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TL:DR = Okey so this is gonna be sort of a rant against DotA/HoN. Now I don't really have anything against someone playing some HoN really. I just have issues with it.
Like back in the day when I used to play WC3, I would nag on my friends to get the game and start playing some ladder for real. A few of em got the game, and were starting off pretty good, starting to get to the point in to the game where you dont lose TOO easy. The level where people would know how to harass efficently with a blademaster for example, or gargoyle snipe wisps. So my friends just gave up playing because it was too hard. And transitioned into playing custom games, in other words, dota. While I was pushing level 30 on the ladder.
And the reasoning for playing DotA instead was because it was easier to just control one hero. And the game was at a slower pace.
Whats the deal with that? I felt DotA as a custom game, something casual. If you're gonna play a competetive game you should well darn play where the real action goes on. The REAL WC3 games. Couldn't compare Moon, Grubby or Sky with DotA. Atleast that's what I felt at that time.
Time passed, I took my break from WC3 awaiting a SC2 beta key. I got it and played like never before. Got good at it pretty fast, went to platinum league within a month of when I started playing. And I told and showed all my friends the game. And they were all superpumped, because it seemed cool, I got them into the Starcraft scene with day9, husky, hd and everyone was game. By then no one was playing Dota still of course.
And as the SC2 beta was down for some times the scene would be a bit dry, and they would try HoN beta. Not anything serious though, they still seemed like they were into SC2.
And when the release came, I was really pumped, I stood in line for 3 days outside a store to get the game. And everyone got the game, got new specs for their computers, everyone was set and had picked the races they wanted to play. I was the only zerg though. And you would see their facebook statuses talking about SC2 pretty hard.
Then two weeks after the release, I had been the only active player, most of them had like 5-15 games played, and a mission completed in campaign. And I asked them why they werent playing. They told me how Siege tanks were imba, and 6pool unstoppable and they only got proxied all the time and how the game was unbalanced, no chat rooms. And so on.
They never returned to SC2, they started playing HoN. And lost all interest in SC2. They told me how they refered to it as a "safer" competetive RTS with an easier learning courve. I tried playing some HoN, an 30-40 games. And I just got the impression of it as being some custom game, like Dota with a better graphics engine. I mean it couldnt be compared with SC2.
Just to be clear, when I refer to my friends I am specifically meaning a group of 4-5 people.
I had gotten the picture of HoN being some casual custom game, with some depth to it. And the other day when a friend of mine asked me how my SC2 was going. And I told em it ws good, I was pressing 1900 pts Diamond and felt pretty confident, told them I had around 160 APM average. And they're like, yeah I've got that too, in HoN. WHAT DO YOU DO? SUPERDUPER SPAM? (note that I am the only one of my friends who kept playing SC2, only some of them log in extremely casually).
Starting to piss me off. Feels like I'm being trolled IRL. I feel like, if they're gonna play a competetive RTS, they may as well play THE competetive RTS.
 
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HoN is extremely competitive and is catered almost entirely to the competitive community of DotA. Do NOT think of it as a casual game for people who can't take the heat. League of Legends, on the other hand...
I'm a high level SC2 player (top 200 NA) and a sorta decent HoN player (1770 psr) and I will say that both games are quite competitive, but the HoN community is absolutely terrible. Brood war is definitely harder than HoN, but idk about sc2 - both sc2 and hon were fairly easy for me to learn off BW, but they take different skills.
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tl:dr hon is more fun than sc2 from a casual perspective.
It's the same for most of my friends, except for the switching to hon/dota part. Alot of them bought the game right after release, played some campaign and a couple of team games then possibly 10-20 1v1's before they gave up. I don't blame them. Sc/sc2 1v1 laddering can be quite brutal when you first start out. They also complained about the fact that you are virtually disconnected from the rest of b.net due to the lack of chat channels.
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Sorry to burst your bubble, but SC:BW is still THE competitive RTS. It's also THE game people don't leave even after many many years.
Your friends are normal gamers. They just wanna play what's new. That's totally fine, I think. There's not really any reason to stick to one game unless you really, really like it.
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On November 23 2010 07:20 Chef wrote:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but SC:BW is still THE competitive RTS. It's also THE game people don't leave even after many many years.
