My GOD, the Heroes of Newerth community is so bad. SO bad. But why?

[bakan]

Play nostats games which are labeled for beginners and avoid the matchmaking games until you understand the basics, hero roles and you achieved a certain skill-lvl, then you will receive far less rage (a certain amount of raging is inherent to this type of game).

Another alternative is to join one of the beginner clans which you can find in the forum and get help from players which are in higher brackets.

There is help for noobs in HoN, but most people don't bother to look it up and make threads like these.

 

[RaikuFA]

snip

Dude, Monster Hunter communitys ways worse. Death threats are of the norm on fan sites and forums. Just bought your first game? You deserve to have your arms chopped off. Need help taking down hunts? You have no right to live.

 

[Lunar Templar]

it amazes me

people KNOW these community's are shit, people know being a 'newb' in these games if basic asking for trouble, yet people still sign up ...

 

[Silvianoshei]

Hello dear Escapist community.

Normally, I am just a lurker on these forums, but this thread is kinda offensive to all the people playing HoN. I have been playing HoN since it's Beta in august 2009 and I played it quite a lot since then.

I agree that much of the HoN community is pretty much worthless. But that does not automatically mean that I will go out my way to insult my own team mates when something bad happens. Over the 2 and half years I have played the game I have met a lot of awesome people and friends, who never do scold people for their mistakes. Yes, you'll get people thrash-talking you, but it is so easily ignored. There are even short chat commands that let you ignore all chat channels and abusive behaviour in HoN games can be reported and dealt with.

Starting out in the genre is indeed very difficult. People expect you to know every ability of all the 100 heroes and you have to know what items to use on the hero you are using yourself. A lot of HoN players actually do understand that it is difficult and do respect new players. I always try to give friendly advise when asked serious questions. I also mentored a few new players until they could get better on their own. There are multiple friendly communities, like gamereplays or the 2 beginners clans on the official forums, which you can join easily. A lot of friendly and well mannered players can be found there, willing to help, or just have a fun game with.

I think the most difficult part of HoN is not the gameplay itself, but to find new friends, so you can team-up and have fun conversations while playing the game. I can't describe the amount of fun I have playing HoN with my friends. Soloing can be fun too, if you know how to ignore certain chats.

In the end it is just a game and games are about having fun. There are a lot of wonderful people playing HoN. Maybe, you can be one of those too and make a difference. Please don't talk bad about the community as a whole, such generalizations are only making it worse.

This dude was talking about matchmaking. His comments are perfectly fair. I played HoN for about 6 months before I switched to LoL. This was back when you had to pay for it. I can't stand that crap.

Just because you might be nice and friendly to new players doesn't mean that it's a commonplace attitude. Kudos to you for trying to help people out, but for every one game I played where noone said anything annoying, there were 50 where I would ignore every player in that game. I generally don't like being friends with people who talk trash like 12 year olds and ragequit whenever they lose a match. If you can't deal with losing after 50 minutes, don't play MOBA.

 

[KnowYourOnion]

"Well you would say that; cause you're no good!" - average HoN player.

It seems to me that DoTA was designed specifically to fuel the elitism that has always existed within gaming culture. A game in which each mistake you make not only hurts your allies, but helps your enemies is always bound to alienate people and strengthen only the relationships between two equal players. Bad multiplayer, simply put.

I reckon it's probably one of the greatest style of multiplayer games ever created, you're forced to communicate with your team and you're punished for a lack of skill. To me that's fantastic, games shouldn't hold your hand while you play them. You either become skilled/competent or you don't play with other people and ruin their game.

 

[KnowYourOnion]

This, in a nutshell, is why I fucking hate multiplayer of all genres. To all competitive players, It's just a fucking game, STOP TAKING IT SERIOUSLY! If there's a noob on the team that's dragging your score down, so fucking be it. It doesn't matter. Let them have fun with a 0.5 KDR in peace.

No I won't stop taking it seriously, I play games for fun and if you come into a game and proceed to ruin it for the other 4 people on your team simply because you started without having any idea what you're doing when there is a perfectly good tutorial and whole plethora of guides on the internet then you can fuck right off. That said if you came into a game and said 'look guys I'm new to this bear with me then I'd react differently, I want to help the new people get better but if they themselves make no effort to improve then I'm sorry I simply don't want to play with them as they're ruining my fun and the fun of three others.

 

[Bostur]

As an outsider to the MOBA genre my experience is that it's really hard to find any guides of substance for beginners. So the advice to do research before jumping in doesn't really work. The only way to learn is to start playing and start messing up other people's game. Of course that results in conflict.

For small scale cooperative play, I can recommend Bloodline Champions, it has a much nicer community.

 

[Skin]

MOBA communities are like that. HONs seems to be worse for some reason though. personally, I think it's because the game's dying and the refuse that was once on the bottom has risen and contaminated the last of the player base.

