A bit odd for me as I played HoN a decent amount before switching to HotS.
HoN was one of the more successful MOBAs compared to other titles that started and shut down within half a year like MxM aka Master x Master.
One comment I found on reddit said 7 months ago:
10-12k concurrent players at peak for the international client. This answer was given by a staff member about a year ago, and it’s the closest estimate we have to todays numbers.
The SEA client has a lot more players but we don’t have concrete numbers anywhere. A super rough estimate is 35-50k concurrent players at peak.
I wonder how much the number of concurrent players declined over the course of 19 months, for them to make the decision to shut down.
What would be a moderate amount of players that can keep a moba running?
If anything we can hope that some of the HoN players will switch to HotS now.
Oh I wish. But realistically, they would join a more solid (less expected to shut down) one, like LoL. Still some probably joins, because saying 0 is also unrealistic. Question is how many. A few’s few?
Well as small as hots is, its still waaay more than 10k players, so wouldn’t change much anyway. And since hon was pretty much a direct ripoff of dota before dota2, I would guess most will just play dota2 (anyone looking for something different probably found hots years ago already).
Is it though? Wouldn’t surprise me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were lower either.
Anyway, my condolences to all HoN players and anyone on this forum who plays it. No doubt it would feel like leaving some part of themselves behind (didn’t know HoN has that long a history, since 2010).
I would say fortunately Blizz doesn’t really shut down servers, but being Activision-Blizz, I’m not certain on that anymore.
Master rank is 1% of the playerbase. 1% of 10k would be 100, meaning GM leaderboard would basically have diamonds in it (nowhere near it, 100th last season was master6,7k) :P. Not to mention with 100 total players, you would never see master-only lobbies, yet those are very common.
Ergo, (at least EU) ranked playerbase is significantly larger than 10k total players. Add ppl that don’t even play ranked and you will easily get an even higher number. If I had to guess, I’d say total EU playerbase is currently somewhere between 0.5-3M monthly players. NA is probably 3-5 times smaller, but still way over 10k.
Well of course they do, but there’s waaay more master0-6k players than master6k+ players (and that’s still that same 1%).
P.S. Just looking at leaderboards, Asia server is officially dead (only 9 grandmasters last season and apparently diamonds can’t get to the leaderboards). So maybe those 50k HON SEA players could help out there (assuming SEA doesn’t play on EU/NA servers) o.O
I guess a big factor there is that there’s a China server too, that’s very much alive (although at least I don’t have access to it).
You’re talking about non-China server, right? I think I might know why (still wondering if I should straight out say it, as I don’t know how Blizz will take it and react, or how other players would).
Didn’t thought about that. That would be awesome.
edit: actually. I think I should elaborate. as in, Asia server might not be dead dead as you might think. no where near as EU, or even US, but still better than ANZ, or if you can count it in, Brazil server.
I was in no way a good HoN player nor did I invest time into it as much as the average customer did. But seeing it closing down soon still makes me sad because despite it all, a good time was spent there. I only hope it will be a very good while before Hots closes its gates.
I agree, the chance that any of them move to another very low population moba is small. The ones that continue to play Mobas will 99% go to Dota2/LoL.
Time investment there is also more valuable than in HotS since the games show no sign of slowing down or dying, their player populations just keep rising on a yearly basis and they keep getting new content.
i wanted to play that game but i had the feeling that it was going to shut down any time soon so i didn’t . glad i didn’t play it , it looked cool though .
For those who care enough, you guys should make accounts and post on the HoN forms to direct some players over here!
If they have a forum…or discord or whatever place HoN players gather.
This news is only shocking to me because I thought HoN was already shut down years ago since I never hear anyone talking about it.
True, but all of us with post counts over 100 are supposed to be paid Blizzard shills and White Knights! Oh wait, I’m not supposed to reveal that information am I?
steam has a ‘forum’ for any game ‘sold’ there, but they usually aren’t used as community hubs, but rather a cesspool of complaints by people that don’t know anywhere else to turn (and tend to be the sort that go about complaining to every outlet they can for about any game they attempt to play.)
There’s also the dev.dota2 but that’s predominately for bug reports, but neither of those outlets are posted on the ‘official’ page for DotA 2, which isn’t that surprising since that game has/had a reputation for disregarding the community anyway – hence no outlet for ‘official’ communication.
The veiled punchline is that ‘forums’ are a ‘dead’ medium so of course a game like HotS will still have one while other games have ‘moved on’ to platforms more palatable for plebeian players .
(only 9 grandmasters last season and apparently diamonds can’t get to the leaderboards). So maybe those 50k HON SEA players could help out there (assuming SEA doesn’t play on EU/NA servers) o.O
