Thoughts on the Hero Draft Section.

[Apostate]

I was an active member of the hero draft forum for a long time and with many names. However, in the last 8 months there's been a really steady decline in the content of this board, mainly in quality and also in the dialogue over submissions. I personally believe that the decline started roughly around when Dream became big, and the Popular Hero Draft forum became obsolete and deleted. Maybe that was a part of it, maybe it wasn't, but I think it's fairly obvious to everyone that this is a dead board at the moment.

I feel no incentive to make heroes at all, simply because now in addition to zero chance that they make it into the game (which was always a very small chance), now it is very likely that your hero won't be viewed at all, even by fellow hero makers.

I miss the old days when every hero had a decent looking page that people put thought into, back when every hero had two pages of discussion at 20+ votes one way or the other. It had its own problems (the design and the image chosen had a huge impact on how people voted), but overall it was a much better community experience and everyone felt like if they made a good hero, it would at least be applauded by their peers, if not S2.

Drasha, I know you have attempted to revitalize things a bit with your conceptual contests, but I tend to think that this pushes the forum farther away from a serious board devoted to proposing heroes to S2, and makes it more of a fool-around board where we make these ideas just for kicks. That said I certainly appreciate what you've been doing. I would love to be a moderator here as well to help.

How can we fix things? I'd like to talk about it, with all of you. If you have any ideas on how we can make this a better forum section, please post here and let's chat.

Here are the current propositions:

Remove Dream and reinstate the Popular Hero section. In essence, completely revert to the old system that has continued to work successfully in Miscellaneous.

Create more incentives for quality content on the Hero Draft board. Mechanics can get you the Puzzlebox icon; why doesn't the Hero Draft board have something similar? This would differentiate from Alchemist's Bones in that you don't need to have something implemented to get it.

More will be included as I think of them and as others suggest them.

I'd really like this forum to be a real thing again. Let's try to make that happen.

[[KNO]DrPeckers]

We do have several ideas in the works for Hero Drafts as part of the reworks for the suggestions forums. And frankly, every single one of the mods for suggestions has thrown out some quite detailed plans to revitalize Hero Drafts.

However, right now we are focused on the upcoming misc section reboot.

For the moment, I am going to sticky this thread.

[Apostate]

Good. I would extend my help in whatever way I am needed.

[[LBI]Melto]

I am totally agree with you and support your idea.
Hero Draft Section need to be a reliable and ordered section.

One thing which can be implemented is a score system to drafts (or in contests), something a bit like in Dota Forums.
It's a mark that judges of draft gives based on what is needed for a hero.

Because a Good Hero is based on 5 points that i'm going to describe now:

Originality /30
How unique the ability is to the current form of Heroes Of Newerth.

Synergy /25
How synergy (or possible combos) the hero's skillset contains, while fulfilling the hero's role.

Fun Factor /25
How entertaining is the hero to use.

Simplicity /10
How easily the general effects of the hero's abilities are understood.

Balance /10
How well the hero avoids obvious and crippling imbalances.

with a /100 Overall.

I got more ideas, i'll edit my post later.

T-Up !

[MaTz0r]

I agree, and I think Dream is really a messy place. There are a lot of random t-downs, people that send their hero links and ask for votes, etc. I really dont know the reason why this part of the forum doesnt have more views...I dont think it's because your heroes wont get in the game...at last for me, I create for fun, never thougt that one of my heroes will enter in the game, but I really appreciate a good feedback :P, but yeah, this part of the forums need changes.

[[KNO]DrPeckers]

The main problem is not that people are unwilling to make heroes. It is that people are unwilling to constructively comment on other peoples heroes.

I can understand why. Often a good constructive comment can take over 15 minutes and if 5 heroes are posted a day, there is no way I am going to comment on more than 1 of them.

This was supposed to be the main reason for [R4R], but the excitement over that lasted only a few months.

Any changes like a rating system or a forums rewards will be secondary to finding a way to encourage people to comment constructively on other peoples heroes.

[Beroya]

In the end, people want to see their ideas get picked up or picked off. None of this throwing ideas into a black hole just so other people who threw ideas into the same hole can discuss it.

