Heroes of Newerth Sucks
It’s been a long time i’ve felt such passionate hate for a game.
My worse better half has spent countless hours on this game and totally loves it. He tried to introduce me to it too so perhaps we could play together. I’ve never played Defense of the Ancients [DotA] before but I thought it’d be a piece of cake anyway since everyone was saying that this game is MUCH better and easier than DotA.
It feels like studying for an exam
The game is still in closed beta but basically all my e-friends are playing it so it wasn’t hard to get an invite. Before even playing the game, it was already becoming quite a task. I’m not one of those great tacticians in games and I hate to have to do a lot of reading before playing. Usually when I get games I like to tear into them right away without even opening the manual.
No one would have any of that in HoN. I had to spend time watching youtube tutorials and reading forums about the correct way to build characters. This would be totally fine if I was playing something like Diablo and I would be investing days into a character, but we’re talking about a 30 – 90 minute game here. Too much research for just one battle.
A melee character
So I spent time doing the research and 6 days later I got to open the game and pick my starting character. I picked a melee character (the panda bear) because it was a panda they have more hit points. Usually they’re pretty newbie friendly. It started out well and I was “laning” like I was supposed to.
But I wans’t aware that I was staying too far away from the fighting to get XP. So I soon found myself levels behind. Because of this, of course the other team would start to pick on me. Then my team would start whining. Then i’d go to the forest to kill the neutral creeps but that would make them whine even more, since they would want a melee character when they were trying to gank the other team.
Understandable, but what do you want from me?! I made a mistake in the beginning, I was trying to correct it but if you can’t correct it instantly, it’s not good enough.
A spellcaster
After a somewhat close game, we ended up losing the first map and since i’m a sore loser I decided to try again but with a spellcaster (the Pollywog Priest) instead for the benefit of ranged attacks. My reasoning behind this was that I wanted to be able to get more creep kills (for gold) and to be able to deny enemy creep kills better. I knew the dangers of a spellcaster (less HP, people will tend to pick on you etc) but I figured i’d be ok.
The game starts and of course, people are totally picking on me. All of a sudden my team starts flaming like crazy because i’m “feeding” (dying unnecessarily to the other team causing them to gain gold and experience at a much faster rate). Well no shit i’m feeding, it’s the 2nd time i’ve ever played the game and I guess my map awareness is garbage. Whoever I was laning with always just ran when I would get bound (trapped in one place with a spell) and I could never do anything by myself vs 2 heroes. Obviously i’d bitten off more than I could chew with a spellcaster.
The whole concept of “fog of war” and hiding in trees was totally new to me so obviously I wasn’t the best escape artist. I probably should have stuck to melee characters until I learned this better. But the pressure from the other players was on. My boyfriend told me that if I don’t have good stats (even after 2 games) people will kick me from games and refuse to play with me.
We pretty much lost my second game quickly.
Giving up
I didn’t even bother trying an agility based character, even though everyone seems to think they’re the easiest to play. It just seemed like too much hassle with a bunch of elitist pricks guys who couldn’t accept that some people just wanted to learn. How are you supposed to get better at a game if people aren’t even going to give you the opportunity to learn?
Are you a n00b-hating fan of HoN? Has anyone else shared the same experiences of the game? Let me know below or tweet your story @HelloLiefje
34 Comments
I can see where you’re coming from. Last week I spent 6 hours (00:00-06:00) teaching a CSS player who never touched DotA how to play the game, and even in the early morning he kept finding new gameplay elements that I hadn’t explain yet.
I’ve gone to 1700 PSR, to 1200, and now struggling to get back to 1500 in playing over 200 games. And I can confirm: The public HoN community is just as full of assholes as the public DotA community.
But the game is sooo good, sometimes..
Maybe you should try League of Legends? It’s still a lot of skill involved but it’s more newbii friendly I think. It’s a shame Riot (the developers) haven’t implemented any replay/observer function yet but there’s still people streaming games, like at solomid.net. And if you dont like LoL, it could still be a good starting point before going into HoN (which I’m not a big fan of but whatever). Good luck!
just come play starcraft2 with me liv
haha eagle! I didnt want to sit and listen for a really long time about the game because I just wanted to play! But apparently that doesn’t fly with the HoN community
Kinkytown, any game that abbreviates to “LoL” i’m willing to try!!
erik: WHERES MY KEY THEN
HoN is like an abundance of other games, you learn builds, doesn’t take a long time for most of them, its pretty simple coz a lot of builds are transferable to other characters. When you get the simple, ‘stock’ builds down you can start getting more complex with them. It seems to me you played one game of HoN and decided it sucks, no doubt its not a noob friendly game but I have personally introduced about five of my friends to the game who have no DotA background and after a couple of days playing with me and learning the ropes, its easy to catch onto. It just seems you gave up really easily and wanted to write a blog about it
sorry for the double post but, Panda isn’t really a ‘noob friendly’ character, he’s probably one of the more difficult chars. Try out Nighthound, Scout, Andromeda, Plague Rider, those are much more friendly.
