Introduction to MOBAs
- Thread starter SteveWinwood
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But I want to get back into Dota, not Hoots.
HotS is getting a Techies hero?
I was curious about one thing about Abathur: Is it rare for him to actually die in a match?
The closest thing in Dota he compares to is make Tinker or Nature's Prophet.
HotS PAX panel says they want more maps. Scary. It's bad enough that you can get thrown into any map queuing up, and you only find out what it is after you pick your hero.
He will inherently die less than other heroes because he doesn't have to put himself at risk very often. I don't know what effect this has on experience gains for the enemy team, but when I played him I didn't die at all. He can burrow to anywhere on the map to try and sneak objectives, but that only works if enemies aren't around. Those seem like they'd really be the only instances where he would die.
SteveWinwood
Member
I want an all mid with 10 abathurs.
This just sounds like a disaster. A train wreck you can't look away from.
I've seen bad players take him into firefights. He melts pretty quickly.
Pureauthor
Member
If they have more maps, shouldn't they give you options for which maps you want to queue into?
What if I told you that you also don't even know which heroes your allies picked until the match loaded up?
I don't think they'd do that. Players would probably gravitate too much to one specific map.
SteveWinwood
Member
If they're anything like the current ones there really isn't a point. It's all just different versions of here's a big push. You want a golem or a giant dragon knight tm original content to just shit on towers go collect objectives. Or a cannon that will just... destroy towers... go collect objectives.
Why couldn't they have something that gave you a defensive advantage, Could be interesting if they're seiging you to try and sneak out to get 30 seconds of building immunity or something.
Or a team fight advantage, that admittedly would probably just turn into more push but indirectly at least.
It's just so samey. Maybe that's how they keep the games short with everything just push push push.
BeekleMatter
Member
Here is some candid feedback on our (Hi-Rez Studios) history and thoughts around the future of Smite:
Some players will look at the HiRez history of game development and arrive at misinformed conclusions, so here are more facts to help everyone understand us and the game development/publishing world. Some of the following was already posted in a post several months ago but people were nice enough to downvote it into the negative zone.
The first and most important thing to note is that MOST games fail (remember that most people tend to remember the ones that did well), SOME games break even, and a tiny number of games are very successful. Thats the nature of the gaming industry. So for every WoW, LoL, CoD, and TF2 there are hundreds of games that are dead.
Global Agenda was our first game and it lost a lot of money. It was not a total loss since we did build significant technology and platforms that would help us develop our next games (Tribes & Smite). We continued to fund Global Agenda for more than a year after it was released and losing money, we continued to create content and new features but no matter how much work we did the user base kept declining.
We created Tribes Ascend since we love Tribes, we made it F2P so everyone can have easy access to it. We didnt think Tribes Ascend would be a financial windfall but it was worth a risk to try. Tribes Ascend ended up being break-even at best. Its very possible we made some mistakes in how we monetize it, but our priority was to get as many people to play as possible (without losing too much money in the process). Tribes received exceptional reviews, we kept adding new features and content, but just like Global Agenda the user base kept declining no matter what we did. (That happens to 99% of the games) Some people have asked for us to provide more tools for community content creation, but our infrastructure and development platform does not support that ability well and the cost and time to develop those features is extremely high. Contrary to the belief that we were milking tribes to support the development of Smite, if we didnt develop another game that could support the studios the company and the Tribe servers would have closed down. Tribes was also reviewed by outside publishers for both console port potential and other regions like China, the evaluations we received from numerous potential publishers was that it was too niche and difficult as a mainstream product (their words, not ours) and they were not interested in publishing it. We would have had to significantly change the game-play which our current Tribes user base would disagree with (for example; much much slower movement, reduce or no skiing, instant fire, etc)
How much did it cost to do the above? At that point I personally funded all the game development with over $30 million of funding (losses) and generated about $10 million in revenue (split fairly evenly between GA and Tribes) so overall we spend about $40 million running the company vs $10 million in revenue. Yes, my wife thinks Im crazy, but what does she know about playing and making video games
Smite is very unusual.
Smite is one of those rare games thats actually growing every month, and is also profitable. This is allowing us to grow the Smite team and deliver weekly updates and content (from 15 people initially to about 80 people now). In addition, many outside publishers were interested in Smite and we are fortunate enough to have made a deal with Tencent who is the most prestigious partner we can have for our type of game.
Given everything we know Smite should have a long and successful future which is why we are very excited as a company and continue to work our butts off to make Smite the best Moba game in the world.
Erez
http://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/commen...do_with_smite/
I don't know it looks promising.
i think the smite model is okay
map of the week + win of the days for each map
infact, dont blizzard do this basically with their WoW BGs?
can you imagine them doing that in an actual moba with real lanes and metas?
yep, thats strife matchmaking.
ive had this rant
i wish blizzard would just bow out of the moba race and go for party battle fun
Pureauthor
Member
Whoa. Props to that dude for personally funding his games, I guess.
defense isn't fun duh, orphans cry whenever you fortify in dota--it's a fact
YUP
Imperfected
Member
I feel like HotS is conceptually a poor project for Blizzard. Their entire raison d'etre is taking extremely complicated, hard-to-approach genres (RPGs, strategy games, MMOs, etc.) and boiling them down to a simplified, more accessible genre that a wider audience can play and enjoy in smaller, punchier increments.
