QUOTE(Moogle Stiltzkin @ Feb 15 2015, 09:07 PM)
whats ironic is, even say Eurozone has different languages other than english. such as spanish, portugese, french.... seems some of those pro region lock supporters from those countries just want to discriminate

i mean if you played on hon or dota, racism does pervade through the chats to give a glimpse of what
some of these players say and think.
and who these days aren't multi lingual ? so why not instead add language filters for people to queue for games with people for better communication, then outright black listing entire regions....
all that really matters is latency, and why should i be told i can't play say on US servers with latencies of 200-300 ms ? i didn't have a problem with it though obviously 10-80 ms would had been better.
Maybe if it was a game like say counter strike, there would be a much bigger impact having that high a latency i'll admit, but other games like say starcraft 2, diablo 3, HON are very playable with that latency
But if the subbing excuse was the case, how is it then possible they can do the strife system (region filters yes, with latency detectors. But no hard region locks, and no selling of userbase to entities like garena for segragation)? that is why i don't buy that excuse
and they wonder why they aren't as successfull as league of legends. because lol doesn't shot themselves in the foot thats how

well compared to HoN, Strife was developed with a better financial pov. the company is bigger, the moba scene is a proven success hence the better funding, proper structure and monetization features. compared to HoN which is hastily put together mainly to port dota to a dedicated engine and initially intended to be sold as a one-off payment game. that just shows that S2 back then is unaware the untapped potential that moba scene holds as well as the lacking of funding even wishing players to pay upfront for the unreleased game. once they realize that the moba scene is a potential goldmine they immediately changed focus, resulting in the flip flop decisions and gayrena. from there onwards the list of blunders pile up and before long the game is only known for its negative side. bad rep hurts marketing and funding, the 2 main reason why LoL and D2 is a huge success (hew hew throw 10mil competition). when they want to expand but dont have the capabilities to do so, they had to deal with the devils and sub for other regions. i dont think they want that but they have no choice. unifying all the players will boost the image with higher number of players compared to fragments over various regions (that might lessen the "omg hon is dead" comments on the forums) but they just cant afford to. Strife is another story as they have a different team with different funding and was built on top of the experience out the blood and sweat of HoN development as well as the booming of moba scene. bottom line is, i think if S2 could, they already would implement them. there are practically no reason not to implement if they are able to do so.
for me personally i dont care much on the popularity contest. its good enough that i am able to enjoy the game and updates are still active as ever. im sad that i cant play my int account along with all the stuff in it but even as hellish as GHoN is, it still provides me with the satisfaction that D2 fail to give. i dont think even S2 dream of beating LoL or D2 in being the #1 moba in popularity contest. compared to thousands other games out there which dies a couple of months after release, HoN is actually doing fairly well. most probably way better than how S2 imagined how the game will end up initially. while tiny compared to LoL and D2 i think it is still safe to say that HoN still belongs in the top 3 moba. well maybe competing with smite on that position so top 5 perhaps?