Introduction to MOBAs

Also, why is Morello so scared of saying some champs may just not be balanced and take them out of captains mode. Icefrog does it without problem, all he had to do was live a life of secrecy never revealing his identity to the world and only communicating publicly with the Chinese.
 
Also, why is Morello so scared of saying some champs may just not be balanced and take them out of captains mode. Icefrog does it without problem, all he had to do was live a life of secrecy never revealing his identity to the world and only communicating publicly with the Chinese.

People might get pissed off if the champion they just purchased wasn't usable in every mode.
 
People might get pissed off if the champion they just purchased wasn't usable in every mode.

Denzel-Washington-Boom-Gif.gif

Business considerations trumping design and balance right here folks.
 
i played that water hero in HoN (riptide)

they're pretty fun

ez rune control with my hyper water jets

dis is coming from someone who thinks night stalker sux btw
 
http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Denzel-Washington-Boom-Gif.gif[IMG]
Business considerations trumping design and balance right here folks.[/QUOTE]

Do you think people may feel more of a connection to champions in LoL since they have to work/pay for the champs?

edit: I know I loved the shit out of anivia, and it was the only thing I played.
 
it's also bound in this way where they can say they are looking out for their players and placing them as their number 1 concern

but at the same time I think disabling a champ cause it's not perfectly balanced is kind of ridiculous, they do disable champs that have gamebreaking bugz tho

i don't spend actual money in the game, but I can report that I don't personally feel any connection to a champ that I purchased with IP
the league thread has a bunch of people who like to claim affinity with certain champs, I dunno if it has to do with money spent tho

kiunch only plays champs that are girls

that's another thing I find interesting about Riot
their main thing is that they proclaim that they are service orientated, that communication and transparency with the community is really important, a peoplez company full of gamerz like u, etc.
and yet they are the richest company
 
there have been cases of champs not being allowed to be selected in pro play, but never because they are perceived to be strong
 
In DOTA2, there is the complete pool of heroes, and the pool of heroes deemed "balanced" for competitive play. Competitive modes like Captain's Mode and Captain's Draft use the latter pool. Other modes like all pick, all random, single draft and random draft use the entire pool. In unranked matchmaking, you can choose any mode you want. But in ranked, you're limited to AP, CM and CD.

There are currently two heroes that are considered "OP", Lycan and Terrorblade. The former is in CM, and is a popular pick/ban in competitive games. The latter is not in CM. In Ranked AP games, it's common to see both Lycan and TB.
 
Also, why is Morello so scared of saying some champs may just not be balanced and take them out of captains mode. Icefrog does it without problem, all he had to do was live a life of secrecy never revealing his identity to the world and only communicating publicly with the Chinese.
Uh, what would they even need to ban out in League that's so crazy?
 
Edit: dumb mobile browser just submitted what I posted before again.

All ranked modes use a single ranked mmr in dota
 
oh right, same in league, thought not necessarily because they have been changed in a way that makes them super powerful
by "competitive mode" I thought you meant a mode available to everyone, but I think I get what you are saying
 
is it just icefrog who decides what's balanced
lycan was so good w/ armlet when i was playing

Yeah it's just him. Heroes don't get removed for being OP though, they get removed from CM either because their balance is totally up in the air, either because they're brand new or recently got significant reworks (see: Medusa, Broodmother, Wraith King). A good amount of people in the latter category don't even get changed before being added back to Captain's Mode though.

There are currently two heroes that are considered "OP", Lycan and Terrorblade.

Not sure if I agree with that.
 
is it just icefrog who decides what's balanced
lycan was so good w/ armlet when i was playing
Yeah, pretty much. He might have helpers for beta testing patches and fine tuning, but he has the final word on all design/balance decisions, as far as I know.

