little has changed since the beta... nice game with a horrible community
Perhaps there are balancing tweaks and other such details, but none of that has any value whatsoever if you don't have a chance at actually playing the game.
I gave this game a fair chance while it was in beta and was horribly frustrated with all the 1337 nerds playing at the time... so I thought after a few months of being out of beta, maybe I'd give it another go.
Nothing has changed, the core of the community is still the exact same griefers that were there during the beta.
I wish I'd had a chance to see what had been tweaked but really, if I have to spend half an hour trying to find a "noob" match that doesn't have these morons doing the auto-kick because you're not a Dota pro, or if you actually get into a match that "starts", to have these pros that feel good about themselves playing on "noob" servers accusing you of ruining the game because you didn't follow their chess-like strategy within the first 60 seconds...
... matches where these morons leave mid game, or throwing the game because it's easier for them to whine/flame than to say "hey, you're screwing up, no big deal it's a dumba** server... here's what you're doing wrong, and here's how to do it RIGHT."
I am reminded as to why I ended up hating the game during the beta phase.
I still stand by my opinion that League of Legends is the superior Dota clone... the visuals in HoN are still very pretty yet still very distracting... and while some of these dota pro jerks are in LoL as well, they do not dominate the community as in HoN.
It's sad because S2 were a great developer with Savage, then Sav2. Really original and innovative games, but they've dug themselves a niche market grave with HoN, and the people populating that HoN niche are annoying nerds. They may not be the same kind of "annoying" as voiping children playing Modern Warfare 2, but they have the EXACT same effect.
If you play games because you "enjoy" developing skill (against intelligent human players most of all), and don't mind a heavy challenge against experienced players that allows you to eventually get better.... go play LoL.
If you have the patience to play multiplay scenarios where most of everyone on the inexperienced servers prefers to grief with sniper-camping style behaviour... you know, going out of their way to make your gaming experience feel like a form of punishment... play HoN.