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Forums \ HoN forum \ The problems of HoN

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Big stars represents five levels - This user is on level 9

Small stars represents one level - This user is on level 9

ig.ahzz

The problems of HoN (9718 reads, 23 replies, 3 months ago)

Before we even begin, I know that this may not be the best place to get recognition, but I tried to post in the official s2 hon forums, but apparently I have no rights to do so (despite having a legacy account, and being a member since the game came out).

And before we call each other stupid, noob or whatever, I believe Ive gotten a relatively good grasp of what I'm talking about, I played competitive sc1 at a very high level (A- iccup) and in HoN Ive played about 1500 games. I was able to hit 1750 mmr rating (That's 1900 from before they brought it down). While I dont consider myself to be an 1900 player, I think I am a strong 1800 player. I believe I've seen both sides of the coin, the good and the bad.

So why do I make this thread? I do so because the game itself is A LOT OF FUN! It's fast paced, its interesting, the heroes are fun. But I've been losing interest for one reason only: The community. This game has the worst community I've ever experienced. Recently a good friend of mine quit HoN. Why? No, its not because the game was bad or unbalanced, it's because three out of four games would be ruined due to one of the following:
1) Raging, not playing to his fullest due to it(even though he was at fault)
2) a leaver
3) raging leaver
4) People refusing to play a 5v5 as a team game. ("I bought this game, I can pick scout if I want to!!!!1 Doesnt matter if we already have 3 carries!!1")
5) Trolling, feeding on purpose etc

I'm not even exaggerating the number when I say three out of four games would be ruined. If not for our team, then for the opponents team. Who enjoys 4v5? I don't.

Okay, so it gets a little bit better once you hit about 1650 current MMR. People USUALLY play as a team, and there are less trolls since people have endured gaining 1650 rating 5 points at a time, and it takes more skill. But even there people rage, throw fits, pick whatever they want etc a lot of the time. Orange player with 0.6 wants maliken? Great. (And fyi it wasnt about KD only, his wards per game and gpm were low too)
So when does it get better? I watched replays of pro level games. What do I see? Raging.
Calling your friends out on their mistakes is fine, we improve that way. As long as its constructive. With raging I mean things like 'omg u suck' "What did I do wrong" 'Ur so bad!!1' "So what did I do wrong..."
I recently played a solo game with 4 clanmates, they were all extremely highly rated players. Almost pro level mmr all of them. Wanna guess what happens? That's right, raging. Let me explain:
-tort and Ra lane bot. They are owning bot.
-Tort sees that andro goes to gank mid, so he goes there too
-Tort gains three enemy kills in 2 minutes of time
-Meanwhile ra doesnt do well against silhu alone at bot
-Ra blames tort and says we lost the game already and refuses to try properly, even though its 10-4 in our favor.
-eventually we lose the game.

You'd expect this kind of crap to dissapear in high level games, which I was hoping for, but it doesnt. Not in any team.

I joined a team with pretty chill people, and we're all about 1700 current mmr. Raging rarely happens, but it does.

So where does this come from? I believe there's a lot of reasons for it, but it's mostly due to the fact that HoN is, without a doubt, a newer version of DoTA. skilled players from dota show up to this new game, and have some sort of an ego and think they're good. They begin blaming other people since they have some sort of an idea how the game works. They are pissed off because they're paired up with people that aren't up to par with their level of skill. We can see the same thing when S2 makes any changes to the game: Elitist dota jerks (not necessarily born in dota, just when they came to hon) complain regardless if their decisions are good or not. Servers are down for an hour after one month of continuos up time? "OMG HON SUCKS". Balance changes that fix the game "OMG HON SUCKS". People simply started blaming HoN for faults that weren't even there.
This raging then spreads like wildfire to newer players, and after a year we have the worst community in history of gaming. The game itself is really good and like I said, a lot of fun. It really is. but the community made a buddy of mine quit, and its almost done the same to me.

Honestly I don't even know how to fix this anymore. I really don't. Any ideas of implementing systems which encourage good manners will be laughed at at this point. Due to the competitive nature of the game, expressing dissapointment must be allowed.

A few other major problems:
1) Alt avatars cost 3000 silver. You gain up to 15 silver per game. Do the math. They are WAY WAY WAY too expensive. Yes, you can get them for free in the end, and yes, they are vanity rewards, but they are too expensive.
2) The pace they release new heroes at is way too fast. While the game stays relatively balanced (especially pro games since they dont allow heroes there until they've had a decent amount of play time) it's still ruining the stability of games imo.

I'm curious to how we can stop this kind of attitude going over to dota 2 or even how to stop it from happening in HoN... Or how I can post this in S2 forums since apparently I'm not allowed to?

