As of yesterday, I am no longer a global moderator for Heroes of Newerth, I was forcefully removed from the team without even getting to post a goodbye. After 3 years or more of volunteering my free time to a game I loved, I eventually became too disinterested and inactive to warrant maintaining the status. As such, I think it's time for a nice big post. I warn you now I'm a terrible writer so I'm probably just gonna toss out a wall of rambling.
The Beginning
When HoN first entered beta, I got in relatively early through a friend. I was never a big dota player but I had played it ocassionally and had heard about LoL being in development (And expected terrible things simply because of the name). I enjoyed the game and ended up participating on the forums, including making a big mega thread at one point filled to the brim with hero information.
Eventually, as I do with most games, I started tinkering with the game files and I created a simple mod that put all the DotA names for items next to the HoN one in-game. It was crude and imperfect, but it got the job done. With that, mods for HoN were born and an incredible and talented community began to thrive, leading to the later creation of the mod manager. Shortly after I made that first mod and released it in the "Interface" section of the forums, it was altered into a modding section with me as the moderator in charge. Around this time, S2 was still a small indie company, with only 20 - 30 people total with nearly half of those being the artist team.
I joined a moderator team along with a number of other really cool people that I'm friends with still to this day. Most of them are listed on the credits page in the 'Moderators' section.
Looking at that list, I wanna quickly go over a couple of them.
The Cool People
Nome was one of the first global mods and a great contributor, eventually getting hired by S2 to work on design. He later brought his girlfriend who we all know as MsPudding on board. Both of them are amazing people that I am proud to call friends. As most of you should know however, they no longer work at S2.
China was a moderator for balance and rightfully so as capable of a player as he was. He was opionated though and as anyone might have learned, including myself, that's not generally too welcome in the HoN community, more on this in a bit.
ElementUser, my god what an amazing fellow. He's made so many improvement to HoN and supplied so many fixes to hero glitches it's absurd. HoN would probably be so much more worse off than it is without him.
Sucker is the worst ever, gggg.
Other people that deserve mentions:
Idejder, who was at first a forum admin and was later hired. He does an insane amount of things for HoN that really don't get recognized.
Maide, another global moderator who got hired and another very cool guy.
Bangerz, a fantastic modder for HoN who was eventually made a global mod, and then like others before him, hired at S2.
SoundWizard, the man with the most fitting name, he's a sound design wizard that S2 was smart to hire, the work he does is fantastic.
A recurring theme with a lot of these people is that they were community contributors who eventually got hired. For a short time, S2 even had a junior staff role, which existed solely to recognize some of the moderating team that weren't actually employees. It gave them status as S2, but they weren't on payroll. I believe Tobias and another member of the tech support team were the first to earn that rank, with me being next after them. Eventually though, the rank was being thrown around too easily, and it was nuked.
A lot of you reading this probably recognize most if not all of those people I mentioned, and rightfully so, they're some of the greatest people working at S2. Well, actually, they're about all the great people working at S2.
That's not to say the other members are bad, but they are not as involved as the above were, because the above were all originally part of the community and stayed as that. I'm not trying to overlook people like Fielding, Brad, Gogo or the art team who are all fantastic people, but they along with my above mentions get horribly overshadowed by the "bad seeds" of S2.
The Problems
You know, there isn't really a number of problems with HoN. I have my rather infamous grudge with Diva and I really dislike his design decisions, but ultimately he was not the only person deciding everything. When Diva took over, there was a distinct change in direction for HoN, not controlled by him or any other designer. This change was shortly after the HoN store was implemented. Something that was created for one reason and one reason alone: Money. There is someone at S2 very obsessed with the acquisition of the stuff and I don't doubt it's any surprise to anyone who that is.
The Addendum
Since I'm under NDA from my fleeting time as Junior S2, I can't speak on certain things I know of internal S2 things and HoN, which is why this is all more of an opinion piece. It's come to light however that Diva might very well be as guilty as Maliken for HoN turning into what it has.
The One Problem
Maliken. This man is the poison that has killed HoN and ruined something that really could have been great. Nothing is changed in HoN without Maliken being okay with it and that's probably the worst thing in the world. It's a wonder HoN isn't worse off than it is right now and that's purely because people were able to talk him out of some really horrible ideas. He's a poor decision maker with a temper and he loves to kick down the doors of his employees who are doing their damnedest to create great things and instead have them do something to make him more money. Unfortunately, S2 wouldn't exist without him, since he's the man funding it all from the beginning, and also now pocketing the profits. You'd probably think it a great thing to be working at S2 but Maliken is probably the only one getting anything decent from HoN's success.
If I had to name anything else wrong with HoN, it would most definitely be HoNcast. Breaky and Phil are poor excuses for casters and their partnership with S2 impedes the rise of anyone else who might try to step into the light. Why should anyone try to became a great caster for HoN when S2 has an official outlet for it. To top things off, HoNcast is terrible, they're poor casters and it shows every single time they go live. If you don't watch competitive Starcraft 2, you should know that all of the big name casters for it are actually very capable players themselves, a couple of which were even professional players during the prime of Starcraft 1. Phil and Breaky are not on that same level when it comes to HoN.
Closing
Over the last many months, I've slowly lost interest in HoN, and it showed in my activity, thus the reason I was removed from the moderating team. HoN is not the game it used to be, it's devolved into a cash grab, and the passion everyone used to have for it seems to be fading. HoN has lost it's flair, LoL is a thrown together mess that doesn't feel like it meshes, and DotA 2 is plagued by nearly decade old mechanics and design choices that do not play well after the improvements HoN/LoL brought to the table. In the end, I feel like my time contributing to this genre is over. I will still probably play all three at various times, but I think all of them are too far gone for me to ever have the passion for them I once had for HoN.
To Fielding, Jason, Ikkyo, Jamestown, Shawn, Mercenary, Slacker, KingKtulu, Gogo, Phlogiston, Jesse, Shippy, Ari, Cracky, Konran, Chavo, Nome, Idejder, Pudding, Maide, Bangerz, SoundWizard, I give you my thanks for providing me with the game that I had a passion for unlike anything else before and for generally being great people. It has been a horrible experience watching such a fantastic product fade into what it has become; a shadow of it's former self and a mere glimmer of what it had the potential to be.
On the plus side though, I'm sure Maliken's got a fleet of ferrari's at this point, and that's what truly matters.
Fuente: http://www.reddit.com/r/HeroesofNewerth/comments/oa4sp/well_i_guess_thats_that/