Imba Spirit kinda getting a rep too, Haly.
Nah, Ember has a 51% win rate in competitive games. People ban him out because he's fucking annoying to play against, not because he's amazing or anything. Lycan is both annoying to play against AND amazing, with a 64% win rate out of 185 games.
http://www.datdota.com/heroes.php

(Ogre Magi has 100% win rate ggggggg)

is there separate ranked mmr for different modes?
You can choose which mode to queue for in Ranked matchmaking, but they'll all affect the same MMR. There's only one Ranked MMR per account.
 
ok just to get one thing clear, cause I think I confused haly and kirby together

CM mode is something everyone can play right? it's not just used in pro games, and even in the non-pro game CMs, particular champs are disabled, kind of emulating the pro scene
 
Yes, CM is accessible to everyone and considered the mode of choice for pro play. Recently, some tournaments have taken to allowing CD occasionally to mix things up, but CM is the tournament staple. Captain's Draft is a variation on CM where there is a random pool of 24 heroes (8 of each primary stat, and the same heroes that are allowed in CM), from which captains then ban and pick. It's considered an easier version of CM to get into because it doesn't depend that much on pre-game knowledge and draft strategies.

There is no difference between the CM you can play as joe-schmoe and the CM that's played every year for $1 million.
 
wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right
 
wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right

No, Icefrog isn't afraid to change heroes so they get removed from CM incase they're broken (OP, bugs, etc).
 
also sry for 21 questions but
is there separate ranked mmr for different modes?

in league all ranked games are draft games

You can queue for three different modes in ranked (CM, CD, and AP) and they all share the same MMR. The important thing is whether you're queuing solo or with friendsas you have a separate ranking for both.
 
wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right
Icefrog releases balance patches maybe 1-2 times a year. It's not like your biweekly/monthly balancing in League.

When he changes a hero, it's usually a significant overhaul, and it takes some time to see whether its "balanced" in normal games. Once he thinks the hero has reached a reasonable level of balance, he'll allow it into CM for tournaments to use.

I feel this makes much more sense than Zilean's "bans are for OP heroes".
 
wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right

No, Valve is saying "we don't know how OP this guy will be until people get a hold of him so we'll disable him from tourneys until we find out".
 
that's pretty cool
league has a "tournament draft" mode and a "tournament code" mode
we use the former for inhouses, it's basically regular draft with a pause function (league has no pause function normally, it also doesn't have voice chat)

tournament code is a mode used for 3rd party tournaments; Riot gives incentives like RP or skin codes for people who do their own tournaments like colleges or whatever. It records stats, reports results to the organizer, stuff like that.

do dota people care that AP and CM have the same mmr or it just doesn't matter?

wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right

league does this same exact thing
like remember new champs not being available yet for lcs and stuff
 
Not sure if I agree with that.

Who else do you think is OP? Or do you think they're not OP?

There's a reason 90% of 5k AP Ranked games are lycan and/or TB.
do dota people care that AP and CM have the same mmr or it just doesn't matter?
Most of them don't, it's a necessary evil because both modes have advantages/disadvantages.

AP: More prone to FOTM, uses entire hero pool so OP heroes are usually instalock
CM: More balanced, and less prone to FOTM, but requires a lot of time (the banpick phase is something like 10 minutes on average), game knowledge, and communication. Most pubs are too lazy to go through all of this.
CD: A middle ground between the two.

The reason Valve allows all three of these modes in Ranked is to avoid splintering the playerbase. It's sort of a tradeoff between queue times, accessibility and balance (in terms of team matchmaking).
 
You can queue for three different modes in ranked (CM, CD, and AP) and they all share the same MMR. The important thing is whether you're queuing solo or with friendsas you have a separate ranking for both.

that's something I kinda wish league had, for league you can solo/duo ranked and it's all under the same umbrella
 
Well it's not that. I just don't see what's interesting about them. I feel like I would get bored with every game having basically the same map.
The variation in these games comes from the different combinations and matchups of player characters on both sides. All of the potential outcomes are more interesting because they deviate from a shared known space, which is why the map is static in most of these games.

Multiplayer shooters benefit from having large map pools because the flow inside of a map has fewer variables, so new sightlines help to create fresh experiences. With MOBA style games there are so many variables that it's usually better for the map itself to remain the constant.
 
Well it's not that. I just don't see what's interesting about them. I feel like I would get bored with every game having basically the same map.

Think less FPS/MMOs and more Football/Basketball. The map heavily affects game balance and the game was built with the map in mind. Introducing new maps into this genre is usually a recipe for failure. Many studios have tried. None have, to my knowledge, really succeeded.

