Originally Posted by
BesouroVerde
Greetings HoN players,
I am BesouroVerde and I'm a very new player to the HoN system. Just to provide further information about me and my gaming background, I had been playing Starcraft from 1999 to 2005, Warcraft 3 and DotA from 2004 to 2009 and currently I'm on Starcraft 2 and League of Legends since 2010 and now I've met Heroes of Newerth. You guys know that HoN is basically a DotA clone with slight differences, like a few new heroes, some changed/ new items, DotA heroes revamped/ mixed in skills, some stuff removed when compared to DotA and a few distinct features like reconnection possibility and alike. I've decided to give it a try on HoN since I've missed a bit the "3 attributes hero fashion" which is something that doesn't show on League of Legends that employs only stats like "ability power", "attack damage","armor", "magic resistance", "hit points" and "mana", instead of calculating those variables from "strenght", "intelligence" and "agility". Since DotA is a very outdated game with terrible online system flaws, like the quitters, laggers and that very sad ladder ranking from Garena which encourages stat manipulators and abusers besides delaying the match start and forcing players to take continuous "remakes" over and over so that you would take about 1 hour until you begin some straight game that is going to finish naturally at some point.
I've decided to start this thread to expose my impressions about HoN and I truly expect to be wrong and also hope some S2 staff shows up to read the contents of my message and perhaps answer me or take some action about it if necessary.
About the game interface:
The good: Everything looks like DotA. Even the Kongor (Roshan, Nashor) dude is positioned at the same point. The items are essentially the same with other names. Even the prices are the same as DotA. Notice that I'm not criticizing, that's just OK by me, since it's a familiar interface, the recipes are all known by heart and I won't have to go through testing builds one by one. The heroes are the same with some missing (Where is Furion? I mean, the horned elf dude that teleports, snare people among trees and raises treants to fight) which is another thing that helps me a lot and saves me a lot of time. Until this point, everything is just fine. Feels like playing evolved DotA and makes me happy about it.
The bad: The icons are sooooooo small. The inventory, the allies/ foes inventory are so tiny. The shop interface feels awkward to browse and you may end up buying stuff you didn't want just because you've single clicked some mistaken icon. Why not double click to buy or displaying a confirmation pop up? Figures... My health bar OUTLINE is green, my allies bar are yellow and my enemies are red but... It's so hard to see! Why not increase the blitter/ sprite that highlights the heroes or just change the HP BAR COLOR, not just add a very thin outline. At team fights I'm always confused when people jump in and start ganking because I just can't tell allies apart from enemies! And hey, I've got perfect eyes and I need no glasses. It's not a physical issue. The other match I've bought a courier I've taken a few minutes until I realize the "share courier" command was positioned at the top left of the screen as my gentle teammates kindly addressed words of peace and love to me. LOL! Guess I'm blind not a newbie after all!
The gameplay:
The good : The configuration menu allows you to remap buttons which is a very good thing. The team chat feature is awesome and saves a lot of time of typeing and risking yourself to get ganked and murdered as you're composing a sentence. The "concede" vote at 15 minutes of game is an excellent choice if your team is found already hopeless and people have lost the will to play and would like to restart another match.
The bad: The game is very fast paced to a point that your reaction time must be close to a fistfight reaction time. When the team fight comes up, it turns into a memorized-macro-button-mash-5 seconds max battle. Bang, bang, bang! 7 guys are dead and 3 are left with little HP. No time or opportunities for original/ distinct/ fancy strategies or something like that. Just pew-pew, it's over. The turret range is huge and some ranged heroes have the same big range, what makes the game even more unbalanced.
The community experience:
I'm really sorry but I don't have any compliments about that part. I must confess this is the most hostile and unfriendly gaming environment I've ever joined. I've witnessed griefing/ verbal harassment/ cussing/ crying/ qqing on EVERY game i've been into even if when the harassed guy wasn't me for missing the target because I've got confused with the colors / got killed early/ stood looking like a dummy because the action was so quick and my reaction slow as a turtle. But what really called my attention was the fact of having voting commands as "pause", "remake" and the most BIZARRE of all, which is the "kick" vote. First, why "pause"? In DotA, no one ever pauses, whenever someone pauses some other one just unpauses because it makes no sense at all when 9 people are waiting for 1 to get back. It's a wasted function and just allows people to slow/ drag/ stagnate the game for nothing. "Remake"? What? We had remake at DotA as an informal way to reset the game messed by some mistake, not an actual feature! If there's a record system reading the game stats, there is no need at all to include this! If the game is going that bad, just concede at 15 and start another one! Who cares about taking a loss in the account record... The "kick" vote is the worst idea I've ever seen on a online team battle game. I was playing a match when my wife asked me to check her e-mail. Just check, she wasn't going to answer people back or take a lot of time to read them all. She just wanted to log in and see who had e-mailed her, just a brief check, not more than 5 minutes. When I got back to the game, where was I? People had kicked me! LOL! For 5 minutes AFK did people hate on me? Into another match, there was this polite gentleman asking for "remake" vote because one of his friends who wasn't into the game - they were a 4 men premade team and I was the random - had just logged in. Then I've said: " Hey buddy, just let us finish this game and you guys will be able of playing with your partner very soon, ok?" Then I've refused the "remake" vote. They've started speaking some european language I don't know at the "ALL" channel and then they've started a kicking vote for me! LOL! Just because I wanted to keep playing, he was trying to persuade other people to kick me out of the game! And they did! LOL! This "kick" system must be sooooooooooooooooooo abused by people who flame others and spam those votes under any excuse just to see people getting dumped for their sick sad frustrated-elite-kiddo fun.
All those traits make the game so easy to be disrupted, corrupted and deprived of fair play. Trolls might just show up in your game and say that you are AFK when you're jungle and then BANG, you're dropped and getting a disconnect as a gift of valour. All the games i've joing I've mentioned that I've a newbie and no one helps, seldom if ever some offers some advice or support.
I know League of Legends is crammed with slobby abusers/ harassers and you might find em on your team when you least expect. But I've had trouble in every game I've joined!
I feel encouraged to abandon this game and just keep playing LOL as a team battle game. The players who played with me are nasty and terribly mannered. Funny fact is that the report system doesn't work properly. It takes a lot of time until you fill it, IF you remember the offender name. Still, the box supposed to be filled with the details is broken and you can't keep writing at the same spot of the cursor. If I ever get into a programming course I won't forget learning how to make operational text boxes (J/K. Sorry, I could not help myselft holding this one out). Besides, I've seen a lot of players feeding/ telling people locations and the mess goes on in very few games.
About buying this, I truly regret it, I feel like I've wasted my cash on it and got baited, lured into something which claims what is not and it's at full expectation. I'm still playing the game - since I've spent my hard earned money on it. I don't know what goes on into S2 crew to let those bad worked factors spoil the fun.
Seriously S2, make the models/icons bigger, disable "pause", "remake" and "kick" vote, reduce some game speed and also reduce some heroes/ turret range. PAINT THE HEALTH BAR CLEARLY PLEASE, that is big thumbsdown on this game. As I said, I expect to be mistaken about these bad impressions which is something I'll keep/ forget depending on how much flamed I'll be on this post/ over the games.
I wish you all players a good game and I hope S2 may fix all those negative points and build up HoN to become the true successor of the dearly loved DotA, since League of Legends and Demigod (which is going pretty much dead by now) have taken other ways and became very different game styles themselves.
See you around,
BesouroVerde
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