'Heroes Of Newerth', A Game Even More Toxic Than 'League Of Legends', Is Now Dead

A little over 10 years ago, two games battled for the top spot in the emerging MOBA scene: League Of Legends and Heroes Of Newerth. We probably don't even have to explain what happened to LOL, but yeah, it spread like a virus beautiful forest. Heroes Of Newerth, on the other hand, not so much. Whereas LOL boldly went for a totally free-to-play model and could run basically on any computer that contained at least all the basic components, HoN was harder to play, heavier on the system and on the wallet.  It originally asked players for full price, a move they later corrected, but there was just no competing with LoL and the emerging DOTA 2.

This sounds like bad news for anyone who knows LoL, as even its own players tend to hate it, but it's good, actually. League Of Legends provides some of the best courses in how to act sh*ttily online, but the really fun part is that Newerth was even worse. Whereas LoL is just an innocuously cute game if we mute the chat (and ignore all the disgusting workplace abuse allegations), HoN straight up encouraged toxicity because it was built into the game. There were all sorts of emojis made just to trash opponents and teammates, and that's not even the worst part. Let's turn on the time machine and go read some chat logs from back in the day, shall we?

Whoa, this Maliken fella looks pretty… ugh.. un-nice. How didn't he get banned after so many clearly racist and homophobic slurs? What the hell is this guy's deal? Well, even though this kind of talk was dime a dozen in this game, Maliken's deal specifically is that he's Marc Deforest, the CEO of the company behind HON. Those aren't even prints of private messages, just of crap he regularly spouted for everyone to see. He sold the rights to the entire IP in 2015 to what we assume was a less-sh*tty company, but the damage had been done and the game just kept on crawling to its grave. HoN will remain one of the few games we can no longer play that we're unlikely to miss much.

Top Image: Frostburn Studios