.... Posting on the forums of a competitor in the genre about whether anyone has played the competition and asking if it's as good as another competitor.  Way to go!  

Heroes of Newerth is a competitor to Elemental?

https://forums.elementalgame.com/379251

I posted in PC gaming section. There's talk about starcraft2 here. I think HoN is in the rts genre.

Only thing I know about Heroes of Newearth is that a few months ago it was home to the absolute worst game community on the face of the earth.

That was enough to ensure I'll never try it.

See, that's not really true. The DotA community for example was great, when the game first came out. If you tried in the last year or two, it's totally different, and extremely hostile to anybody who doesn't have 2 years experience. It's just not a group of people I want to play with.

Heroes of Newearth had the same kind of assholes dominating the game. It's really not normal and shouldn't be tolerated. (Well, it isn't normal outside of Call of Duty on Xbox Live, that thing is totally dominated by asshats).

Did the makers of LoL not think about the initials their game would have when people shortened it?  I find it hard to take a game with initials like that seriously.

I can't speak for HON but I really enjoy LOL.  You should give it a try.  Great revenue model.  It can be played free forever with no disadvantage; however, you'll likely want to buy some stuff.  I did just to support this great game.  That team is pumping out bi-weekly content updates.  By the way, there are no ads.  It is purely supported by microtransactions.  If you enjoy the game, I'd recommend the character pack sold on Impulse.  It's a cost effective way to open up many of the characters.

Demigod is bett

Any heavy team based multiplayer community generally ends up being horrible, not just these DoTA clones.  I played World in Conflict for a bit, and you'd often have high ranked players in public games screaming profanities at the low ranked players instead of calmly explaining what they're doing wrong (this was a game with no skirmish mode either, so you had no choice but to play online to practice).  It's like people completely forget that they used to be an inexperienced newb at one point too.  But no, rather than try and help the newbs so they understand what they're doing wrong people seem to go Internet Tough Guy and relentlessly flame them until they quit.  Then act surprised when the community is dying months later.  I could understand being annoyed if a newb got into an otherwise high-level ladder game, but you get too many cases where people troll low-level public games expecting everyone to be a pro or something.

Anyway, the answer the OPs question I've heard HoN is pretty much DoTA with better graphics, while LoL tried the make things a bit less hardcore and more user-friendly.  HoN seems to be more popular in the competitive scene from what I've been seeing, but LoL has the advantage of being free if you don't mind the character limitations of a free account.

I'm pretty sure HoN was made by people who made the DoTA mod in the first place, so they're not actually ripping anyone off.  But yeah, literally all it is is DoTA that no longer requires having Warcraft 3 to play.