League of Legends has over 100 million monthly active players, ~8x larger than Dota 2

Kalentan said:
I don't see how any of that means the game has been on a decline playerbase. It's not like the entire playerbase is in Korea. In fact if others are to be believed there is more players and in the EU and CN than in KR.
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While that may be true, LoL is a big deal in Korea, which is apparent by the aforementioned status as the #1 PC Bang title for years, and the fact that the last 3 World Championship teams were Korean, and Korean teams made up 6/12 top 4 teams the last 3 years--including both the 1st and 2nd place team in 2015. LoL is a big deal in Korea, and for it to be overtaken by Overwatch should not be seen as inconsequential.
 
neurosisxeno said:
I just find it confusing that they went years without talking about player numbers, and in the meantime we've had HotS come out which undercuts LoL for the "accessible MOBA" and Overwatch recently which displaced LoL from #1 in PC Bangs for the first time in years, as well as several patches that were reviled by the community and several PR disasters from their staff--yet somehow they are on the up and up.
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Korea isn't the largest community and if I'm not wrong, lol is back at #1 again after the fuck up that is ranked in overwatch.
 
Renekton said:
Didn't Overwatch eat LoL's lunch in a big way?
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Not really. In the west at least I don't think many people left League for Overwatch. Some people play both games now, but I don't think a lot of people quit League for it.

But we'd need AGPM (averages games per month) per player to figure that out.
 
neurosisxeno said:
I just find it confusing that they went years without talking about player numbers, and in the meantime we've had HotS come out which undercuts LoL for the "accessible MOBA" and Overwatch recently which displaced LoL from #1 in PC Bangs for the first time in years, as well as several patches that were reviled by the community and several PR disasters from their staff--yet somehow they are on the up and up.
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"Years", they skipped 2015 lol
Renekton said:
Didn't Overwatch eat LoL's lunch in a big way?
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Overwatch is more popular in Korean PC cafes. That's all it "ate" as far as we know.
 
Renekton said:
Didn't Overwatch eat LoL's lunch in a big way?
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Hardly was ever gonna be a long time thing, given they're vastly different games, even all lol players with OW will need to scratch their moba itch and go back to it.

Same for any DotA player.

Not HotS tho! they can scratch both itches by just playing HotS!
 
Quonny said:
If anything, bragging every 5 million players just opens up people to hate on it more. People don't like it when a successful competitor announces impressive numbers. Just look at this thread.
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Yeah. This.

Also the fact that "Overwatch as a new release dethroned League in Korea PC bang" itself being a headline is another proof of League's absolute dominance.
 
Good for them.

It's an enjoyable game. I'd estimate the real number to be more like 50-75 million considering how many people have smurfs and alts. That said, they're stomping everyone else in size and popularity. Other MOBAs would be wise to look at what they've done and take some notes if they want to see more than a fraction of their level of size.

Things Riot is doing right that Valve, Gearbox, Hi-Rez, Blizzard and Boss Key need to learn from:

