…just for one Beta period. Matt Coddington gave us the heads up on this. Heroes of Newerth are giving 30,000 keys away via Facebook. There’s 27K odd left at the time of writing, so time for you all to get into this videogame thing. If you don’t know about it, it’s another of the Defence of the Ancients derived games which are appearing this year (See also: Demigod). Anyway, go get your code here or watch some manner of footage below…
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in all honesty, I already bought one game from this developer, I’m not going to make that mistake again, gg
@Railick : Most of the game I tried started with “Who here is god at DOTA?”
They mean “noob” at playing a DOTA style game is seems.
Been in the beta for three weeks now, and coming from a person who played DotA casually, I must say that it scratches the same itch that DotA did. Of course, relearning is frustrating, and right now some heroes are still unbalanced (hence why it is still in beta).
For anyone new to the game:
Start a private game with only yourself, pick a hero you like and learn the item shop. The item shop is EVERYTHING in this game. Hero abilities are easy to pick up in-game, but if you do not know what item counters a specific enemy build, or what your guys needs to shine, you are in trouble.
For the first few games, stick to the ‘easier’ heroes (Don’t think I am allowed to disclose hero names).
Ask your team for suggestions. Usually some heroes work naturally well with another hero. Additionally, some heroes are excellent counters to heroes your opponent picks, so your team might ask you to pick those.
@lePooch:
The problem is, unless there’s some sort of guide out there that I’m missing, I have no idea what those counters/compliments actually are. How am I supposed to tell what heroes are ‘easier’ to play? What makes an item a good counter?
The game would certainly benefit from at least a tutorial mode or something. Maybe that’s planned for the future? Or maybe they’re just building it off of DotA’s playerbase and that’s it, and dont feel the need to cater to us nubbins…
Having played the HoN beta for a few weeks now, these are the obvious issues I can see in the game:
- The learning curve is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to steep.
- The community is horrible.
- The whole team is punished for playing with beginners (and idiots), possibly explaining the above point.
- Sort of lacking in content to be a unique title.
Hopefully these points will be addressed by release, or they’re going to scare away far more players then they will pull in.
Everything else aside, it’s a brilliant game, and I love it to bits.
For new players, I suggest starting out playing with friends, and avoiding public games until you’ve learned something of the game. If you don’t have that option, at least filter out all servers that aren’t “noobs only”.
I also suggest reading some of the great guides that are posted on the HoN beta boards, if only to avoid being flamed by the above-mentioned horrible community.
Worst. Player community. Ever.
And I’ve been around for a while. Never seen such a bunch of morons gathered in a same game.
Problem is: this is a beta, you’re intended to test things and the more testers the better, who cares about some former leet DotA players getting and e-peen boost ?
Dev team needs to police their testing playerbase.
What I kind of don’t understand about the learning curve is that it is absolutely intentional how steep it is. I mean, nevermind the 30-ish heroes all with 4 abilities you’re supposed to pick from and learn how to identify in combat and counter, the item shop alone is insane. Does there really need to be 150 different items? Do half of them really need to be made up of other items, which are in turn made from other items? As far as I can tell, this kind of item complexity exists just to let experienced players screw over new players as thoroughly as possible. I guess I could spend a good hour sitting there charting out all the items and the dependencies and which ones can be bought at which store and which order to buy them in so I can hold them in my inventory, but on the other hand, I could also just stab myself in the eye with a fork and then go do something that’s actually fun instead.
Of course all this dovetails nicely with the official death messages being “PlayerA has pwned PlayerB’s head”. I could hardly believe it when I saw it. Aside from not making any sense at all, you’re using a word deliberately engineered to be as aggravating as possible, in every death message?
As for the “testosterone poisoned, horrible playerbase”, I could not agree more. The mechanic where the enemy players are made stronger for every player they kill really reinforces the mentality that all “noobs” should be ridiculed and kicked at the earliest opportunity. For a game without an AI, this playerbase is seriously a dealbreaker for anyone who isn’t planning on playing it strictly with friends.
One other thing for new people trying. Learn to get good at last hitting.
That is just attack to make the kill on the grunts. Damage dealt doesnt help get more gold.
More so, kill your own units when they are in the red (or orange later in the game) You’ll know it worked because a gaint “DENIED!” will pop up in your color. By doing that you can give yourself a slight edge early game by limiting the experience and gold your opponents get.
The game is extremely punishing for deaths though. You are worth alot, hence ganking heroes is quite viable to win. Stick together once you have your main skills maxed (usually around lvl 8-10, although some heroes need all of them)
When in doubt go for items that boost your HP, at least you’ll hold up slightly longer in a fight.
It’s DoTA, it’s going to inherit the same problems that DoTA has. If you don’t like DoTA, there’s no way you’re going to like HoN. Those of us who do like DoTA though (and there are several million of us), like HoN.
Anyone with any sense avoids pubbie games in DoTA, so why believe it would be any different in HoN? Play with friends, have fun and maybe play competitively every once in a while with a team of friends.
