more friendly with the influx of new, more casual players. While the higher ranks will still keep their elitist asshole attitude.

I like the heroes in Hon better than Lol, this will always be true. The truer dota style gameplay I enjoy but the community for Hon was just dicks.
Something that immediately stuck out to me in Lol was that there wasn't any creep denying. While you don't actively deny your enemy experience you instead harass them out of getting the exp by making them back. Having a skilled or poor deny score would bodaciously be deciding factors in a game had you been laning against a carry.

I don't prefer the rune system/masteries/summoner spells. While they are as helpful to me as they are annoying when the enemy team uses them, I much preferred everyone being on even grounds.

I can't believe you're defending this point. Have you ever been to a store where their competitors handed you coupons to try and steal your business? The only reason S2 has managed to get away with it is because it's impossible to hold them directly accountable for the advertisement. That doesn't make it any less despicable or underhanded.


My point was that the same strategy exists in all three games. Blitzcrank and Urgot, Vengeful Spirit and Pudge, or Andromeda and Devourer. Their signature abilites are all the same. It's a pretty safe bet that every "unique" ability in HoN is either a combination of existing effects, already present in one of the other two games, or in violation of Riot's "Anti-Fun" design philosophy (thus explaining why it's unique to HoN). The heroes might be different, and they might be fun, but they are no more or less creative than anything you could find elsewhere.


Hardly a fair comparison when HoN just went free-to-play. Riot wanted incentives for their players to spend cheddar at the start of LoL's development, as well as a reward system with permanence beyond each individual game. Runes must be earned, but focusing on purchasing them requires you to buy RP in order to unlock champions. The game was designed to be free while HoN was simply made so, long after its initial release. Players might appreciate how much easier it is to unlock content by playing the game, but it's undeniably less profitable for S2 games if they have such an easy time that they never feel compelled to spend real cheddar.

Also, I still don't get this argument about being on uneven grounds due to runes and masteries. The matchmaker is designed to only pair up teams with a similar average level and normal Elo (meaning more games won at level 30 will put you up against harder opposition). This means that if you're level 30 and someone on your team is level 15, you won't be at a disadvantage because the enemy team should have something like two level 23's. Even if a single player is vastly more powerful than anyone else in the game, it will come at the cost of his team being severely under-equipped compared to the enemy. Even in such an unbalanced case, the level 15 player's performance will be far more dependent on which champion he's laning against rather than how many more runes the player behind it has. I'm not suddenly going to beat an Urgot as Olaf just because I have more runes than the other guy. Chances are, he's going to mop the floor with me even if my runes are specifically designed to counter his champion and he has none of his own. If I beat him anyways, it's because I'm an outright better player and deserved to in the first place.

Dude really, I'm not even trying to argue with you.


Actually, this entire thing is silly. HoN is fun, oh god i can't stop farting.