Apparently a standalone Dota is in beta

[Occasionally Fatal]

eh, its cool, im moving this weekend, so i wont be on for awhile either. im butthurt s2 removed the console command to zoom out the camera, too.

 

[Padre]

That's a good change imho. Nobody can gain an upper hand by using this so that's ok with me, especially I wasn't using console to do so

Btw, we gotta start playing RD, it's much more forgiving in terms of hero choces and team line ups.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

well i just dont see why they didnt either zoom it out for everyone, or put a zoom slider in the ui. seems like a head->desk decision but i guess not.

 

[MapMan]

S2 dev posted on the forums explaining the decision. He said something like: "We didnt allow further camera coz players with better rigs could zoom out further than those with fucking old pcs". The S2 guys are fucking idiots. When I complained about horrible pathfinding a S2 dev said its there on purpose, because it requires more skill to manouver around creeps etc... Why dont they remove the cursor and, well, pretty much everything, it'll require even more skill to play!

 

[Padre]

s2 team has a point. There are games where range of vistion is very important and HoN is one of those games. So there should be a max vision for all so the chances are even. Besides they wanted to cater to dota community and have it the w3 engine alike.

About pathfinding, are you one of those guys that click on the fountain while being chased and just sit back and watch ? The game is heavy on micro so the automatic pathfinding is inferior and always will be.

 

[Sovard]

They just gave me two invites for this, pm me an email address if you want one.

EDIT: Down to one key. I also have a key available for League Of Legends, which is the DOTA game Guinsoo is making with Riot Games.

 

[Mangoose]

So. I suck at this game. It also doesn't help that my framerate drops to 3 fps when I get into a fight bigger than 2v2. I'm playing on my laptop because my desktop is dead, but why the fuck is this game such a cpu hog? Turion X2 ZM-80, 2.1 GHz here.

But who cares? Add zhandao to your buddy list =p

League of Legends any good?

 

[Padre]

Added, but it appears you are never online.

Today we had some good matches with Occ, bringing much glory to ITZ. Pub stomps are funny, especially when someone starts throwing shit just because he got raped.

We had a pyro on the other team who started crying when I was able to two shot him during late game as a carry. Good times

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

yeah, he was all confused and upset when i used a bottle in mid and popped a haste rune. "WTF You didnt grab rune! How you get that!?" He didn't go for the runes once the entire game, either. Also, last game padre had a carry pebbles that was pretty lulzy.

 

[Xor]

I'm kind of interested in getting in on this standalone DOTA thing. If anyone has a beta invite and is willing to hook me up, I'd appreciate it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Been playing this some more lately. Seems a lot more balanced/polished now, and the new heroes help counter a lot of the old broken heroes. Still some issues, but looking very good. The new bane looks retarded but the new venge is awesome. Always hated her stupid projectile. Hopefully they add some good image heroes soon, I want to see phantom lancer and spectre and chaos knight.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Heroes of Newerth released version .3.0.2 yesterday, which includes matchmaking, at long bloody last. Still just started so it's still got a pile of retards and leavers and the like at mid ranks, but in a week or two it should be mostly sorted out and the losers will be in the proper ranks.

Still no image heroes, oddly.

 

[MapMan]

I havnt played this for months but they keep giving me new invites. If someone still cares write me an email or pm and ill send you invite.

 

[Padre]

Still no image heroes, oddly.

s2 stated that they won't port image heroes because of orb stacking in Hon and how it would be hard to balance this. Images here carry over many properties and would make some ports imba.

Went up to 1730 PSR just to now start matchmaking in 1500 range. God those players are awful...

 

[Mortmal]

Benn playing that a while but really the community .. some guy wrote it was like being jailed with inmates that really really dont like you and suddendly the lights go off.. Thats exactly that.
Its very good game with some good teamwork and strategy involved but i cant stop thinking that 99% of those players should be locked and gased.That really hinders any enjoyment i could get from it.
Now thats a cesspool, codex is a refined tea salon compare to that.

 

[Tails]

Well if they add LAN support then HoW could be fun.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Still no image heroes, oddly.

s2 stated that they won't port image heroes because of orb stacking in Hon and how it would be hard to balance this. Images here carry over many properties and would make some ports imba.

Went up to 1730 PSR just to now start matchmaking in 1500 range. God those players are awful...

The only orb that is worth using on images is mana burn and that worked in DotA, everything else is just a debuff anyways. You aren't any slower or weaker if 5 people hit you with a shieldbreaker or frost skull instead of one. Images lifestealing is completely irrelevant.

Well, wouldn't want to add something hard to balance. From what I've seen S2 would have trouble balancing a brick in a sandbox. Hopefully once the game goes gold they'll find some people with better sense to take control of that aspect- right now they just take shots in the dark based on whatever random snippet they noticed in the forums or wherever. Almost always by making a hero more powerful instead of weaker. At least in the last while they've given some attention to the most broken support heroes, but not enough. And the 'pros' they take cues from are really quite bad, making completely amateur mistakes. It'll be very interesting once the game goes gold and some actual competition gets set up.

 

[Zed]

Heroes of Newerth released version .3.0.2 yesterday, which includes matchmaking, at long bloody last. Still just started so it's still got a pile of retards and leavers and the like at mid ranks, but in a week or two it should be mostly sorted out and the losers will be in the proper ranks.

