Is paying for a game practically immoral? Almost, as you are supporting sharecropping.

This is an incredibly arrogant point of view. Just because someone doesn't create content for a living doesn't mean that they're not contributing to a project. In private industry, positions that don't add value to a product tend not to exist for very long.

To use your game development example, I'm assuming you're referring to publishers who fund projects that are developed externally. It's tempting to portray publishing firms as oppressive fat cats working poor, oppressed developers to death, but the fact of the matter is that they play an important role in the process. If development houses could bankroll their own projects and shoulder the risks involved in funding a game without involving a publisher, they would. And most publishers contribute a hell of a lot more than money.

Businesspeople are, by and large, not slavers. Even the highly-compensated ones--especially the highly-compensated ones--generate value commensurate with their paychecks. If they didn't, they wouldn't be receiving those checks for very long. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but not having technical skills doesn't preclude one from doing "real work."

(And before you ask, yes, I write code for a living.)

I got a HoN beta key a few months ago and played for a month or two. Based on my impressions, the OP is spot-on in his observations about the community. It's actually most of the reason I don't play anymore.

To put this in context, I led a fairly hardcore WoW raiding guild for a couple of years, and played Magic Online semi-seriously for a while. I have a pretty thick skin. I'm very familiar with the concepts of nerd rage and sexual frustration made manifest over the Internet. It's worse in HoN than anywhere else I've seen it. The game's lack of a proper matchmaking system is partially to blame, but as the OP said, a lot of it does fall on the community.

For people who have never played HoN, it's a very complex game. There are almost a hundred characters to choose from, each with a unique set of stats and abilities. Compounding this, there are dozens of different items that you can purchase over the course of a game, and each character has its own "build order"--what the community considers to be the optimal strategy for playing a given character. Learning this for even a handful of characters is a massive undertaking, but many types of matches don't let you choose which character you'll end up playing, or even restrict the options that much. The rules of the game also very heavily punish a team for having one sub-par member--if your opponents figure out where you're weak and exploit it successfully, the balance of the game will tip very quickly.

The result of all this is that the game heavily rewards people who spend the time to learn it, and by the same token, severely punishes people who haven't invested that level of commitment. Which is great if you think HoN is your life's calling. But for those of us who play casually, well, you can only have your sexual orientation questioned in Portuguese so many times before you decide there are more constructive things you could be doing with your free time.

Long story short: HoN's community is unusually hardcore and unfriendly, and will certainly be an impediment to the game's mainstream adoption if certain issues are not addressed.