Alright for a while now most of the clan members who still play custom hero arena have been using entgaming.net for hosting games. It has been working great for a while too. Games would fill pretty fast much faster then the other option makemehost.com. The reason for this was because entgaming.net included garena on their lists as well as the other realms of battle.net.
What is Garena?
Garena is an online gaming services provider and distributor. When it comes to warcraft it is often used by players who do not have valid warcraft 3 cd keys, IE they probably downloaded the game or borrowed from a friend etc... Most of your south east Asian players generally play on Garena.
How does Garena work?
Garena works much like your typical Bnet chat room except it has the added features of Server List, My Host List, and My BanList.
Server List: Lists the games players have hosted (up to 20 games)
Host List: Was something you used to alt tab and see the players who entered games you hosted as well as their IP & Pings
Banlist: Basically blocked players from joining your games
Mostly garena works from a room to room basis you can only see games of the people who are in the same chat room as you are. Most players would join rooms that are almost full as they are more likely to have players to play with when you host. Rooms have a limit of 225 players. You generally play these games over your lan part of warcraft.
Clan Ent and other bots would fill fast because they allowed hosting over various rooms of garena not just one. Recently though bot games began to fill slowly mostly because more and more auto host bots began to flow over to garena and flood the channels. As a result no human hosted game could be seen over the bots. As you can imagine this caused a bit concern and an enormous amount of complaints from human garena users. So in order to combat this issue Garena is now moderating rpg room 1's of various country servers also known as the fair play act
http://fairplay.garena.com/forumdisplay.php?434-Europe-RPG-Room-01-Requests/page3 and banning all bot user's for a period of 365 days aka 1 year. Unfortunately rpg room 1 usually are your first rooms to fill by default so for multiple countries RPG ROOM 1 would have 225 players while 2 has 70 & the rest have like 10.
Personally I think this is a good move. I mean look at Bnet auto host raped gaming, I mean if I had my way auto hosting would cease to exist. However I honestly was hoping they would have a moderating team using discursion and only banning autohost bots and not clients like ent.hosting/ent.europe/ent.chichago. I think bot hosting is a pretty cool idea however I think it should only exist in the makemehost kind of format. That is to say an actual human is queing up a game and not a bot generating numbers...
Any ways I was only posting this to give people an idea of why games take longer to fill feel free to share your opinions/thoughts/concerns below.
