Nome Speaks About Geomancer - HoN contest winner

Richard "Nome" Liu Talks About Serqet (Temporary Name)

No, this is not Geomancer from DotA (Meepo)

Serqet - Upcoming INT HoN hero
(Winner of the Heroes of Newerth Hero Contest - Intelligence)

Nome:
Since there's this huge hullabaloo on the forums over Geomancer (winner of INT contest), I figure I might as well start sharing tidbits of progress on him. I'll eventually post pictures and videos of the hero in progress, but for now, you'll have to deal with some sugary text and a really, really crappy teaser.

* The temporary name I have bestowed upon the Geomancer is "Serqet", which Google spit up for as the name for the Ancient Egyption scorpion god. I'm using the Scorpion Magmus model as temp art while I rig up the hero, so it seemed fitting, as I tend to dole out mythological names to all the heroes I work on. Cerberus, Midas, and Ashtoreth are some of my other heroes sitting in the "waiting to be implemented" pool. Take from that what you will.

* I am the only one working on Geomancer for now. We have Empath, the previously unannounced hero I mentioned in my earlier tweets, and perhaps one or two more before Serqet becomes the primary focus.

* The base design is actually extremely sound and lends to some very fun gameplay. Credit this to Phobis and Chibbi, the original designers of the hero--they knew what they were doing. I think of Geomancer as a very mature design--it's extremely simple, but very effective and unique.

Fielding Speaks on Easy Mode

Fielding Speaks about the Heroes of Newerth State of the Game (EM Notes)

S2Fielding is the Director of Design & Development of S2 Games.

Fielding Speaks:

I want to take a moment to talk about Easy Mode and our thoughts and observations. Firstly - we understand what it is players like about Easy Mode, and that they have a good reason to want to play it. There are some very specific things EM tries to do, such as shortening game length, and providing a more casual less stressful experience. EM players like to have their cake and eat it too - getting a lot more gold and items in an EM match than normal mode. None of these things should be frowned upon - there's nothing wrong with wanting that experience out of HoN.

That said, since the beginning of HoN's launch we've seen EM play percentages drop from about 50% to 28%. Ultimately we feel this has been good for HoN, as EM presents a lot of poor mechanics and balance issues. It has never been fixed up in a way that we could be proud of it - it largely just contains copied mechanics from DotA's EM mode. We don't want to mess with the reason why people choose to play EM, instead we want to fix the rest.

Our current outlook on EM isn't very positive. It uses a lot of arbitrary mechanics to try to achieve an end result, and it does so poorly, creating many problems in its attempts to solve others. It's no secret to any HoN forum-goer that EM players are treated rather poorly. Ultimately, this is an understandable reaction when you consider the bad habits EM's forced mechanics can cause, and the frustration this creates amongst normal mode players when they play with EM players. One of our goals is to fix up EM in such a way that the types of player choices it promotes is consistent with normal mode, all the while offering the same increased game pace, faster progression and leveling, less stressful/more casual game type that EM players prefer.

Some of goals that are attempted to be achieved in EM games actually coincide with some of the issues we see in normal mode (gold distribution and game length). We fully validate the desire to want a more approachable, less stressful, fun, quicker, more action oriented game. EM has some very poor mechanic decisions to try and force this result. With a few modifications we feel we can provide a much more balanced experience while still achieving some of these underlying goals and making a game mode that won't be sacrilege to play by all HoN players. It should be a mode that keeps all the balance of normal mode but just makes for a less stressful environment.

Related: Fielding's Design Update (HoN)

Fielding Speaks About HoN's Design Update

Fielding Speaks about the Heroes of Newerth State of the Game - Design Update

From S2 Fielding:
This is a comprehensive update aimed to fill you guys, our awesome player base, in on the current state of the game as we see it, and possibly clue you in on some of the types of changes you could expect our design team to produce in the near future. This post is somewhat intentionally vague, I'm avoiding giving the specifics until our design team is ready to unveil them, but I do want to open communication with you guys and make you aware of what our design staff are currently focusing on.

Keep in mind this is a design update - not a general development update, so there is no update on Match Making and our various other projects in here.

General Direction of Heroes of Newerth
To start, I want to give you guys a very basic outline of the core goals we want to achieve with HoN's direction.

* Faster game pace, shorter games

We want to maximize your fun-per-minute! This goal originated with the intent of increasing HoN's competitive viability (HoN tournaments take a LONG time to complete), but we also believe that more casuals games will benefit greatly from less time being wasted. Long, epic games will still be possible, we just want to make sure that if a game is long, it's due to intense battles the whole way through from evenly matched teams, not because each team decided to play it safe and turtle/farm for 60 minutes.

