IIRC, HoN was super popular back in Beta, but they came out with a priced release and...nobody was down for that. They went free like a year or two later, but it was too late.
-
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
IIRC, HoN was super popular back in Beta, but they came out with a priced release and...nobody was down for that. They went free like a year or two later, but it was too late.
well I remember that was my first experience, then I manage to convince some friends to play with me and we were frustrated as fuck during our first month, maybe things have changed, to be honest we stopped playing Dota2 one year ago when Heroes of the Storm launched and we have no plans of coming back
For those complaining about Dota's turn ratios, it is a very integral mechanic and would make a ton of the heroes extremely broken if it were to be removed.
There is a hero with an ability that a huge part of it is slowing turn rates.
Another hero has an ability that does 3 ~300 damage nukes on short, medium, and long distances in the direction he is facing, all on separate cooldowns. If he could turn instantly, he would be one of the most broken heroes in the game.
There are plenty of examples like this, it is a very necessary mechanic that factors into planning all your moves carefully in Dota.
There is a hero with an ability that a huge part of it is slowing turn rates.
Another hero has an ability that does 3 ~300 damage nukes on short, medium, and long distances in the direction he is facing, all on separate cooldowns. If he could turn instantly, he would be one of the most broken heroes in the game.
There are plenty of examples like this, it is a very necessary mechanic that factors into planning all your moves carefully in Dota.
So if someone doesn't understand something within half a second, we should just remove it? Assuming your player base is incapable of learning anything is not good game design.
XANDER CAGE
Member
This is some pretty transparent cherry picking my dude. Both League and Dota have plenty of interesting and flavorful character concepts.
psychodino
Neo Member
LOL got started first, but i do think Dota 2 is gaining popularity
Stone Ocean
Member
It's not about assuming your players can't learn a mechanic, it's about assuming they will very likely not give a shit.
LordRaptor
Member
Are we pretending that MOBAs have shallow learning curves now?
LoL streamlined a hellofa lot of mechanics, but to someone entirely new to the genre it is still an uphill battle to internalise what are still a large number of complex systems.
e:
Like, from a pure design perspective, what are the benefits to a player of having 2 different shops?
SirPinkyNose
Member
Guinsoo did not make Dota. He made Dota All-star, which like it's game implies, a map which collect all the heroes from other Dota map into one. You can say that he helped Dota to be big, but he did not design the game at all. And Dota under him was very unbalanced.
If you want to talk about original Dota creator, then it was Eul who made Dota map based on Starcraft's Aeon of strife custom map, and accidently he's a Valve's employee.
Napalm_Frank
Member
How often does LoL receive new heroes (or whatever they are called?). DotA has been stagnated in this regard for a while, they haven't even gotten every DotA 1 hero ported over and have 0 completely new heroes currently.
Stone Ocean
Member
About once every two months, not counting any champion reworks in between
Then why are you even playing? The same could be said about any LoL mechanic by your logic.
Evolution of Metal
Member
- It has way better and more appealing characters
- It has way better skins and cosmetic items
- It is much easier both mechanically and strategically
- Dev support (as questionable as Riot is) is superior: more champions, experiment modes, more balance changes etc. Dota has the community support though.
- Riot's esports and leagues are superior
- Nexon are garbage, they wasted precious DOTA years in Korea allowing LoL to completely take over. Now Perfect World is in charge, but DOTA will never get big in Korea at this point.
- Marketing, exposure and developer support
- Riot does everything to push their game while Valve released it on Steam
My personal problems with DOTA:
*Lagging animations. WC3 had limitations, why is DOTA 2 still suffering from it.
*Snowballing is unforgiving. Dying not only gives enemies money and level advantage, but it also removes money (which pros spend before dying, so it is an issue only to new/average players).
*Mana and cooldowns. No, I am not interested in strategically using 3 regular spells because that is all my mana pool.
*Terrain is the artifact of old design.
Dota 2 is the game for Dota 1 players. It is not the evolution of the game, it does not care for new players or trends.
PsychoSoldier
Banned
Oh, and again this is anecdotal, but I've played maybe 1/10 as much DotA as I have LoL, but have encountered way more shit-talkers and ragers, despite the fact that I only play bot games.
But isn't that the whole point of "easy to learn but hard to master"?
You don't need to deny, leech XP, junge suicide, camp stack/block in Dota. You can just as well win without it and you probably won't notice those things in low MMR games anyways.
But the better you get, the more you have the mental capacity to include these little things that give you the edge over the enemy. That's what I love about Dota. No matter how good I feel at the game, I know there are so many things that I can improve on.
Completely subjective. I might just as well say that all the LoL designs are horrible (which I don't because I only know a few of them; but Bunny and Swimsuit Girl outfits don't give me hope)
Agreed
Debatable. LoL certainly gets more attention from Riot than Dota gets from Valve. The fact that the client is still shit though and basic functions are still missing while Dota has custom games made by the community at this point, could also tell you that Riot really doesn't care about the average player's experience.