  • Constant, DAILY engagement with the community. Engaging the community with information, future plans, ideas, polls, lore, sales events, videos, AMAs...I mean look at this News section (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news). We're talking 3-5 posts per day on average. That kind of interaction makes people feel invested and involved in what is going on with the game. It breeds loyalty and attachment. Compare to 3-5 per month for Dota 2 (http://blog.dota2.com/). It won't always be good news or good interaction, but when the volume of good outweighs the negative, you're in a pretty good place.
  • Waifus. Don't think that shit is imporant to your own peril. Gamers in the target demographic like cute/attractive characters and they like to play dress-up with them. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that 65%-75% of their entire roster of their 132 characters would be considered cute. That's roughly 90 attractive male and female characters. By my count of the Dota 2 roster I see 21 that would qualify for that sort of marketing pitch, or 18%. Yes, lots of gamers were lured to LoL by the attractiveness of the characters. That said, only 1 of League's last 5 characters would qualify as "cute" (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/page/champion-reveal-taliyah-stoneweaver), but it's not like they need any more of them. These sorts of characters lead to fan art, additional social media sharing and discussion, etc. I imagine the female player base for League is an order of magnitude larger than anyone else's and this certainly helps.
  • High turnout of new characters. Through the first 9 months of 2016, Dota 2 has had 1 hero released [1] with a second hopefully coming (Monkey King). In that same time, League has had 4 champions released [1][2][3][4] and there is a strong chance for a 5th. Since the start of 2015, League has had 9 new characters added, roughly one every 3 months. This does not include several champions that received full (ground up) skill and design reworks this year or last (https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/202294884-Champion-Update-Schedule). In that same time, Dota 2 has added 3. Smite has added 18 since 2015. Keeping a game fresh with new characters is important for high player retention. Particularly for the flakier players who aren't the most highly invested.
  • Continued development of lore and universe with videos and such. Games like Dota2 ocassionally offer comics (http://www.dota2.com/newbloom/part2), but Riot does comics, high-quality CG cinematics and videos, short form stories, and more. I saw one nice cinematic from Smite early this year but I'm not sure if they've done much in this vein since. Again, these things give fans a way to feel further engaged in and involved with the world of the game. They make it feel more alive and less a random assemblage of characters. I believe the Dota 2 Monkey King cinematic is the first one of its kind for Dota 2 that was actually made by Valve in literally years.
  • Constant, transparent balancing process. League posts balance patch plans damn near weekly (example: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/patch/patch-618-notes) and they are usually implemented a few days later. They constantly test tweaks and changes in their beta environment client, listen to feedback and make adjustments again in the future as needed. Not only do you see what has changed by why they they made the changes and what they hope to achieve. Transparency makes people feel like their concerns about characters are being heard and acted upon in the never-ending effort to try to get balance to a good place. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don't. But when they don't they're usually reasonably fast at making updates (again, weekly or bi-weekly patch notes) and again there's usually little guessing about what is coming down the pike. Where competitors like Dota 2 might only get similarly-sized balance patches to what LoL gets regularly every couple of months.

That said, League has plenty of issues of its own, including the client (which is soon to be updated), the clear lack of spectator features, runes and masteries that clutter that game and should be removed, in-game items that cannot be traded (I believe Dota 2 is unique in this so perhaps it's not an issue), eSports configuration and payouts, lack of custom modes of play, etc. But many of these things seem to be coming and their fanbase is both large and loyal.

To the degree that Dota 2, Smite, Battleborn, HoTS and Lawbreakers can take those things to heart is the degree to which they can also experience speedier growth. But the development of impressive dedicated webpages, cinematics, and comics requires manpower. Dota 2 can't keep up a decent pace without more help to do it which seems very unlikely. There's a reason why they went from releasing a new hero or two every month to one every few months...to one a year.

Unfortunately Dota 2's growth will always be lower regardless of the above because the game is designed to be more punishing (loss of gold upon death, longer death timers making it harder to come back, longer cc). It's a harder game and many would rather play something not as punishing. Because of the difficulty in succeeding, the community tends to be more aggressive and vitriolic. As for Smite, its 3rd person view will inherently have a limited audience. HoTS, Battleborn and Lawbreakers will never challenge the top 2 regardless of what they do.

$0.02

Oh and LOL @ the salty posts trying to co-opt or put an asterisks next to their success. Fuck off, nerds.
 
PSqueak said:
When people bring up LoL they like to pretend toxicity is a problem exclusive to it and now, you know, rampant in ALL popular competitive multiplayer games.
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I know some might think me a hater-- but I honestly and sincerely think LoL is one of the worst gaming communities known. By far the worst than any I currently play.

I can give reasons- will try to keep it short---

- As a popular streamer says (Sky Williams), the matches just go for sooooo long you just build major salt as it keeps going and you're getting pooped on by your enemy laner (because let's face most of us just plain suck and belong in Bronze)

- The meta- enforced by the players, calls for a Support and Carry role in bottom lane. But if you're in low elo your carry will make crazy errors and many times blame the 'support'

- And thus hardly no one wants to be support (to an extent, officially confirmed by Riot as they admitted its by far the last picked role). Because toxicity and blame

- There's so many other reasons I could write a book. But there is 'snowballing'. So if you have a bad day and 'feed' you'll cause the enemy to get strong and this strong enemy will consume yer teammates. They will blame YOU. Because YOU suck. And its true! But the game is designed around snowballing.

I do not blame Riot for hardly any of this. The players created the meta (where Support is in bot lane). And Riot merely cloned most things from Dota so surely Dota & LoL have these issues

So--- to be clear, Toxicity is common across most any MOBA but really horrible in Dota-clones.

Funny thing is I've only ran into less than handful of toxics in Smite. I know this sounds like I'm making it up. I guess its cause it takes so long to get to ranked plus there's so many casual modes (which is what I play!!!). LoL has no short casual modes really.

