MOBA's: Fucking Why?

MOBA's: Fucking Why?

I don't get it. I just do not get it. I don't play multiplayer pvp modes in shooters, but i get it. I don't play fighting games, but i get it. I don't play galege, but i get it.

This i do not get the fucking appeal at all. I tried league, newerth, dota, doter 2, smite, paragon and a few others nobody cares about. Its just not fun.

You get into a match and its repetition on a level comparable to low functioning insanity. You go down these set paths, killing the same things to rank up an account and unlock skins. I get its meant to be a power creep thing to get addictive, easily influenced beta personalities but i do not understand where the fun is in this.

I know some of you are DOTA 2 fags in the closet, explain this shit. What on earth is fun about this repetitive nonsense?

With Dota at least the skills are so intense that 1/20 of your games is unlike anything you had before. It's really like playing the lottery.

There was a game where we thought our lineup was fucked because we had no carry. What we didn't realize is we beastmasters attack aura, another attack aura, and warlocks golems was op. Beastmasters aura gives a really huge flat attack speed boost and warlock can summon golems that hit like a truck but attack really slowly (up to 4 if you get the correct items), so what ended up happening is we just all grouped up and used the golems who where attacking so fast the animation looked all akward to win a game we thought we lost.

And a lot of the crazyness in the abilities like

Keep the game fairly interesting, especially when a random playstyle that most people haven't heard of surges in popularity out of nowhere because a random pro decided to do it in a tournament and won. Things like, boots of travel ember spirit being able to press D and instantly be in his base at any time. The pubs usually get turned on their head within a year, unless you're playing with autistic BRs in 2k mmr.

Also dota is distilled autism. There's like 100s if not 1000s of hidden mechanics that, when you pick one up, gives a false sense of progression just because you uncovered some secret. kinda like old fps level secrets. Not to mention you don't really experience the game how it's meant to be played until you're at least 3-4k mmr, which equates to 1000s of hours of gameplay. So most people who play it for 50 hours and think it's just LoL with crazier abilities have no idea what they're talking about.

Do you not feel you are wasting your time that could be better spent in games with more variance?

I haven't played Dota 2 in 2 years or so because after playing the same game for almost 10 years it got kinda boring, but I can explain.
For starters you have a very weird idea of the game. It isn't a power creep, everyone starts every match with the same resources. You don't get an inherent numerical advantage by playing more, you just get better at the game.
Your second weird assumption is that the game is repetitive. It has like 120 heroes to pick from, and most of them can be built in several different ways, with how you level up your skills and what items you buy for them. Some heroes can have different roles. Even without the different skill builds and item builds, 120 different possible choices in a 5v5 game is a lot of variation. This is one of the reasons why I played for so long.
Another reason why I played for so long was that it's a game where you getting better has visible results. The difference between a new player and someone with more experience is huge. If you're good you can carry teams by yourself. A lot of people shit on Dota saying it's a no skill game, this complaint is so baseless, I can't even imagine how someone would reach a conclusion like this.
And the most important reason why I played for so long is because the game is fun as fuck. When you start getting good enough to shit on the other people playing, get great scores, play heroes in unconventional ways and still win, when people cry at you and you call them a faggot, it's really fun. It's the same mentality as any other competitive game.
When you get good at Street Fighter, Starcraft, CS, Quake, King of Fighters, whatever game you want, and you realize you're good, your experience improves in two ways: shitting on the people worse than you, and struggling against the people on your level and better than you. If you've played anything competitive you should know about this feeling, OP.

Like what? Dota is the most varied game I've ever played or seen.

I basically just told you how it can become a completely different game once in a while. Not that 19/20 games are the same. Just that they're typically what you'd expect out of the game, which is true for any game ever, and then it just completely changes. I've yet to see a game that completely changes out of the blue every other game. I mean vid related, I just saw it in the Dota thread someone posted here and have never seen shit like this done before.

user you are moving down one of 3 lanes to kill a maguffin. Every time. I understand there is more complexity to it but you understand there are games that offer more vibrant experiences right?

You don't just play Dota 2 all day do you?

I spent about ten hours a day playing DotA:A in highschool with friends and had a blast

Might want to try getting this thing called a 'friend' OP

so is kicking cans and setting off fireworks in the woods. thats the last bastion of rational before "its fun if you switch your brain off".

I worry for you user.

Not him but no and yes.
No because perfecting yourself in a single game is really fun and rewarding when you start seeing results. This goes for competitive games, obviously, but for single player games too, getting a better score, a better time, grinding that one level to squeeze 500 points more. If you don't know feelings like this then you're a casual, there's no two ways about it.
Also dota on itself is extremely varied so there's that.
And yes because I like to do different stuff too. I fucking love video games. You can actually do different stuff on Dota since the game has enough variance to allow you to just go full retard or do something creative in a match and do something you've never seen before. Sometimes you even win while doing stupid shit, it's great.
And the other thing I did was take a break from Dota to actually play some different games. It's not like I was bound by some contract to just play Dota 2 all day every day.


You're contradicting yourself.
You're saying you understand there's more to the game than what you're reducing it too, but you keep trying to reduce it to something basic and repetitive. It's like you have a weird grudge or something.

