Something that hasn't been mentioned (I think), is not just that League was the first to market. League also had the good fortune of gaining traction at the same time livestreaming did, first with ustream, then justintv and finally twitch really took off. This was a pretty radical change in the game industry because you no longer had to only play the game, but you could also watch it as you would television. Sub-communities sprung up around various channels and it became a very powerful marketing tool that basically self propagated. Riot also polices their sanctioned players pretty closely, so not only were they players on a team, in a sense they were also advertisers, like those product ads featuring athletes. In contrast, Dota 2 had only a few notable streamers and these were usually the ones that performed well in this tournament or that (dendi), or were total ass clowns (singsing, RTZ). They approached streaming like a hobby, but it was never their focus. They don't treat streaming like a job (and you need to treat it like a job to succeed) like League players do. I don't know who the big streamers are now but 2-3 years ago the top League streamer was pulling in as many viewers as most semi-major Dota 2 tournaments, on a daily basis. That is just massive for word of mouth and visibility.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
So why does League of Legends still have a larger playerbase than Dota 2?
- Thread starter ScOULaris
- Start date
In fairness, you'd probably get kicked out of about 90% of the lobbies if you didn't already have the map downloaded (people really didn't like playing with beginners back then, not that they do now either).
On the other hand, downloading the map was about as easy as it gets, so it really wasn't much of a problem for anyone.
LordRaptor
Member
Maybe its different in <whatever country the claim nobody used mods in WC3 is coming from> but in the UK at least, literally every PC oriented gaming magazine came with a cover disk DVD literally filled with mods, maps, patches and demos.
I think more importantly, it's just flat out disingenuous to act like it was a 'mod'...we call dota a mod now for convenience, but it wasn't a 'mod' it was a map, there was no modification of the game required at all, WC3 just had powerful ass scripting tools built in, just like Starcraft did, so it wasn't exactly a small scene that was playing, it was virtually everyone that played multiplayer WC3 that encountered Dota at some point or other.
Gully State
Member
I wish Valve did a better job marketing and promoting DOTA 2 to China. It was uncharacteristically shortsighted of them to assume that the large DOTA playerbase in China would just naturally migrate to DOTA 2.
LordRaptor
Member
It was certainly the case that when Stardock released Demigod in 2009 that DOTA was well known enough for people to understand that this was a gametype popular enough to have studios cloning it.
Might as well claim that Tower Defence was only known by a handful of nerds in the wc3 community while we're at it.
e:
Or spawn a fucking hit single
Valve expecting other people to do their work for them is nothing new. I still think Tencent owning Riot was an insurmountable barrier though.
SilentRacoon
Member
As a DOTA player I very much agree with you, lot's of game mechanics that never get acknowledged by newcomers because designers think is a good choice to never make mention of them. You have to discover it yourself by watching an experienced player or by the means of trial and error as you play the game, some people enjoy that "skill" barrier, but it's the sole reason it turns a lot of new people off.
I'm not sure why people hate the secret shop so much. If you've played other WC3 mods there were always maps with "secret" locations, particularly the Angel Arenas. That the secret shop gave you access to end-game item components lent to its prestige as a "secret" shop.
Now, the side shop. You'd have an argument there, because its stock is wholly redundant, but both offlane and safelane feel better with the sideshop, and it fosters real strategic opportunities. I can say the same of the river creeps in League. Why were they added? To give people a reason to fuck around in the river right? Well the side shop gives people more things to do in the side lanes. That's all it is. The difference, as far as I can see, is that the river scuttler is an "explicit" objective ("here's a thing you might be interested in killing") whereas play around the side shop is implicit ("you'll have to figure how to best use this area").
Now, the side shop. You'd have an argument there, because its stock is wholly redundant, but both offlane and safelane feel better with the sideshop, and it fosters real strategic opportunities. I can say the same of the river creeps in League. Why were they added? To give people a reason to fuck around in the river right? Well the side shop gives people more things to do in the side lanes. That's all it is. The difference, as far as I can see, is that the river scuttler is an "explicit" objective ("here's a thing you might be interested in killing") whereas play around the side shop is implicit ("you'll have to figure how to best use this area").
Or I could play a game where I don't have to care what reliable golds are or how to manage them, and spend my effort learning things like champion interactions.
Yeah these are barriers to new players for sure. Courier seems neat tho
For China, yes.
For the rest of the world. Riot has been doing a bang up job with starting leagues, promoting teams, seasons, local tournaments, etc. Even though it's not the premier DOTA, they are working with the community to make it be.
AnathemicOne
Banned
Gold loss on death is fine as it lends to be more methodical in how you control/play your hero, ie make sure you don't die. Learning how not to die also interacts with how you go up against other heroes, because you are making sure you don't die from them, thus the interaction.
