Heroes of Newerth Open Beta About To Start
You may recall last summer when we discussed Heroes of Newerth, a title from S2 Games that's based on the popular Defense of the Ancients mod from Warcraft III. We passed out some closed beta keys, and there seemed to be a ton of interest, in part due to the fact that they have a Linux client. Well, if any of you missed it or want to see how the game has progressed since then, now is your chance — the open beta begins tonight (March 31). There's a countdown on the sign-up page that shows when you can register.
I have been one of the lucky closed beta testers, and I can tell you that the least people I've seen online was 38,000. ragequits and no-stat try-hards FTW!!!
Not trying to advertise but League of Legends is a very solid clone of DOTA. There is no Linux (sorry slashdot) but it is fairly well balanced.
I've been playing the beta for a few months on my 64-bit Linux platform that usually gets shafted by game developers. If you liked DotA Allstars on W3x, you will like Heroes of Newerth. Those who played the classic DotA will find this "flashy" and imbalanced, fun though. I also encourage Linux gamers to support those few independent game developers that do support our platform by buying the game.
I had a closed beta invite early on, but the community is angry, rude and just spoil the game.
Echo this. I was lucky enough to get into the closed beta a few weeks ago, when one of my friends sent me an invite key. There was no tutorial when I started (though there's one now), so I just went into a no stats game. The people there, and in most HoN games, seem to be just generally mean, elitist people who votekick at a moment's notice when another player doesn't exhibit some tidbit of knowledge that they're supposed to have acquired. This is really bad in HoN, since those votekicks affect your ability to play legitimate games. So, if you know a lot about DoTA, good game. Otherwise, stay away from it unless you know other people in meatspace that can help you out.