Also: More champions at a price. The average player will never play as many heroes in LoL, than the average player in Dota.
Again subjective. Many people like the community driven side of tournament and the natural evolution of Dota as an eSports in comparison to Riot handling everything themselves.
Agreed.
Snowballing has been addressed in recent patches and is more forgiving than ever before. You can still be steamrolled by one skilled player, but if that player fucks up even once, you roll in cash.
"Lagging Animations" is probably turn time, which is an integral part of Dota. As someone said before, turn time is what makes some heroes balanced.
I felt the exact opposite on mana and cooldowns. I never had to look at the mana cost of my abilities in LoL because mana never went dry. Why even have mana costs and not just cooldowns then? I am sure this is not with every hero, but because of my limited hero pool to choose from, this was my beginner's experience.
In Dota my spells feel more important and impactful because I know if I fuck up, I may not have enough mana to save myself or kill the enemy. The stakes are higher and I enjoy the fact that I am required to be mindful of what I do and when I do it.
Napalm_Frank
Member
I haven't played LoL but I could see this being a big selling point for casual players that want new content more regularly. I loved back in HoN beta when there was a steady flow of heroes both old and new, the game never felt stagnated.
DotA 2 does have some big balance patches and new items but they just don't have the same hype as a new character.
Stone Ocean
Member
Because what is directly avaiable to me is engaging and fun. League is a fun game to just boot up without ever having touched a MOBA and having no clue of what you're doing. Dota2 not so much, it feels immediatly overwhelming.
This is from my experience, mind you.
Holundrian
Unconfirmed Member
Was already this way a year ago. It's not a lot of people bother to learn stuff.
Like this frustration about falling behind by a big margin on the scoreboard and people feeling defeated, it's their feeling of defeat that hurts their play the most.
What I told my friends that felt that way is watch the gold graph in those games.
And surprise they noticed that the gold advantage shifts early game were pretty minimal(like with 4k gold being really large and rare) compared to midgame fights.
They would also notice that it's the exp advantages that count early.
Some of them learned that they could just counter those advantages with dodging ganks/fights and smart solo lane pushing/jungle farming and try to come back in mid game fights despite being ~0-16 or something similar.
Sry for nerding out, given that this wouldn't interest you :/ but can't help myself dota 2 is a wonderful game with incredible depth. Some of its strategic aspects really blew my mind even as someone that grew up with startcraft/similar games.
Only to people not playing the game extensively(despite the reddit memes). Honestly new heroes always bring miserable weeks of ranked play. I despise them.
I actually stopped playing for a few weeks after Arc Warden/Techies.
You were the only one pretending that.
I would think the purpose of having a secret shop outside of base is obvious. A lot of items in Dota have huge impact. Shortening respawn times, disabling, dealing burn damage just by standing near them , and more. If you are stuck in your base in turtle mode, if you needed critical items, you would have to do something other than turtle.
ProfessorLobo
Banned
This is a good question. My short time with dota seemed to be filled with design decisions meant only to confuse the player with not a lot of benefit.
Both of these posts get it. DotA is 'harder' but not in any way that is fun to most people, it's just obtuse. It has so many design 'decisions' that are tied to the game being very strictly adherant to a mod for a 15 year old game. League cleaned a ton of that up but kept the basic complexity that made the game rewarding to play.
Throw on top of it the appealing characters and visuals of league vs the muddy ugly DotA look with generic characters (again, tying too closely to the original mod which were all just generically named versions of wc3 units), and it's not a surprise. Teemo alone is infinitely more interesting as a character than something like "Drow Ranger"
How about the more obvious answer: The secret shops are in DotA2 because they were bullshit added to DotA the mod over the years due to shit like limits on the vendors and just carried over because reasons. Just like nonsense like couriers. DotA was a mod that had a very very strong core that became bloated, dota2 continues the bloat, league distilled it to its core. It's not just secret shops, you've got nonsense like Buyback, couriers, runes, denies, all of this shit undeniably adds complexity, but you could just pile more bullshit on there if you wanted - it doesn't make it a better game. Most of it is impenetrable and silly.
thestopsign
Member
An average League match is somewhere around 35 minutes. A 50 minute game can happen, but the teams either have to be extremely even or the winning team has to be incompetent with the new dragon changes.
Yup. Even on lower graphical settings it is pretty easy to make out what is going on too. The spell effects suffer a little, but everything else is very readable.
This is one of the top two reasons I play League over Dota 2. I found Dota 2 goes out of its way to make things very hard to interpret on screen. Abilities, characters, and even differentiating if a character was on your team or not are all considerably harder in Dota.