LordRaptor
Member
The implication here is that dying isn't sufficient punishment on its own at a game design level though.
Gold loss vs not gold loss is almost semantics, dying is punishing enough in other games, losing gold is fine too though. But that's not what reliable gold is. Reliable gold is taking both approaches and making it needlessly complex, again for no actual benefit to making the game better to play.
Like, how dumb is it to say to someone "Oh, you can afford this item, but some of your gold is SPECIAL gold and you don't want to spend that gold on that item even though you can, so instead of buying your thing at 3000 gold, you've got 1500 special gold and you should wait until you have 4000 gold so that you can spend your 2500 not-special gold on the item and save your special gold for later"...k. That's intentionally obtuse and serves nothing. It's literally just a trap for new players.
People complained about snowballing this entire thread. That's what reliable gold is for, to dampen the effects of multiple consecutive kills. IIRC League does this by scaling back the amount of gold rewarded per repeated kill? Or has that been changed?
I'm not sure I have ever seen anyone say this to someone else in my 10+ years of playing this game. It doesn't even make sense, strategically speaking.
Procarbine
Forever Platinum
I think people are hard on the secret shop because they've bought in big time to LoL's marketing that the changes they've made aren't just different, but better. They successfully paint dota's design as archaic, unintuitive, and unfun. Yeah, a lot of mechanics started because of quirks in the mod, but they grew into defining gameplay.
The secret shop is not one of those things though. Shops were indeed broken up because of engine limitations, but the secret shop was placed outside of the base as a design decision. Access to the most powerful items then requires gold AND some semblance of map control, rather than just gold. Why is that backward or outdated? Why can't it just be different?
If it's a game mechanic that new players are unaware of then how does it impact them at all, assuming that they're playing with other people of comparable skill?
It makes the game better to play because getting killed as a support, ganker, or roamer, that is generating reliable gold from player interaction over unreliable gold from creep farming, is less punishing. Encourages attempting to play in that style.
Irrelevant though. Just like how special shops and risk/reward of leaving your base came up before, or denies or any other ridiculous dota 2 mechanic: If the goal is to reach the same result as what league does, why does league do it elegantly in a way that isn't obtuse and complicated? Why does dota take the path of most resistance? There are ways to achieve the desired outcome that don't involve designing your system like amateur hour bullshit.
Because map control is already desireable, there are other implementations that could work if it were truly necessary, the actual mechanics of the secret shop are outdated and tied to the limitations of the mod. Of course it was intentionally designed that way, lots of workarounds were in the original mod, the point is that they're not GOOD designs. The secret shop gets mentioned because it's indicative of the kinds of stupid decisions that plague dota and thus dota 2. The notion that a mapmaker just doing it for fun with the limitations of War3 scripting is infallible in their decisionmaking is HILARIOUS at best.
You should be encouraging the player to play the game in the way that is the most enjoyable, not working counter to it.
I'm already trying to make sure my hero doesn't die because being dead is a negative for my team, gold loss just means tanking five opponents while my team takes an objective feels bad rather than heroic if I don't manage to walk away from it.
Because scrapping Dota 2 entirely and retooling it from the ground up according to "modern design principles" would just serve to piss off a lot of existing players and isn't guaranteed to appeal to any new ones. If people truly dislike Dota 2 they can play League or HOTS as an alternative. The point is to increase or decrease the effects of some system, sometimes emergent, to offset another system, sometimes also emergent. It's not "emulating League". Even Dota players don't like it when games are too snowbally either, but they also don't like it when games aren't snowbally enough, as with the "comeback mechanics" debacle of 6.84.
When a game runs into a quandary in its balance, the solution isn't to scrapthe game and restart from scratch, copying its closest competitor. That's just myopic.
This is again wrong, what a surprise. Losing gold increases the risk/reward for going for bigger items early. It makes it a bigger risk to for example go early radiance. It's also reflected in item balance where some items has expensive recipes instead of smaller items to make it a risk to save up for. What reliable/unreliable gold does is lessen the snowball nature of the game. This mechanic does that you doesn't lose as much if you die two times in a row in a short time.
I mean it's fine if you prefer a game without these mechanics but you constantly in this thread just spew nonsense and insult those who disagree.
Procarbine
Forever Platinum
You are proving my statement, almost word for word.
I agree with this. Which is why I'm glad Dota 2 encourages its players to play Dota 2 rather than changing/scrapping all its various nuances to appeal to League players instead.
I'm glad Valve has put effort into increasing the visibility of these "archaic" and "unfun" mechanics among the other quality of life systems present in the game. Stuff like the visible camp boxes is a step in the right direction in addressing the accessibility/difficulty argument.
LordRaptor
Member
Yes, you're absolutely correct.
This is a much better argument than the "Its complicated therefore more strategic" arguments I have seen put forwards.