[edit] I emphasize I'm not trying to discourage any from LoL. Toxics just become plain funny at some point. You begin to understand their frustrations. And its great you can talk to everyone in the match
 
patchday said:
I guess its cause it takes so long to get to ranked plus there's so many casual modes (which is what I play!!!). LoL has no short casual modes really.
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ARAM is literally a short, casual mode that I've never, ever been raged at. Even when building full AP Naut or tank Vayne.

And they have rotating game modes that are the epitome of casual modes.

wat

TriniTrin said:
Does LoL have a international type event? Is The International the biggest prize pool in video games?
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Worlds. It's in October. It's a little more spread out than Dota 2's International but it's the same idea.

And yes, International smokes everyone in terms of prize pool.
 
I'm surprised people are surprised LoL is such a huge game. It is way easier to just assume everyone I know has played it or been playing it. It's insane.

I'm 23 it might have something to do with it though.
 
Well deserved.

Obviously, these are not all unique accounts, and probably includes some yet to be banned bot accounts. But even if you take them out of the numbers, the player base is still massive.

It probably is the best game in terms of community engagement.
 
DevilDog said:
I'm surprised people are surprised LoL is such a huge game. It is way easier to just assume everyone I know has played it or been playing it. It's insane.

I'm 23 it might have something to do with it though.
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Mostly a console centric site with people that don't interact with other humans.
 
Me and my friends pretty much migrated to Overwatch for the shorter matches and less stressful environment. We're no longer at each other's throats about random ingame shit and it's great.

Plus we were all pretty burned out on the game too, we had been playing league as a group game for 3-4 years with small infrequent breaks in between.
 
patchday said:
I know some might think me a hater-- but I honestly and sincerely think LoL is one of the worst gaming communities known. By far the worst than any I currently play.

...
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Yes, MOBAs breed toxicity.

You're playing in a game where your own success is dependent on individual competency and teamwork, where your stats and lofty KDA don't matter if the end collective result of your team is an L. But that teamwork is usually created among strangers who will likely never encounter each other again and these games are typically being played by people who have never played a sport or been on a "team". Thus, venting and blame usually become the order of the day to preserve ego and self-esteem rather than positive reinforcement, encouragement and help.

These are people who respond poorly to adversity and have never been in an organized environment in real life to actually have learned how to deal with people. Sociopathic and passive-aggressive tendencies become more exposed and clear in MOBAS, as you have to spend anywhere from 15-200 minutes in a single match with people you probably don't know, where your behavior probably won't come back to bite you. MOBAs are in fact the only kind of game that requires you to (a) work as a team with strangers and (b) do so for 20-30 minutes on average. Most multiplayer game modes last somewhere between 1 minute (fighters) and 10 minutes (sports games, some fps games) and in most of those games, your success is not as completely tied to the performance of another person like you find in Dota 2.
 
Quonny said:
ARAM is literally a short, casual mode that I've never, ever been raged at. Even when building full AP Naut or tank Vayne.

And they have rotating game modes that are the epitome of casual modes.

wat
.
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ARAM can go like 40+ mins and for sure over 20+ (logon to the client it shows it plain as day matches go 20-30 minutes right there lol!!!). That ain't casual too me
 
Wolf Akela said:
Well deserved.

Obviously, these are not all unique accounts, and probably includes some yet to be banned bot accounts. But even if you take them out of the numbers, the player base is still massive.

It probably is the best game in terms of community engagement.
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It certainly includes bots but not as much, since it's supposed to not include bots (at best of Rito abilities) Sauce
 
TriniTrin said:
Does LoL have a international type event? Is The International the biggest prize pool in video games?
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Beatn but you know pictures help. Indeed it does. This was worlds in the World Cup arena in Seoul a couple years back. Sold out.

BN-FB944_LOLfin_G_20141020003402.jpg
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patchday said:
- There's so many other reasons I could write a book. But there is 'snowballing'. So if you have a bad day and 'feed' you'll cause the enemy to get strong and this strong enemy will consume yer teammates. They will blame YOU. Because YOU suck. And its true! But the game is designed around snowballing.
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I remember this was only true before second half of season 3, when bruisers and assassins can dominate a lane and then proceed to 1v5, such as Yi (AD or AP), AP Tryndamere, Jax, Xin Zhao, Darius, and Riven. During that time it was true that if you lose top lane your team is pretty much screwed and you (or your jungler, or both) are to be blame.

