For those of you who happened to miss out on the Heroes of Newerth Beta Key Giveaway, a trailer has been released which shows what you can expect. The trailer shows some of the things that HoN has over DoTA with the K2 engine. At the end you can also make out some of the replay interface which isn't yet available to testers.

You can view the trailer here.

Recently S2Games added the ability for beta testers to pre purchase Heroes of Newerth. Here is a statement from the man in charge.

We opened up pre purchasing in an attempt to let us continue to work on the game under this closed beta scenario where we allow in as many players as we are ready to have (no open sign up). Due to the extreme popularity of the game, our operational costs are very significant. We can not continue to pay for the service that is Heroes of Newerth in closed beta with this many players without income.
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Why Pre Purchase? I gave you a small prelude to that in the paragraph above. Heroes of Newerth cost a lot to operate. While this is built into the budget of (what we consider to be VERY reasonable) price of $30 USD and operating the service after our initial release date, we need assistance in the interim.

There are usually at least 15,000 people on at any given time, not to bad for a game that hasn't even been officially announced yet. Still no Aussie servers, although I play on US servers which is around 200 ping and I barely notice the latency.

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Correct me if I'm wrong but don't you connect directly to the host? It doesn't matter where the server is, just have to find aussie players.

The servers work like most other games. They are not Peer to Peer. When the 'host' creates the game it gets created on one of S2Games servers, everyone else then joins that server. This way when someone has internet problems they don't give those problems to the rest of he server like in DoTA.

been playing HoN since I got the key from ausgamers... very fun, although almost an exact clone of dota. benefits are basically better player support, in built mic support, clans, easier to join and create games and the HoN engine allows for better abilities for future heroes.

Very fun and if you can nab a key you wouldn't regret it... but get used to being labeled a noob by other players.

Give me some Heroes of newerth beta key sir.. thanks..

want beta key plz send it to my email jedtin4evr@yahoo.com thx

gtfo

You should see the amount of people we got asking for keys on newerth.com forums.

ill have to check that out, Ive prepiad for hon myself ^^

Yeah man I paid for it straight away.

Here is the forum where they are begging for keys, was a Russian invasion at first.

Also see http://www.aus-newerth.com (new site in development).

We are talking to them about running servers in Australia, but it's not looking likely at this point.

Sad face.

If you are keen for Aussie servers you should make sure you tell them they should be releasing free, dedicated server software

Dam i would love to have pings that aren't over 300 :\

Another massive benefit HoN offers over Dota at this point is the ability to explicitly prevent leavers or noobs from joining your games. This is a really great ranking system as this appears to be one of the only things that let's Dota down - it still runs on a third-party banlist and notation system to separate the ragers and leavers from the people that will stay to the end.

If only Blizzard had supported Icefrog with the development of dota and integrated something into the custom game interface on bnet, it could have been so much better.

trog: I think there will atleast be the ability to host your own servers as unofficial servers. This would just mean they don't track stats etc. This is how they did it in Savage 2. I could be completely wrong though!

there will be a server option later, but during beta they don't want to release it out.

Primordius the anti leaver system needs work. I couldn't join games because I left a game after 2 other people left the game. Then my computer crashed I got another negative mark. In other words I had 100% leave rate when I only played 2 games.

s

^WTF how do i edit/delete my comments lol.

btw 100% agree with you greazy

if this was a paid account, your account would be useless by now
you'd be kicked from every game the moment you join in

and i still reckon dota is better than hon. hon is alright but it just doesnt feel that fun as dota
metagame/gameplay wise
also character design/voice actors/effects/graphics are simple yet effective

only thing about it is that it doesnt have its own system and the graphics are looking a bit aged by now
however i still prefer the wc3 graphics over hon's engine any day

in wc3/dota it just easier to see terain/creeps/heroes and etc

there will be a server option later, but during beta they don't want to release it out.

that should send you running and screaming for the hills if the game is an online, client/server based game. If they don't beta the server component then how can they know it doesn't suck?