Because it's RTS for babbys, none of the skill or strategy, all the fun

I think the popularity of MOBAs can, at least to some extend, be traced back to the growing number of casuals in the gaming scene. Now, I do not want to make the argument that all MOBA players are casuals, but in truth, the team-based nature of the game makes it a lot more appealing for people who play games for their social factor, a thing they have common with the surge in co-op games or games with co-op modes that has occured in the last few years.

In many ways, this is a recurring trend in he gaming community - Pokemon was so successful because everyone fucking played it and you were left out if you didn't. Same with Counterstrike, or whatever Call of Battlefield was popular back then. They all share the fact that they are inherently social, team-based games: Cawadooty and CS are largely multiplayer-based by default, and Pokemon had the entire trading thing going on.

MOBAs are just like that. Playing a moba is not just playing the game, but playing a game with friends. Unless, as in my case, the fucking shit kills the regular lan parties you had with your friends over the years because everyone except for you wants to play MOBAs for the entire evening.


TL/DR: It's the casual's fault, as per usual.

Come on man, theres no need for the victim complex stuff, i know questioning mobas is kicking a hornets nest for some people but the act is repetition that is designed around heavy time investment. Other games lifted the "level your account and incrementally unlock things" artificial busywork and habit forming design nowadays but for a long time that was a moba only design to keep you playing for the sake of playing. Matches can have some variation i am sure but the game is designed for the one goal to be played on repeat - in many games on a single map- for hours per day for years of your life.

Theres no need to be upset and start projecting a boogeyman persona because thats an opinion you dont like, this aint steam.

OP, but Dota only does that for hats, I don't give a shit about hats, I just want to play against other people.
And the matches don't have some variation, they have a lot of variation.
It's OK to don't like a game but you need to stop repeating yourself. I have a shitload of complaints about Dota, the game is far from perfect, but it being a carrot on a stick sort of deal and it being repetitive are seriously not issues with the game.

Let's see if I understood how MOBAS work:
There aren't defined factions but a variable number of characters with common characteristics but different special attacks.
And it should be the bestest thing ever? Sounds like RTS for morons
Also apologies for long text

Well DotA was that thing you played between melee games to relax you newfag

Your same argument can be used for literally any video game ever.

Dota was never supposed to be fun, it was always competetive to the point that you spent the better part of the game being angry.

Fucking hell, Dota was a game within a game. You'd play stuff like Kodo Tag, or Tower Defenses, or Werewolf to relax.

So new it hurts

I bet you don't even know why it was called DotA:A

You can easily use that argument on anything. It's clear at this point you just wanted to bury your head in the sand and reinforce the mob mentality here.


I guess surf maps where always competitive to lol.

Considering "Defense of the Ancients: Allstars" clogged up the better part of the custom games lists, I disagree.

Like you only control a single character in an FPS, or a fighting game.
This is a half truth. There are strategies that allow you to siege by yourself, with team mates, with summons… And if none of those options are viable, and you have to siege with your creeps, then it becomes a matter of timing. This was also a really fun part of Dota for me, organizing your actions, optimizing what you do, and timing things right. People less experienced at the game always shit the bed on this, being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
This is a good thing, every match people start with the same stuff, how well they do depends on how well they play, not how hard they grinded.
Not really true, an important thing to learn when playing dota is strategies to know where your opponent are, and escape strategies from fights in case things go sour. Finding enemies by yourself and dying like that is scrub shit.

Friend, you can minimize any game like this, you can say Dark Souls is a game about walking slowly and rolling until you have a window to stab enemies you find, you can complain about how Tetris rewards reflexes over anything else for the high scores, you can complain how about you die instantly in Quake if you're playing against someone with better reflexes than you, you can complain how in Super Metroid all you do is walk around until you find the next whatever that lets you progress and repeat that a million times.
And of fucking course a Brood War player has more individual skill than a Dota player, because that game is about memorizing builds, counters, and performing a lot of actions per minutes. But Dota rewards working with other people, and you need to be aware of how multiple people are moving and what they are doing at the same time, and can also destroy multiple people by yourself at the same time if you're doing well.


No it wasn't and I don't think I ever got angry at a dota game.

Low entry barrier, catering to everyone with a huge character roster, memes, and sluts. Especially sluts.

Do the mobas fear waifuwatch then?

It's a pretty simple concept and the same as any other multiplayer game OP but i'll try and explain it to you.

Despite the memes on Holla Forums shit like DOTA and LoL are skill based multiplayer games, most of that skill comes from game knowledge and strategy rather than micro or reflexes but it's still a skill based game. A good player will completely demolish a shit player with little effort. You say that each match is the same and in essense it is, you fight your way down lanes and destroy the enemies base but you can say the same thing about any multiplayer game, CTF works the same way every time because you just grab the enemies flag. How each match plays out is where the game exists. I've only played LoL much and it's been a few years since I last played it but i'll try explain how a game usually went in that.

You start the game in the champion select screen and it's here that you take turns picking and banning your characters(called champions in this). Depending on your skill level this will be people randomly picking whatever they want to play or it will be a set of mind games between teams as they try to secure the champions they want while denying the other team power picks and counters. This is also where you have to start working with your team to create a team composition that isn't retarded and can actually excel in something. People often complain that their teamates bitch at them for picking something that isn't "meta" but this is just because most people who play these games are retarded and can't understand how comps or champion interactions work so they try and blindly follow whatever the latest trend is. Most people are usually happy with this and don't like seeing something "non-meta" because it means that their teammate is likely going to be absolute garbage with no idea of how the game works. It doesn't really matter what you pick as long as you know what you are doing and can fit it into a comp, just expect people to bitch at you if you pick something unusual.