Your friends are normal gamers. They just wanna play what's new. That's totally fine, I think. There's not really any reason to stick to one game unless you really, really like it.
SC2 is newer than HoN, and waaaaay newer than DotA. :<
Lack of chat channels is a valid complaint, but please do not say hon is for non-competitive newbs. Testie plays/played hon and was one of the best in the world, probably made a decent amount of money.
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On November 23 2010 07:15 Pokebunny wrote:
HoN is extremely competitive and is catered almost entirely to the competitive community of DotA. Do NOT think of it as a casual game for people who can't take the heat. League of Legends, on the other hand...
I'm a high level SC2 player and a sorta decent HoN player and I will say that both games are quite competitive, but the HoN community is absolutely terrible. Brood war is definitely harder than HoN, but idk about sc2 - both sc2 and hon were fairly easy for me to learn off BW, but they take different skills.
I agree.
Starcraft and HoN take different skill sets, one really can't just pick up DotA and become pro. There are tons of micro, positioning, and other miscellaneous tactics which good players can use to destroy bad ones. If I played Boxer in starcraft, he would destroy me, and if I played a pro dota player, he would destroy me too. Both games have very high skill caps, and even though you are only controlling one (or a few) units at a time, it has many tricks that separate the pros from the joes.
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Just take it easy. Most people prefer some level of ease even amid what others may see as grueling challenge. I take it you prefer the ease of SC2 compared to the challenge of BW, just as BW vets may prefer BW to something even more niche and with an even more arcane interface like WC2. On the other hand of the spectrum, believe it or not, some people are terrible at games like WoW.
For me personally, even though I've played BW and iCCup for years, I still find SC2 more relaxing even though I know it's easier in a variety of ways. Mainly because the community is vibrant and creates a lot of content. I'm honestly not a very competitive person; I only followed and played BW for the community.
I feel that DotA type games also provide a closer social experience with RL friends, especially since there's no implicit understanding that the BW/SC2 veteran is miles ahead of them in experience and skill. Some people just don't get good at RTS, and sometimes I'd like to have fun with them too (without constantly having to figure out the best way to phrase that they're bad and how they can improve.)
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The people i know that (casually) like AoS games are generally the kind of people that cant handle the pressure of 1v1 while playing a game. It sounds like you're friends fit in to this group from your description.They don't like knowing that their mistakes were the fault of their loss. I see this all the time in dota, its so easy to blame team mates and bandwagon against a single player for the loss that it makes the whole community look like shit in return.
I think at the highest levels this kind of evens out, as most of the high level dota players are pretty manner.
I'm in no way saying that the games don't take skill, i think they both take some degree of skill, but they are completely different skillsets.
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Low skill games attract the most people to play, because their ego's don't get too dented when they lose.
It's why FPS games have gotten gradually less skilled over time to play - the average pace has slowed down massively to curb the skill advantage of better players.
Hon/dota/lol fill that kind of demographic in the RTS genre.
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I'm not trying to say that HoN isn't competetive, I just merely explained the impression I had gotten from it, and my friends picture of it. As in the top of any competetive there is great difference between the normal gamers and the top gamers. I also agree that the game focuses on different aspects of the game.
I also think that SC2 will be on par with BW in time. The biggest difference is the mechanic of the game, BW is like playing a piano while SC2 is guitar hero, mechanicwise, but when the expansions are released, the maps are way bigger (Shakuras a step in the right direction) and the shit start falling in place I think we're gonna have a pretty damn good game.
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For my I play hon because its the best game for me to play with my real life friends. They are too noobie at sc2 so we tried to play hon competitive. Unfortunately they suck at that too so we just play APEM noobies only games =(
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I thought I was fast for a dota player regularly pushing 80-90APM...I refuse to believe you can keep up 130APM in that game, lol.
In SC2, I'm probably barely 130APM. Back in BW, I pushed 200APM when I was at my best.
Man, I miss BW massively. ):
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While I personally like bw, and sc2 more than hon and dota, you can't really shove them to the side as a custom game, because frankly, they are very competitive games in their own right, missing out on the top spot only to the likes of broodwar and maybe counterstrike
Are your friends playing them at a very high level? Probably not, but that doesn't mean nobody is.
