A Message From Pandaroohoo

Hail friends, I’m Pandaroohoo, a gameplay designer here at S2 Games.

 I’m going to shed some light on the focus of this patch to give you an idea of our design principles and the direction our game is headed in. The focus of this patch is the never-ending goal of hero diversity from all aspects that encompass a hero, including its strengths, weaknesses, roles, play styles, niches and even item choices.

 There are a large number of changes aimed at this direction. The first is against unskilled burst damage and also a reconsideration of the counter-play and frustration that some of our popular heroes may be causing. We also have some substantial buffs targeted at emphasizing the unique concept and mechanics of some heroes. We want to be sure that when you’re picking a hero, there is a defining reason for that pick, not just instant kill power.

 Parasite is an example of lowering burst. Parasite has some unique mechanics: jumping inside creeps, reducing enemy damage and stealing buffs. All of these mechanics become second rate once Parasite obtains a Codex. Why worry about utility when you can always kill whoever you want by just clicking on them. By toning down Parasite’s damage specifically with Codex, we can begin looking into putting more emphasis on his other mechanics, keeping him still as a burst hero, but reinforcing the reasons you pick him up over others.

 Night Hound is our example of alleviating frustration. We made a substantial change to his pounce skill, no longer always appearing behind the target. This puts a large emphasis on the decision for the enemy to play against Night Hound, allowing them to effectively turn and fight avoiding backstab entirely. By adding a counter play aspect, it gives us avenues to even increase the effectiveness of backstab or pounce later on but still reserving the concept and counter play.

 An old icon and a good footprint in the game, Maliken has some interesting mechanics about him that have fallen behind in strength. With our reinforced focus towards his passive Hellbourne Zeal, Maliken is much stronger when he is low on hit points, putting more emphasis on the punishment for enemies not finishing him off while allowing the Maliken to experience more power unique to his concept. I could go on for days about the values and reasoning for our changes – in the end, this patch is given to you guys with the hopes of the never-ending improvement and longevity of our game. We will be monitoring these changes very closely and look forward to any feedback you may have.

Thanks friends!

Circe the Deceiver: Designer Insight

Circe, the Deceiver: Dev Blog

Hey everyone, Buro here! Earlier this week we released Malloc's blog post on how the concept of Circe the Deceiver was conceived, I would like to go into a bit more depth and detail about some of the design iterations that she went through prior to becoming the hero she is today.

Before Circe was put into SBT for testing, she went through quite a bit of iteration. With a concept as interesting as deceiving the enemy, we had to make many adjustments in achieving something that was fun to play, without adding a large amount of frustration to play against. This proved to be quite the challenge. As an example, one iteration of her ultimate was to change the appearance of all allied heroes to that of the deceiver for a duration so the enemy would not know who was who. This was a neat ability in concept, but turned out to be terribly frustrating for the opposing team -- removing interesting decisions for the enemy team while not providing any tangible satisfaction for the user.

Once Circe made it to SBT for testing, it was apparent her first and third abilities did not mesh well with the rest of the hero and needed to be looked at again. The original first ability was a single target stun that reduced the primary stat of the target hero. The stat reduction, while effective, didn't feel impactful at all in use and limited the options of whom you could effectively target. Since we wanted something that needed to feel good to the player to use we decided against this initial design.

After reworking the first ability, we turned our attention to the other outlier, Circe’s E. The third ability became something that we really enjoyed and will likely put on a future hero, but just didn't work with Circe's skill-set and overall feel. Here was the initial concept:

Shrouding Mist

-Target area to spawn a cloud of mist for a duration. Within the mist, allies are granted stealth with a fade time and all terrain walking.

After trying a few iterations of this concept, it turned out to not have enough synergy or effectiveness with Deceiver’s other abilities and was changed out for the ability - Deceive. This ability was suggested many times throughout the design of Circe and really fits well into the theme of the hero.

Circe's second and ultimate abilities have been essential in solidifying her unique role in HoN. Her (W), Doppelganger, allows her to deceive the enemy with illusions of other heroes and her (R), Twisted Visage creates those exciting and memorable moments that make Circe a truly fun hero.

Immediately when Circe hit SBT, there was a lot of great feedback about her ultimate and concerns regarding its balance, but above all, it was fun. We've since added the channel time requirement to the ability, a break range, as well as the damage reduction. Much feedback focused on Circe copying items, but in the end, we wanted to keep the fun aspects of the hero and went the route of reducing overall damage instead of removing that functionality. Even after doing all of that we will be keeping a close eye on the balance of this ability when it goes live.

I hope you enjoyed this little insight into the development process of Circe, the Deceiver. Look for her to deceive Newerth on September 25th!

Patch 3.2.3: The Staff (of the Master) is back!

Patch 3.2.3 is here and brings some new Staff of the Master effects as well as item and hero balance changes!

For this patch, we took a look at some of the late game and underused items in HoN. With the recent shift toward faster paced gameplay, these items needed to be re-adjusted to become more viable. We also added some new Ultimates to the list of abilities boosted by Staff of the Master. We will be continuing to look at these types of changes for future patches.

