S2Games has just announced the start of the Heroes of Newerth open beta:

With the release of 0.3.0 we are preparing for Open Beta which will begin Wednesday, March 31 @ 4:00pm PST. We will continue to work on the client and improve all the additions to the game. We also have an awesome new hero on the way! We haven’t released ANY information about it, however I’m sure you will see some stuff leaked soon.

You can see the countdown on their site: http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/. For those who have been under a rock for the past year HoN (Heroes of Newerth) is a strategy game based on the widely known custom map for Warcraft III DoTA. There is a lot of mixed feelings when it comes to HoN. Running on a more up to date gaming engine compared to Warcraft III, HoN has many features including Re-join on disconnect, leaver protection, Match making system, stats tracking, ladder rankings, in game voip and re-bindable hotkeys.

S2 however has done something very weird, instead of making the ladder based on which team has the most points and/or win/loss ratio they have based it on who has the highest PSR (Pub Skill Rating). The ladder is very easy to abuse and generally means absolutely nothing in terms of skill. There are a lot of people with high PSR that are atrocious and some with low PSR that are very good players. Be sure to check out HoN if you have not already and judge yourself if you prefer the original.