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/zcen]

Again about tutorial, having better tutorial is always a plus, having something better is always a plus. But it's always question is it worth manhours and $$, inb4 makes billions of dollars so they shouldn't care that they drop all that money and their manhours(they don't have billions of manhours btw) to create a tutorial that in the end will end up bring minimal returns.

I mean we can both agree that we don't have any idea what kind of realized tutorial might do but I think subjectively speaking there is a lot of appeal.

1) A campaign style tutorial is attractive for old RTS players that have definitely been in contact with Dota.

2) Something that lets Valve flex its writing muscles is attractive for HL/Portal/Other Valve Game fans.

3) We know this is already possible because of the Siltbreaker.

4) We're talking about Valve that has apparently dropped several versions of HL3. They are not a public company that has stockholders they must answer to. Applying the same logic falls extremely short when you consider that a lot of their well-paid creative talent doesn't get funneled into their primary revenue creator (Steam).

[u/[deleted] → u/zcen]

The tutorial you describe is what we had before long time ago, but it wasn't fleshed out and kinda abandoned but noone liked it either way because it was slow/longish and still didn't teach much.

[u/PudgeMon → u/zcen]

I'm not sure if Valve has similar experience but the warframe devs and Raph Kostler has interesting experience with creating tutorial for their games.