It's been a while since I made a non-anime post...
So, lately, I've been playing a lot more HON matches. A while back when I first made a post about Dota 2, it was before I started looking into the HON Competitive Scene. Lately, I've been watching some of the streams of competitive matches, which has helped improve my game a bit.
Side note: Today, I played in a match with the person (breakycpk) that does the casting of those shows and WOW... Just, wow. Granted, I didn't do exceptionally well at mid - but compared to the fact that he gave a free feed at the start of the game to their mid hero and then handed off a free-farm to bot (to their carry) is by far much, much worse. It was still astounding how well their carry farmed; it was like our heroes weren't even in the lane.
Anyway, I'm straying heavily from the point. I wanted to point out a huge change in stance of Dota 2. The competitive scene of HON definitely exists, but there is one big thing that HON is missing that Dota 2 will have: capital. Being backed by a big company like Valve will guarantee a much larger exposure for the game. That means that Dota 2 is much more likely to make it into those big Gaming Competitions. This also means that a lot of the competitive teams will most likely group up into Dota 2, since it gets more exposure.
Competitive gaming really pushes a game to be extremely popular, and it's just a snowballing effect. It'll pull in a bigger audience, which gets more people to play.
This, combined with HON's very passive marketing (really word-of-mouth only), means... I mean, if HON as a game isn't bad, but without these key things, it will be hard to compete against Dota 2. They really have to step up if they don't want alot of people swapping over when Dota 2 is finally released.
So, if you'll remember my other post:
TL;DR: Dota 2 will be hardpressed to find a player base without somehow overshadowing HON.
I finally found the thing that will help Dota 2 overshadow HON. Without it, Dota 2 will cause HON to be nothing much more than any other random Dota-knockoff, like Realm of Titan (that's coming out soon). I really don't think a great game like HON should be batched in with games like these, but it seems like the downward spiral it's moving towards.
~Pearz