A reward would be a start. What the forum actually needs is an S2 employee to go through and say "hey, I like X about this hero" so the readers feel like their actions aren't for naught. Implementing them isn't even necessary, all that needs to be done is give proof someone of impact is capable of reading a suggestion. Anything less will cause a brief spike in the use of this forum, only for it to be lost once more when people remember no matter how many sparkles you throw onto the metaphorical piece of crap, it is still a piece of crap.

[[RCT]IsmaelVera]

Wow very nice to sticky this! I have been pushing for comm heroes for a long while.

[Hubaris]

I really agree with the thoughts expressed here. I used to love making heroes but I have no motivation anymore. The contests were and still are a great idea, but a subforum for the contests can be a good way to keep the front page cleaner and easily accessible.

A few points (I hate using bullets for discussion but here it goes)

- Sometimes a post can exist for a day then get buried on page 2-3 in such a short time it never gets the chance to get reviews.

- (Good) Reviews take a long time, decreasing the chance of it getting reviewed and thus bumping

- There is no incentive outside of personal development

- Good and Bad heroes can still have good concepts in them, but seeing 30 threads with Vampires in the title really makes me not want to review any at all (Going back to the hero contests as a catalyst to this)

I haven't visited this section in a while and coming back to see this post sparked something in me. Hopefully this section can be turned into a section worth posting in (no offense of course), and seeing the revitalization of the Misc. forum has given me the faith in this endeavor.

As a side point, what if there was an "S2 Community Hero of the Week" where an S2 member mentions a hero they liked, a concept that may have sparked something and provide a link to the hero and hopefully start a discussion. Seeing this, there can be an incentive and even a little bit of prestige to say that you caught Buro's eye or that a skill concept may be seen in the near future.

Either that or allow the UHoN project to exist with online play

Endrant. Huff huff.

EDIT: I'm all ears and eyes for suggestions and ways to help. I hate to see a good board empty

[MaTz0r]

uHon project?:O That sounds interesting

[[300]Branfour]

I tend to feel the majority of the problem comes from the fact that the forums are accessible to anyone and so you get a-lot of entries that are all over the place / make no sense / are not logically balanced or created and the authors of these creations are most of the time 12 or 13 year-olds who then spam for you to go look at theirs.
Then the second you start pointing out the tiniest thing they freak-out start attacking you and just fail to be able to accept criticism. These same users are the ones who will create alternative accounts just to spam-down-vote things ( seeing as how I had my entry, Underminer, at the top of Dream for well over 8 months before they went free-to-play and many users falsified Dream entries by creating multiple accounts ).

While on the topic of Dream : It's garbage. It's a failed concept.

It fails for two main reasons :

• Ease of Access

• No Moderation.

Those last two points are kinda ones I feel come back time and time again in these forums.

Ease of Access could be represented by any user's ability to just make a thread and post-it. That's why you have so many "I posted a picture and said it would be cool if this was a hero" threads or 1 paragraph/line heroes and trash-of-the-like.

No Moderation is self-explanatory. Due to the absence of moderation the entries are flooded, spammed, downvoted, and many of them are just joke or false entries.


That's why I think that focusing on those two points would help improve the quality of this forum greatly:


Ease of Access
Make it difficult to post a new thread.

This can be done by either having a certain character amount [ eg 300 words ], by having the format to be specific or similar to something existing, by having the post be scanned before it displays itself in the forum [ eg previewed by a mod / community person ].

That alone would discourage most of the people who post those invalid entries from doing so due to the effort they would have to go through to make it work, while the rest of us, at least the more serious of us, already do all of those things so it's not a change in the process.

No Moderation
Make sure each thread is 'of posting quality'.

I know this isn't a good solution it's just stuff I'm throwing out there for the sake of making this whole forum better.

[Zerazar]

I actually find most 'hero/item ideas' annoying. There's a design team working for S2, I'm pretty sure they've got this, I don't need to see 'fun' attempts at overly conveluted or boring suggestions with no qualities of insight in design, balancing or gameplay.

But if there are many who'd enjoy it I'll just keep my ass out of there :b.

[Hubaris]

uHon project?:O That sounds interesting

Ya, its a group of playable heroes which can be fooled around with in practice mode that some community users have created. Follow the link in my signature if you want to play around with some!

I actually find most 'hero/item ideas' annoying. There's a design team working for S2, I'm pretty sure they've got this, I don't need to see 'fun' attempts at overly conveluted or boring suggestions with no qualities of insight in design, balancing or gameplay.