Games dying? It has more players than ever before..

 

[Darkmantle]

^Please stop calling Dota games MMOs. 5v5 instances != "Massively" Multiplayer.

Anyway, you'll find good people in the community and you'll find bad people.

Sticks and stones.

They are MMOs, because the community of players is absolutly huge and they all share the same matchmaking. The battles might be 5 vs 5 or whatever, but those 10 people come from a pool of tens, or hundreds of thousands of players, maybe even a few million if some hype is to be believed. That's an MMO by any definition... it's just an MMO that consists entirely of a 5 vs. 5 arena queue (of a sort) without any kind of real persistant world structure behind it.

massively multiplayer implies that they all be playing at the same time on the same instance. not 1 billion 1v1 games. under you definition, every multiplayer game is an mmo, SC2, Shogan: total war, CounterStrike, LoL, HoN, CoD, etc etc. that's a silly definition and you know it.

OT: HoN is clearly the true successor to WC3 DotA, the whole community must have moved over.

EDIT: Also, I know a lot of MOBA players in general don't realize this, but when you viciously attack a new player, they tend to stop playing. and when older players stop playing )lack of interest, new game, etc) your community gets smaller and smaller and disappears. It's like the birthrate/deathrate of a country.

now there are exceptions to this rule, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

[lacktheknack]

It's - it's like the POLAR OPPOSITE of Myst Online!

(In Myst Online, there's very little reliance on other players except for three puzzles, so you end up with a community that's out hunting for n00bs to help out (!) or just relaxing and socializing in the main cavern.)

I think I've found the two extremes of the sliding scale of game community pleasantness.

Being a fan of the series, i can agree to this.
Problem is, not everyone, or better, only very few people like Puzzle games.
Lack of competition, etc is a huge turndown for many.
Then again, it's pretty trollfree most of the time because of that concept. ^^

I'm VERY HAPPY about it too.

"Hey, Main Cavern! I have to do that eight-person-puzzle, and I think I have a clue on how to do it. Anyone want to help?"



I spent a few days once just hunting down newbies just to help them get grounded in the bizarre situation the game drops you into, and rather enjoyed myself. I've also staged interventions/rescues when the trolls DO show up. I get a sense of accomplishment out of assisting people ingame, and that immediately puts it at odds with pretty much every other MMO in existence.

And you're right, the only downside is that there's only about 500 people online at any given time, but oh well. If you WANT competition, however, you could always go with a couple of friends to the Chessboard age (Jalek?) and set up a friendly game of whatever you darn well want.

 

[Zaik]

sounds exactly like when I tried dota.

 

[Therumancer]

it's just an MMO that consists entirely of a 5 vs. 5 arena queue (of a sort) without any kind of real persistant world structure behind it.

Uh, I thought persistent world structures were pretty much fundamental to the definition of an MMO. Otherwise you might as well say Diablo 2 is an MMORPG because it contains persistent characters all logged on to the same server. But it's definitely not.

Not every community has to be brown-nosing, pony riding anime fans. I think the HoN community is refreshing in its honesty about people.

Taking advantage of internet anonymity to talk shit is not honesty. It's childishness.


OT: Why is the HoN community so awful? Because the game design brings out the worst in people. I tend to just look at it as a positive rather than a negative. The more HoN attracts the shitty, immature gamers, the fewer of them there will be in every other game.

Actually the term "MMO" was in part coined by Diablo. Games that have matchmaking, clans, and the participation of thousands count as MMOs, but like everything I think the term is misused, in the case of MMO I think it's because of the same associations that cause the confusion here, with companies not wanting their games to be mentally put in the same classification of other games even if they belong there in this respect.

This is to both people who responded to this.

-

Other than that, I'll go so far as to say that the other guy you quoted does have a point. Free speech is not just the right for people to freely say things you like or agree with. Like it or not bigots, racists, and others have the same rights as everyone else. There are also communities carved out by people who are not left wing, and a lot of them given that they represent roughly 50% of the population.

Not every community winds up being welcoming to everyone, and trying to force people to change or accept something is pretty much a lost cause. It's sort of like how while I say my piece on certain political topics here (militarism, social policy, etc...) I don't bother to try and convert a community inherantly hostile to those topics.

That said, I don't think that the problems described here are akin to what this guy is saying, or a community/point of view conflict, so much as the game simply having become established to the point of the trickle of newbies being unwelcome due to the fact that they do tend to disrupt the high level play the majority of game players are involved in (as I said before).

Dealing with the issue of newbies trickling into an established game, and not being run off, is one of the big issues online games of all sorts has to learn to deal with to keep their new blood intact. The more competitive a game is, the more unwelcome newbies are going to be once things get moving.

 

[Therumancer]

^Please stop calling Dota games MMOs. 5v5 instances != "Massively" Multiplayer.

