Real-time implies action already, and the game doesn't have any strategy — it has tactics. So that term is basically the worst ever.
I find it when a game says says action. Action Adventure, Action Real Time Strategy. Like, yeah, fucking duh. What game doesn't have action? Name one game without action.
Eve Online. Hoo hoo, hee hee. But god damn if I don't love it when some Japanese trailer calls their game a TREE-DEE ACHSHUN GAME.
Maybe genres in video games are just inherently busted conventions.
And, uh, gamers...
I call them ARTS. Action Real Time Strategies. It's no more or less valid than any other term to call the genre, I'm just a fan of the anagram and what those four words communicate.
you're a cunt
Why of course I'll get the ball rolling on talking about that article! I was planning on it, but it's so nice of you to ask. Let's dive in, shall we?
I’d love to hear what you think gives Dota 2 deeper gameplay. It’s certainly not skillshots or mechanical complexity, like being able to respond to opponents’ abilities.
The problem with people who favor LoL over Dota are that they just can't seem to find the right arguments as to why their game has qualities that Dota doesn't, or has those qualities in a better form. They go to things like skillshots, because it's a pretty blunt difference. You can look at something like an arrow you have to aim, and it's pretty black and white about what's going to happen. You can either miss, or you can hit. It's pretty easy to discern the potential for failure there. But then they feel that this implies that just because a lot of skills can be started by clicking on a single unit, it lacks depth.
Let's look at a champion like Kunka for example, because I've just got done playing my first game with him. No skillshots. We have an AoE knock-up with a long windup that can be placed in an area around him, a passive on-hit splash, a move that snaps someone back to position after a certain amount of time or at your beckon, and an AoE stun with a long windup. And here's where I think the problem arises from with people who are on the side of LoL... It's that none of this seems to be too complex. This guy can only look at Pudge's hook and see the potential for complexity. I can't point to a single move in LoL that has the same potential for making a play interesting and worthwhile than Kunka's X Marks the Spot. And even then, it's not that complex of a move! It's just a quirky way of trapping someone beyond just stunning them. But it's those little oddity moves that I feel LoL is really lacking in as we move towards this production of champions with gap closers, shields, attack damage buffs, and etc. Kunka has an incredible kit! He's really fun to play with, and he's a real delight to be seen played well. I can't look at a lot of champions in LoL who have the sort of potential for failure as he does, the potential to just bobble an entire third of your potential moves and just throw out an impotent little splash as every thing you tried to set up got fucked up through no fault but your own. But no, LoL babies can't see complexity unless there's literally a giant arrow pointing them towards it. It's just too absurd for them to consider that there could be more potential for complexity than just dodging.
And I fucking love dodging! Dodging is like my favorite thing in games. Period. But the problem with LoL is that as important as all these things may be, I still feel like everyone has the potential to miss until they hit. It comes from a very large mana pool, low mana costs, and low cooldowns. It's okay to miss your skillshots and then not use the other three moves after that. LoL sort of breeds situations and champions that CAN miss ONE part of their kit and keep going at it try after try. Only when they do get that one move off does the other three moves they have even come into play! Is there too much complexity in someone like Morgana or Blitzcrank? Most of their kit is completely inert until the success of a single move of theirs.
Dota is all about counterplay, way more so than LoL. Sure, there may not be a lot of collision-deniable skillshots, but that’s a very niche case to hang your argument on. A lot of Dota’s heroes are designed to counter other specific heroes, or kinds of heroes.
I want to disagree with this? I'm kind of on the fence about this. One of the things I like about Dota is that I feel like I'm not as tied down by who I am and who I'm going up against. I feel that 99% of the time just playing better is going to cause you to win, and not who you're playing. Obviously you do get situations where an Ursa, or an Anti-Mage, or a Silencer can just eat up a team. I got stomped harder than you can imagine by an Anti-Mage, and I was Skeleton King. I really felt like there was nothing I could do against the guy, but feelings like this are few and far between.
I think it goes back to how out of control gold is in LoL, and how Riot seems proud of the fact that the team with 10% gold at ten minutes wins 90% of the game. While I'm not sure if it's a case of correlation or causation, I still feel like it's a big problem. And I feel like it kind of makes it hard to judge if counterplay is that important in LoL, because ultimately the guy you counter picked might just get fed. You might have done everything right, as you often do, but he just got fed! And you can't make him lose gold, you can't starve him out now! Oh no, he got something like an Infinity Blade at twenty minutes and now your jungle Rammus is going to be shredded even if you gank flawlessly. I think counterplay, like most mechanics in LoL, kind of falls to the wayside when you consider how brutally effective it is to just have a lot of gold.