Next you get into the actual game and this is where most games tend to go the same way, what do you think happens? Everybody goes to their lanes and spends 5-10 minutes farming minions until something happens right? This is because early game is all about setting up for the late game and most people don't like to take the risk of doing anything unsafe and messing up their power spike so they just farm. I'm mostly going to talk about higher level play now since low level usually consists of people sitting in lane not knowing what to do or suiciding into towers like retards.
The early game (first 10 minutes) is all about farming to get your first major item while disrupting the enemy as much as you can. How you go about this varies greatly on your skill level, the enemies skill level, your teamates skill level, your teamates synergy with you and the champions you have all picked. Let's keep it simple and say you are a bog standard mage in the mid lane with a weak early game, spike mid game and steady peak late game. You consider your likely opponent, buy your first item for lane and decide you are all ready to step off the platform and into the game, now what do you do?
If you answered "I go into lane and sit under tower while I wait for minions" then you are shit and doing nothing for your team. You will first need to consider whether you are needed to leash your jungler and how much help you can give him, can you tank some damage? Can you take the time to give him an extended leash or do you need to cast a single spell and run off? Where do you stand to provide vision while having an escape route so you can see if the enemy invades? Where do you put your wards? Do you ward offensivily or defensivly? How will you play your lane in relation to the two junglers on each team?

Even though this first part of the game often plays out the same way as people play it safe it still has a lot of things to consider that can influence the rest of the game. What i'm trying to get at is that even though the game seems to play the same way everytime there are a lot of things that can change and make it different, especially when playing with people comfortable enough with the game to do something other than play it safe.

I don't want to go into too much detail because the game plays differently early on depending on what role you are playing and where on the map you are. The general flow of early game in a standard 1/1/2 lane match with no lane swaps goes something like this.
The early game will play out like this, if the team is working together than you can get more things happening but the the invidividual roles usually just follow that. Early game mostly revolves around pressure and is dominated by the jungler but it's also important for laners to either make their own plays, punish enemy plays or punish the enemy for not making plays. A simple early kill can result in a free dragon, pillaging of the jungle or destruction of a tower.

Mid game is usually thought to be when most people have their first item or second item and teams start grouping more frequently for heavy pushes. This is where the meat of the game usually is. I need to go walk my dog but i'll write more later if anyone is interested in reading typo filled walls of text written by some MOBA shitter.

CRAPCUNTs are MOBAs

Kill yourself

Who is the audience for these posts? Do you have legitimate autism?

Yes, just like pretty much anything but flipping coins

God forbid someone actually cares about making threads and the board better.

OP asked why people played it and this guy goes and explains how to play it. I see nothing in those walls of text that say why he plays them. Perhaps you two should improve your reading comprehension.

I've always hated them. Even back when it was just a shitty custom map in WC3 I've hated it. I hate how everybody stopped playing regular fucking RTS skirmishes so they could play their shitty modded minigames instead, and it kept happening.


I don't play RTS with other people anymore, because other people don't play RTS.

remember the time when wc3=dota?
it took so long to find a match, and when I did want to play a custom map, you had to scroll past sooo many dota games before you could find one that wasn't.

They're fucking crack addicts.

95% of their playtime is misery and anger, but they live for that 5% that brings them elation.

But of course

This

These posts make me glad I hopped off the MOBA train back in 2009.

What a waste of a life.

i think that's accurate.

i remember a time when I was playing boots first juggernaut like the true shitter I am. Was raping this lane hard, then my spidy senses started tingling coz I played this game too much and just backed off, whole enemy team shows up, I am already gone to buy my broken items. They accuse me of maphax then I end the game by right clicking on them.

Not long after, I realised each game I was wasting 20min-1hour of my life and quit.

LoL used to be fun during season 2, because you were allowed to experiment with a lot of things - team comps, items, strategies, masteries etc.
now if you dare go 1 step away from the meta, everyone will shit on you, you'll be banned, you'll be disowned by your family, you'll lose your job, and you'll eventually kill yourself for daring to play taric top/jungle
i'm still mad for what they did to him and his model/artwork. the shield of valoran doesn't have a fucking shield

If you're asking why they're popular/successful, it's because team games got a resurgence in the new modern casual game design. They're always designed in such a way that the actual impact players have is minimal, but it feels like players have strong impact. This is usually achieved by slapping some strong abilities (ultimates) onto the game with limited usage. This is painfully obvious in Overwatch where you're playing an fps, until people fill up their ultimate bar and suddenly its a shitfest of throwing ultimates against ultimates against ultimates. I'm sure that at competitively level, people can actually strategically use these abilities. But in pubs everybody just tosses their ult and prays for the best. It randomizes victory in many cases for pubs, and having the occasionally victory because your ultimate just so happened to be optimal in that case makes casuals feel good about themselves.

The strategy games (Dota/LoL/HoN/Smite/Demigod/Etc.) who have this game design mostly got popular for two reasons:
1. They were the first games to actually sport this kind of design.
2. DotA actually has a high level of complexity, showing off that the genre is actual capable of being interesting whilst at the same time giving good players the option to easily improve by simply analyzing mechanics and discovering counters.