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3 months ago

Big stars represents five levels - This user is on level 5

Gemmanite

The problems that you're describing - raging, trolling, poor teammates - this is mostly just the nature of an online game. Games in the DotA-genre especially, because there are a lot of new players and the learning curve is so high. Is it raging because some aspect of the game is imbalanced (which may or may not be justified), or raging because the other team is better than you? I don't understand. It's good that you found some chill people to play with, though.

As for the other problems:
1) I think you hit it on the head: they are vanity rewards. High silver coin costs come from encouraging players to purchase gold coins, which comes from the game following a "free-to-play" business model.
2) I agree with you on the rate of new heroes. S2 Games used to agree, too, but it seems that they changed their mind.

This post was edited by its author @ 3 months ago

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3 months ago

ig.ahzz

When people 'rage' as in to call out other players mistakes, that is fine. When they stop playing properly after someone is 'supposedly bad' and in reality it was just them not playing as they should. We had an actual troll every fifth game in 1500's, as in someone who really joined the game with the intention of ruining it. (For example, picking scout when we have 3 carries, and when we're like "why u pick scout omg, u had glacius as an option", they will say 'ok try to win without me' and disconnect)

While I understand that free to play business model can use relatively highly priced vanity rewards, we should not forget the fact that 'f2p accounts' actually need to buy all avatars, and tokens or whatnot to play verified games. I'm not totally sure, but I think they might even need to buy avatars as they come out, opposed to legacy players. Are expensive alt avatars still justified? I think not. If we look at alt avatars from before, they were affordable. even 1000 silver per avatar would be fine, especially since they've made them much cooler recently.
Also, some time ago they introduced a -50% sale on everything I think, and brought store prices down because 'they were too high'. What is happening now? They are slowly coming back to the same, ridiculously high price.
This is, however, a problem where I would leave room for debate because ultimately its only about vanity rewards.

Like, competitive attitude towards games, especially in the moba genre is perfectly fine. Acting something that you are not is another, along with acting up when things dont go your way in a 5v5 game.
I just watched moonmeanders live stream. He seems to be whining too, though not too much there at least, and some of it is justified. The only chill pro I know atm is testie, and maybe tralf (not much research done I must admit). I'm just vastly dissapointed at the community, because after 1500 games and seeing a little bit higher level of skill I expected more.
This game looks better atm and probably is better than dota 2 as well, but we'll see how this goes. if dota 2 has a decent community, Ill probably switch there only because of that. we'll see what happens, but trying to purge these trolls takes a lot of effort.

Actually, in my opinion all trolls should be banned. Maybe one warning, but thats it. However, with the f2p business model (and even before too) it would have taken too much resources to do anything like that. meh

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3 months ago

Small stars represents one level - This user is on level 3

c4P

finally someone that can type the words that are inside my head...( if u search for a chill dude to play with who never rage, whisp c4P (me) and we can take some good games!) im in exactly same spot as you only i found 2-3 mates to play with without any rage ever, i think thats the solution to our problem.

S2 please do something about this!!!

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3 months ago

Small stars represents one level - This user is on level 4

Mr.Greedy-

Could you give me a couple of 'too long; didn't read' sentences summarizing this text? It's too much for me to read.

This post was edited by its author @ 3 months ago

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3 months ago

ig.ahzz

You write decent english, and I just read what I had written myself in like 3 minutes, so Im not sure what you're talking about. regardless, if it helps people join in the conversation, or encourage them to perhaps read the whole thing, here are the main points:

-The author (me) is not a 1500 f2p account noob, and while he is not gosu, his experience has some credibility to it
-I think that the game itself and the way it works is absolutely incredible and a ton of fun, but the problem is the community
-Especially in low level games (but as written, even in semi-pro and pro level) the communitys behaviour is utter trash, and bad towards the game and S2 staff in general too, and almost none of it is justified. Like I mentioned, at least 20-30% of your games will be ruined by a troll, or opponents team has a troll so you get 5v4 which is not fun despite winning. (and if not a troll, then another type of leaver or whiner that ruins the game on purpose). We are not talking about 'competitive attitude' here, we are talking about genuine raging and acting up in a 5v5 game, not 1v1 sc2 game. It's a team game.

-Other problems:
alt avatars cost too much, and they try to milk way too much money out of the community. They are vanity rewards so this is not a huge deal
new heroes are released way too fast. A new hero each week is too much, no matter how you look at it. I don't know if they want to keep the game fresh or what, but they should let the game settle down for a little bit at least before bringing out a new hero.

