Design flaws !== Game's complexity. It might be a huge part of it, but since LoL is pretty much streamlined to also please casual players it is obvious that's not the case for the game, at all.
That's where it diverts from SC2's failure, unfortunately it still holds lots of similarities.
it's streamlined but it's still a very complex game
dark souls is streamlined from demons souls but it's still complex
these games have really high skillfloors, streamlined or not
Not that Riot's fuck ups are completely unknown by the community, they're quite well known actually, their inability to balance the game outside from introducing imbalanced new heroes, weird rules or establishing a new meta by themselves are quite remarkable. Revamps are the latest approach to fix the problem but they fail to understand that it might be doing more harm than good (as always), but oh well, I'm just an outsider giving my 2 cents.
i think riot's intervension in the game meta and balance has generally been for the best. the game today is a much more interesting game that it was a couple years ago and champion releases, reworks and balance make the game always feel fresh. lots of things have turned out pretty crappy, but the game keeps getting better and better
I mean, I could go on and on: Client with multiple missing features, pay to unlock features, fixed lanes (HAHAHA), fixed item builds, lack of decent competitive structure, horrible pick and ban phase in competitive games, etc, etc... It's not that hard to find complaints if you use google correctly.
you're not elaborating on any of these points so it's hard to take it seriously, specially when some of them are just not true or aren't issues to actual league players (fixed lanes might sound bad to you but ask any league player and we all love it)
what the hell is pay to unlock features?
I understand that many of you like the game, but it is not enough.
it is not enough for what?
I think the thread title was changed. I vaguely remember it not mentioning DOTA 2.
if anyone changed it then they're idiots
Has there been any Professional League players that successful switched to Dota 2's Pro Scene? I don't think there is much cross pollination either way.
yup, none i know of
I'm personally not a fan of how Riot has balanced their game over the past 5 years, but it clearly must work to some extent. From what I have seen, the IP system and need to unlock characters actually seem to work in favor for retaining players, since it gives an additional incentive to come back daily. The design philosophy causing the 5 roles to be so rigidly defined is clearly popular, allowing players who just enjoy being able to keep picking the same 1 or 2 characters every game to do so and not get nearly as punished.
yeah some of league's model limitation sort of work out in ways you wouldn't expect
like i said before on other threads, the free rotation stuff actually helps new players only focus on a small number of champions they're gonna be playing through a week so it helps them not have to deal with 100 different kits all at once
similarly the ip grind is a good motivator to play every day and it creates a nice loop of playing a lot of a champion on free week and being rewarded for it by unlocking them fully
none of this is better than having all champions for free, but it definitely works out
I personally also think the League Pro Scene is a mess right now. Riot has almost absolute control over it in the west, making it difficult to impossible for 3rd party tournaments to happen, and also makes it difficult for new teams to emerge. And while they pay teams/player a salary, they impose a bunch of restrictions on what the what team organizations can do, to the extent that many pro LoL teams are cash sinks that are supported by the other esports teams that are part of the organization. This is not even touching that the game tends to make for a dull viewing experience, and have been steadily losing viewership.
i think you're being really fair here but for the sake of being factually correct i'm just gonna say the "bunch of restrictions" actually came up from a situation in which tsm players were doing an ad for some vive thing. honestly that's stupid but generally enough teams have a lot of sponsors and do ads and stuff and it's the first time this sponsorship has come up (outside of g2a and youporn or whatever)
other than that i'm not sure about some of what you're saying as fact here, the viewership loss was talked a lot but the format has changed so there's about twice as many games and on two different streams which means there's a bit of self-competition going on. the being difficult for new teams to emerge stuff again is not something that was a big deal until like two weeks ago and i still don't know what evidence of this exists as new teams do appear all the time (and idk if new teams in any game have an easy way of "emerging"?)
also idk why people want third party tournaments in general, we have iem already which is a bore to watch with sometimes 15 straight minutes of intel ads, and riot has you covered for games with two long splits over 13 regions and big international tournaments in between
so maybe lets not make statements about things we don't know about.