Some of the games have also plenty of complexity hidden in the exact way mechanics interact with each other. This complexity can make the game interesting to play, since some analytical abilities and logical reasoning allows you to use the mechanics towards your advantage on edge cases, giving you that little bit of leverage that lets you win some fights, possibly tilting the game in your favor. This is what attracts many people to get good at DotA, as there's just so many ways you can improve, and we all know that getting better at games is the non-cancer version of skinner box.

...

That's the worst part about league, because at the very least dota 2 will allow for you to do some really crazy shit that at some level might be legitimately viable, but that fucking game is so proud of its extremely rigid metagame to the point that not only are champions being redesigned to fit a very specific metagame, the devs are actively enforcing said meta. So you feel like trying this somewhat unique strat or team comp that isn't precisely optimal but looks kinda fun and creative? Well you can go fuck yourself friendo, you follow this rail or you loose without recourse.

i still remember the pic where someone picked random in ranked, and his teammate turned out to be a dev or whatever, so he got banned right off the bat
honestly, if we could just get an earlier version of the game and a different server to play it on, i'd be happy

ASSFAGGOTS are all garbage regardless of the game.
The community thats drawn to the mechanics at play are complete fucking garbage.


These game are all about the metagame and its exploitation while giving you the feeling that its skill based.
Thats why they are trash


Hi stupid

Dont lie to yourself

i had fun with it in season 1-3
it's the absolute need for everyone to treat it as some holy sport that ruins it

As much as underage faggots like to be contrarian, if you don't understand MOBAs you don't understand competitive and/or PVP games at all.

They are hardly more repetitive than first person shooters or fighting games. Quite the opposite.

Quit using manufactured terms like MOBA, faggot

...

Yeah but how you go about doing those things is different each game

Its already ruined from the get go

I understand that feel, OP.

MOBAs and isometric games in general just don't do it for me and I've tired so hard because all my friends love the shit out of these games and they're obviously highly popular, if not among the most popular but no matter how many times I try to get into shit like DOTA or league I just can't do it.

Isn't understanding a game and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage a skill?
I do agree that balancing the game around metagaming is pretty silly, but that seems more of a "game doesn't explain the player how to play" kind of issue.

In my experience its people screaming to pick the one character they play or they ragequit at the pick screen and do the same thing and refuse to leave that comfort zone.

...

Theres that word again
>>>/cuckchan/

CRAPCUNTS
CRAPCUNTS
CRAPCUNTS
CRAPCUNTS


I didnt think this thread could get more cancerous but it did


I dont think so

I can do this too. I don't even fucking like MOBAs but out of all the "competitive" genres they are far from the most monotone.

...

I have a funny one from the new champ select:

Wanna play WC3, user?

maybe youre not having fun because youre playing to unlock cosmetics. good lord, you must really hate the games if thats the closest thing to appeal it has for you.

well, back when i would play them i had fun trying to get silly strategies to work or figuring out how to salvage bad situations. learning the ins and outs of the games is what would keep me playing, after i learned everything there is to learn (or so id like to think) and my mind starts processing numbers instead of concepts it loses its charm though. because as you know the gameplay itself can often lack variety when youre just controlling one unit in an rts engine, it mostly comes down to a game of positioning. at that point the last fun thing to do is make the enemy uncomfortable in some way, by playing some rare gimmick or a character who fucks with positioning usually with a hook that a lot of people just cant handle.

You're still using terms wrong, especially when none of the games OP listed fit the "CRAPCUNTS" forced meme

The whole skin unlocking and account ranks is irrelevant unless it affects gameplay. What matters is the gameplay itself. Now the reason why the gameplay attractive to some people is extremely simple: it's a team based game that isn't too repetitive (at least in design, in practice you usually only see the same 20 something heroes at the high end). While the skill ceiling is quite low for almost every hero, the real meat and potatoes of the gameplay is focused around the team based combat that I mentioned above. Playing with people who are as skilled as you are against a team of players who is also as skilled as you are in a game where decision making is kind is great.

Unfortunately, those kind of even games are exceedingly rare even at the top of the elo ladder. You'll have one of those amazing games maybe 1 out of every 500 games or so. Rest of your time will be spent dealing with brooding manchildren who will shift blame, skill discrepancies between players or teams, drama, tantrums, stat whoring, raging, etc. Those rare sublime games aren't really worth dealing with people who have the maturity of 12 years old kids.

As far as why it got popular: it's fun and easy to play casually. Playing perfectly takes a lot of time, practice and knowledge. So there's always room for growth for new and casual players, which keeps them coming back for more and makes them bring their friends along. Also amazing marketing on LoL's part. As much as I fucking loathe that company and that game, I always give credit where it is due and Riot has one of the best marketing teams in the gaming industry.

Stay asshurt faggot, your tears don't change the fact that MOBAs are far from the most monotone competitive genre.

Is Future Cop LAPD Battlegrounds mode a MOBA then?

It also doesn't hurt that they put out "balance" patches constantly, so that the metagame shifts every month (or even every week) and you basically have to keep playing to keep up with what's good and what isn't. Even without the consideration of adding in new heroes, any doto will have a wholly different metagame after a year.

Compare that to something like an arena shooter, or hell, even tacticool shit like BF or CoD, where the rules stay pretty much the same for the entire lifespan of the game. Doom multiplayer today is the same as Doom multiplayer back in the 90's (barring mods, of course, but I'm talking unmodded core gameplay here).

