That being said, at the beginning of HoN, Tarano heavily supported HoN over Dota1, with reasons he outlined in that thread: Actually, many of his ideas were almost completely parallel to mine in terms of balancing the game. Anyway, Tarano built up this reputation in the competitors forums (at least in my opinion) of being S2's harshest critic. I never heard of him in Dota 1, sounds like he played on more East leagues or something (old IHL by Ucross, DCL, etc). This is taken from TDA forums, and it was a topic started by Tarano, one of (in my opinion) the strongest players HoN had seen in its time. I found this many months back and found it very interesting: Many other Dota players, both casual and pro, who have played Hon most all agree that Hon *plays* better. I instantly fell in love - between the reconnect feature, smooth gameplay, and the other things I mentioned, it was far superior to Dota in every aspect (at this time, too, about 90% of the heroes in HoN were all DotA ports, so balance was near-perfect). For about 2 weeks, while I was playing in the DXD league on USW, Orie (YoDa) kept spamming /b m whispers saying "YOU GUYS! You're playing the wrong game - Dota is dead, hon is where it's at." Eventually, I got annoyed with his spam and went to try it myself. I remember the moment, actually, that I switched from Dota 1 to HoN. This inhibited me quite a bit - but when HoN came out (as well as my new computer ^^) it had a build in hotkey script that made me fall in love with the game. That's right, I had to click **everything**.
I also played a great deal of Dota 1 (and now Dota 2) - I dabbled into some of the top inhouse leagues, but never really got heavily into the scene - unfortunately, at the time I had horrible netlag from college internet, and I played on a horrible laptop that yielded 10 fps tops, and I couldn't download a hotkey script. When I list all of these qualities, in my mind (and I think most others' as well) I'm directly comparing them to characteristics of Dota 2. The response, the animations, the graphics, the turn rates, reduced lag all of these things can be credited to amazing developers and coders for S2 - what an amazing job they have done. It plays by far better than any MOBA in its genre. The game Heroes of Newerth itself is disgustingly good.
This is going to be a long one, but I'm going to do my best to outline my opinions with as little bias as possible but with as much detail as possible, to give you a full scope of where I am coming from.
I am going to talk in great depth about my experiences, my success, and now my frustration with Heroes of Newerth and S2 Games as a whole and why I'm quitting.
Throughout my career in HoN, I've managed to make a decent chunk of money through both online and offline tournaments, such as the GosuGamers' World Cup to Dreamhack Winter 2011 to NASL Season 2 Finals, with great success, as well as meet some really wonderful people in the Heroes of Newerth community. My name is Tralfamadore, formerly of SK-Gaming and now Trademark Esports for Heroes of Newerth.
TdM|Tralfamadore: Why I'm finished with Heroes of Newerth and S2 Games When Playing Thunderbringer and Someone Gets Low