Personally, I was a little dismayed that when Valve launched DOTA2 it was such a linear iteration on its predecessor, for all the same reasons I can no longer play TFC after playing TF2.
And people wonder why Dota 2 players consistently have the reputation for being toxic.
Literally no other moba is full of people who only shit talk every other game specifically because they act as though theirs inherantly makes them better. "OH ITS HARDer. I HAVE BRAIN CELLS" is not an uncommon dota 2 player stance.
Last I checked, this is a thread about how league is more popular than dota. You want to know why it's more popular? The shit we're saying is why. The reactions you guys bring up are why. The notion that "Oh, it's a good thing they never touched my dota" is why. Dota 2 should have been the giant that crushed all comers when it came to this horse race. it had literally everything going for it. They pissed away much of that goodwill by not making their game better, period. You can harp on complexity and bullshit like reliable gold and secret shops and denies as being hugely important mechanics, but they're not, that's not what the genre is about or has ever been about, they're tiny nuances that detract more than they add and THAT is why League is more popular: It is a more fun video game.
To brass tack specifics:
Losing gold doesn't make risk reward better, inherantly it makes buying expensive items earlier better - reliable gold is what prevents you from wanting to buy stronger items early. Reliable gold, a mechanic that is extremely obtuse to anyone that isn't deeply entrenched in the game. The notion that some of your gold is more valuable to save and some of it isn't is fucking ridiculous, make different currencies, make it painfully obvious, they don't though because LOL DOTA. Reliable gold prevents snowballing: It only does that because of gold loss on death in the first place. Know what else would prevent that? Just not losing gold when you die. Funny, league has basically the same result and without tacking two extra complex systems on top of the basic action they're both trying to interact with: Dying.
AnathemicOne
Banned
Are you referring to saving up gold to counteract the gold loss? That's intuitive right from the mechanic of gold loss on death. "I don't like losing gold when I die, so I should save up enough gold to counteract such a loss." On the other hand, you can spend the gold once you acquire enough of it, death counteraction be damned. Hell, that's how I play Lina; if I have the gold to buy that Blink Dagger I'm gonna fucking buy it, however to obtain that Blink Dagger I have to play smart and not die else I lose gold and it will take longer to get.
You're not supposed to feel heroic in Dota 2, the game is designed to be methodical akin to a game of chess. Yes, you can die for the team but under certain situations if the opportunity presents itself. To use a LoL example people playing supports justify dying if they are able to place a ward down before death for team vision, this is never a good idea but people do so anyway because the only penalty is the death timer and the stipulations that come with it. In Dota 2 playing a support and dying in an attempt to place a ward is punishing so the next time you try and attempt it you are more methodical in your ward placement in terms of where and when to do so.
This reminded me of legacy key binds.
For those unaware, it used to be that keybinds used any letter of the alphabet, typically the ones that "made sense" given the name of the skill. This is a holdover from DotA's RTS origin. Of course, most modern players would agree that these kinds of bindings are fucking stupid and yet for people who grew up on it, using QWER probably just feels weird. Dota 2's solution was to support both. There's a ticky box that let's you turn on legacy bindings for all your heroes, and in this way old diehards can play alongside new converts.
Which is to say Dota 2 placed, and still places a lot of effort on reconciling the old with the new and I think this is vastly preferable to just abandoning older players. Everywhere you go you see people complain about how modern games have left them behind, have become "overdesigned", too streamlined to capture their attentions, and so on and so forth. The retro game boom in the indie scene is driven precisely by these sentiments. So there's no sense in trying to argue that because it's "old" or "archaic" that it somehow lacks appeal. It's true, most new gamers will prefer whatever design trends defined their formative years of gaming, but that doesn't rob the old designs of their value.
I was trying to be diplomatic. You said, and I quote:
The most enjoyable game for Dota 2 fans is, uncontroversially, Dota 2. This is a tautology actually. What you were implicating, I think, was:
Which I disagree with. Pretty much utterly. There's no question Civ 5 is more popular and more intuitive than EUIV, but I still prefer EUIV. Why is that preference some kind of cardinal sin? I know very well why League is more popular than Dota 2. What I take issue with is you coming in here to definitively state which method is "superior" and which is "inferior", without regards to context, basically continuing the same kind of indoctrination Riot was once guilty of with their "anti-fun" rhetoric, labeling such and such designs as "bad for players" and their own approach as "good for players". The best situation for the entirety of strategy gamers is that both Civ 5 and EUIV exists concurrently. There is no one who really benefits from EUIV becoming Civ 5, except possibly Paradox's wallets. But here you'll argue to the death that apparently Dota 2 should, and this is the key word, "should", because I think you see it as a flaw whose existence is undefensible, follow League's lead.
???????
