Genuinely the most toxic community to attempt to join. MOBAs in general tend towards hostile communities, but LoL and HoN before it were downright abusive at all times. If you didn't start at god-tier, you were going to have a bad time and everyone would make sure of it - especially your own team.

Deadlock people are pretty calm

The only good MOBAs are Heroes of fhe Storm and Deadlock

I played one LoL match where I told the team I was brand new. Immediately got called homophobic slurs because we lost. Never went back.

I was more of an Awesomenauts man myself.

I had suppressed any memory of HoN up until this point. Life was starting to seem manageable, despite everything else.

Ah, yes, HoN.

I did like the game and played a decent amount (wasn't very good though) and the game could get super toxic.

It also had some very enjoyable games with lots of productive and funny communication even over voice. But it could also be a cesspool more often than not.

Good times

HoN was truly the most toxic game ever, yeah. Even the developers were remarkably toxic.

Deadlock can be pretty toxic too at higher ranks.

It's toxic at low rank too. Not every match but a solid number have at least one rager.

Ah yes, the classic multiplayer experience.

The second one, is literally how the League of Villains was founded, and named, in My Hero Academia. Yes, Mr Handy plays League, and so does his lizard bestie, Spinner.

I swore off MobAs a decade ago. Then found Wild Rift when I got my Retroid Pocket 5. Playing short games with a controller while connected to a big screen monitor was genuinely some of the best multiplayer fun I've had. It helps that people find it too difficult to get into raging rants with a phone keyboard. I didn't really mind forums saying it's mostly bot games for a long time. Really makes me wonder why LoL isn't on console. They're leaving free money on the table by not porting this shit to console.

I agree, though as I said, it was a game of two extremes. I have some very enjoyable memories of that game.

Even the developers were remarkably toxic.

Funny enough, it wasn't so much the actual developers in the technical sense (those were fine people we far as I can tell, ElementUser for example always seemed quite nice), but Maliken himself was really bad. Haha

It's also funny that the person I replied to implied that league and HoN were on the same level of toxicity. League is a baby's game compared to HoN in that regard. What added to this was the fact that voice chat was not recorded, so any abuse over voice would never be punished.

Also you could upload your own picture for earnable in-game currency which yielded some... interesting results. The forums are gone now, but if I remember someone complained they reported someone with a nickname like "AdolfCritler" and Hitler's picture as their profile picture. The official answer was that this was on as long as he wasn't presented in a good way or something (which was hard, given the 12 character limit for user names).

Oh and for the longest time, S2 was fine with smurfing as long as they got paid in the process (so-called subaccounts). Multiple accounts per real user were not allowed under their ToS, but for the equivalent of $30, you got an additional account that was linked to your main and shared all the cosmetics, but none of your friends, clan... or rating :) a ban against any account would affect all accounts though.

They were on sale once (which I used to buy one) and then never again because they knew and admitted it was mainly used for smurfing. Though if I remember correctly, this got rectified at one point, like a new sub would get your average MMR over all accounts as its starting rating, though I'm not sure whether in HoN or any other of their MOBAs (Strife and Reborn).

However, despite being an absolute circus, I always held S2 Games in high regard because all their games (until and including Strife) had Linux native clients from very early on. Savage, their first game, had a Linux native release on its launch day. In twothousand-fucking-three! And I tried HoN and Savage 2 close to release, they worked flawlessly.

Not playing that AI cashgrab slopfest Reborn though

Wow I never made that connection, that explains their vitriol much better. Also, Mr Handy lmao.

And being really good just changes it from your own team flaming you to the other team flaming you.

Awesomenuats and Battleborn are the only MOBAs I've enjoyed.

Deadlock is less a MOBA and more "taking the greatest hits album of video games and mixing it together in a big jug". You have to be fluent in a lot of games for it to make sense and thats long before your able to git gud.

I do love the asthetic, a supernatural 1940s NYC is inspired.

I owned Battleborn but never got around to playing it before the servers shut down

The devs has promised to port Wild Rift to consoles years ago. Nothing came of it. They might still have that info on their official website. Soon™

They came right out and said it in one of the later seasons. Before, we knew Shiggy and Spinner were League players because that's how they named their team and we knew they were gamers. Then a manga chapter came out and explicitly pointed out that they were playing League. I think the anime called it something else to avoid copyright, but it was also really obvious what they were talking about. We assumed before but it's been straight-up confirmed.