Hi, I am the founder of Project KONGOR.

On the 13th of December 2021, Frostburn announced that the Heroes Of Newerth services would be taken offline. That was the day that I started capturing network traffic of everything that could be done from the game client, which was the basis for reverse-engineering protocols and data models in the months that followed. It was a gigantic effort but, in the end, it paid off and people started to gravitate towards the project. This is how I built the foundations of the community which is still growing to this day, and how I discovered the people whom I ended up inviting to join the development team.

Mid-Autumn 2023, certain events happened which made me realise that Project KONGOR has become a victim of its own success, and this will make more sense as future events will start to unravel, so on the 13th of October 2023 I left the Discord server in order to shift focus from support, maintenance, and management tasks to development tasks towards what was always the real goal for me, the preservation of HoN with no strings attached. While Project KONGOR was about creating the means for players to continue playing HoN, Project KONGOR Open Source is about allowing anyone to run their own server and play with their friends in any way that they might want to, which is the only way of truly preserving the game. This way, HoN will continue to be alive for as long as there are still people wanting to play it.

Long story short, I want to put Project KONGOR in the hands of the people, but now I am a dad of two young boys and I make it a primary objective to prioritise my time much better than when I started this project, because writing code until 04:00 and then starting work at 09:00 is not a sustainable lifestyle anymore. This means that progress will be slow and steady but, on the plus-side, I've already got a wealth of knowledge from the first time around doing this, so I don't need to re-invent every wheel. You might also be wondering why not just open-source what already exists, and the answer to that is: 1) the codebase is a mishmash of good and not-so-good code, 2) it has too many moving parts that are too tightly coupled to the infrastructure, 3) some major components are designed in ways which are not generic enough for general usage and are too specific to how the services are currently operating, and 4) I just want to modernise everything from the ground up.

I will be working towards a rewrite of the entire suite of services regardless of anything, because my personal goal is to be able to play HoN with my kids when they grow up, but any sponsorships will certainly drive my motivation up to deliver features faster. In addition, people who will be sponsoring this stream of work will get some perks and will be able to say that they've supported the true preservation of Heroes Of Newerth.