The additional mechanics added don't do anything for me either, and I say this as someone who played DotA Allstars. I think League went the right way with streamlining the mechanics and focused it on more constant skill spam (which provides more constant feedback and makes you feel useful) and is less punishing when you die, which can be supremely frustrating.
Damn. Yeah, I remember the "switch" to free to play. By that time Dota 2 was becoming a thing and League had far out paced them.
I suppose there's no smooth roll over from beta into release if you're attaching a $30 price tag for people to stay in. They might have had more luck with a Smite style model of "pay 30 bucks for everything OR be more limited and continue playing for free. Of course, Smite didn't exist then either.
I actually looked up HoN the other day and it's still alive somehow. Been sold to another company but they're still adding content. Hilariously, they have their own version of Dota's "compendium" right down to "buying levels" and "betting at the beginning of matches for tokens".
I always assumed the idea was to make many of the more impactful items require more risk to acquire. Especially if you're stuck in your base.
dave is ok
aztek is ok
Calling a very intentional design decision "nonsense" doesn't make it true. Both the couriers and secret shop have had drastic changes and reworkings since Dota 2 was introduced, along with virtually every other game mechanic. They add depth to the game and create interesting gameplay scenarios that would not exist otherwise.
The items in the secret shop in DotA could just have easily been added as another building in each team's base.
Having employees post memes on Reddit is superior dev support.
LordRaptor
Member
No, TheYanger is correct - it was a workaround from the WC3 engine where it originated that has persisted.
It's the same thing as "Denial" as a mechanic - WC3 cannot differentiate NPC units as 'belonging' to anyone, so emergent gameplay came around relating to ebing able to kill your own units, as hugely counter-intuitive as a success strategy that may be from a design perspective.
Read my edit, you can bolt on as many random systems to any game as you like, making it more obtuse is not making it more meaningful, it's false depth and detracts from the game itself. They're willing to tweak that stuff, but are they smart enough to remove it? No because they've dug in hard on the "DOTA ALLSTARS WAS INFALLIBLE" model of bullshit. League does away with that nonsense.
Exactly. all of that shit is stuff that is a relic of Warcraft 3, not because it's 'good' design. I mean we shouldn't be expecting valve to innovate here - they couldn't even think of their own designs for units and had to steal that shit as well, but it always makes me laugh when people try to defend DotA as better because it's 'harder'...by that logic I should just copy dota 2 and add 10 more layers of bullshit, clearly it would be the superior game right?
Thank you for the correction
Oh I'm sure a lot of the design decisions stemmed from limitations within the W3 engine. I'm just saying in application today though I still think it provides a more interesting game regardless.
Stone Ocean
Member
Doesn't the secret shop not appear on the minimap? What would the reasoning behind that be?
PsychoSoldier
Banned
While I think it's true that there's some degree of intention here, I am often curious how much of what is the core game is due less to intent and more to the limitations of the original engine that have simply been passed on throughout the game's development.
And I wonder if some of these vestigal pieces, if removed, would actually make the game better.
Then explain why Valve merged all the base shops into one. Aren't they hellbent on keeping everything the same? No they aren't. Having multiple shops in the base had no impact on gameplay, but side shops and secret shops do so they remained. Same for runes, couriers, etc.
See, this is the problem with Riot's bullshit: they tried to convince people that some mechanics are wrong. You are free to prefer one over the other, but calling it "bloated" and "archaic"? Give me a break.
That's fine if you do, but most people do not - clearly, or DotA would be more popular than League. Like, if it were definitively a better game, it wouldn't even be close. But it's not, it's just different. Dota players tend to hang their hat on those aspects as WHY it should be better, which is ridiculous. I don't think league is perfect either, and I don't care to invest my time in either game (if I did, it would be league though), but dota is a highly flawed product of its time that survives because the basic premise of the moba gameplay is still extremely appealing and fun.
Because having the shops in base be separate didn't add any gameplay, and having secret shops does. It doesn't mean it's a good decision, but I think we can all agree that having 2 guys standing next to each other selling different shit because of the item limit is not actually adding anything no matter what your stance is. It's fine though, I expect dota defenders to be obtuse about shit like this. You are also fine to prefer one over the other, but yes, bloated and archaic are both words that describe most of the 'extra' depth DotA has. Shit like denies are so nonsensical in any way other than "that's how wc3's engine works" that it's literally baffling that people defend it, but there you go - dota fans.
This post just hurts to read. I mean, it's fine if you prefer to play a more streamlined game and personally don't enjoy those mechanics but to pretend that these mechanics which has been changed a lot and finetuned over many many years is just something they left in just because is silly.
