I believe that was stats for one game that a bunch of malicious people played ? Nobody cares about those stats for that game. I was playing before 2011 and I still have my stats.. So they didn't get wiped out??
I really don't recall the casual players caring much and the tournament players play in a different game mode that excludes new characters. I don't even recall any problems
specifically with Gemini other than being a little over powered. Playing against over-powered heroes can actually be kinda fun.. More teamwork involved, suddenly everybody on your team stops being lazy and starts checking to make sure they don't duplicate auras, and victory is all that much more sweet. It's really not hard at all to cripple any particular hero on the other team in the normal game mode. Just ward enough and get your team to group up and go hunting. It's not complicated.
WRONG... It was one guy who attacked the servers first, had some fun by logging into other people's accounts and selling login credentials for $35 a pop.. He said he would only disclose the exploits *AFTER* S2Games patches them. There's only one word for those kinds of people.
It's difficult to balance heros and they're trying to crank out a hero every 2 weeks to keep the casual gamers interested. If you don't like to play against certain heros, that's what banning pick and lockpick mode is for.
And that's so important... because.... why? I honestly have no idea why people would think that's important at all.. It's a game. You don't need a HoN Tour.
Don't need. DOTA2 and the other competitors doesn't have this either. Heck, even the original DOTA series for WCII and WCIII were very strictly contolled so that people couldn't create spin-off maps. I'm surprised anybody was looking forward to a map editor since it's extremely difficult to make a good map.
Strange, I was pretty sure they all switched simply because the original creator that popularized MOBAs was working on DOTA2 and they really didn't have any other reason.. Despite many DOTA2 players (such as yourself apparently) saying that there has been a mass exodus of people from HoN to DOTA2,
I can say that it simply isn't true.. When I started playing HoN there was about 20,000 people online at a time.. I remember last year when it went FTP there were over 60,000 people playing online at the same time... A couple weeks ago, for the first itme I saw over 115,000 people online playing at the same time.. I can't even guess how many will be playing after the buzz of HoN 3.0 dies down, but I'd bet it's over 130,000...
I'd say the major killer-feature that HoN has that DOTA2 doesn't is that HoN does a great job at putting culture into the game.. Remember the Nyan-Cat Courier? The Electrician Ghostbuster? The Michael Jackson taunt? The alt-avatars in HoN that speak other languages when you use them (French, Japanese, etc.).
I bought DOTA2, played it for a few weeks and wished I didn't.. Came back to HoN... I've spent a lot more money on HoN gold coins than I've spent on DOTA2 already and I still think it's worth it.