(By "faster game pace" we're referring to the pace at which action occurs, not changing how quickly you die or increasing lethality)

* More action oriented play

We want to encourage player vs player engagements over an excess of farming/PvE engagements. You've likely already seen some of the first steps toward this goal with the introduction of Striders and Blood Chalice. Ultimately, farming will always have its place in HoN, however we want to encourage a healthy amount of team fights, ganks, and pushes.

* Deep, strategic options in the gameplay

This is a constant goal that is being worked on every time we balance patch. There's always improvements to make and as the meta game shifts with player decision making, so do our focuses and goals with the game's balance. Ultimately, this goal simply means we want to see multiple different strategies remain viable, not only in terms of the line up of heroes on each team, but the roles those heroes play. Whether you enjoy roaming and ganking, playing a carry, or playing support, all of those roles should be rewarding and fun to play.

* More content!

Heroes! Lots of heroes! Heroes and items and maps and other content will be coming soon, in future patches. We've especially ramped up our hero creation process to produce more balanced, well designed heroes at a faster rate.

Issues On The S2 Games' Radar
This section is intended to make you guys aware of some of the issues our design team is looking into - some of these issues are ones we are addressing in the interest of achieving the above goals. Note that we're constantly working on a LOT of stuff - so just because something isn't listed here, doesn't mean we're not aware of it. These are just some of the more note-worthy items.

* Prohibitive Gold Mechanics

For the most part we're happy with how the gold mechanics work in HoN, however there are a few issues that directly damage the pace and enjoyment of the game, regardless of if you are winning or losing.

For example, in an evenly matched game, if a team fight occurs and 4 people from each team die, more gold is lost in player deaths than is gained in player kills (assuming no players were on a kill streak and therefore worth bonus gold). The net result is that team fights are, quite often, taking more gold out of the game than they introduce. This is the type of thing that does nothing other than slow the game pace down and indirectly discourages team fights and engagements.

Another issue we're observing relates to how gold distribution is handled. There is currently not much of a distinction between a player who is actively engaged in helping get kills, resulting in a lot of assists, and a player who does not aim to help by assisting. In the interest of encouraging more team vs team engagements, this is something we're looking into. There's a big difference between a 1-8-20 Demented Shaman, for example, and a 1-8-5. We want to take steps to make sure that the player who is actively attempting to help out the team and participate in fights is being rewarded above players that play too passively.

* Lack of Caster & Support hero options for progression

Another issue we have relates to how support-oriented heroes currently progress in the game. They naturally should be supporting their team - but often this support comes at high personal sacrifice, and the result is that there are very few options left to support players in terms of how to progress their character and stay relative past the early-mid game. This concern isn't one of balance - it's clear from competitive games that support heroes are both necessary and effective, it's a question of how rewarding the role is and what we can do to keep the skill ceiling high and allow other progression options for support players. As a carry scales in his ability to deal damage to the enemy team, so should a support player scale in their ability to support their team. This issue relates closely to the last point in the prohibitive gold mechanics section above.

We also are very sensitive to the subject of how early-game caster-oriented heroes fit into the game. There is a point in every game in which these heroes start to lose relevance, and the physical DPS heroes (carries) gain relevance. As we increase the pace of the game and induce more team fights, a side effect of increased gold, experience, and level gain will result. This may mean that caster oriented heroes lose relevance even more quickly, perhaps before they can make a meaningful contribution to the outcome of the game. Currently casters usually remain viable in the late game due to disables (or buying items like Sheep Stick if they don't have any built in disables), and while that will likely always be true to a degree, we do want to make sure there's a bit more depth to playing these characters, by providing other options for them. These heroes are very important to the feel, fun, and pace of HoN - they bring a lot of the excitement and we want want to make sure they remain viable and interesting to play.

* Viability of early-game pushing & tower mechanics

A trend we commonly see in the early-mid game is, after winning a team fight or ganking a few heroes, players will retreat to farm rather than push. This can especially be observed in many competitive matches. It's the safe route, due to the risk-reward ratio of continuing a push simply being too risky. We also find that the tower AI is somewhat punishing to push attempts and could behave a little more consistently.

As we push HoN in a direction that encourages more aggression, ganking, and team fights, we want to make sure we don't over-do it. We could easily make ganking worth it by having hero kill gold be a very high value, but that undermines other mechanics in the game and makes the progression very one-dimensional. We prefer to allow for successful ganks and team fights to yield opportunity for the winning team to press the advantage, rather than directly giving them too big of an advantage in terms of gold reward. With that in mind, we're taking a close look at the viability of pushing towers after winning an early game fight or gank.