It'd be like adding platforms or height variations to Street Fighter. It works for Smash, why? Because Smash was designed with verticality in mind. Not so for MOBAs. You'd think you can transport the roster of any MOBA to any kind of variant, as long as it was symmetrical, because they're just RTS units in the end But you can't, it's one of the curious properties of MOBAs that the three lane river layout is as close to "perfect" as you can get.
 
gotta love the passive-aggressive responses

i'd agree for the most extreme cases, like pre-rework kassadin, but sounds like a very lame way to do things if it's done regularly, specially if it's like half a year without being able to play your champion

like taht sucks

league does this same exact thing
like remember new champs not being available yet for lcs and stuff
they only do it cause of bugs or the week just after a rework/release tho
 
Who else do you think is OP? Or do you think they're not OP?

There's a reason 90% of 5k AP Ranked games are lycan and/or TB.

Lycan is most certainly not OP. If you look at the drafting stats it looks pretty bad at first glance since recently he's had pretty much a 100% pick/ban rate. However, if you look at the stats for 6.80 overall, Invoker has had by far the most impact in the pro scene with 90% pick/ban, a full 13 points ahead of the next runner up. Lycan is the definition of flavor of the month.

As far as TB goes, I would love to see where you got your stats from. There's no doubt the hero is strong, but his effectiveness in pubs is much higher than he would be in pro games due to how brain dead easy he is to play and how hard it is for uncoordinated randoms to deal with split push (which is what he excels at). I would say that Phoenix is probably stronger than him overall due to him being much level cooldown dependent, but Phoenix has an extremely high skill cap (similar to Ember and Visage) that won't really shine through until talented teams get their hands on him.
 
I think people aren't saying that a hero gets disabled because it's crazy, but because of the same conditions league champs get disabled
it's just that dota also has access to a mode that emulates the pro scene; under this mode certain champs are disabled to create that f33l, but you can play them in other modes np
 
i'd agree for the most extreme cases, like pre-rework kassadin, but sounds like a very lame way to do things if it's done regularly, specially if it's like half a year without being able to play your champion
Valve allows AP in Ranked matchmaking for this very reason, so ladder climbers aren't denied the newest experience, or denied being able to play an old favorite. Unlike League, which puts every new champion behind a pay/grind wall.

And competitive game balance always trumps individual motivations for play, which is why pro players never really complain about the system. It's strange that you would think otherwise.

Lycan is most certainly not OP. If you look at the drafting stats it looks pretty bad at first glance since recently he's had pretty much a 100% pick/ban rate. However, if you look at the stats for 6.80 overall, Invoker has had by far the most impact in the pro scene with 90% pick/ban, a full 13 points ahead of the next runner up. Lycan is the definition of flavor of the month.

As far as TB goes, I would love to see where you got your stats from. There's no doubt the hero is strong, but his effectiveness in pubs is much higher than he would be in pro games due to how brain dead easy he is to play and how hard it is for uncoordinated randoms to deal with split push (which is what he excels at). I would say that Phoenix is probably stronger than him overall due to him being much level cooldown dependent, but Phoenix has an extremely high skill cap (similar to Ember and Visage) that won't really shine through until talented teams get their hands on him.
I was talking only about pub games. Lycan has a 64% win rate in competitive games but I attribute that to the strength of deathball rather than Lycan himself.
 
gotta love the passive-aggressive responses

i'd agree for the most extreme cases, like pre-rework kassadin, but sounds like a very lame way to do things if it's done regularly, specially if it's like half a year without being able to play your champion

like taht sucks


they only do it cause of bugs or the week just after a rework/release tho

Heroes that do get a major rework that gets them removed from CM were probably garbage in the first place (eg Huskar, Broodmother) so nobody really minds.
 
wait wat

like valve literally says "this guy's op so instead of balancing him we'll just disable him from ranked"?

i can't be reading this right

Not ranked, just Captain's Mode.

Also it is pretty much always just after a rework or a new hero with questionable balance, they let it gets some play in the wild before putting it back in CM.

Though if something is clearly broken it could be disabled until it could be fixed, I don't remember that ever happening though. Mostly just major reworks that could be imba get disabled.

