MotleyFOOL
01-20-2010, 05:30 PM
As a new player, I found that one of the most daunting tasks when learning HoN was the sheer amount of knowledge you need to acquire. In order to be proficient at the game at an above-average pub level, you need to be familiar with all heroes -- all of their abilities, likely item builds, and synergies with other heroes -- along with all of the items.
Furthering the categorization of items in item shops by adding three more categories -- early game, mid game, late game -- to the already existing categories (supportive, combative, etc) would greatly help players grapple with the sheer amount of stuff being thrown at them.
Right off the bat when stepping into a match, new players are faced with a wall of items when clicking on any category. These items range from 50 gold to over 5000 gold in price, and to me, it was quite confusing which item to get without seeking out a guide online to tell me or asking players in game. I feel like it would have been much easier to understand which items I should be getting if there were time-based categories (early, mid, late).
Actually, today I was playing a game as Jeraziah (whom I have a pretty firm handle on), and I already had my Ring of Sorcery, an Astrolabe, and my Runed Axe. The game was carrying on for quite some time, and I came to an impass -- what item should I get? What is considered a "late game" item at this point? If there was a distinct late game category it would have been easier for me to pinpoint a proper item to get late game, rather than wasting my time with something like Nome's Wisdom (which I didn't, but it's a good example).
The general philosophy behind this suggestion is that categorization makes it easier to absorb the large amount of knowledge necessary to be proficient at HoN in public games. This philosophy does not only have to apply to items -- it should apply to heroes as well. If heroes were not only segmented into Agi, Int and Str, but then sub-segmented into intiators, carries, support, etc, it would be much, much easier for new players to both understand the basic roles of characters (how much does int or agi tell you?) as well as make it easier for new pub players to engineer a successful team.
Anyways, that's my suggestion. So far HoN is refining a lot of processes by taking advantage of a completely new engine, and we're seeing a lot of success with that. We should take further advantage of that by further defining all of the items and heroes at our disposal. In Warcraft 3, DotA was limited to Str, Agi, and Int categorization, as well as combative, supportive, etc categorization. In HoN we can futher define items and heroes to make it easier to learn (MUCH easier to learn).
Furthering the categorization of items in item shops by adding three more categories -- early game, mid game, late game -- to the already existing categories (supportive, combative, etc) would greatly help players grapple with the sheer amount of stuff being thrown at them.
Right off the bat when stepping into a match, new players are faced with a wall of items when clicking on any category. These items range from 50 gold to over 5000 gold in price, and to me, it was quite confusing which item to get without seeking out a guide online to tell me or asking players in game. I feel like it would have been much easier to understand which items I should be getting if there were time-based categories (early, mid, late).
Actually, today I was playing a game as Jeraziah (whom I have a pretty firm handle on), and I already had my Ring of Sorcery, an Astrolabe, and my Runed Axe. The game was carrying on for quite some time, and I came to an impass -- what item should I get? What is considered a "late game" item at this point? If there was a distinct late game category it would have been easier for me to pinpoint a proper item to get late game, rather than wasting my time with something like Nome's Wisdom (which I didn't, but it's a good example).
The general philosophy behind this suggestion is that categorization makes it easier to absorb the large amount of knowledge necessary to be proficient at HoN in public games. This philosophy does not only have to apply to items -- it should apply to heroes as well. If heroes were not only segmented into Agi, Int and Str, but then sub-segmented into intiators, carries, support, etc, it would be much, much easier for new players to both understand the basic roles of characters (how much does int or agi tell you?) as well as make it easier for new pub players to engineer a successful team.
Anyways, that's my suggestion. So far HoN is refining a lot of processes by taking advantage of a completely new engine, and we're seeing a lot of success with that. We should take further advantage of that by further defining all of the items and heroes at our disposal. In Warcraft 3, DotA was limited to Str, Agi, and Int categorization, as well as combative, supportive, etc categorization. In HoN we can futher define items and heroes to make it easier to learn (MUCH easier to learn).