* Legion vs Hellbourne Map Balance & Map Layout

Yes, we are aware of issues with the map! The issues we plan on addressing with the map extend beyond Kongor's placement - that's probably the most identifiable issue with the map that players notice, but there are a number of inconsistencies that lead to some rather specific advantages/disadvantages. Our changes are focused on not only game balance between Legion & Hellbourne, but also ways to make the map more enjoyable and more rewarding for skilled and coordinated teams to use it. We'll reveal more on this as we get closer to releasing our changes.

Final Notes from Fielding:
The bottom line with any changes we make, our mission statement so-to-speak, is that we always aim to reward and encourage player skill and decision making. The above observations and declared direction for HoN come as the result of observing you guys, the community, and taking what you want out of HoN and working our vision into it. We want to take the best, most fun parts of HoN and promote that type of play.

Even though we're pushing hard in a certain direction for the game, we do want a variety of strategies to remain viable. HoN's gameplay should be deep and rich, full of variety and possibility, such that the game never grows stale. We aim to constantly improve HoN - nothing is ever perfect - so as always, we'll continue to monitor the issues, deliver our changes, and observe what you guys like and don't like and keep improving the game the way you guys want it.

Read about: Fielding's Notes on Heroes of Newerth EM.

Fielding Speaks About HoN MatchMaking

Lead developer of Heroes of Newerth, Fielding Speaks:

Hey guys,

After a long wait, matchmaking is here. We've got tons of players playing tons of matchmaking games and we're thrilled to finally get it out to you guys.

That said, please understand that we are NOT done developing our matchmaking. We're still optimizing it, getting it to replace dropped players more efficiently, and making tweaks to make sure it matches players accurately. We reached a point in development where we needed a much larger userbase to efficiently develop our matchmaking further, and so here it is It'll take a few weeks for everyone's solo matchmaking rating to become accurate, so do expect that you won't be getting matched with players of your skill level right away.

We also have plans on the horizon for team match making and the like - the first step was just getting solo matchmaking in. We don't have any sort of ETA on these extra features yet, just know that they are very important to us and we will absolutely be adding them eventually. Most of the work is actually already done - team matchmaking is actually easier for us to implement, it's the tool surround team match making (team finder tools and the like) that'll take some time.

We hope you guys enjoy the match making, and we appreciate any feedback or general impressions you may have as we continue to optimize and improve it. Please note that many of these improvements will be done server-side - meaning you won't even need to download a patch.

Help Test HoN Match Making and Other Features

Heroes of Newerth Closed Beta within a Closed Beta

S2 Fielding speaks regarding test match making & other upcoming features.

Fielding:
We've got a pretty big patch in the works, but before we can release it to the general beta populace, we need to run it through the pre-beta test client first to clear up any obvious issues that we can't quite test ourselves.

To those of you unfamiliar with the pre-beta test client, it's a special client that updates and installs separately from the regular beta client. When we have content that we know is going to require some more thorough testing, we put it through the test client to get the obvious bugs/issues out of the way (in addition to feedback on experimental balance changes). Some people like to ask "what's the point of the main beta test, then?" The second client really doesn't diminish the value or meaning of the primary beta test. Rather than put out a patch/update to the beta client that we know will have some glaring issues, we run it through this secondary process first. This actually helps the main beta test by not slowing it down with potentially game-breaking issues (our test patches on the pre-beta client receive minimal testing and often we'll patch multiple days in a row as we work on it, a process which would be quite troublesome if attempted on the main beta client).


To participate in the pre-beta test client games, you'll need to participate in our IRC channel. This is open to anyone who wants to join. Our IRC information is:
server: irc.s2games.com
ports: 6667
channel: #hondev

Or to join IRC through your browser, click here.
Once you're in, you can use /nick to change your name.

We'll be posting the link to the pre-beta test client in the topic of that channel, as well as information as to where to contribute feedback and discuss the patches.

The first test is going to take place 10/20/2009 at 4pm PDT / 7pm EDT

Now, everyone's favorite Red Jedi (S2Idejder) will be posting what kind of things you can expect to see down the road, some of which will be featured tomorrow on the test client. The main thing we need help testing tomorrow is the beginnings of our automated match making - it could completely fail and break, or perform marvelously. Find out by joining us on IRC!

Heroes of Newerth Test Client

Heroes of Newerth Test Client

[S2]Fielding Speaks:
Very shortly we are going to begin maintaining a second test client for Heroes of Newerth. This second test client will allow you guys to help us test changes before they're officially ready to go live. This second client is optional, and can be installed in parallel to your current beta client.