I actually find my sc2 apm is higher after playing hon (my normal sc2 apm is like 110, it goes to 130 after playing hon, where i play at like 150)
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Damn I feel bad for you man =(
I never played DotA and only became aware of what HoN was during sc2 beta down time. I still have it, but I'll never play again because the community for that game is just so horrible. Every player I ever met there was uber bad mannered and really got PISSED at noobies when I entered into "noob only games." The game was allright but not enough to endure the torture of dealing with those freakin idiots.
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Your friends sound like casual gamers who probably aren't good at either DotA or Starcraft. I wouldn't take anything they say about DotA being easier as the reason they play it seriously. It's probably that it's a team game; one in which they aren't pressured to constantly improve. It's similar to casual players who opt to play only team games in SC2.
You should abandon the notions you have about DotA being a simple custom game, though. It isn't a dumbed down RTS. It's a completely different game which shouldn't really be compared to WC3 or Starcraft, and at a high level it's every part as difficult and complex.Their comment about APM is a major hint that they're novice players, and that their skills aren't representative of the game as a whole. (Similar to the way new players fixate on high APM with SC2.)
The problem is most likely their feeling of being cut off from help on battlenet 2.0. Try helping them actually improve in 1v1 by teaching them. Once they feel like they have a place to start, they might be motivated to play on their own.
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It's funny because I feel the exact same way about SC2 being the "safer competitive RTS" so I rarely play it. People just have different opinions, can't force people to like everything.
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I played bw and followed the proscene for like 6 years and have been playing sc2 since beta. I recently started playing League of legends and it's just addictive as hell man. I've been playing hardly any sc2 at all since. Lol is just so fun. Bottom line, who gives a shiet about how difficult the game you play is, just have fun yo.
Only problem with lol is that the community (at lower levels at least) is fucking horrible. Seriously the people who play this game need to calm the fuck down, soo much rage happens.
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I think games like HoN make it less directly obvious that you are losing. You can be sucking, and yet the game still goes for thirty minutes. A Starcraft 2 game is over far quicker if you're sucking. That and the larger variety of situations that are encounterable (number of unique teams constructable from ~60 or ~100 heroes) make HoN a much more appealing game on the surface. In SC2 you've got 3 races. Say what you want about building specific units, because HoN/DotA have items that in a very loose sense do the same thing.
I definitely found myself getting very psyched up when playing SC1, it is a far more intense game.
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you can keep a 100+ apm average in hon, in fact most decent players hover around 120.
it is however depending on your style of play, some professional players keep a 100 apm average, and that homo testie's apm is 90-92. On the flipside some are 200 apm lag spammers.
in a game where the smallest movement one way or the other can easily influence the out come of the lane, it is usually beneficial to always be on the move, and in non predictable patterns. also you need to be able to react on a moments notice, which is easier when you are already in the mindset of moving, and only need to slightly correct your path.
HoN is a high micro high map awareness, TEAM game, there is no macro, so actions are usually smaller corrections, rather than full blown assaults.
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I use to play hon before sc2 to fill the time. I was like one of the OP's friends and started playing dota soon after I got wc3 because to me, it was just more fun.
While having APM in HoN is quite necessary because you have to deny and last hit the creeps properly and even a single millisecond can throw you off and you have to be constantly moving so you aren't just a block on the battlefield and easy to harass.
You and your friend have different perspective of fun in games. Just leave it at that. There's no reason to compare and bash the other game because you play something different.
The skillset for HoN are different at competitive levels with a main emphasis of teamwork and communication because you rely on each other. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
In SC2 it really is the battle of who is better and whoever can make the less mistakes and thinking ahead.
I went through the same thing. I played with a group of friends for like 5 years of my life. They said they were all going to get sc2 and I got them into the beta by begging around for keys. I eventually got them all in and they said it wasn't their cup of tea (metaphorically). When sc2 came out only 2 out of 5 of them got sc2 and they soon left because they were not interested with it. I met new people around my school who had interest in it and it's been great.
tl;dr : Get friends who enjoy your passion for sc2.
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EPT
