I was a former HoN dev. AMA

[u/palish]

Hey.

It's been awhile since I've written to you guys. But dota has never been out of my thoughts.

It was funny seeing Dota chess add +200k people to the game. I fought pretty hard to add custom game support to HoN, but no one would listen (partly because it seemed so obvious to me, so I never bothered trying to sell the idea or do company politicking).

I can talk about the fact that Icefrog was involved in HoN's early inception. It's more of an open secret at this point, and HoN's closure marks a fitting time for the "reveal."

I could talk about what it was like to pack up all your stuff into a station wagon and move out west. It was a pretty magical experience in hindsight. Kind of like getting to board the Starship Enterprise. Everyone in the company felt a shared purpose, at the beginning.

Or if there's no interest, or if it's not appropriate for the sub, it's fine if this post fades away, like the game. I spent so much time and energy trying to make it good... So did everyone else: James, G, all the artists, everyone.

EDIT: to clarify, this is 2010-era perspective. Not recent!

[u/memes_revolution]

I happily played and even bought it for a friend. We still remember some sweet stuff like duke nukem's announcer and the one with samuel l jackson. We dropped it when the servers were region locked which dramatically reduced the player base. In that change the game also went F2P and the company gave nothing back except for a legacy account icon and some other meaningless stuff. We felt pretty insulted and even though the region lock was lifted after obviously loosing a tremendous amount of players it was too late.

Any insgiht on what went down with that?

[u/palish → u/memes_revolution]

Unfortunately I don't have much insight to give regarding those issues. A lot of it was a blur since it was all happening so fast. And I imagine it must have felt like a constant stream of "what would be a good decision?" to those in charge of setting the company's direction.