We'll have scheduled testing on this client and it will be updated occasionally with our latest changes, but they will be largely untested. Content in this client will be in a raw, unpolished state. Some art and icons may be missing, tool tips not done, etc. The idea of the client is to get some more stability testing so you guys can help us identify issues before the patch goes live.

Additionally, it'll be an opportunity for you, the testers, to give us preemptive feedback on what you think of certain gameplay and balance changes, and allow us an opportunity to make tweaks based on that feedback before the changes go live to the general beta testing public. Note that the focus of our Design team is shifting toward making necessary HoN-specific changes (that will differentiate from DotA), and the more testing we get with these changes, the better.

Participation is going to be limited mainly to testers who participate in our IRC channel. This is open to anyone who wants to join.

Our IRC information is:
server: irc.s2games.com
ports: 6667
channel: #hondev

S2 response to concerns about the camera

S2 response to concerns about the camera

Citizens of Newerth!

We realize that the recent restrictions on camera controls have a number of players upset, and feel it's only fair that we give you guys an explanation as to why things are the way they are. We know this is a controversial change, especially among the non-DotA players, and there are folks here who aren't happy about it. Everyone likes to be able to see more and feel in control - we can certainly understand the desire to have more control over your camera height. It is certainly frustrating to die as a result of not being able to see what was going on (there are other things that may be reducing your ability to tell what's going on, I'll touch on that at the end of this post).

I'm hoping to shed some light here on why we made this decision, and to convince you guys that we're making this decision for the good of the game in the long run. It would certainly be very easy for us to lift camera restrictions right now and avoid a lot of heat, but we do not feel this is the right thing to do.

So, why did we choose to limit the camera? Well, there is no simple answer to that, but I'll try to cover the primary reasons. First and foremost - we want to keep the game fair. We have a duty to the community to deliver a consistent experience and make sure everyone is on an even playing field. If a player who is running a superior PC is able to handle zooming out at greater distances than another player, or has an ultra wide screen monitor and can see more with it, that is unfair. The best way to keep it fair is to ensure everyone operates within the same camera restrictions and has to learn to control their camera in a similar environment.

Additionally, we wanted to emulate DotA faithfully, in a manner that is familiar and comfortable to a DotA player. Just like DotA, the decision to limit camera height in HoN is an intentional design choice. Make no mistake about it - any veteran warcraft III map maker will tell you they can absolutely change the camera's height, yet the decision not to has been made in DotA development. Screen space is an important resource that players have to learn to manage and control. It's one additional element that can separate a veteran from a new player.

Removing this element will cause gameplay deviations which are not immediately noticable to players. For example, more screen space in your immediate area means less reliance on the minimap. People who would previously be susceptible to a gank from not paying attention to the mniimap may find they are able to respond in time to survive now. Another such example is a hero who tries to sneak up from behind in team fights would have less success if those in the team fight were not fully distracted by the fight itself - it'd be easier to see that hero sneaking up. These are pretty specific examples, but they do represent a change from DotA gameplay that we are not aiming to make. Awareness of your surroundings, camera control, and monitoring the minimap are skills we do not want to trivialize.


In regards to being able to tell what's going on in fights - zooming out your camera is a bit of a bandaid fix to this. The real fix is for us to tone down over-the-top effects and tweak the scale of various units that may be too big. If you encounter issues in game where you felt the screen became unreadable, feel free to make a thread and let us know about it. We're very open to this type of feedback and will aim to improve battlefield readability.

It's very easy to make the simple observation that you find the game more enjoyable and easier to play with a zoomed out camera. On a basic level, you're right, and this begs the question: if it's more enjoyable, why not implement it? To a lesser extent, this is comparable to saying it's more enjoyable to play with more gold or more health, why not add those? Taking it a step further, map hackers may find the game more enjoyable and less frustrating for similar reasons, yet the detrimental effects this has on gameplay are much more obvious. This is an extreme comparison, naturally - zooming out your camera is not as impactful as map hacking, yet on a smaller scale the comparison is valid. The main thing to keep in mind here is that the long term negative effects of allowing more advanced camera controls would not be immediately noticable until it's too late.

We can appreciate that this is not a popular change. To people who are not used to the default camera height, we patiently ask you to give it a chance. Try to get used to it, and work around it. DotA's vast popularity spanning millions of players is proof enough that the formula works and that, despite the camera restrictions, it's an awesome game to play. We feel confident you'll come to the same conclusions about HoN if you give yourself the chance to get used to the current camera restrictions.