Me n ETEFT has a sick ass game today. Pretty much had a shitty line up: dev, flint (ETEFT), scout (me haha), valk, and TB against Pesti, behe, magmus, tort, and voodoo.

We were laning together for some odd reason, and pretty much got jacked up by tort and behe. At one point i was 0-4-1, adn had a terrible farm. I managed to ward all the spots coming into our jungle as our TB and the rest of our team held it together, until i had my runed axe, at which point our team started coming back. We wound up winning with me being 11-4-11 and ETEFT being 14-5 IIRC. Basically we won because our TB and the rest of our team were able to keep it together early. By the end though, with me 3 shotting voodoo, and ETEFT wrecking with illusions, it was gg for all their squishies.

Also, scout and flint ulti combo works extremely well for finishing off running heroes at half HP.

"get at me"

I lol'd

You did it wrong, BEAST.

It turns out map making in HoN will be like SC2, except with even less freedom.
To play them online, they have to go through the DREAM process (in theory sounds great) and get approved to be an "official" S2 map. Otherwise, you can only play them by yourself.
The reason is because HoN games are hosted on their own servers, not the player's.
If they allowed players to host/create their own servers, it would leak the server code, allowing for privacy.
And finally, S2 wants to secure all intellectual property in maps, to prevent something like DotA in WC3.

Sounds reasonable to me.

S2's plans are usually very well thought out and usually work out well. I dont think it will be an exact copy of SC2 in the "no freedom" department.

And hey, at least they assure that the maps will be quality, and not like the 5000 "simpsons masser" games that were in sc.

Source?

I doubt S2 could make mapping worse than Blizzard.
S2 wouldn't censor normal words for shit reasons.
I HIGHLY doubt we need our map to be "official" to play it with others. Hell, even Blizzard lets us have this freedom.

In any case, I won't believe a word of yours until I see an authortative source.

It is true. It was in one of the interviews they had about 2.0.

Seriously. it makes sense. S2 is a small company. They can't afford a shitton of servers to host all of the custom maps, and they cant have their business turn into WC3, where almost a third of the copies were cracked and played in a LAN setting where they wouldnt make any money.

There was nothing about censorship though. It's more like, oh, the community likes it. We'll make it "official" and allow it to be hosted.

From a SC1/SC2/WC3 perspective, this looks very bleak and greedy. But it is actually pretty reasonable, as long as DREAM is as active.

I still want to read it myself regardless of its truth.

Anyways, at least the limitations seem reasonable, compared to Blizzard (then compared to Google...).

The intellectual property thing is rather irrelevant to my concerns.

You bring up a good point about the quality > quanitity issue.

I think it would be a wise idea to make people pay for more server space reserved for their own maps. This could offset the cost of running the servers and provide a profit too. Say, a dollar per 2MB or something?
Although, give people at least one free map slot with a bit of space. :x

Bah, whatever. I'm more used to making single-player maps anyway!

Local hosting. Seriously, this whole WE GOTTA HOST IT ON OUR SERVER business killed custom content. People need to drop it. Like, now.

Otherwise just typical bs that will suffocate any hopes of making a name for themselves as supporters of custom content. gj gies

Apparently you missed the part where if they allow local hosting then they lose out on a shitton of money from players who will only play LAN, i.e. what happened to blizzard with all the SEA dota players.

I think ShredderIV actually brings up a valid point, considering that S2 can probably be considered pretty indie, and it probably needs every cent it can squeeze out of people.

Versus a huge corporation like Blizzard that has WoW and SC2... THEN the argument for pro-local hosting is a lot more valid.

HoN has LAN? News to me dawg. I don't play the game but I presumed that it was online only.

That doesn't change the point, though. Having LAN is not an excuse for suffocating the capacity of your community to express their abilities in creating content, and furthermore forcing everything to be hosted on your service obligates you to censorship and bandwidth you otherwise would never have to care about.

HoN doesn't have LAN.

If they allow you to create server games on your own that friends can join LAN could be cracked because they would have to release the server binaries in order to do so.


And all that revenue they would also never have to care about, too. This is actually a pretty well thought out decision if they keep an intelligent and responsive team together to authorize maps.

Not necessarily. You could easily have different server code for LAN games than for server games, same as SC1 did.

I'm taking his word for it, since it's kind of his job:

Wha?

The point is this: to let players host, they have to put the code in the game client that allows that computer to act as a server. Players crack the code, and can now set up the server in a lan environment by bypassing login code.

Now, anyone who just wants to play hon in a lan setting can for free.

They already said they aren't supporting lan because of the amount of people that would do this. Also, remember, S2 is a VERY small company,and cant really afford to lose any revenue. It is a completely sound business decision.

*shrug*

Business kills creativity. All that I can say, really.

There are modified clients that have LAN, but none of it is supported by S2 and most of them are such hard rewrites, that they are unstable. However... There have been dozens of private servers that came and went. Apparently, hosting a private HoN server isn't hard, considering there have been literally dozens.

But yeah, the 'best' LAN version I saw, was such a hard rewrite, that the UI looked like shit. I don't know what the fuck they did, but it looked horrible.