But this was no longer true after Riot actively nerfed snowballing multiple time through tweaks in first blood, cumulative kill gold, and passive experience scaling. You can almost always make a comeback no matter how behind your team is before 25 min. If you can capitalize one small screw up from your opponent after 35 min, which always happens, you can straight up win the game or claim one major objective. People (of course) relentlessly complained about this because this made the game more about bad players in late game rather than about good players that can snowball. If one player got caught instead of grouping late game, all the efforts in early game are pretty much gone.

Does this reduce the general "toxicity" of the community? Not really because that one player will be flamed or even reported in post game lobby, and to some extent rightfully so, because some assholes will always think they are the only carry to this "team game" and split-push non-stop. But this change does reduce the anxiety in early game and is generally better for new players since it nerfs the impact from smurfs. A team game, is what League was becoming, at least still was when I left the game last year.
 
Man, I know there's a lot of potential issues but I would love for Riot to try and make an event at a big outdoor stadium like that again. Watching that felt really special.
 
DevilDog said:
I'm surprised people are surprised LoL is such a huge game. It is way easier to just assume everyone I know has played it or been playing it. It's insane.

I'm 23 it might have something to do with it though.
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It depends where you are I guess. I've only really met one person who was super into it, and he convinced someone else I know to try it. Besides that, I don't know anyone - online or offline. Might not be as big in the UK though.

I know quite a few online people who play Dota 2 though over the years, I think that's just down to the games I played online and how the community overlapped. I knew people who played the original Dota because we played Vanilla WoW together and naturally they were fans of Warcraft 3. Some other friends got into Dota 2 because they had steam, and I gave them some beta gifts at some point. Ironically they were the ones who got me into it years later. :P
 
neurosisxeno said:
LoL is a big deal in Korea, and for it to be overtaken by Overwatch should not be seen as inconsequential.
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Overwatch being more popular in PC bangs doesn't mean Overwatch is overall more popular than League in Korea.

Overwatch requires a better computer to run, so people are more inclined to play it at a PC bang if their computer can't run it. Overwatch also requires a purchase of the game, playing it at a PC bang means you don't have to buy the game itself.
 
Rapid decline of the franchise due poor balance, design and gameplay decisions are going to be the defining aspects for the game next couple years.
It might be 'huge' now, but as SC2 once was, it won't be long until someone takes the throne.
 
Tunin said:
Rapid decline of the franchise due poor balance, design and gameplay decisions are going to be the defining aspects for the game next couple years.
It might be 'huge' now, but as SC2 once was, it won't be long until someone takes the throne.
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I dunno if there's any comparison, besides the fact that SC2's wounds were entirely self-inflicted. I think MOBAs are ascendant and RTS in decline, and there was nothing Blizzard could do about that, but for me they screwed the pooch on the story, which made me not bother with the campaign, and then their online was a total mess (Arcade was too little, too late to keep me playing.)

I know nothing about LoL, but it's in a completely different situation than SC2 was.
 
Fuchsdh said:
I dunno if there's any comparison, besides the fact that SC2's wounds were entirely self-inflicted. I think MOBAs are ascendant and RTS in decline, and there was nothing Blizzard could do about that, but for me they screwed the pooch on the story, which made me not bother with the campaign, and then their online was a total mess (Arcade was too little, too late to keep me playing.)

I know nothing about LoL, but it's in a completely different situation than SC2 was.
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SC2 wasn't even a matter of story or genre decline. Blizzard voluntarily killed SC2 in Korea in probably the most bone headed decision to ever grace competitive gaming. The biggest game in the biggest stage, and Blizzard literally shot themselves in the foot.

clemenx said:
I highly doubt it.

Cm2KDV9WcAEgCe_.jpg

https://twitter.com/_SuperData/status/751408510257262592?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
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LOL.
LoL
 
The Hamburglar said:
It sucks though. Tried to replay and it's not even fit to lace dota2 boots if it had boots or laces.
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It's different, not bad. A lot of people get the two switched.

I alternate between Dota 2 and League and there's definitely an adjustment period each time I switch but neither game is bad, they just differ in a variety of ways. It's perfectly fine to like one over the other but that doesn't mean the game you like less is objectively worse.
 
You're not going to learn a new moba when all your friends and you started on LoL. This is one of the best example why first mover advantage is huge.

Hindsight it may be but competition is over as soon as it started.
 
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