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3 months ago

WhyNotZoidberg

Surely it's the Dota players fault that HoN got the more bad mannered and trollish part of the community.

And it's definitely not by S2's decisions to put ridiculous features in the game, like taunts, troll avatars, macros and retarded pro players like Moon who for some reason is liked by the community, and people look up to.

Yea, it's probably Dota players' fault. Let's blame them.

This post was edited by its author @ 3 months ago

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3 months ago

ig.ahzz

I'm not sure if I should bother to reply to your post or not, but I guess I will.
I don't know where you pulled out the fact that I'm blaming dota or their players? I thought I was obvious about the fact that I speculated it to stem from experienced people playing essentially the same game and forced to play with people who are of way lesser skill level. Yet many probably expect a similar level of competitiveness that they're used to in dota.
I didn't say that this was it, but this is what I speculated the reason to be. And I didn't mean to blame dota players, I know that they have a healthier community than HoN does, any game out there does (though I know very little about it).

But yes, now that you mention it, those features really promote 'trolling other people'. You've got a good point. They're certainly not making the community any healthier as far as manners and friendliness go.

Anyway, I might have plans on moving over to dota 2 once it is released (If I'm still feeling like playing a decent moba game), and I'm just concerned whether this same sort of attitude would move over to that game too.
Those who have dota2 beta could answer this, is there a lot of raging, trolling, leaving etc? Sure, any such game would have some, but I'm just wondering.

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3 months ago

Small stars represents one level - This user is on level 2

physiology

when something goes wrong, blame dota.

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3 months ago

WhyNotZoidberg

2012-02-19 20:09, ig.ahzz wrote:
Those who have dota2 beta could answer this, is there a lot of raging, trolling, leaving etc? Sure, any such game would have some, but I'm just wondering.

It depends.
Some have apparently noticed some of these, but these things almost never happen in the games I play. I don't know if I'm lucky, or the others complaining are overreacting. I play mostly solo queue MM.

Out of the last 30-40 games I've played only 1 game where a player from my team left (not because of rage though, but probably Internet problems, it was early, before the creeps even started I think), and we still won that game, 4v5.

Out of my 250 games I still haven't seen any griefer/troll, never seen a first time Dota (ARTS) player either. You'll see trash talking sometimes, but it's not constant throughout the game. The usual "u ok bro?" after a counter-gank.

It's my experience at least.

This post was edited by its author @ 3 months ago

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3 months ago

#10

Big stars represents five levels - This user is on level 13

Small stars represents one level - This user is on level 13

RamiZ

Anyway, I might have plans on moving over to dota 2 once it is released (If I'm still feeling like playing a decent moba game), and I'm just concerned whether this same sort of attitude would move over to that game too.
Those who have dota2 beta could answer this, is there a lot of raging, trolling, leaving etc? Sure, any such game would have some, but I'm just wondering.

It will if more and more HoN players start switching. DotA has pretty awful community, Moba games in general, but I thought that HoN community is close to DotA. What I find out is that it really isn't, HoN community is more like WoW community, the worst of the worst, bottom of the hole.

I usually play HoN with few my friends, 90% of the time, we enter with 1-2 guys on our side that just keep flaming everyone while they feed. Don't even want to start that when we play like a 5v5 team, there isn't "gg" in the end, there is "LOL leave this game", "your team sux ass", or making macros to type everything with "GGGG" etc. Even other team start flaming you.

From all these years(about 7) playing DotA, then HoN and now DotA 2, there were just few cases where DotA teams and players would be so bad mannered, and keep shitting on other team/players. In HoN everybody knows what they are talking about, everyone are the smartest beings in the universe, and they know that you are wrong. They are not satisfied with anything you do, they just keep flaming, or trolling. That is why it reminds me mostly of WoW community. The arrogance reeks from them.

But even my friends that played DotA before, but fully switched to HoN now, are becoming(or already became) the same. They just keep flaming others for their own mistakes, and blame others for lost game.

In the end, it all depends, and I agree with #9, different people have different experiences and opinions, but I can assure you that DotA community is a lot better. Maybe at start it won't feel that way, but the more you play, the more you see.

"Living for the swarm..."

This post was edited by its author @ 3 months ago

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3 months ago

#11

ig.ahzz

yeah my feelings exactly. And the point which #6 brought in makes a lot of sense now too. HoN dev's just implemented another new taunt....

Honestly, I don't see anything positive coming out of these macros, taunts etc. They probably aren't the only reason the community got bad, but it definately has a big part in it.

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2 months ago

#12

eG_SykeS

You should switch to DotA 2.

