Heroes of Newerth/YMMV

""I got in there, and started trying to decipher everyone's slang and abbreviations, learn the UI, figure out what my abilities did, etc. Needless to say, I wasn't pro. Within ten minutes my teammates were hurling every racial and sexual slur imaginable my way because I wasn't holding my own in my lane. As you can imagine, I was incredibly motivated to spend my time learning how to play so that I might get to hang out with people like that on a regular basis.""
 * Game Breaker: Due to the constant patches and many new heroes being added, occasionally a hero will be ludicrously overpowered for a patch period.
 * An extreme case was Gemini, who had a Game Breaking Bug upon release which gave him infinite stats, meaning he was quite literally unkillable and could one-shot every enemy hero and building. This was fixed a few hours later but still.
 * Entitled Bastard: A Necessary Weasel for the MOBA genre. If you never run into these types of player on this game; then you should buy a lottery ticket and head to the nearest Casino because you are the luckiest person in the world.
 * Internet Backdraft: When the game went from "pay to play" to "free to play", none of the existing players were exactly happy about it, but the change for them was sufficiently minor and didn't cause any 'massive' disapproval. Unfortunately S2 games had also added a new feature called "Early Access", which made new heroes available for pre-purchase a month before the rest of the old "Legacy" players would be able to play them for free. This caused the forums to immediately go up in flames, spawning numerous threads and a custom tooled signature, that was copied from poster to poster, that quoted S2's promise of only ever allowing players to purchase "cosmetic" features for money, alongside the quote that said heroes will now be available for pre-purchase. Cries of "pay to win" resounded far and wide.
 * A week went by without any official responses to the complaints, only moderators deleting signatures and moving threads to "non-constructive complaints", including a thread calling for a boycott that reached almost 2000 posts in a couple of days, and people who didn't care saying "stop whining". A week later S2's CEO, Maliken, said that they were waiting for people to chill and that they don't intend to remove Early Access, ever. That left quite a few people unhappy.
 * Memetic Mutation: "TOO BAD ITS ME BLACKSMITH", "It's party time!", "3 seconds", "WHOOP!" "I pull them fukers in"
 * Scrub: Too many, or too few, depending on who you ask.
 * Just because a game has the green 'Noobs Only' icon next to its name does not mean you won't get called a noob/idiot/feeder and possibly booted the instant you do anything wrong.
 * The colored noob/normal/pro markers have been removed in favor of a min/max allowed rating setting when creating a public game.
 * The many "noobs only, 1650+ PSR only" games are especially ironic because actual noobs have a personal rating around 1300 and even 1500 seems like a distant dream until you get a whole lot better at the game.
 * The Scrappy: Scout, kill stealer extraordinaire, runner of fights.
 * "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Unless playing with friends, it's almost impossible to not pick up a Scrub who will complain about this even on noob/practice games.
 * As can be seen by the section just above this, YMMV as to whether or not this is actually true.
 * Not really. Ask anyone who plays this and they will agree with this game's dubious honor of having one of the absolute rudest and most hateful communities of any game out there. Try playing just to have fun. I dare you. Have fun getting instakicked, called a nigger and a faggot, and being reported for bullshit reasons simply because your teammates are a bunch of spiteful, immature assholes.
 * Not only that, but in an official review for Heroes of Newerth, the reviewer docked a point for how mean spirited the community is, if you lose a point for your game SOLELY because of the community, you know something's wrong.
 * To be fair; Heroes of Newerth is a multiplayer-only game and a lot of the game's fun is dependent on the players. It's not very fun to play by yourself, and if the only people to play with are incredibly mean-spirited, rude, entitled, and jerkassish, and you're getting kicked from a noob game for being a noob, it's safe to say you won't be having much fun. It's probably best to say that Scrubs, "Stop Having Fun!" Guys, and Entitled Bastard are Necessary Weasel for the MOBA genre.
 * The more extensive the stat-tracking, the higher the elitism. HoN's stat tracking is pretty extensive so... yeah.
 * Suffers Newbies Poorly: As described by Tim Buckley, who had never played a MOBA game before and tried to get into this game in particular:


 * Jumping directly into public matchmaking games is a very bad idea for newbies. As a completely new MOBA player, your rating will be at least a couple of hundred points higher than your actual skill and experience can sustain, and you're going to have to lose a fair few matches before your rating drops enough to get matched with newer and/or crappier players who you can actually compete with. Expect to be wished a thousand gruesome deaths by irate middle-rankers in the meantime. Actually telling your teammates how inexperienced you are is as likely to elicit further abuse as helpful advice. Those without unusually thick skins are advised to bring friends and/or find a clan that caters for newbies with private training and/or just-for-fun games.