None of those posts were even rude, except save maybe for Procarbine's. I don't play either game and have just been reading the thread out of curiosity, but you strike me as the one being weirdly 'toxic' all of a sudden.
SecretMoblin
Member
Ana you buy blink on linda?
that sounds very powerful, legend JAYCE-tier powerful even
that sounds very powerful, legend JAYCE-tier powerful even
Ghost is Bad
Banned
This is essentially the "Melee vs Brawl/Smash 4" argument in ARTS/MOBA format. Yeah, there's a lot of modernized, streamlined stuff in the newer games that make it easier for players to get into, but asking the guys that have played the older, more complex game to shove off and accept some of the baffling design decisions made in those newer games as a sign of "progress" is a dumb argument.
This is all your posts in this thread. You make definitive/objective statements on subjective matters like "fun" and then interpret any responses (that have been polite barring a few) to your posts as a declaration of war against your intelligence and game of choice.
Adding RANDOM caps does not improve your ARGUMENT.
Procarbine
Forever Platinum
Where am I being toxic, or even passing judgement? If you want to be pedantic you can say I meant that reliable gold made the game better, but I was just trying to use your phrasing to explain what it added to the game.
All I'm saying is that dota and LoL have different designs with different intent, I even agree that LoL is more popular because of them. Do I think this makes it a strictly better game? No. Do I think dota is a strictly better game? No. What even constitutes a game being better? They are clearly just different games in the same genre, comparing the two is like comparing Overwatch and Counterstrike, or even Overwatch and CoD if you'll get bent out of shape about implying which game is which.
I see a lot of outdated's, should's, and better's in your posts and many others in this thread. I don't think it's toxic at all to point out that games can be different, and even more popular than one another, without being better or worse.
Prophet Steve
Member
Although I think the DOTA 2 gold system could benefit from being simplified, there is most certainly an extra risk reward element so I am not sure what you are trying to say.
It makes buying expensive items earlier better only if you can think you can buy them without dying. Save up more money for a bigger item, you risk losing more money. With smaller items that is a lesser issue. Losing no gold on death doesn't have the same effect at all.
Also reliable gold is to promote kills instead of farming creeps and not to prevent snowballing.
Suzushiiro
Banned
Coming first counts for a lot in the online MP space, because games like that are inherently "sticky"- yeah, maybe you like Dota or HotS more than LoL, but all of your friends play LoL and you've invested a lot of time in it so it's not worth "starting over" with another game. This is also why WoW and CoD continue to dominate their respective genres.
There's also the fact that Dota seems to go for a more "hardcore" audience than LoL and especially HotS, which is naturally going to give it less appeal.
There's also the fact that Dota seems to go for a more "hardcore" audience than LoL and especially HotS, which is naturally going to give it less appeal.
Abilidebob
Member
After all the posts here you can't POSSIBLY be serious right now. Like, I sincerely can't believe you read what you wrote here, read the other posts, and thought "yep, that's the way."
AnathemicOne
Banned
Blink Dagger for erryone baby
SecretMoblin
Member
I've seen you bring this up a lot and I'm really curious why you think that the secret shop, out of all things is tied to the limitations of the WC3 map. To me, it just seems like a holdover from the old angel arena style maps that had a ton of really obscure things like that in them that was just sort of stuck in DOTA since nobody really cared all that much.
Like, I can understand why people think denying and turn rates are tied to WC3's limitations, even if they clearly aren't. But the secret shop could have so easily been moved to the base, next to all the other shops, that I feel like I'm missing something in your argument. As an aside, the shops them selves could be merged into one shop in the WC3 map as well (I've seen some maps implement similar things in various different ways), so the shops in WC3 don't really have any inherent limitations at all.
Ragnar Blackmane
Member
Try it out and decide for yourself. Both are great games IMO, no matter what people in this thread are saying.
Probably yes. Try out both. I found the additional challenge in Dota rewarding and couldn't get into LoL after having invested some time into Dota, but thats just me.
Have fun
Gully State
Member
Why are people here saying that LoL has better overall art and character art design than DOTA2? Where's this visual proof? That's all just subjective.
Try both...honestly you can't go wrong with whichever one you choose as they're both great games.
Try both...honestly you can't go wrong with whichever one you choose as they're both great games.
Dota 2's art design is what first drew me to the game.
Imperfected
Member
The MSI number is sort of useless out of context.
DOTA Majors generally have 16 teams. MSI had 6.
Having more teams not only means more characters appearing purely due to individual preference--as you can probably assume is the case for most characters that are selected by only a single player over the course of the tournament--but also other characters appearing specifically because of their value as counters to the player-specific characters or team-specific compositions they encounter. You're going to bias toward having fewer characters used if you have fewer participants in a tournament.
Worlds was definitely garbage, though. They played it on a poor patch.