The problem is that people have already done that to MOBAs. That's what MOBAs are, basically: they are to RTS what Diablo was to old school RPGs. There really doesn't seem to be enough of the experience left to streamline to give it that "Blizzard Touch", which puts them in a D2->D3 situation where they're trying to trim the fat on an already svelte figure and end up carving off important bits in the process.
Who knows, though, maybe they'll stumble onto an iteration that legitimately adds something to the formula before release.
The problem is that people have already done that to MOBAs. That's what MOBAs are, basically: they are to RTS what Diablo was to old school RPGs. There really doesn't seem to be enough of the experience left to streamline to give it that "Blizzard Touch", which puts them in a D2->D3 situation where they're trying to trim the fat on an already svelte figure and end up carving off important bits in the process.
Who knows, though, maybe they'll stumble onto an iteration that legitimately adds something to the formula before release.
Remove some roles on maps (mid/jungler) and remove gold and items. I'd say that's simplified quite a bit already. EXP is shared by your team so everyone can always do something!
The team leveling has to go. While I can see they want to help new players along by raising them along with the rest, it's not going to encourage them to play any better for one thing, and if their team is losing, they're going to rightly feel they can't do anything about it. Instead of the team level, they should focus on comeback mechanics that let the team that's behind have the chance to catch up, and make sure that new players have something to do that's not direct hero to hero combat, which is always going to be the hardest part of the game.
Not exactly. MOBAs have a very different kind of depth than RTS, owing to its team-based nature and larger pool of "units". MOBAs might have been borne out of the RTS genre, but the only things they really share are control schemes (which are malleable, as Smite has shown) and resource control (which many, many games have).
That said, you're right in that "streamlining" isn't really necessary in the field of MOBAs because League already did it to great success. At this point, Blizzard is streamlining the streamlining, like if they tried to make a game even more accessible than WoW. It's... a bit redundant to say the least, and there's such a thing as "too streamlined", which you can see from the way HOTS' "simple" mechanics are actually making the game more complicated and unintuitive.
I honestly do not see what could be bad about one team having level 2 Ultimates and the other team not.
Imperfected
Member
That's why I said "to RTS what Diablo was to old school RPGs".
Most old school RPGs were not team or player-vs-player games, they were purely solo experiences. Diablo streamlined the core experience (kill monsters, get levels, get loot) while making it more of a team/pvp experience in the process.
That's what MOBA did to RTS. Yes, they are entirely different genres, just like Diablo-style hack'n'slash is a completely different genre from the (mostly turn-based) single player RPGs that preceded it, but it's the same theory: you take a genre that some people like, but most people find obtuse and unapproachable, and you rip out the guts and throw away all the things that stop people from being able to play it (big unwieldly piles of units to micromanage, build order optimization and base macro, etc.) while simultaneously making it a team game rather than a habitually solo experience.
Yeah, it seems to be a wall they're running into company-wide. The auction house aside, most of D3's problems stemmed from trying to over-simplify D2. I'm guessing Project Titan's perpetual development cycle is them coming up against the question of, "How do we make WoW more broadly accessible?"
I feel like they're much better off when they're taking someone else's thing and saying, "That's good, but if you do X Y and Z people will actually play it." (Like Hearthstone from Magic: The Gathering.) MOBA's already the streamlined offshoot of what was already a hugely streamlined offshoot (old, hugely complicated turn-based strategy games being trimmed into RTS), so at this point every cut carries the risk of seriously damaging the core experience you're trying to amplify.
Ya. The owner of the studio forks up the money for their games. There were interviews about it for Global Agenda.
i really cant tell if youre serious or not.
RE: HOTS.
i think you can simplify mobas even more than league and be successful
e.g. online party arenas. the mario party of mobas. blizz pleasee.
i am 65% confident that the reason blizzard is maintaining the base v base structure of their games is because they want it to have esports 'potential'
Imperfected
Member
That's possible, yeah. If you were willing to completely step out of the esports/highly-competitive game and create one where winning is basically meaningless anyway (ala Mario Party), and it's all just about the moment-to-moment action, that could definitely be a thing.
Turin Turambar
Member
That reddit post has now several months, but there are more recent news: A few days ago they said there were expanding, staffing up with 30 new devs. That sounds good for the company.
It's the reality of game development. Most games fail at making money. Most multiplayer games have a dwindling player count after the first 3 or 4 months. It's very very hard to get millions of players playing your game for years: there are hundreds of games in the market, and not enough gamers in the world for all of them, only a few can get to be "big".
Yes. He was the CEO of a decent sized IT company, and he sold it. Now he is millionaire, who chose to fund a game studio with his money. Also a janitor.
sobaka770
Banned
Teamleveling is in no-way tied in with forcing hero-to-hero combat or not encouraging team members to play better. Every action in-game (for HotS) is tied to global team xp pool and there are stats tracking how much you contribute to that (on death screen if I remember correctly) so you know when you don't deliver enough.