The problem is that HoN is not a casual game and lot of his player play their lifes at each game they do !!!
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They don’t understand it’s just a game and furthermore they don’t help noobies. But sometimes you can go with some pleasant gamers
Crofteh I didn’t mean that HoN in itself is a bad game (judging by how hooked my bf is I bet it is good) I just mean that it’s difficult to even get to the point where it is fun because people aren’t willing to accept that you’re still learning
Yeah, I agree that people on the public scene are very immature, i’d suggest, if you do want to get into the game, playing games with your boyfriend and him showing your the ropes, because as you said and to which I agree, it is very difficult to find people on the public scene who would rather help than flame
Oh, and if you’re gonna try LoL you should go to lol-europe.com to play on the EU and not the US servers. Other dota clones: Avalon Heroes(haven’t tried but they had alot of airtime at IEL), bloodlinechampions.com (a bit different) and of course, Demigod.
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Oh, and if you\’re gonna try LoL you should go to lol-europe.com to play on the EU and not the US servers. Other dota clones: Avalon Heroes(haven\’t tried but they had alot of airtime at IEL), bloodlinechampions.com (a bit different) and of course, Demigod.
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Difficult games contain players of varied skill which is good; however, I don’t believe the problem to be the game itself. Misleading topic title; I was expecting more about the gameplay and less e-drama =P. In my opinion, games which require levelling/grind have players that are pseudo-competitive and usually sycophantic. Guildwars PVP (it’s nothing like WoW before you think that) was like this for me – I had poor awareness to begin with which resulted in exotic words from people. As I became quite good at the game I felt people completely changed. I was quite impressed by their obnoxious behaviour though. There was no happy medium with them; from hating to a clingy, begbegbeg, join my group type of mentality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-w8GsMbb4&feature=related
It’s short sightedness, people don’t tend to think “hey, he/she might end up one of the best players and a real asset to my team”. I always find it’s best to play with friends where possible – it’s often not possible though.
I’ve just played HoN today for a bit after playing LoL for months. Originally I enjoyed the good matchmaking features, the server system, the public game system, the filters, the low latency and so on, however when it comes to gameplay, this game is just trash. I was expecting dota, but this is not dota, some heroes may be similar but that’s about it, the heroes are totally unbalanced, the abilities and items are totally different from dota, pretty much nothing of what was good in dota was taken. I’m really disappointed in HoN and I would recommend anyone that thought the gameplay of LoL was good, NOT to even bother trying LoL. Also, to dota players, I’d recommend you stick with dota, because HoN is just a clone with everything from heroes to abilities to items messed up, so you’ll just have to re-learn all builds and heroes all over again and then have to deal with all new unbalance.
Unfortunately, LoL suffers from really bad development, they are not working on the features promised almost a year ago, there’s no clans, there’s no ranked “public games”, there’s only a matchmaking system that’s pretty much a lottery draw where the people you get matched with and the chars they pick (you can’t counterpick in LoL, you don’t even know what the enemy picks) define the result of the match.
Pretty much, the ideal game would be to take the gameplay of LoL (which btw is great from all points of view and it’s much more alert than HoN’s), and combine that gameplay with the features that HoN currently has: leaver protection, matchmaking system, public games system, stats tracking, server system, and so on.
I would say LoL is currently my pick because the gameplay is just superior to everything else, however the game, at its current state, is just umplayable due to vast amounts of feeders and leavers that ruin every single game. IF you have 3-5 good friends that you can play with in premade teams, then you’ll have a good time in LoL, otherwise, PUG-ing will be your doom. And HoN… very very disappointing, good features, really crap gameplay, if you’re a nerd that likes to fill up his brains with builds and counters and study that stuff for hours, and if you don’t mind a game where things can get really unbalanced really fast, I guess you can go play HoN, if you want a game with fun and balanced gameplay, where the situation can change at any time in the game nomatter how fed the enemy team is, then go for LoL.
Yeah i’ve heard a lot of really good things from LoL as opposed to HoN and not coming from DotA then I think I might have a chance to learn it.
However, I just recently heard about a new game coming out from some Swedish developers.. which is kind of like HoN but the games are “limited” to I think 6 minutes… do you know which one i’m thinking of? I can’t remember the title!
Knowing where to go was the most confusing part of the game for me. People have told me if I didn’t play Dota (and I didn’t) that I wouldn’t understand how to play. My boyfriend also hated Hon. I guess if I want good quality pvp, I need to stick to Neopets. FML.
hahaha Neopets! people still play with those? I remember when they first came around 10 years ago…