That's the main thing I don't get with dotos, is why anyone can justify continuing to play when their favorite character could be nerfed out of being effective in any given week. I suppose you can always have a favorite few to mitigate that, but as anyone who's played these games can tell you, picking even a slightly suboptimal choice will get you chewed out. Not to get down on the competitive mindset (because that's what games are, competitions), but I feel like with dotos, more people play the metagame than the game, and I personally don't see that as fun, just autistic.

Just my two cents.

life ain't worth living man.

It has the ""fun-factor"" of rts and rpgs with less drawbacks related to individual skill(and more autism)

I honestly never found them to be that fun and even the ones that claim to be innovative get old pretty fast(hots,paragon).
Back in wc3 pudge wars,footman frenzy etc were far more entertaing as for retarded custom maps go.
Mad props to blizzard for finding a way to bring fps and moba even lower and making a ton of cash by doing so.People deserve being assraped


While massing hunts and tower rushing was incredibly fun,wasn't it?Go drown in sea of piss and shit

Same reason you fags play RPGs

You have no life

Gee, where have I heard that before?

what are you even here for?

That's a very good way of looking at it. Here's a good example of this from HoN. A while back a new hero was released named Kane. Kane was supposed to be a counter carry and a solid ganker/initiator and a strong mid hero. His skill set was a short range, high dmg drag back + snare ability // passive that rapidly regens health or mana when not taking dmg for a few seconds // passive that steals damage from heroes and towers, up to 80% or something // his ult was a 45ish second cooldown skill that forced the target to attack Kane. Get passive that steals dmg > ult someone > steal all their dmg > kill them. Now here's the thing: Kane has amazing survivability, he does great dmg, he has great CC, great utility, doesn't require gear to perform although a PK (HoN's dagger/blink) is great. You know what role these credentials lets him perform? Support for ranged carries. After playing him a few times I realized just how much potential this hero had in a support role and started playing him as such. And EVERYONE I played with - mind you I was in the high 1800s/low 1900s which is ridiculously high for a solo support/suicide player - thought I was an idiot for picking Kane as a support and instantly kept trash talking me. But hey 5 minutes into the game they realize the enemy suicide is still lvl 1 and out of consumables, the carry's been able to free farm, I've ganked mid a couple of times, the map's warded, I have my boots and holy shit! Kane support actually is amazing.

Not meta, but holy shit how is a suicide supposed to fight against that monster? The guy's a mid monster and you're sending him to beat up suicides except there's a carry to feed on the kills he sets up. He's incredibly hard to kill and his presence doesn't fall off at any point in the game, even in ultra late game. Not only that, if the game goes on long enough he forces the enemy carry to get a Linken's (the block 1 spell / 20 second item) and forces the enemy support(s) to get the cyclone item. And he still kicks ass regardless of that. Oh ya, and if he happens to catch an enemy physical dmg carry alone, he can 1v1 pretty much all of them. As a support. Against a fully equipped carry. But it wasn't not meta so everyone bitched and moaned and cried about it every time, and every time I showed them how awesome it was but until the time I quit, support Kane had never caught on because none of the pros had made it "the meta".

I love how OP asks a question, gets proper answers but then completely decides to ignore the answers and just sticks to believing his preconceived and misinformed opinions about mobas being about some sort of account grind. It's almost like he didn't actually want to discuss anything and just wanted to shitpost. Who would've guessed.

t. ASSFAGGOTS player

I play shooters, afps, rts and mobas amoung other games. Dota 2 gives me the most sheer variety of things out of all of them baring EVE (EvE of course being the closest thing to stepping outside and trying to pretend you have a life). 112 heroes with 4-6 skills and abilities all with different interactions. 78 items with again interactions beyond just more stats and the challenge of dealing with 9 strangers each match. The only multiplayer game with more crunch interactions stuff than this is Guild wars, which is mostly dead. Because of this working around these feels engaging. Yes farming a creepwave is walking up and right clicking a shitty monsterman. But at the same time it's a timing game with me judging how much health it has, how much damage I do and when my opening to click it is on the fly. In addition to this I have to deal with the lane equilibrium, my positioning, my team mates and my opponents positioning. I also have to keep in mind what items I'm looking to get, what time I need to have them by, where I go after that and what I try to do. All of which changes depending on what my team-mates and the other team are doing. then there are the other roles such as supports, gankers, initiators, pushers which all have their own niches and nuances. And that's just in the early game, once items are got or towers are destroyed the whole map, with all it's maze of trees, pathways and objectives opens up and it's no longer just 3 lanes.
The part where it all falls apart is this is a team game, and people dont play in teams. Doing that requires having friends who are also dedicated to it and organising. as a result people make do with 9 random fuckheads from the internet. Imagine if you had a football game where both teams were picked out of random crowd members. It would fucking suck wouldn't it? When you play with a team against an equally matched team it is a tense and interesting game. The trouble is it often isnt and matchmaking is an attempt at creating those games out of the sea of chaos. Sometimes it works and you get the most fun in gaming outside of setting up a stealth infiltration of a wormhole, dropping a surprise siege on the owners 2 weeks later and evicting them and burning everything they spent 6 months building, other times it's a fucking shitfest that will make you want to hang yourself. But until I can get the former from another game I will keep playing this.