“I guess I could spend a good hour sitting there charting out all the items and the dependencies and which ones can be bought at which store and which order to buy them in so I can hold them in my inventory, but on the other hand, I could also just stab myself in the eye with a fork and then go do something that’s actually fun instead.”
QFT
I joined one game and was immediately swore at and called a noob. I explained that yes I am a noob as this is my first game! Everyones a noob the first time you start. I followed my buddies to help them but they screamed at me to go somewhere else so I did, and died a lot then left.
I’m sure its fun if you have the time to invest in learning the game, and some good buddies to play with. but not all of us have that luxury.
It could be that DoTA is not my tea cup.
But this game is something so we all have to congratulate.
Here we have a mod, that is spawning a genre, a mod community that grow to a professional one. Dreams made true, and the will of the community fullfulling.
This *is* a better DoTA, how the purist want it (I may hard, anyway, to move these purist, since all purist want is status quo, and zero changes). Better has in, the interface slighty enhanced for this purpose, with all the decoration of the original warcraft, and more.
These of us that started playing videogames before the words RTS, FPS where invented, remenber a time where (other than platformers, shot en up and clones of other famous games) there was no genres. All games where original, and a genre at itself. Some of us hate that gamming has been reduced to a set of gameplay types “RTS”, “FPS”, “RPG” … The permasive (?) mod community could be our savior (??) that will demolish the wall (??) eroding his base (?) spawning a infinite variation of genres.
Or to use my mother lang:
¡OLE!.
The people that are struggling with the learning curve, but who do want to continue playing should check out the beta forums. There is an entire subforum devoted to guides on how to play heroes and on other aspects of the game like rune grabbing and juking (running away through the trees). The hero guides will usually tell you the best combination of items to grab for that hero too, which you can apply to all similar heroes (there are only about 4 ‘roles’ a hero can fill).
The tutorial is in the pipeline, but not done yet and I can completely understand why it’s not been implemented from the start.
I’ve been on the beta for a while now, and I’m impressed. I’d never played DotA (don’t even have any Warcraft games to hand), but it hasn’t taken me too long to get used to this. One of the nicest things is the visual ability effects, which add quite a lot to the game – the vocal cues are often quite funny too, though bizarrely they seem to be missing for a few heroes.
The one obstacle really is the aggressive DotA players who have migrated over to HoN. They insist on calling everything/one by their DotA name, and viciously abuse everyone who doesn’t exactly stick to their idea of what should be done – a lot even bark out orders to other players as you would to an unpresponsive RTS unit. You’ve also got to be wary of team balance – often hosts will quickly start games as soon as ten players are in the game lobby, despite the host and his team having an 87% win chance or something – real noob harvesting for the unawares. Always have to keep the cursor hanging over the “disconnect” button.
All that said, it’s really enjoyable, especially with friends that you know won’t insult you incessantly. Given how busy the beta is, I suspect this may take off in a big way.
Cheers for the heads up, just signed up myself and a mate
I’ve played dota for over 5 years and have been participating in the HoN Beta for a little over a month now.
One great feature of Hon is the ability for users to create mods. Only mods that don’t directly affect gameplay are allowed in HoN.
A few such mods address the fact that a portion of the players coming from DotA don’t want to relearn all of the Heroes / Items.
One mod in particular replaces all of the pictures and names of 1 for 1 ports in HoN to their DotA counterparts.
Another mod simply places the DotA equivalent item name beneath the HoN item name.
If you are already in the beta, but don’t know where to find these mods, simply jump on the HoN Beta forums (beta.heroesofnewerth.com), navigate to “Interface Discussion and User Mods” and click on the stickied post entitled “The Modification Repository”. The mods are super easy to install (just need to save a single file to the game directory in most cases) and may improve your HoN experience.
The ability to create user mods is just one of the ways that S2 caters to their community.
Ehhh… It’s alright, pretty well made it seems, but I didn’t seetoo many reasons to get it if you already have Warcraft3+Xpack. I do like all the statistics it keeps though, which is pretty awesome.
Been playing for about six weeks, having crossed from playing DotA casually for a couple of years. Yes, the learning curve is steep. Yes, the community can be harsh. But remember this; if you were to ebay a WoW character (or any other MMO), at top level, join a group and try to do an instance/raid or somesuch, having never played the game before, you would still get aggro from people. Possibly a bit less than in HoN, but only because its sometimes feasible to carry someone through an instance/raid without it screwing up everyone else’s experience.
If you join games having done no reading, no offline practice and having made no effort to learn anything, then its hardly surprising if you get flamed when you ruin the game for the other four players on your team. Because you will ruin the game for the other four; make no bones about it.
@WantOn:
It’s absurd. Apples and oranges here.
Cheating the learning curve in said game by buying a character, and expecting to be accepted if you try to play above you real skill level in highly challenging environment is obviously wrong – and even that wouldn’t justify to be treated without respect.