You will also notice a few significant hero changes that are in line with our direction previously stated in the blog post for the last patch: to tone down burst damage in the game in order to  increase the skill, interaction, and viability of other strategies within HoN without reducing the fast paced, action-packed gameplay that we enjoy so much.

See the patch notes for details on all of the changes, as well as be on the lookout for Circe the Deceiver in our next patch on 9/25/2013!

-Buro

Heroes of Newerth might be looking to seeing something much more exciting happening soon! Read on to find out more on what we can expect!

Hello! My name is Robert "Kros" Cherry, and I'm the Technical Producer for Heroes of Newerth. I've been playing HoN for a long time now, and one of the things I do with any game that I play for any serious length of time is theorycraft. I'd like to share some of that theorycrafting with you guys today.

Imagine a mode that starts off with each player picking three heroes. You decide to pick your favorite heroes: Solstice first, then Predator, and of course Monarch.
You enter the game, and it’s not quite the HoN you'd expect; your abilities have been randomly generated from the 30 heroes chosen by all of the players!

So, with your crazy abilities in tow, you head off to your lane. There you are, carefully last-hitting, when suddenly Martyr throws an Amun-Ra stun at you. Good thing your Bubbles lane partner has Accursed's Shield! Unfortunately, Legionnaire pops out of the jungle as Minotaur (that he's stricken with Parasite's Infest) and catches you before you can get back. Luckily, you respawn very quickly, and haven't lost any gold. You also notice you have a whole new set of abilities!

This mode is chaotic, this mode is action packed, and it’s incredibly fun. I know this because we've been play testing it internally for a while now.

We would love to hear what you guys might think about a mode like this, so please leave some comments on the forums here: http://forum.hon.garena.com/showthread.php?43807-Blog-Post-Discussion-Imagine-a-mode...

Persistent Matchmaking Groups

I'm DJ Hirko ([S2]Deejay), the lead programmer of Heroes of Newerth. I'm writing a post today to give you a look inside the nitty-gritty technical aspects of working on Heroes of Newerth.

One feature we've planned to add to HoN, and actually did have for a few hours, is persistent matchmaking groups. This would mean that after playing a matchmaking game with a group, you would still be in that group and wouldn't need to re-invite everyone next game. It's a very nice "quality of living" improvement for our loyal players.

The original matchmaking code was written to get good match-ups in a timely manner. It worked pretty well, but had scalability problems. These scalability problems laid dormant until the first attempt we made to add persistent matchmaking groups. Our stats showed the number of groups quadrupled, leading to very poor performance on the chat server. This was quickly pulled and has sat on the shelf ever since.

Now here's where it can get pretty technical. We've made huge changes on the chat server to improve its performance. Many O(N^2) algorithms were reduced to O(N) or even O(1) and we now use a separate process on the chat server to matchmake. After these changes, the chat server's peak frametime was lowered from 13000ms to 1200ms. This is a great improvement, but it's still higher than we're aiming for. In order to add support for persistent groups again, we need to further optimize the chat server, and that's where I/O completion ports come in.

Our profiling data shows that 41% of frametime (i.e. peaking at 480ms) on the chat server comes from polling sockets to see if there's data waiting, and if there is, receiving it. This time does not include processing the data - just polling and copying! Polling an individual socket is fast, but it's an O(N) problem - it grows linearly with the number of sockets (including clients and servers). The best solution to this problem that we've found is a Windows feature called I/O completion ports.

Windows supports I/O completion ports for a variety of asynchronous I/O functions - the pertinent one here being reading socket data. I/O completion ports are an OS level messaging system. When you call an asynchronous function that's hooked up with an I/O completion port, a message will be queued up when the function call is finished. Instead of processing the socket immediately, we instead associate the socket with a shared I/O completion port, call an asynchronous read, and then process the messages as they're created. This reduces the O(N) problem of polling socket data to an O(1) problem, since we no longer need to loop over all sockets - we just process the messages as they're posted to the single I/O completion port. This reduces our peak frametime from 1200ms to 760ms, leaving plenty of space for us to add a new feature like persistent matchmaking groups.

These changes will be going out soon and from there, you can expect to see persistent matchmaking groups being added in the near future.

I hope this was informative and thanks for reading!

Welcome to the Heroes of Newerth Blog

You've probably noticed a change around here.

At S2 Games & Garena, we've undergone a company-wide shift to become more transparent, to listen harder, and to produce more content and changes that you, our players, want to see.

In an effort to prove our dedication to transparency, we've established this handy little blog. Here, you can read posts from Designers (both balance and hero), the Content team, our Community Manager, and even from the CEO himself. We want you to be informed about the changes happening around HoN, and to also feel our passion for these changes first-hand.

In the top right corner, you'll notice a filter function. This will allow you to filter posts by topic, so you can always stay up-to-date on news you're interested in.

We believe that giving back to the community is the best way to provide service to our players. As we continue to improve, we hope you will check back here for updates, insight, and in-depth reasoning behind the decisions we're making.