A lot where the games direction went to shit. But this is especially the case in League because the developers changed and so did their design philosophies. It was Riot Lyte that brought in the whole passive aggressive mentality of the playerbase where you are somehow supposed to have your mandated fun and god help if something prevents that. I kinda wish I could have tried League and HoN back in the day as well as WC3 Dota.

Not really. I played some matches of dota to understand and see what it was about and decided that it wasn't for me and it didn't hold my interest for very long. I just like to actually make an opinion myself instead of making shit up based on nothing or parrot the opinions around me.

too bad they nerfed techies and made the game LoL v2 with all the ez mode changes

DOTA 2 is the only alive moba that doesn't have character grinding, since all the gameplay stuff is available outright.

Sadly it still sucks. I have 1000 hours in the game and I can tell you it stops being fun once you realize valve is only catering to players who want the game to be easier. Every game is a 50 minute coin flip with who has fewer feeders. The game would be fun if it wasn't 50 minutes and was more like 20 (the only thing that HotS got right)

No you dont
You play 7K hours of ASSFAGGOTS and Goons In Space.


Sure you do

Ran my casual ass to Heroes of the Storm and now I don't shit up DOTA2 matches anymore. It's just a great big ball of rage and teamfights that ends quick..and that's about all I can ask for for ENFORCED MULTIPLAYER ACTIVITIES that aren't Monster Hunter in the MOBA bubble. Wouldn't bother playing it if they weren't giving away super expensive heroes due to the game's imminent death though lmao

This thread is pure fucking cancer

I really don't know, Op. I'd asked myself the same question about Counter Strike many times.

Techies needs a little bit of a buff from where they put him but he did more or less instantly bankrupt supports the second he gets picked. He's still usable but people wont pick him because nobody want's to play 4v5 for 80 minute game.

Not going to deny that I put 3000 hours in dota over the last 3 years. I have however been playing just about everything else for about 20 years including bulk quake 3 and UT 99/2k4, CSS/GO surf, and 4k hours in Guildwars. At the moment I've been trying to get into Reflex and doing the odd game of FAF but reflex is a cunt due to the small playerbase of ex CPMA monsters.
The biggest issue is none of my friends IRL are willing to touch ANY of those save dota (and even now most of them bitch and scream that dota 2 is too hard and want to play HoTS instead).

I played DotA at release. And by release I mean the first day Eul released the first version on bnet
and the first thing I thought of was that DotA was like Aeon of Strife, except good. It was completely new and it was great. Of course the gameplay was way worse than the best of All-Stars or HoN gameplay, but it was a bright new shiny game, not just a custom map. And I played the fuck out of it. Game went to shit when Guinsoo took it over but after Icefrog started getting shit done, the game got kinda fun again.

HoN was a different beast. The game has always wavered being fucking amazing and being bad because of the retardedly OP heroes S2 kept introducing and not nerfing for ages. I still remember Monkey King dominating for over a year before they balanced him to be really strong instead of a fucking god. Bunch of other heroes were released in completely broken states too and had to be nerfed into oblivion to have a semblance of balance. But the devs did great things with the overall balance, gameplay and meta which usually were years ahead of DotA/DotA2 (at least until DotA copy pasted the HoN changes).

Everytime
I'm lucky enough to have IRL friends who play Mount & Blade and Company of Heroes, but I also have internet buddies who play PR and Quake Live.
Everyone I know, friends or otherwise plays ASSFAGGOTS, I dont play with them.
And whenever the first guys want to play ASSFAGGOTS I just fuckoff and go play a singleplayer game.

Your shit excuse is worthless, you just want to socialize while having that garbage on the background.

the MOBA is a brilliant design in terms of the addictiveness and skinner box potential. I played early LoL back in 2010 or 2011 and it gave me more severe tetris effect with less time played than any other game. Affected dreams, pre-sleep hallucinations, closed eye visuals with just a few games played that night.

They're shit, but they are arguably the most potent form of skinner box entertainment there is.

I dropped 1500 hrs in DOTA2 and there needs to be a framework of repitition for the minor differences of each match to stand out like they do. Really it's just a complex setting for competition. I play a lot of competitive online games and when you play at least at an intermediate level it becomes pretty fun, there's the potential for high levels of team synergy and group success. mobas that reduce the complexity reduce the payout in success as you improve. This level of complexity can only hang on repitition.

That said I'll never fucking touch a moba again, I've gone back to my one true love of online FPS where even if we lose a match I don't feel that I've wasted an hour.

is it Overwatch?

I haven't played dota 2 in over 2 years and I vowed to never play it again, but back when I played it I would play 3-5 matches a day, almost every day of the week, for like a year and a half.
I can guarantee you that not two matches went the same.
The amount of variables is so high that even with the same lineups you will not get two equal matches, ever.

I see the term MOBA triggers people more than ASSFAGGOTS and CRAPCUNTS which are unfunny forced memes at this point.

They have an illusion of depth, when really victory is achieved through very defined strategies. Once you look up a strat for how to cheese the game you've learned all you need to. People play them because to outside observers MOBAs seem complex and they like looking as though they are playing a game that requires intelligent thinking.

I shit you not. Tried that game for a while but everything feels off about it. It's like it has all these neat gamplay ideas but then they spread them out thin over 20 classes, throw in massive ults and force people to play random maps and modes. It just doesn't sit right. UT4 is much more fun to play it's just a pain in the ass to get players to come out other than specific times so you just end up with the bots.

how the hell do people put so much time into this shit

I don't get it either, to me, strategy games are 10x better, specifically AOE 2.