On the contrary, I don't think that personal hero level is a perfect reflection of player's skill or his ability to play the game. Depending on your role you should be judged by different standards. I honestly don't think a concpet of"carry"-hero is beneficial to the genre anyway. It forces one player to be the team superstar, based on a select skillset (ability to last-hit, find farm). Considering that a carry hero usually makes or breaks the game, it introduces unneeded tension in the line-up. Removing the concept of individual leveling and gold farming removes this divide and now you get a more meaningful choice of whether you want to be a DPSer, tank or healer and you're not being punished for it.
Individual contribution is highly overrated in MOBAs anyway. If you watch a pro-streamer, even a seasoned carry or mid-laner cannot alone save the pub game in 80% of cases, I'm not even talking about new players.
TharpDaddy
Member
Awesomenauts is a pretty awesome controller moba.
SteveWinwood
Member
I can't think of any reason to play DotA over Dota 2 unless you really want to play unreleased heroes or if you're really anal about some bugs and minor differences.
The shop is nearly impossible to go back to, the people on the us servers are practically insane, readability is very poor in comparison, the pro scene is all on Dota 2, some of the latest things have started to break it (isn't bloodseeker's thirst still super goofy in it?), it's not technically free, no matchmaking, no modern amenities like key rebinding or wide screen support, and no hats!
Schweinehund
Member
Glad to see this thread going strong, I'll post my impressions of Dawngate and Infinite Crisis soon.
That can't be true.
just wanted to point out that this is the product of a properly functioning matchmaking system,
and not an example of 'Individual contribution is highly overrated'
Thanks for making this thread, there's some good conversations going on in here.
Dota2 is my game of choice, but sometimes it's just way too much of a time commitment (especially with an infant at home). HotS appeals to me from that aspect, but the streamlining still has me worried about the overall gameplay. I'd love to give it a shot once available.
After seeing some Pax streams I went ahead and downloaded Dawngate this weekend. Seems alright so far, although it still has the Loadout aspect that bugged me from LoL. For some reason being able to buy stat buffs outside the game and not being able to see which buffs your opponents have seems wrong to me.
Dota2 is my game of choice, but sometimes it's just way too much of a time commitment (especially with an infant at home). HotS appeals to me from that aspect, but the streamlining still has me worried about the overall gameplay. I'd love to give it a shot once available.
After seeing some Pax streams I went ahead and downloaded Dawngate this weekend. Seems alright so far, although it still has the Loadout aspect that bugged me from LoL. For some reason being able to buy stat buffs outside the game and not being able to see which buffs your opponents have seems wrong to me.
Tyran_lord
Member
Add me ingame if you have any questions, i don't mind helping new players out with dawngate. IGN = Tyranlord. You can see the enemy loadout when you select the enemy shaper and hover over the circle with the red/green/blue parts.
Haunted
Member
It is true.
Thanks! I didn't realize that about the loadouts. There's a lot about the game I'm still learning still there wasn't a tutorial mode (or not that I saw). I watched a couple youtube videos, played 2 custom games with me as the only player to get a feel for it, then jumped into a few matchmaking game after that.
One thing that was confusing the heck out of me was that smart casting was turned on by default. Once I went into the key binding and swapped the smart-casts with regular ability use things seemed more intuitive.
Strife has it too, and it was a frustrating experience.
Well, that's what the objectives in HotS are for. Waste your mana and you're at a disadvantage at the next objective fight. And then there are still lanes anyway to put pressure against going 5-man on an objective.
That's pretty much it. Everything is about killing an enemy fort or nexus. If one team ever gets an obscene advantage (around 3 hero levels ahead) then the game will usually end in the next 3 minutes or so. The only comeback mechanism is a small experience boost for every level you're behind, so you have to turtle up and try to keep your towers from going down until the next wave of objectives come online, hoping by then that you evened out the level advantage enough.
There's also the fact that most objectives aren't an auto-advantage if the defending team properly rotates. The exceptions are on the more snowbally maps (primarily the curse objective on that one map, but a small nod to the pirate ship map too).
Tyran_lord
Member
It's sad that a lot of people don't know that you can see the enemy loadout
. I hope you got some good games in .Gentle Rodriguez
Member
This would be great except for the part where Nintendo makes it.
hero roles aren't as rigidly enforced as lol which is much cooler cuz you get wraith king/alchemist/naga siren supports appearing in the meta
False. Several of the popular support mages in current League meta were previously played as carries and vice versa.
There's definitely room for dumb fun, given the success of things like officially-sanctioned ARAMs or how much the League playerbase loved getting -wtf mode as an event. On the other hand, things like Dominion (alternate map shape, win by controlling neutral objectives) are pretty much dead.
I'd be inclined to guess that it's very advantageous for the 'dumb fun' mode to be a sort of anything-goes scrimmage for the competitive mode. I know a lot of what I appreciate about ARAMs is the experience with really unusual lane opponents, and URF was great for charging up mid, where the meta was pretty similar to normal games, and getting an hour's worth of 1v1 practice in about ten minutes.
Is there a reason why it would be a good thing? I feel like it's a terrible idea.