This seems to be a bad idea, but... for the curious...
Playing on HFIt seems that I have 1 or 2 spare accounts. PM me or prod me on IRC if you'd like to try out a game or two on HF using them. I make no promises regarding the connection quality. Try to observe a game or two first and leave if you're lagging or spiking noticeably. Some fellas host games using their school's connection and your ping/connection quality to them is going to suck hard no matter what.
Step 1 - Downloading the HF client from
www.cga.com.cnScreenshot: http://i40.tinypic.com/169oua0.pngClick on any of the four download links at the right (in the red circle). Your locale needs to be set to Chinese for the HF client to load properly. Use Applocale if needed.
Step 2 - At the login screen, ensure that the black and red circles display the options as shown in the screenshot. These will allow you to use the e-mail login function.
Screenshot: http://i44.tinypic.com/wwdvmg.pngStep 3 - Once logged in, click on the 2nd option in the list on the left (red circle), then in the next list, scroll down and click on the option in the yellow circle (this indicates the room's area). If you scroll down about 6 pages or so in the main list of rooms now, you will see the 12 DotS rooms. DO NOT ENTER ANY OF THEM FIRST.
Screenshot: http://i44.tinypic.com/68d0nn.pngStep 4 - Install the XLacc accelerator. Will write up more about this later on. It's free to use and seems more reliable than Xrush. Download from here -
http://jiasuqi.xunlei.com/Step 11 - Once that's done, you can double-click on any of the DotS rooms displayed in the screenshot in Step 3 to enter them. At this stage, if you've registered your own account, you will be prompted for your nick to use. This nick is permanent and cannot be changed unless you pay a fee! Once you enter, there may be a pop-up asking you to download something. You can safely ignore it - you won't be able to download it anyway. It's the HF platform's Teamspeak-like functionality. Rooms 2 and 9 are the most popular because that's where most of the better players go. Get ready for teamstack here because these two rooms have a large number of teams/groups of friends hosting games and playing together. The Xrush accelerator will take a while to determine the best route from your computer to the server before you can enter the room. If you are using Windows 7, you may see the Xrush accelerator install a dummy network connection. You may need to enable IPv6 for this connection (don't worry about this if you don't get any prompts about it). To start WC3, click on the big button on the lower left.
Screenshot: http://i44.tinypic.com/f4fjhk.pngStep 12 - The first time you try to launch a game, it will prompt you for the path to your WC3 executable. Click on the button in the red circle to search for it. This is NOT "Frozen Throne.exe"! Locate "war3.exe" in your directory instead.
Screenshot: http://i41.tinypic.com/2v9c86c.pngOnce done, head on over to the LAN menu in WC3 and join a game. In case it hasn't been clear from the screenshots, HF is a chinese gaming platform, so expect some linguistic difficulties. While half (or probably more) of the players there are able to read and understand simple english, few will be able to type fast enough to respond to you. As you can imagine, this will be a problem given that they do rely a lot more on communication there, so you might want to indicate at the start that you can't read chinese (some jerks
may kick you, but there're jerks no matter which platform you go to anyway) and keep your eye out for pings on the map. The Korean players who used to play here now have a team there, so you might encounter them there too.