Quote (Maliken;14067313)

I apologize for the delay in this statement. However, it was intentionally timed to allow initial emotional reactions to subside and allow logic and rationality to step in.

It was a week ago today that HoN changed its business model from a Pay 2 Play game to a Free 2 Play game. Along with that change we introduced Early Access (EA) which is a new way to deliver some of our free content updates (heroes). Both of these decisions were controversial, causing a lot of different reactions in the community. These decisions were not made lightly and were made after months of discussion, deliberation, and iteration. We knew there would be significant reactions but at the end of the day we had to make the decisions that we felt best served the game and more importantly the community that enjoys it.

Here are some quick numbers to show the explosive growth of players since this change. HoN now has:

• 4,000,000+ registered accounts
• Concurrent users increase 35%+
• Daily unique logins nearly double to 300,000+
• Games played daily has grown over 50%

These are exciting statistics that shows there is significant demand for a superior, high quality, fun, free 2 play game. We appreciate all the new players coming to check us out and our amazing community for helping to spread the word (and hopefully warmly welcoming all the new blood).

Lastly, I’d like to say a few words about EA. There have been a vocal group of players showing their displeasure with our decision to release this program. While we disagree with many of the assessments being made about EA, your frustrations do not go unheard. It is never S2's intention to upset any part of our community. We appreciate the ever growing HoN fan base. One of the biggest pleasures of making games is seeing people enjoy the fruits of your labor. Our ability to take HoN free to play relied on EA. In planning for this, it was important to us to make sure the first two early access heroes were accompanied by heroes released for free to the general hero pool to keep the FREE content coming as our existing community is used to. There have been claims that with EA we now have introduced pay for power. I strongly disagree with this statement. We are allowing people the privilege to play a hero sooner than its normal FREE release (to legacy players). While this is a highly debatable subject, pay for power is selling power ups that give heroes magic armor penetration, faster attack speed, more starting gold, etc...

We know you have a choice on which games you spend your time and money on, and we continue to be committed to improving HoN, the overall player experience and expanding the community to encourage new and exciting matches. We hope our HoN community understands the rapid changing landscape of online video games, especially in this exploding genre. Inability to adapt as variables constantly evolve would have significant negative ramifications to the game we all love. Developing and implementing new HoN structural changes is done with tremendous consideration, and with our community in mind. We encourage all HoN fans to embrace these changes with us.