Imperfected
Member
There really isn't any point comparing League and StarCraft. The challenges they present, especially for top-level players, are almost completely different.
StarCraft has a ridiculously high execution requirement, and particularly has an absurd execution tempo, requiring constant and consistent accuracy. League, conversely, is almost entirely about "breakpoints" that have incredibly high reaction speed requirements (much higher than the individual actions in StarCraft), but happen far more infrequently and generally require less accuracy in execution.
StarCraft has a very high moment-to-moment cognitive load - actually much more than most players can reasonably keep in "memory" - in terms of the sheer number of things players need to track, many of which are obfuscated (literally or figuratively) by factors like limited screen space. League has a relatively small number of moving parts, by comparison, but most of them tend to display far more complex behaviors. (That is to say, you usually won't have trouble in StarCraft knowing what a given unit is doing or going to do in any given situation, but you have to track hundreds of them simultaneously; in League you really only have to track a handful, but the individual heuristics are much more complicated.)
The main reason League has broader appeal is that aside from the reaction time prerequisite for top-level play, most of the skills can be learned. There's a certain "talent floor" to StarCraft that basically acts as an unspoken "You must have these physiological traits to ride"; if you do not have a brain wired in such a way as to be able to track enough things in short-term memory, or the manual dexterity necessary to commit enough of the rote actions to muscle memory, well... you can maybe get yourself up to Gold just on raw game knowledge and practice, but you're probably going to be pretty bad at the game from now until forever.
The main reason League will eventually be supplanted is that you can still go one better in terms of broadening appeal. Most people can learn all of the abilities of 125+ champions and incorporate them into their moment-to-moment heuristics, but most people probably don't want to. The game that replaces League on the "broad appeal competitive game" heap is probably going to be one that requires an order of magnitude less memorization, while still having similarly low barriers in terms of moment-to-moment cognitive load and physical execution.
TL;DR: Think of it as a spectrum. Fighting games have an enormous reflex requirement and incredibly complex heuristics, but task the player with tracking and managing an extremely small number of factors at any given time. RTS games require the player to track and manipulate an enormous number of moving parts, but are more overall more forgiving in terms of errors or missed windows in execution, and have a lower demand for ultra-fast reaction speeds. MOBA games are somewhere between the two on all counts.
(And, for a bonus, FPS games are even more twitch-focused than fighting games, replacing a great deal of the adaptive heuristics with rote memorization, and in most cases having very little information the player has to track in short-term memory. They would technically be the opposite extreme from RTS, if you wanted a full-spectrum view.)
StarCraft has a ridiculously high execution requirement, and particularly has an absurd execution tempo, requiring constant and consistent accuracy. League, conversely, is almost entirely about "breakpoints" that have incredibly high reaction speed requirements (much higher than the individual actions in StarCraft), but happen far more infrequently and generally require less accuracy in execution.
StarCraft has a very high moment-to-moment cognitive load - actually much more than most players can reasonably keep in "memory" - in terms of the sheer number of things players need to track, many of which are obfuscated (literally or figuratively) by factors like limited screen space. League has a relatively small number of moving parts, by comparison, but most of them tend to display far more complex behaviors. (That is to say, you usually won't have trouble in StarCraft knowing what a given unit is doing or going to do in any given situation, but you have to track hundreds of them simultaneously; in League you really only have to track a handful, but the individual heuristics are much more complicated.)
The main reason League has broader appeal is that aside from the reaction time prerequisite for top-level play, most of the skills can be learned. There's a certain "talent floor" to StarCraft that basically acts as an unspoken "You must have these physiological traits to ride"; if you do not have a brain wired in such a way as to be able to track enough things in short-term memory, or the manual dexterity necessary to commit enough of the rote actions to muscle memory, well... you can maybe get yourself up to Gold just on raw game knowledge and practice, but you're probably going to be pretty bad at the game from now until forever.
The main reason League will eventually be supplanted is that you can still go one better in terms of broadening appeal. Most people can learn all of the abilities of 125+ champions and incorporate them into their moment-to-moment heuristics, but most people probably don't want to. The game that replaces League on the "broad appeal competitive game" heap is probably going to be one that requires an order of magnitude less memorization, while still having similarly low barriers in terms of moment-to-moment cognitive load and physical execution.
TL;DR: Think of it as a spectrum. Fighting games have an enormous reflex requirement and incredibly complex heuristics, but task the player with tracking and managing an extremely small number of factors at any given time. RTS games require the player to track and manipulate an enormous number of moving parts, but are more overall more forgiving in terms of errors or missed windows in execution, and have a lower demand for ultra-fast reaction speeds. MOBA games are somewhere between the two on all counts.
(And, for a bonus, FPS games are even more twitch-focused than fighting games, replacing a great deal of the adaptive heuristics with rote memorization, and in most cases having very little information the player has to track in short-term memory. They would technically be the opposite extreme from RTS, if you wanted a full-spectrum view.)