But if there are many who'd enjoy it I'll just keep my ass out of there :b.

I hate to ask but what if there were qualities of insight, design, balance and gameplay in some of the heroes created in the community?

If we all had a closed mind to ideas and didn't listen to some constructive community people we would not have :ctul: (to an extent) and .

Sometimes to find diamond, there must be a lot of sifting through sands.

[MaTz0r]

Ah yeah, thats really cool! I wish I could code my heroes too xD If in the near future, maybe HoN 3.0, they release the optium to play modify maps, maybe we could play just the hon map but with all those heroes! That would be awsome

[[LBI]Melto]

To my mind, suggestion forum have tons of heroes or concepts which can really BOOST UP this game.
is a hero from community which shows it. He's one of my favorite, a really fun hero to play and anybody that can handle this grapple knows that it is a good concept.

I think Suggestion Forum need few real things:

- More feedback from S2.

- More Official focused Hero Contests which leads globally or partially to new in-game heroes.

and which will motivate a lot hero makers. Periodical Hero contest (One Each 6 months).

- A manner to regulate crap hero drafts with a new system like Tier System in the forum.

- A manner to filter 9 years old guys votes.

- Something like "S2 Community Heroes of the Month" or 1 per week as Hubaris said.


I really need to see a new or ...

[[FAKE]Caracole]

Periodical hero contests would definitely be a plus along with Dream's removal. Anyone remembers old DotA boards with that popular system ? There were awesome individuals back then who judged hero entries using a template such as the one Melto suggested above.

As for Dream, I seriously wonder why it's still existing. Branfour was spot on about its drawbacks and those seriously make it a joke of a tool. Not to mention they gotta pay to maintain it, which is beyond me.

[[KNO]DrPeckers]

At this point, the only thing I use Dream for is as a sandbox to save rough hero ideas that I may or may not ever complete.

[Drasha]

I didn't notice this was here. Good read.

I agree with you guys that dream is horrible. We could go back to the popular section system but it would be more likely that we would go to the tier system like in misc. I am interested in how many of you guys would want to move to that kind of system?

I will try to talk with some of the design team and see if we can get some more involvement though if it did happen you probably still wouldn't get s2 feed back but ideas would be looked at and we might possibly have contests.

If we added a reward for suggestions how would you guys want it to be handed out? The idea has been thrown around a bit and is a definite possibility.

[Apostate]

I didn't notice this was here. Good read.

I agree with you guys that dream is horrible. We could go back to the popular section system but it would be more likely that we would go to the tier system like in misc. I am interested in how many of you guys would want to move to that kind of system?

I will try to talk with some of the design team and see if we can get some more involvement though if it did happen you probably still wouldn't get s2 feed back but ideas would be looked at and we might possibly have contests.

If we added a reward for suggestions how would you guys want it to be handed out? The idea has been thrown around a bit and is a definite possibility.

I would want the award to be simply for "excellent contribution". This wouldn't necessarily mean that their heroes were incredible, but that they were just excellent contributors to the forum as a whole. Consistently posting above and beyond expectations with insightful ideas and criticism, posting clearly well wrought heroes themselves, and being a high quality member overall.

[Hubaris]

I would want the award to be simply for "excellent contribution". This wouldn't necessarily mean that their heroes were incredible, but that they were just excellent contributors to the forum as a whole. Consistently posting above and beyond expectations with insightful ideas and criticism, posting clearly well wrought heroes themselves, and being a high quality member overall.

I would love this idea; the problem with gold/silver coins is that it would just dilute the pool of suggestions and have people who are spamming suggestions in hopes of winning moneys. Seeing a hero you made, or an idea you built off of receive praise from members of the community is always a great motivator and it does make those who are "serious" at making heroes get some good feedback and a sense of accomplishment.

By having Hero of the Week or what not, you can bring light to some designs and maybe even bring in some constructive criticism to the pool. Getting help and utilizing other ideas from other designers and blending ideas is a great community building experience and is actually quite fun.

As for DREAM, I couldn't care less about it. It is a site which is as lawless as the west and has no structure or end goal to it (barring the original contests). Moving it back to here would "force" people to put in more effort, as they wouldn't be able to rely on flashy pictures and upvote begging.

(Disclaimer: I am very biased toward DREAM)

It would be great to see some structure and some more of a community feel for this section, as that what its heart and soul really is.