I'm not sure what there is to not understand, I'm not really seeing the factor that sets it apart from other multiplayer games to you.

The appeal is in the fact that it's all the thrill of a grindy MMO and building your character and seeing yourself get stronger, except it's all rolled into a contained ~40 minute run and you get to start fresh every time to try new things and do it better. The fact that you're playing against people who also started from level 1 at the same time adds a thrill of speed here, if you can power yourself up faster and more efficiently you become the strongest thing in the match.

Any game is boring and pointless when you minimize its mechanics this much. I can see this applying to LoL somewhat since the laning and team comp is so formulaic and the lane phase lasts so long, but in general that part of the game is a lot of decision making and zoning and resource control with planned out kill attempts.


I have a pretty good amount of experience with FPS, fighting games, and RTS.
Dota has more variance than any other multiplayer game I've ever played.

OP made the thread just for confirmation bias and ego stroking, expecting 300 replies of "yeah it's so stupid ecs dee"
Instead, he got a thread full of people actually talking about the game and now his head hurts.

Please, you glorious faggots, don't ever stop having regular arguments to defend your point of view, even if it's not a popular one. Personnaly, I think Big Rigs can be more fun than Dota 2, but I'm happy to see the games I don't like discussed too, especially in such a civil manner.

I had a friend once, great fan of DOTA allstars and another friend of mine trying to convince him to play World of Warcraft with him. His answer was always "Why bother with that shit? It looks like a Dota match, but it takes 3 months, WTF"

If it's due to the number of heroes and mechanics, wouldn't Smite trump Dota2 though? It has a massive amount of Gods now and a good amount of gameplay mechanics that affect the game as well, while it feels faster than Dota, looks better and plays better.

From my limited experience with DOTA, most characters will end up building the same thing anyway or they deviate too far from the meta to be properly usefull and some of your items are mandatory depending on your oposition. I honestly wouldn't actually use their items as a way to create varied gameplay.
Unless you're talking just fucking around where there are a lot of fun things like that polymorph staff or the dagger to teleport yourself.

MOBAs should never have a competitive scene and should have remained a party game. Prove me wrong.

The same can be said of chess.


You really can't use that argument on anything. The objective stays the same and the means to achieve it are the same as well. The variance in heroes and classes is nice, but given the RTS format and the actual lack of mechanics, it's not really varied at all.
Of course, among all MOBAs, Dota 2 is by far the best I have ever seen, but among all games, it ranks extremely low regardless.

Dota has three positive qualities and I haven't found a game that does all three of them better. These would be the amount of variety between and within games, the tight balance of the heroes/items, and the usage of teamwork. There are certainly games that do those individual elements better than Dota does, but I haven't found anything that does all three better.

That's not to say that I think Dota is remotely perfect, however. The core gameplay is shit (leave that RTS shit for the RTSs), the RNG is shit, and obviously the community is shit. If you can stomach those (and the crazy learning curve) then it can be incredibly fun (provided you play with a group of non-faggots), and if you can't tolerate its bullshit then maybe Dota just isn't for you. And just because a game isn't for you doesn't mean it's shit, everyone has different taste.

its art style is gorgeous and Valve deserves to be commended for the distinct hero designs but they should be shot for allowing retarded community cosmetics to fuck everything up.


I'd be pretty surprised if you can name a multiplayer game that actually has more variance


Sure, but it's more fun with friends than many other activities

Are you implying that chess isn't a good game?


Having more numbers doesn't mean more variety, there are 18 quintillion planets in No Man's Sky but you'll find more variety in the one square mile that makes up Lordran. The trouble with Dotaclones is that they fail to make each of their heroes as distinct as those in Dota because they don't balance with the same philosophy that Icefrog does. According to him, if everything is overpowered, then nothing is overpowered. You have a hero in Dota that can lock an entire team down for 12 seconds and you have heroes that can nuke people from full health to none in less than one. The fact that at any given time, ~90% of these heroes are seen in competitive games is absolutely insane. Dota is not a balanced game compared to something like chess, but it's far more balanced than its competition and each of its heroes/items are far more exaggerated as well which makes them feel quite distinct.

wtf i don't come here for real discourse

Why do people like MOBAs/ASSFAGs/Dotalikes/what-fucking-ever?

Go ask someone who plays the game.

I only really enjoy it with friends so I can dick around with builds like Machinegun Lulu and play Normals, even if watching people freak out in Ranked is hilarious.


He stopped being the Shield of Valoran when he stopped being a shitty Diablo 2 joke.

==THE== Single best reply in here.

Assuming an even split of 10 games, 5 wins, 5 losses, you will be responsible for winning 1 of those games and losing 1 of those games. The average person will interpret this as 4/10 games being won thanks to something they did and 5/10 games being lost because of their shitty team. In ASSFAGGOTS you can place the blame on other people.

