Disadvantage: You have to coordinate with teammates to make sure you don't need the same file at the same time.
Advantage: You have to coordinate with teammates to make sure you don't need the same file at the same time.
Sometimes, not being able to work independently can be an advantage. Two people discovering they're trying to work on the same file can lead to useful conversations.
That is so cool. I bet that was an absolute blast. Can I ask for a war story? Something hard or goofy that I as I player (and a software engineer) probably had no idea you had to solve? I really loved that game.
Firstly, if you email me at shawnpresser@gmail.com or DM me on twitter, I'll be happy to tell you as much as you'd like.
The whole time period was goofy. I loved it.
Imagine being a 22yo, disillusioned with your first gamedev job. Then you spend all your nights playing HoN with friends.
I played hard support each game. Back then, there was one particular bug: you used keyboard hotkeys to buy things, but the shortcut for Logger's Hatchet was very close to the shortcut for wards. And hatchet was a special item, because you weren't allowed to sell it once you bought it. So at least three or four times, I was playing crystal maiden and accidentally bought this damn hatchet -- something which only benefits melee heroes, so it's completely useless to me. And I couldn't sell it back. So I'd have to start down 225 gold. When I finally got a job at S2, that was by far the most satisfying bug fix of my life. (I changed it so that you can sell it within the initial 15 second sellback window.)
Let's see, what else...
I remember a time in 2010 when we knew Valve was coming to eat our lunch with Dota 2. So I was trying very hard to think of ways to avoid this impending doom. One day I said, I got it! Custom games! Custom games had made WC3 live long beyond the lifetime of the original game. Ditto for starcraft and a bunch of others. So, being very 22, the same night I had this idea, I wanted to test it out. I didn't ask anybody. I fired up an EC2 server (which was a new thing back then) and ran the server software on it for exactly one match, which I was observing carefully, to see if EC2 could support our server. The match went well, someone called gg, and once their stats were submitted I shut down the server and went into the office the next day about to pitch my "brilliant" plan.
When I got to the office, Sean (the admin guy, and #2 at the company) was looking a little frustrated. I told him hey, if you saw any weird activity last night, that was just me testing something. He said that was you? And my heart damn near dropped out of my chest. I said yeah. He said ok, and I go to my desk.
About 20 minutes later he pulls me into a side office where he gives me the dressing down of the century. He's like, "you didn't ask anyone or let them know what you were doing? Don't you know EC2 is so much more expensive than self hosting? And by the way, something like that is completely unrelated to what we're doing here anyway." (All of which were true!) I profusely apologized, and that was the end of custom games on HoN.
If you want some more, I can probably think of a couple others.
That is fucking amazing. I’ll email you. Thank you so much for even typing that out. I also played hard support almost exclusively, back when buying wards was not a thing.
