Happy 2nd HoNiversary Garena HoN!

You are Invited to Garena 2nd Birthday Bash!

Login during the given period and get a FREE exclusive Garena's 2nd year anniversary symbol!

*Promotional Period: 30th June 2013 1400 hours (GMT+8) to 1800 hours (GMT+8)

26 June 2013 0000 hours (GMT+8) to 1st July 2013 0200 hours (GMT+8)

May coins be overflowing in your vault this Summer!

Bringing in the start of Garena HoN's 2nd Big Birthday Bash,

we're going to start this off with having the 50% coins promotion!

What more can you ask for!

Play and Be Rewarded!

(26 June to 1 July 2013)

You heard that! All you have to do is to log in and play to get these rewards for free!

Play 10 Games Receive 3 Heroes: Swiftblade, Blood Hunter, Pebbles

Play 15 Games Receive 3 Throwback Avatars: Throwback Swiftblade, Throwback Blood Hunter, Throwback Pebbles

Play 20 Games Receive 1 Exclusive Avatar: Slasher Maliken

* Rewards will be inserted from 6 - 7 July 2013 despite Match Reward System downtime.

* Only FOC/Grimscrossing/Normal/Casual games count

* From 26 June 2013 0000 hours (GMT+8) to 1st July 2013 0200 hours (GMT+8)

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It's a Good Game! Triple Match Rewards

(28 June to 1 July 2013)

This weekend we'll be having the 3x matchmaking event! Get your friends and start TMMing to grab those coins while they're on triple mode! Don't miss out also on the 50% bonus gold coins and game rewards!

* BOT match does not count

* From 28 June 2013 0000 hours (GMT+8) to 1st July 2013 0200 hours (GMT+8)

VIP Vault: Limited Ed. Avatars Reopen!

(26 June to 2 July 2013)

Opportunity to be part of the exclusivity clan! Starting tomorrow, we will be having releases of the Limited Edition Avatars! So if you have missed out on the earlier promotions and really want to get something that you couldn't before here's your chance! 7 Avatars will be released in random order throughout this event daily so stay tuned to find out what they are and don't miss out!

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!

The Ultimate Legend Returns: Sun Wu Kong

The King has arrived in Newerth today.

Early Bird Promo: 33% Discount + Bonus Power Level Chat Symbol
Only from 21 - 23 June 2013

When you purchase Sun Wu Kong from 21 - 23 June 2013, not only will he be on a 33% discount off the regular price, you'll also receive an exclusive bonus gift:

Power Level
Chat Symbol!

Strike while the iron is hot!

Sun Wu Kong is undoubtedly the strongest and cheekiest monkey of them all. He's got a stick with your name on it and he's going to swoop right in on his Nimbus Cloud and dish out the pain. Get ready to be schooled unless of course... you're playing him.

"I win. You lose. I'm awesome. You're megabad." - Sun Wu Kong

Garena Honiversary 2013: Regional Lan Party 2013!

It's an honor to celebrate GHoN's 2nd birthday with you! We would like to thank you for being on this journey with us as our HoN family grows bigger and stronger. You have made a significant impact on our lives and for that, we sincerely appreciate your support and friendship.

Something Exciting is Happening Everywhere!
Visit the links to find out more about how you can participate!

 

Singapore
Date: 21st June 2013
Venue: Online
Events: The Ultimate Totem Wars
Prizes: 47,500 Gold Coins + Avatars + Ultimate Avatar Giveaways
Link: http://bit.ly/tutw2013

 

Malaysia
Date: 30th June 2013
Venue: MOL Friendster iCafe (http://bit.ly/molicafe)
Events: Welcome Party, "You Hook Me, I Hook You", SAY CHEESE!, Tournaments, Lucky Draw and more!
Prizes: HoN Merchandise Giveaways, HoN Steel Series Mousepads, HoN Anniversary T-Shirts, Treasure Cards!
Link: http://hon.garena.com/news/all/873

Thailand
Date: 30th June 2013
Venue: Siam Paragon (IMAX Theatre + Infinite Zone)
Events: Tournaments, Watch & Win, Lucky Draw, Birthday Cake, Meet & Greet GMs & Star Players, Thailand Avatar Contest, Best HoN Team Players of the Year!
Prizes: 160,000 THB, Gaming Peripherals, In-Game Avatars
Link: http://www.hon.in.th/news/content/4998

Philippines
Date: 29th June 2013
Venue: Arena Internet Cafe, Vito Cruz, Manila
Events: Tournaments, GM/Mods vs Community, Raffle Draw, Q & A, Hon Henyo, Early Bird Goodie Bag!
Prizes: 25,000 Pesos, Hon T-Shirts, Ballers, In-Game Items
Link to article: http://hon.garena.com/news/all/877

Indonesia
Date: 30th June 2013
Venue: Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, Yogyakarta
Events: Birthday Cake, Battles of Newerth, Battle of The Burgers, Mini Game, Lucky Draw
Prizes: IDR 30,000,000, HoN Merchandise, Gaming Peripherals, In-Game Items
Link to article: http://www.hon.co.id/berita/all/791

More information on online events & promotions will be posted in the coming days!

Stay tuned to find out!

HoNiversary 2013: The Ultimate Totem Wars & Giveaways!

 Happy Birthday to Garena HoN!

The very first event for HoN-iversary 2013 will be held by the Singapore GM Team this Friday.

 

ONLINE EVENT

THE ULTIMATE TOTEM WARS

21 June 201, Friday

Qualifiers from 18:00 GMT+8 onwards
Semi Finals & Live Stream from 21:30 GMT+8 till late

 

PRIZES

25,000 Gold Coins + 5 Deconstructor Tempest Avatars

15,000 Gold Coins + 5 Alien Andromeda Avatars
7,500 Gold Coins + 5 Hope Avatars

  

ULTIMATE GIVEAWAYS

Risen Ra, RXR9, Stardust Aluna, Quintan & Zenifer.

Live stream will start at 21:30 GMT+8.

 

*Brackets & Schedules have been released:

Check the link given below to see if your team is on the list!

If you have missed registration or did not manage to get a spot on the Brackets, you can still join #Waitlist, and there's also the Ultimate Giveaways to look forward to!

   

*Full Details & Important Information

Read http://forum.hon.garena.com/showthread.php?43390

 

The Rift Wars: Week #3

Week 3: Hunter Bushwack or Rift Bubbles?

Every Wednesday brings a new epic battle between the two warring guilds!
This week brings a new match up between Hunter Bushwack VS Rift Bubbles!
With popularity, comes great power!

Every click counts. Place your bets wisely!

*If you own all 5 avatars on the winning side,  you will receive a 6th avatar with special effects.

Last Week's Results: Rift Predator Wins!

A true mercenary never fails his master. If you had put your money on Rift Predator, you've made the right choice! This brings the score to a tie.

Summary: Hunter VS Rift 1-1

It's a tie!

Also new this week, Sun Wu Kong, the Ultimate Monkey King avatar will be released on Friday, 21 June 2013! Stay tuned for more details.