With a new year comes new opportunities, ideas and features for Heroes of Newerth. We would like to talk to you, our dedicated community, about some things that you can expect to see in the upcoming year. We hope that this news will have you as excited as ever to play HoN in 2018!
First off, this is coming from the Design Team. Other features will be coming to HoN in various forms, but those are not for us to talk about here, so we will keep this strictly in the realm of design related content.
We very much believe in being as transparent as possible with our community. We do make our fair share of mistakes, but we learn from them and fix them as soon as possible.
So without further ado, let's get started:
2017 and 4.0
Everyone should know, first and foremost, that we have two major clients: the South East Asia (SEA) client and the International Client (NAEU). SEA very much prefers a more casual, but still serious, focus in their games, meaning they want to be hyper competitive, but they also don't want games to be mega frustrating (e.g. losing gold on death and being severely underfarmed).
At the same time, we have the International Client, where overcoming frustrations and difficulties in the game is seen as a badge of honor. These are two very stark and different playerbases and present challenges.
In 2017, HoN was feeling increasingly stagnant. Although, statistically, HoN was the most balanced it had ever been prior to 4.0, this statistical balance lead to a stale meta and stagnant strategies.
We believed for many years that we have a realm of acceptable win rates and frustration levels; we had a line of what represented perfect balance, and we knew that heroes should slowly but surely gravitate closer to that line. Some would be above that line, some would be below it, but all should be within a realm of acceptability.
However, this rigid balance plan was hurting HoN. It made the game feel stagnant, and like there was nothing left to learn for the players. The consensus was that we were not shaking things up and our hero power level was too low, not simply in numbers, but also in design.
So we created a new power level for where we felt our heroes should be. We wanted every hero to feel a little overpowered (OP). The idea being that if every hero is a bit OP, then no hero is actually OP, but they all still feel strong individually.
The 4.0 patch was going to usher in the first wave of heroes reaching this new power level, with the intention that every 2 months we would push more heroes up to that level. We knew balance would be rough, but after enough time had passed all the heroes would be at this new power level and we would rebalance the game from this position. This was done with good intentions, but in the end it did not meet our expectations.
For balance, we decided we couldn't just do this in bits and pieces, so we began to pull back from that power level and slowly nerf the heroes we pushed up, while creating content where the heroes would gradually move up to this power level over time.
At this point in time the design team decided to take a new direction. Since the SEA player base mainly played casual mode and the INT player base mainly played normal mode, we would make these two modes starkly different from each other so that both sides could get a version of HoN they like.
Our goal is to bring HoN to a relatively balanced state while we prepare our new Normal Mode Release for the INT client.
Before we go into a lot of detail on this, we wanted to bring up another quick topic. We have noticed a lot of players asking the reasoning for reworks and why we aren't touching other heroes. All heroes are constantly being worked on, but sometimes it's a lot harder to fix certain heroes like Ichor or Deadlift, so those reworks take longer to get right. We also determine reworks on a lot of different variables and analysis, but that is not what this post is about. This is for everyone to get excited about HoN in 2018!
2018 and the Future
We have many goals as we move into the future of HoN, but the main goal is to continue to make HoN something that you, the players, will have fun with and enjoy. This goal is to go back to our roots, while simultaneously innovating for the future.
So design-wise, what do we want to do?
We still believe that the power level of the game needs to be increased. However, we learned that we can not do this in pieces
We know that the International Client has been wanting a more hardcore experience like the days of old, so Normal Mode will be making some adjustments to a more hardcore experience.
Something cool for players who reach max hero level in a match
We want to return to our roots on some hero designs and game play mechanics, and support a more hardcore, punishing experience like it was in 2011
We want to take with us the huge successes that helped make the game better and grow
We want to create new features and provide a refreshing experience for how people play the game
We want to add map changes that can provide more juke spots, more balance, and more strategy
We want a hero pool that is based on well designed heroes that each have something amazingly strong, but also have an equally strong counter
We want to remove tedium and frustration where it adds no value
We want to involve the community more in what you like and what you want out of HoN
We want to implement a new testing environment that includes the entire community