SirPinkyNose
Member
Whether if you perfer having people wearing mordern nurse outfit or beach bikini in your fantasy videogame or not is subjective so I won't talk about it, but I still feel that there are ridiculously baseless claim that's just flat out wrong that I need to adress:
Dota has 2 layers of golds: reliable and unreliable. You gain reliable golds by doing objectives and kills/ assist and unreliable golds by doing everything else. Spending golds will removes unreliable golds first then reliable golds. You cannot lose reliable golds on death.
Mana can be refilled using multiple means. Bottle, mango, rune, arcane boots, guardian greaves, mana restore skills, mana regen item. Managing your mana takes skill, but a good player with a good team can stay in the field forever without having to return to base. Same can't be said about LoL.
Terrain is the beauty of the game. It forces the plqyer to learn the map to be able to gain advantage in the fight. It's just not a back ground for you to play on, but is actually a battlefield where you can use the enviroment as your weapon.
Anyway games are created for entertainment. It does not have to care about evolution or trend as long as the players are happy playing it.
I don't know where you got the idea that the secret shop was a "workaround" when there were shops in the base already.
Denial is a good mechanic. Lots of games have intentional bugs result in a mechanic. What about bunny hopping? Denial isn't "counter-intuitive", you are preventing your enemy from gaining gold, experience, or both, which is absolutely worth it and logical. You want to have higher levels and more gold than the other team. How is that counter -intuitive?
Holundrian
Unconfirmed Member
I don't know I think the design intention with which it started with doesn't really matter when players made stuff like the secret shop part of their strategies.
In higher play you get a good feeling around certain item timings. Which does allow you to play around the secret shop(in pubs at least).
My favorite example of that is creep stacking, its origin is kind of a bug rather than intentional design. But the way that creep stacking influences map movement or general efficiency plays, item timing acceleration is really cool. Thinking about it is mind boggling what pro dota was 3 years ago doesn't compare to today.
Evolution of Metal
Member
Then don't be surprised that RTS and other complex games are dinosaurs. Digested MOBA, FPS and RPG experiences dominate mainstream.
Most League players are Unranked/Bronze/Silver. That is the evidence that players aren't even capable of playing an easier game at a reasonable level. They ignore a bunch of elements of the game because they either don't have time or capabilities to learn them.
Dont worry and I agree that the game has incredible depth and thats also the reason why it might scare away people that come from other similar games because I fell that unless you have someone to guide you it can became a frustrating mess.
I played this game for like 6 to 8 months straight after quiting LoL and we were starting to improve by ourselves by reading some online guides for builds and stuff but at the end it was still overwhelming to the piont that we started to comparethe game to studying for some kind of mayor test at college and we were simply not having that much fun.
After that, we jumped ship to hotS since it was simpler, I loved the different maps and we were really having fun.
No, rather the issue is that Dota has a ton of bizarre minor mechanics that need to be memorized for the sake of being memorized, and after a point it gets annoying. It's the issue of "more mechanics doesn't make the game better." The whole idea of LoL was to strip down the DotA to the core gameplay that really drives it, and expand of that rather then adding aside complications-and to add some game design 101 refinements that weren't in the original Warcraft Mods.
Some people like to say DotA is superior because it's more complex, but a lot of the complexity is superficial in that it really doesn't need to be there and doesn't add much. That's why a lot of people don't like DotA.
I'm just happy we don't have to mess around with up to a dozen different "shopkeepers" to buy the item we want to buy. One thing I definitely don't miss from the old mod.
It feels weird to think back on the old dota 1 days, I don't remember too much about it tbh. It was just one of many custom maps that were available, and my friends and I were more into ranked WC3 than Dota. I do remember always feeling like the games took forever though, and one person leaving would fuck everything up. Then there was the proliferation of 3rd party "ban-lists" and stuff to try and deal with that... good times for everyone!
It feels weird to think back on the old dota 1 days, I don't remember too much about it tbh. It was just one of many custom maps that were available, and my friends and I were more into ranked WC3 than Dota. I do remember always feeling like the games took forever though, and one person leaving would fuck everything up. Then there was the proliferation of 3rd party "ban-lists" and stuff to try and deal with that... good times for everyone!
Abilidebob
Member
So every thing that DotA has over LoL is "obtuse", "bloated", "nonsense", while everything that LoL removed was exactly right thing to do, and the things they added always had a perfectly logical explanation.
Okay then.
I'm pretty damn sure that Denying isn't a WC3 engine limitation. It COULD have been, 13 years ago, but a quick look at Map Editor can show you that not letting players "deny" their allies is as easy as checking a box.
You haven't presented any argument for how any of those gameplay systems are "meaningless". This isn't really the thread for that discussion, but all of the things you mentioned have extremely good reasons for their current implementations. Buyback, for example, gives players a risk-reward scenario where they can choose to sacrifice future flexibility for winning a fight for immediate benefit in the form of a item.
Also, the origin/intention/restrictions of a game mechanic came to be have no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it's actually good.