Do a bit of research, DotA has literally millions of active players- I believe 11 million was the download count for the last version of the map. I assure you that at any given point in time there are more people playing DotA just on GArena just on a single server than there are on HoN and LoL combined.
Not to keep this going, but I remember reading that LoL has around 15 million subscribers. Granted those include multiple accounts and whatnot, but that's still a high number. I haven't found any concrete number regarding total number of DotA players worldwide, but I have found a few sites with estimates around 10 million. I think its hard to say which one has a larger community unless you have actual proof that it is one or the other.
The issue is that LoL doesn't have subscribers, it has accounts. And DotA doesn't really have players, it has computers with the map, many of which have been shared to over flash drives or an intranet.
It also follows with about 30 people hate bashing League and saying its the same 100,000 people with 200 accounts each, but 12 year olds will be 12 year olds. People dont argue when WoW says its got 12m subscribers, but when League, being a free to play game, shares their information, its bashed instantly. Im sure they've figured in factors such as how many level 1 accounts there are with 0 wins, or smurf accounts, for example and made their stat appropriate.
It's not a matter of bashing. Subscribers are actively paying for the game, that's pretty simple to track. Accounts? I think I have 2 different LoL accounts and I've played for maybe 10 hours in the past year: that stat is meaningless.
- Every day, roughly 1.4 million players log into LoL.
- Players spend about 3.7 million hours total every day in-game.
- Per month, over 4 million players duke it out online.
- At its busiest, LoL has reaced over 500,000 concurrent players, across North America and Europe.
Those stats are useful. But then you consider that HoN at its busiest was hitting around 80,000 and has routinely hit 50,000 since moving to free to play, and that even right now when it's like 3-8 AM in Europe and China there are 175,000 people playing DotA JUST on GArena, not counting Cybercafes, Battle.net, LAN's, other private servers, etc.
If we could see how many players are playing at an average time (I think there's a way to do it just from the first two stats I quoted... but my brain hurts [maybe 216k?]), that would be comparable to other games, because that is the most frequently seen stat.
In any case, the discussion on player numbers is meaingless: here's what I initially said that was disagreed with: "There weren't any good US [DotA] teams to begin with, and neither LoL nor HoN are more competitive than DotA." Playerbase has very little to do with competition: LoL doesn't have ingame voice, it doesn't have replays, and it hasn't really encouraged competitive gameplay until this most recent $5 million blitz. It's also pay for power which is completely antithetical to competitive play. HoN is no where near as competitive because there still isn't a half-decent way for teams to compete against other teams, 2+ years after the game has been public, its metagame is still dull as shit, and it's regarded by most top DotA players as a step down strategically, probably because metagame trends from DotA hit HoN 3-4 months later.
Also: my computer flat out crashed while typing this. Firefox reopened both it and my other Firefox windows, tabs and text intact. Wow. =o
None.