Still no image heroes, oddly.

Matchmaking is shit you can't even see other peoples rating/stats or play anything else than BORE DRAFT. And it's broken - you can't vote kick people, or vote remake.

I'll stick to my SD or AR 1700+ AB (no locks) games, instead of matchmaking.

If people haven't given up on matchmaking in a month maybe I'll play it then.

 

[Hory]

Matchmaking has Ban Draft? That's the best mode. In SD there's too much of a chance that one team gets more overpowered heroes than the other while in AR one can also get a really shitty team combination. But, yeah, other than a decrease in the time it takes to start a game, there's not much of a benefit.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The entire point is that unlike the PSR rating, which you can dick around with by hosting your own games with friends, or just stacking the teams by putting obviously shitty players with horrible stats on the other team, the matchmaking rating can only go up when you win in a match you had no control over. I've seen way too many people with a PSR of 1800 or more do shit even a 1500 player should know better than. It's obviously worthless except as a measure of how much time you're willing to spend stacking the teams in your favour.

Playing in pub games, my win rate was a little under 50%, because I couldn't be assed to check the stats on every player in the game before every round, make sure the host didn't swap people at the last second, and dick around looking for a game to play for 40 minutes. On the test server I went up in matchmaking rank pretty quickly, and it'd have been much quicker if people weren't constantly leaving because the leaver restriction wasn't in effect. Counting only 5v5 matches, it was close to 80-90% win rate. The difference between being dicked with every second game by the host and his desperate need for winning more matches than he should and actually having fair matches every time was night and day.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Any particular reason they went from 1.66.2 to ... .3.0.2? I updated to the latest patch but was waiting for the weekend to hit before giving it a spin. The amount of butthurt on the HoN forums right now is colossal though because they changed the leaver threshold from 9% to 5% and MM doesn't affect stats. I really look forward to using it though, if only because I won't have to dick around with stacked pubs and dick faced hosts. The bad news is it's going to suck for a bit with everyone starting at 1500 MM PSR or whatever. Ah well.

But, yeah, other than a decrease in the time it takes to start a game, there's not much of a benefit.

Really, that's a huge benefit IMO. Takes forever to find decent banning games with no leavers, no EMers, English speaky, with decent PSR ratings with host that's only a regular asshole instead of an uber douche. Now try finding those games with autobalance. lol pwned XD XD XD as lost comrade of kings would say.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It was .2.49 when it finished the test server, since they added in the new frontend and matchmaking the .2.XX made sense. Not sure why they went from .2.XX to .3.XX, doesn't seem to be anything significant changed from test. Just wanted a nice clean number I guess.

And I love all the leavers bitching on the forums because they didn't get any warning about the change and had been ragequitting 'only' one in twenty matches. Though I was hoping for a stat reset anyways. I'm curious what my stats will be once one happens and I can play strictly matchmaking games. I'll certainly feel inclined to play much more seriously, and end up playing with more skilled people.

 

[Padre]

@ zed

you are an idiot, the mode is banning pick and its the most 'fair' mode to play. People play SD when they feel lucky, not skillful.

About orb stacking on illusion heroes I was thinking about brutalizer, savage mace and charged hammer proccing for some massive dps spikes.

All in all MM is a great way to find matches so you don't have to be on your toes because some fucking idiot host will swap his friends in the last few seconds. Unfortunately, there are some downsides, yesterday MM put me with 2 total noobs ( i mean 0 matches played, of course they didnt finish the tutorial, of course they didnt visit the forum, WHY THE FUCK BOTHER, I PLAYED LOL BEFORE!!! ) so it was a pretty fast and painful loss. So what I do quite well going solo mid if my team starts to feed from minute 1.

My win rate at peak was 57% playing solo or with one friend but after reaching 1700 psr it went kinda downhill because I wasnt prepared (skillwise) to compete with some of the players.

 

[Hory]

Unfortunately, there are some downsides, yesterday MM put me with 2 total noobs ( i mean 0 matches played, of course they didnt finish the tutorial, of course they didnt visit the forum, WHY THE FUCK BOTHER, I PLAYED LOL BEFORE!!! ) so it was a pretty fast and painful loss.

MM uses a new skill rating and so it has the same downside that PSR had: it doesn't function before people play a dozen games or so. True, it's pretty shitty to have to play like ten hours of crappy games so that you can "prove yourself" but I can't imagine a better alternative.

 

[Damned Registrations]

@ zed

About orb stacking on illusion heroes I was thinking about brutalizer, savage mace and charged hammer proccing for some massive dps spikes.

Forgot about mace (Which isn't even an orb effect, but rather a bash), but the other two don't work. Images bashing was fixed back when they added sand wraith in. And I recall trying charged hammer at the same time and it not working either. It'd be simple enough for them to change mace to not trigger on illusions.


The orb stacking is most ridiculous on heroes that have orbs to begin with (Arachna, magebane, predator) and on heroes that already have powerful non orb scaling abilities (Crit or -armor skills + shieldbreaker + lifesteal = stealing insane amounts of life per hit.) Plus they gimped the mirror image item by removing it's ability to clear debuffs and dodge spells, and hide your real image. Well, it was kind of gimped when they separated it from the mana burn property anyways.

Not that the current scene really needs image heroes. AoE lineups already dominate everything. Phantomlancer is a joke when you've got magmus and pyromancer in every game.