The ability to be good at the game is like, 70% knowledge and 30% skill. There's a 100 people with usually 4 abilities and about as many items and you need to know how all of the abilities and items function and interact and which are the best to have in what circumstance and on who. And then added to that is you need to know timing on how to last hit/deny, positioning, laning, jungling (when relevant), when to push, when and how to gank or escape ganks etc etc. The skill of the game is mostly reaction speed, and occasionally controlling 2 or 3 units. So the outcome of the games usually boils down to judgment calls and who you picked at the start of the game rather than some sort of major outplaying. Not even a joke, any half-way decent player can get to a decent rank in any of these games just by brute forcing it; playing 8 hours a day like an autist, and most bad people can do this as well because majority of the time the result will be out of their control.
Now Dota players usually get their panties in a twist when I say that, so lemme explain. A top-tier player who has all the reaction speed, knowledge and judgment necessary to reach the pro ranks will typically be the reason their team does well, but when you put two pro teams next to each other no player shines through as 'that one really good player'. You don't have a David Beckham or even Flash in ASSFAGGOTS. The closest is that 'Faker' chap and as far as I can tell come the finals he doesn't shine all that much more through than the other players.

Of course not. It's inferior to some games, but it's still quite good on its own. Still, the 'variety' of MOBAs are quite pathetic, considering all of the advantages it has. Dota 2 does have some interesting things compared to its competitors, but it's not really enough.

Thank god the bots are actually good though, I still can't hold my own against some of the higher difficulties and they do a great job of making the bots feel believable. You can fuck with them just like real people by dodging side to side or making them assume you've gone one direction while out of sight when you really went another. I just wish they'd coordinate in CTF more but CTF is casual mode anyways, at least in comparison to 1v1 DM which they are pretty competent at.


Okay genius what's a good arena shooter that is not like Quake? You run around in an arena for 10 minutes picking things up and shooting the other dude. There's nothing wrong with this because the processes involved here are interesting even though the core thing you're doing doesn't change.


You don't have standout individual players they are nothing without their team. If a carry is doing insanely well in a game it's because of the combined efforts of everyone, it's because of the carry's efficiency in farming and death avoidance, it's in how well the supports babysit the carry and intelligently ward to defend them, it's because of how effectively gankers keep the enemy under control, and it's because of how effectively everyone functioned in teamfights to allow the carry to get that advantage. You're correct that there aren't standout players within teams but there are certainly standout teams. At any given point, there is usually one team that is placing decisively better in tournaments than everyone else because each of their players are individually skilled and they have better communication than everyone else.

It's not, it's due to the amount of variety and interaction between the mechanics it has.

Smite follows the same general design philosophy as LoL, with cookie cutter character archetypes made to play in specific strict roles. The abilities are also comparatively low-impact and focus more on unique player-side feel rather than unique and significant impact/synergy on the game side past the input layer.

I don't think the game even has more content numerically to begin with, but either way it's a much more simplistic game. It has nothing to do with quantity.

Well early on before the communities gave a shit about strict metas, everything was a lot more chaotic. MOBA's could be fun again if they got rid of the 20 minutes of farming and just made the games about fighting other players with gold farming being a side objective. Unfortunately, they care too much about esports to make competitive games fun.

The most fun moba I've played is dead now. It's the Dead Island moba.

I've only seen this happen in LoL and LoL clones. Even in professional play, Dota's "metas" are very high level and there's still a ton of chaotic variety game to game. There's nothing even close to LoL's 1/1/2/jung garbage

...

I haven't played Dota, so I wouldn't know. I just know LoL is completely sterile. They even took out game modes and the random spectate to make sure you are only doing what they want you to do.

Please don't use your experience with only the shittiest game in a genre to blindly describe the entire genre then
Thanks

That's because there are not enough mechanics or depth of mechanics that a player can meaningfully practice at to become noticeably better than other pros. There are people statistically best in the world, but when watching them perform alongside a team of 5 against a team of 5 they don't stand out. Meanwhile, someone like Flash or Beckham… (in their mutual primes)

LoL wasn't the only one I played, faggot. I outright stated that.

Unless the other one was HoN, it's a LoL clone.

Ya know, MOBAs actually sound breddy fun, but it's the fucking community and the "competitive gamer" shit that turns me off. Even in CS you can enter a pub and they'll tolerate you, because either you contribute to the team or you get popped off 3 seconds in. But in MOBAs it feels like you have to put hundreds of hours learning every damn character, every move set, every little technique against a computer. Only then can you join a live game, but even then you still have russians or chavs yelling at you through over saturated microphones for not buying some item 1 level ago. The skill gap is just so high it feels like I need to take on the game as a second job just to be competent at it. I'd play WoW 30 hours a week because it was fun, not because I felt some obligation.

I see mobas as mainly an excuse for normalfags to act like cunts to each other. They love it.

There's more to DOTA than that at least but it shares the same community as other MOBAs anyway, just bumped up an age bracket. Senseless, tightly-strung assholes who'd never touch a game that didn't utilize voice chat as projecting their asshole voice across the net is the main attraction.

The funny thing is, it takes zero skill to play MOBAs. Also
You don't belong here.

MOBAs are basically sports games. Every game has the same objective, layout and equipment, you have limited options and are expected to practice and practice to perfect your own skills within that setting.

They're football for people who don't want to go outside.

...

turns out threads like these are never actually made with the intent to get sincere answers

That's more or less what Overthrow is.

are custom mods in dota2? they said something few years ago

no its this

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Every single MOBA game is repetitive trash that has the most immature & retarded playerbase of all game categories.
Its mostly just these underage kids comparing their elo and competing about bragging rights among their other casual friends.