Lycan is most certainly not OP. If you look at the drafting stats it looks pretty bad at first glance since recently he's had pretty much a 100% pick/ban rate. However, if you look at the stats for 6.80 overall, Invoker has had by far the most impact in the pro scene with 90% pick/ban, a full 13 points ahead of the next runner up. Lycan is the definition of flavor of the month.

As far as TB goes, I would love to see where you got your stats from. There's no doubt the hero is strong, but his effectiveness in pubs is much higher than he would be in pro games due to how brain dead easy he is to play and how hard it is for uncoordinated randoms to deal with split push (which is what he excels at). I would say that Phoenix is probably stronger than him overall due to him being much level cooldown dependent, but Phoenix has an extremely high skill cap (similar to Ember and Visage) that won't really shine through until talented teams get their hands on him.

More importantly WRT to Lycan, a lot of his current perceived OPness in the pro scene is the current popularity of the fast push zoo strat with multiple necro books.

We will see if people find a reliable counter to the fast push strats or if it needs to be nerfed and whether that will be a nerf to the hero or the necrobooks or some other related area. Of a buff to counter pushing heroes.

Incidentally about the Ember spirit, I believe his current popularity is related to the fast push strats as well, as he is probably the best hero in the game at dealing with a zoo strat.
 
There's a 10-14% spread in winrate depending on starting side in LoL, across all levels of play and game modes, because of the isometric camera vision differences? Yikes...

A year or two back the stats were showing that 90-95% of pro matches in LoL were decided by gold advantage by the ten minute mark, is that still the case too?

Abysmal choice for #1 e-sport, either way.
 
And competitive game balance always trumps individual motivations, it's strange that you would think otherwise.
that might be a difference between riot and valve

there's a champ right now who has always existed as kind of a "low"-level stomper, master yi. he needs time to ramp up, and even then he can be stopped through coordinated effort

to this end, he poses little threat in competitive play, but I'm pretty sure if his win rate is crazy at low elos he's going to get changed somehow

There's a 10-14% spread in winrate depending on starting side in LoL, across all levels of play and game modes, because of the isometric camera vision differences? Yikes...

A year or two back the stats were showing that 90-95% of pro matches in LoL were decided by gold advantage by the ten minute mark, is that still the case too?

Abysmal choice for #1 e-sport, either way.

iunno the idea that #1 has to align with some idea of purity of competition and balance is kind of foreign to me
you can argue whether basketball or football takes more skill, or whether the NBA or NFL have a more even playoffs, but I don't really think these are things that are that meaningful when talking about popularity
 
Heroes that do get a major rework that gets them removed from CM were probably garbage in the first place (eg Huskar, Broodmother) so nobody really minds.

The Broodmother situation is so fucking awkward. I've never seen a hero go from trash to amazing, then back to trash so fast. The only comparison I can think of was Drow back when her aura was a toggle.

that might be a difference between riot and valve

there's a champ right now who has always existed as kind of a "low"-level stomper, master yi. he needs time to ramp up, and even then he can be stopped through coordinated effort

to this end, he poses little threat in competitive play, but I'm pretty sure if his win rate is crazy at low elos he's going to get changed somehow

There's a couple of those in Dota, most notable Bloodseeker and Huskar. They've both gotten some significant work done on them recently, but they still suck.
 
bloodseeker and huskar were like
really good against nubz when I was playing
I think I've said when I was playing every other post I've made in this thread

riot also tries to rework stagnant champions to make them more appealing competitively to varying success
but they will also nerf champions that have no place in competitive play
 
There's a 10-14% spread in winrate depending on starting side in LoL, across all levels of play and game modes, because of the isometric camera vision differences? Yikes...

A year or two back the stats were showing that 90-95% of pro matches in LoL were decided by gold advantage by the ten minute mark, is that still the case too?

Abysmal choice for #1 e-sport, either way.

I think the gold advantage has been narrowed a bit, but it still there. IIRC I think win rate after first inhibitor is still like 100% though.

No where close to the wild seesaw back and forth game of throws we get in Dota.
 
bloodseeker and huskar were like
really good against nubz when I was playing
I think I've said when I was playing every other post I've made in this thread

They are still excellent at potato mmr , alongside Sniper and Riki. Although those two do on very rare occasions see pro play.
 
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