On the other hand, in this case we’re talking about regular games, even tagged “new player”, were a bunch of primitive anthropoids are throwing virtual dung at anybody doesn’t meet *their* expectations.
All of this not even considering it’s a beta, so it’s overall harming game development by reducing testing coverage and detection of various bugs.
Hell, let’s try reverse thinking: tag some games to “leet hardcore morons only” and let correct and educated people of various game skill sort the rest by themselves.
I’m an utopist so I’ll not request that the said morons choke on their own tongue, just that they don’t pollute other people just trying to, well, beta test the thing.
The lerning curve is Steep? More like an impenetrable brick wall. The community harsh? More like a bunch of anti-social elitist arseholes who’d rather spit on someone than help a new player (for the most part).
Any game that requires you to trawl through a forum trying to figure out how to play the game isn’t worth the time frankly. Single player practice would be fine, if there was such an option in this beta. There isn’t that I could find (no bots in the create a game).
Don’t get me wrong I’m more than willing to put some effort into a game, read guides and instructions but not BEFORE I play the game. I spend hours trawling the diii.net forums for guides, advice and such, testing builds learning the math behind D2.
Any game worth it’s salt should be easy to blunder into and only require that kind of study, and that is what it is, study – once you start to get a feel for the basics and want something more advanced.
Everything about this game is utterly bewildering for a new player – If they hope to actually sell copies to people who are not former hardcore DotA players they have a long way to go.
There’s also a bunch of things that this game has clearly taken from the WC3 engine, which you’d think they might have improved upon.
The ability to zoom out, or rotate the camera being a damn big one.
I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh given this is clearly labeled as a direct clone of WC3 DotA, not a game that is taking that gameplay idea and expanding on it.
It just seems a missed opportunity to modernize the game making it more accessible to new players (which doesn’t mean dumbed down – well only in the small minds of elitist idiots). A tutorial is all that’s needed, a good, step-by-step in game tutorial to get new players familiar with the goals of the game, how the mechanics work and such.
The game is great but only with friends: it has the same ‘toxic’ community as Demigod, DOTA, and to some extent WoW arena. I played with the friends that introduced me and I really had a lot of fun. But even in games labeled as ‘noob friendly’, a five-game veteran like myself gets a torrent of abuse and votekicks.
DOTA’S (as a genre) community problems are rooted in the game. Its about micromanaging 1 unit, but with literally thousands of options. This creates 2 classes of player, those who do the math/read the math and those who don’t.
I was always a math player, after playing a dota on wc3 i’d load it up singleplayer and check out all the heroes and explore the maps. Then after finding 4 or so strong builds (often up to an hour of pondering) i would go back and kick arse, it was such a massive difference.
Of course, before long i discovered faq’s and boards. But i’d watch people play game after game and still never really get the maths.
And the hate they recieved was monumental, all because they didn’t rtfm.
The problem with DOTA needing people to rtfm, is that it doesn’t have a manual.
Don’t get me wrong but these games are impossible to properly document because they are such a crapstorm of mathematical models.
On one dota i saw a player avoid killing anything because his class (builder/hero) gave no xp at level one. He would freak out if you killed anything near him, but in turn he could deploy healing shrines off the main route and was a massive boon to his team without ever offering the enemy xp.(despite dying so much the actual game mocked him). The manual would need 20 pages of tables just to offer half of this information.
First impressions are, getting face stomped by everything. Read some more, face stomped some more.
The learning curve is a headache
Side note: awesome community full of “lol u newbz why so shit?”
really feels like playing with a bunch of hardcore elitist teenagers, which it probably is. Can’t wait for my two mates to install and play so this game can become slightly enjoyable for me.
What bothers me, is that Savage was about combining the accessibility of fps/hack n slash with the depth of rts.
This would have been the perfect opputunity to do the same thing for the DoTT formula, your already controlling just one guy, why not do so directly?
The only nice person I met on this game couldn’t speak English. Which actually spoke a lot of his character that he would try as best he could to communicate with me on top of being nice. Instead of going “y u suck lozl”
it looks to be yet another game rewarding the choice of one hero, and one chain of items, I kept getting insta-killed again and again, but if i copy them, choosing the same characters and weapons, well, then i pwn, not tactical…
The beta seems to be more oriented to testing the balance of the heroes rather than finding bugs in the client itself (which is pretty solid). So if you’re not a DoTA player, or not willing to do a bit of reading before playing, you might want to avoid this one. I myself was one of the latter; went into a couple games, got owned hard, got flamed by my team, was pretty close to uninstalling. But then I read the forums a bit, lrn’d2play, and now I’m absolutely loving this game. Hopefully the final version will have a tutorial.
I recommend starting with:
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=737
Then read a hero guide:
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=520
Not sure which one to play?
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?t=3814
please send me a beta key….ive been dieng to play this game please…if i need to beg you i will do it just for a beta key sir…