Other than denying (which, let’s be honest, is kind of a stupid mechanic)
Fucking heresy. What is stupid about being able to strangle the amount of money and experience that your opponent has the potential to get? Denying isn't a thing in LoL, but there are plenty of times where you're trying to make it so that getting a last hit is no longer the safe and sane option for your enemy. There's no denying, but there's ways to menace your opponent so that going for that fifteen gold could spell their doom. Denying is just a way of hammering that home. It's also a way to add some dynamic to laning, which doesn't see as much ability usage as LoL does. It also doubles the amount of creeps you have the potential to interact with, which you can't even argue doesn't make things more interesting. All of a sudden there's so many more ways something as banal as the first wave of creeps can go down.
Yeah, it’s awesome that Dota 2 unlocks all the heroes at once (for free, too, if it ever actually leaves beta), but Dota has to because, like you said earlier, it’s built on hard counters for every hero. Without access to the full roster, game balance would be broken. LoL, on the other hand, is balanced around team compositions—a late-game team, a poke-damage team, an AoE ult team, etc.
This is so absurd. Valve doesn't have to give a level one champion fucking Meepo because they don't give a shit about team comp. They do it because they don't expect a game to become fucking work.
I got so tired of chasing the carrot on the stick. 6300 just seems like a more and more absurd amount of points the more I think about it. I start to rationalize how long it would take me to get a hero that in a season may not even be the hero I bought. It's such a fucking sham that everything has to costs as much as it does. It either forces you to spend real cash or it asks an absolutely absurd time commitment that makes every loss feel like wasted time.
Not to mention the fact that some people would tell me that I'm not supposed to own every champion, which is a really lousy way to look at things.
And you can just fucking bite me Riot, for telling me that those IP nerfs are for the best. Don't lick my cupcake and tell me that the frosting is being scaled off of time spent playing rather than a flat rate.
The Rune and Mastery system adds a ton of depth to stat tweaking and theorycrafting builds at high levels, and the matchmaking system keeps you playing with people around your same level.
The greatest lie ever told. Runes and Masteries don't matter. Here's the red pill, right here, go on and chase that with a glass of water. First of all, if they did matter, if they were absolutely critical to how you performed and played, why can't you see what other players are using? It's just chatter in the background. And it's always so obvious what masteries to use, and there's a tiny pool of good runes to use for each specific character. It's an unsatisfying illusion of choice. You KNOW what masteries to use, you KNOW what runes to use, so why does having it matter? Can't you just lock all these skills into every AD Carry I play? Into all the Supports I play? I know how I want to play them, EVERYONE DOES.
And are their still three tiers to the whole rune thing based on leveling? What a great way to force people to blow all their IP on stuff that they'll perceive as a bonus that will just turn into dust in the wind once they go up ten levels.
You can’t just go look up a good jungle Warwick build, because they all assume you have certain runes and masteries. But I can look up a pro-level jungle Lycan. And while I may fail utterly in the execution, at least that’s my fault, and not some stat deficiency I have to grind my way out of.
Very smart. I wish the guy arguing pushed this point a little harder.
Then you’re, no doubt, also familiar with the fact that it is absolutely ridiculous to expect players to know that if they pull jungle camps far enough away from their spawn points, the game will create a duplicate camp on top of it. Oh, and that you can only do it at the minute mark because that’s when the map checks most jungle camps, and respawns the ones it thinks are dead. Gameplay is balanced around this opaque, archaic design! That is some of the stupidest, most unintuitive, lazy game design I’ve ever seen.
So many buzzwords you'd think we were in an apiary.
Because the jungle in LoL is just perfect the way it is! That's why it's been changed, changed back, changed, un-changed, re-re-changed, and then, new for season three... Jungle changes! Holy shit, I was big into jungling, and when LoL made their jungle babytown frollics for season two I really saw a decline into how much I played.
And now this guy is going to ape on a risky mechanic that requires a lot of foresight, intent, and planning because it's aaaaaaaarchaiiiiiiiiic. Hey, I can't argue with the guy, there's nothing archaic about LoL's jungle, because it's always a new flavor of awful every major patch.
The stronger abilities and items combined with smaller health pools make team fights more interesting. It feels like a high-stakes samurai duel, where one misclick can result in a triple-kill for the enemy team in the space of seconds. I’ve been in too many mid-game brawls in LoL where a couple people die, and the other eight walk away with lowish health to lick their wounds. That’s just not as exciting.
Another pretty good point.
Yeah, that one pretty much comes down to a stylistic preference. I know it sounds silly to try to frame MOBAs in anything resembling reality, but I prefer games where the lethality is a little closer to how an actual such fight would work. Hollywood aside, most sword fights last a couple seconds, then someone gets stabbed. (That’s the only conceivable reason fencing never took off as a spectator sport.) It’s the same argument I make about shooters feeling boring when you can soak up bullets for a half hour.
And then it's like watching a fucking star burn out.
eSports
Fucking derp.
Player