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2 months ago

#13

c4P

its not really up to us to make a switch if we dont got a key ;)

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2 months ago

#14

shox-the-feared

the community of hon is pretty awful indeed. but i wouldn't say it's any worse than in dota.
regarding dota 2 - it's an inferior game to hon, even if the community were a little better in Dota 2(and I am sure it is the same from my experience) I would not recommend playing it. slow, buggy with built in delay and with less viewable area. I'd give my dota2 key away if I could somehow detach it from my steam account, the game is THAT bad.

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2 months ago

#15

r0yaLe2k11

2012-02-27 17:08, shox-the-feared wrote:
the community of hon is pretty awful indeed. but i wouldn't say it's any worse than in dota.
regarding dota 2 - it's an inferior game to hon, even if the community were a little better in Dota 2(and I am sure it is the same from my experience) I would not recommend playing it. slow, buggy with built in delay and with less viewable area. I'd give my dota2 key away if I could somehow detach it from my steam account, the game is THAT bad.

This is total bullshi*! If you ever played DotA or War3 - it's the same speed. Yes HoN is faster, but that doesn't at all show it's superior(i think in Dota you get more action/kills and teamfights, but thats my opinion). And if your PC/i-net are not really bad, you will have no delay at all. (if you are from Eu/NA, i don't know about the other servers) And buggy?! It's a B E T A , get that and stop judging it like a finish product!

But that being said, if you are going to play DotA don't do it because of the community - it's bad, we all know that. I don't see many leavers, yes, but lots of ppl stay afk or try to feed when they get mad. The russian community is really big and till you get to 500 gamse + you will have to play with those retards. Play it because of the balance (no argue for that, even hon pros say it) and the show you get from the pro-scene. And last - it won't be all about the money like most games.. just think how many years IceFrog worked on DotA for nothing at all.

Troll: And it won't die in the near future.

This post was edited by its author @ 2 months ago

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2 months ago

#16

ig.ahzz

I could make do with playing some games to get past retards, if thats where it ends. HoN needs you to play around 100 games too to get past retards, assuming you win a decent amount more than you lose.

Though dota 2 looks like crap lol. Maybe its just me that is used to looking at better graphics, better decoration, better looking everything from an older game, but HoN looks so much better.
Though I have only watched streams. I don't know if they used top settings, and I dont know if the graphics/decoration is final. Either way, I dont think anyone can say it looks as good. Maybe its just a matter of what you're used to. Dota 2 certainly is similar to dota 1 gfx-wise.

Just today I played another HoN game (I was 1710 rating), my teammates would rage and blame each other, and eventually one of them ragequit. I didn't feel bad for playing sc2 the rest of the day.

In any case, I'll see where dota 2 develops, and I might move to it if I feel like its good and once it becomes availible. However, with diablo3 around the corner and me getting back into competitive sc2, it doesnt feel so bad.

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2 months ago

#17

WhyNotZoidberg

Surely graphics are subjective and you can say that you don't like them.
But to say that they look bad is just stupid.

If you haven't played Dota 2, you shouldn't make your decision solely on watching streams.

Besides, you can't make up your mind instantly when it comes to these types of games. Lets be honest, I couldn't stand either WC3 Dota or HoN when I started playing them for the first time. But I got used to them after a while. So it takes some time.

In my opinion Dota 2 has superior graphics of all the games in the genre. When I'm saying superior, I'm not talking about eye candy, which HoN graphics are.
I'm talking about spell effects, animations, textures.
Dota 2 is clearly better in those aspects, who could even argue.

What HoN has is shiny and over saturated graphics, and nothing more. The textures don't even look that good.

Dislike != Bad
Learn it.

This post was edited by its author @ 2 months ago

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2 months ago

#18

SwineEyedSheep

I too have noticed the manner of most of the HoN players. One of the examples that really made my jaws drop is I think the guy is called Moonmeander or something? I saw his stream on gg.net and he has pretty good number of viewers and I decided to watch his stream and I found out he flame his teammates non-stop I mean wtf bro really really non-stop for like 20 mins? all because his teammates didn't miss call for one time. I have never seen any players who can flame like him. Not even misery. That really made my jaws drop. And one thing I can feel about is the dota and dota 2 community is really maturing now. I don't know other people feel the same but for me I rarely even see people raging RQ or flamming each other in "GARENA" nor dota2 matchmaking it is only HoN which is infected with raged people

trollface.jpg

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2 months ago

#19

ig.ahzz

Well, it's good to hear that dota 2 is doing much better with manners, though of course every such game has its share of idiots. I can only hope that it stays that way so that if I eventually switch over, I can stay out of all that. I hope most HoN players stay out though. lol. At least until they mature a bit

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1 month ago

#20