Anyway, you'll find good people in the community and you'll find bad people.

Sticks and stones.

They are MMOs, because the community of players is absolutly huge and they all share the same matchmaking. The battles might be 5 vs 5 or whatever, but those 10 people come from a pool of tens, or hundreds of thousands of players, maybe even a few million if some hype is to be believed. That's an MMO by any definition... it's just an MMO that consists entirely of a 5 vs. 5 arena queue (of a sort) without any kind of real persistant world structure behind it.

massively multiplayer implies that they all be playing at the same time on the same instance. not 1 billion 1v1 games. under you definition, every multiplayer game is an mmo, SC2, Shogan: total war, CounterStrike, LoL, HoN, CoD, etc etc. that's a silly definition and you know it.

OT: HoN is clearly the true successor to WC3 DotA, the whole community must have moved over.

EDIT: Also, I know a lot of MOBA players in general don't realize this, but when you viciously attack a new player, they tend to stop playing. and when older players stop playing )lack of interest, new game, etc) your community gets smaller and smaller and disappears. It's like the birthrate/deathrate of a country.

now there are exceptions to this rule, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Not silly at all, given that the game industry in general chose to intentionally make just about everything massively multiplayer and online due to the money that was making. Understand what the term "MMO" actually means.

Otherwise, as I've said otherwise, the treatment of new players, especially in competitive games is something that developers need to work on. The problem with the current system is the established players are focused on their goals, their relative rankings, obtaining the next loot upgrade, or progressing through raids or competitive boss-kill/dungeon clear timers to prove they are better than other groups. It depends on the type of game. The problem is a newbie, or someone who is new to endgame, actually is nothing but a liability to an established player, even if good for a game as a whole.

 

[Zeetchmen]

Moba games bro, my roomate plays them and turns into a rageaholic whenever he does.

He is also one of the most conceited people you will ever meet; which Moba games seem to attract.

 

[Evilpigeon]

So can some explain the difference between these games to me? I mean it sounds like they are all the same. Are there any major differences between LoL, Dota and HoN? If so then what is it that could cause HoN to have a worse community than say LoL?

Also LoL tribunal system, that looks awesome. I haven't done any research so I don't know how it works but from what my level 30 friends tell me it is pretty cool. Whenever we report someone we usaully end up writing something amusing to entertain the Tribunal, it's pretty fun.

So from your post, I take it you've played LoL. As you know LoL splits you into two teams of five with each game being very, very focused on the end result, rather than kills or whatever else people use to distract themselves from bad allies in, say fps games. Every mistake takes you further from winning and actively makes things harder for your allies.

HoN is 10x less forgiving of mistakes, has 10x more to learn if you want to do okay. It also has a much smaller and more stagnant community so it's harder to avoid veteran players who think they know what they're doing - by the nature of the game however, and judging by my experience with LoL almost all of them are clueless. This kinda combines to produce a game with an even worse community than LoL, LoL already beign a game where people are perfectly happy to flame you for an hour because you picked a champion they don't like pre-game.

 

[freddi91]

Indeed, I agree with ^^^^. One guy once said in HoN forums that its so rage inducing because its as frustrating as watching a 23 year old repeatedly try to jam a square shape through a circular hole.


I think the problem also lies in the "any change is BAD" nostalgia mode, spurred by the fact that for some players HoN is a replacement for DotA. I remember the balance forum discussion on how the camera in HoN is very close to the ground (leading to many new players not to notice the enemy that escapes the teamfight at 2% hp spurring hatespeech from the dead allies).

Some players argued that the camera should be further from the action to give a better overview, while overzealous nostalgiagoggled forumgoers said that controlling a camera was an essential skill newer players need to master and everyone had to go through. Of course the camera was never really part of the designed skill part of DotA, the camera position was limited by the warcraft 3 engine.

 

[ChocoFace]

It's mainly to do with the highly, HIGHLY competitive nature of the game.
I've played HoN on and off for almost a year now and even though the gameplay itself is the best MOBA experience i've had (since it's so fast paced), the community can really get on my nerves.

Thankfully, since i do already have a sizeable amount of experience with moba games, I've learned to mostly ignore this and you will usually see me saying stuff along the lines of "manners." or "behave, now" without adding anything to that. I find it sometimes helps keep the flaming douchebag in check.

There is the odd time, however, when i've just had enough of these idiots and that's the time i either take a break completely or play a more casual game (which is pretty much every game in existence)

I'll also have to admit that the elitism is a little over-the-top in HoN. The only criticisms HoN players make on "why LoL is SO BAD" are:
1) Look at these cartoon kids' graphics! Only 3 year-olds play this!
2) You can't even deny creeps/players/towers! there's no strategy in LoL!
And anyone who's played LoL realises how dumb these claims are.