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[LurkerPrime]

FYI, a few things. There are 3 core people with the credit towards DOTA.

1. EUL(Valve) - DOTA was created by this man and updated till FT.
2. Gusinoo(Riot) - Took over control after someone else combined them to create All Stars and got it to it's first "professional" level. Left back in 2005.
3. Icefrog(Valve) - Been the curator since 2005.

So the original creator and the fanbase curator since 2005 are at Valve. The only ones who are not would be Gusinoo and Meian. If anyone has a claim to "DOTA", it would be Valve.

HoN existed, because of the lack of community features in DOTA. Once DOTA 2 was announced, it died off. LoL continued to grow due to the accessibility, birth of F2P, and how it really is a different game than DOTA.

Bit more, the original issue came up when Valve announced DOTA. This was back when it was just announced with Blizzard and Valve. The term MOBA, was heavily pushed by Riot back in 2009, prior the genre was simply "DOTA". Ala, Doom to FPS. Unlike DOOM though, MOBA does not particularly make any sense since it fits a vast variety of games. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Which funny enough, can fit about any game that happens in an arena. Riot heavily pushed the term because them associating anyway with "DOTA" meant advertising the competition. The rest of it has been sort of a rewrite of history since.

AoS-DotA-MOBA would be an acceptable genre name progression, but AoS was unquestionably the original term. And good point about HoN.

As to ownership, no one should own DotA. It's a community effort that exists in the first place due to the good graces of Blizzard and its respective community. Even looking past Blizzard's involvement creating the tools and systems in WC3, there are legions of testers, modellers, animators, artists, and creative/design consultants that have gone uncredited and unpaid in Dota 2 because it was alpha tested while it was a custom map in WC3. So yeah, curator is the right term for those helming DotA's development because no one person truly created it, or should truly own it; especially now.

Like, Valve should have done the right thing and made their own, original take on DotA and relinquished the name to Blizzard for their irrelevant game, so we could be spared having a company with a single acronym for two of their games. Then Valve could have also avoided getting into the unsavoury spot of monetising a user-made mod for their own (huge) benefit, while Blizzard's HotS/DotA could be languishing over there just as it is now. It would be a better world.

Also, you've reminded me how weird it is that Ice Frog is still just a user name after all these years. Like, c'mon.


MOBAs, man. They stoke a fire in me and I don't even play them anymore.

 

[Parsnip]

I can't understand how they can f-up this bad.

DF: Batman - The Telltale Series: Lowest Resolution of the Generation?

Sub 720p on X1 (1600x766 on PS4) with drops below 20 FPS.

I mean, are you really surprised?
It's Telltale after all.

 

[The Dear Leader]

I mean, are you really surprised?
It's Telltale after all.

I mean yeah kinda, they talked up their new and updated engine so one would expect better performance, or at the very least the same as their previous game, not significantly worse. I don't even expect TellTales games to be technical show cases but 600p at 20ish fps is pretty surprising I say.

 

[dex3108]

I mean, are you really surprised?
It's Telltale after all.

I am surprised because they managed to make it worse. I mean if you can't pull at least 1080p/30 on PS4 for a adventure game that is mostly interactive movie and you have 240 people in the company then something is really wrong there.

 

[Ascheroth]

Man I love Trails in the Sky SC and all, but the Ramblin' Gambler achievement sucks. Luck based achievements aren't fun.
The only thing I'm missing for the achievement is getting 4 of a kind in poker at the casino. And I've probably played at least 5 hours of poker throughout the game. I have 300k medals and the most expensive thing to trade them for is 5k.
Thankfully playing poker is addicting in this game, because a 1 in 4165 chance to get something you need for an achievement is ridiculous.

There we go

Proudly joining those 1.4% who have that achievement.

Now enough playing poker and back to saving the country.

 

[BoosterDuck]

it's called friendly banter, sadly you seem to have sunk too deep in the fanboy pit to be able to have friendly banter

typical League fanboy always attacking everyone

since you don't seem to be able to muster a reason why prize pool matters, i'll tell you all there is to say about prize pools

it's a penis thing

Well no; the prize pools are meant to keep the competitive scene alive, they expose the good competitors and show companies who to sponsor. And Dota is bigger than all of them you're just salty at dat success breh

Valve making dat paper lol

edit: btw that picture only tracks prize money, which is a really biased statistic to use to measure the success of an esport. sadly it's very hard to track things like sponsorships, salaries players get from their teams, transfer fees, etc. and it's pretty late for me to look for data on this but i think what you're showing is very misleading if it's meant to say league players are underpaid

Everyone in TI is sponsored and get paid by Valve to travel and make money off streams and donations etc. etc. like every other professional esports player

ctrl+f compensation. $12.500 per player and coach over a split. hardly undisclosed. not sure what $12.500 gets you in america but if that were my salary for 6 months (on top of team salary, twitch stream money and sponsors) i'd be pretty pleased

shit that's it? That's not even enough to cover rent, Riot are jokes

i would love higher res models too but what can you do. hardly a cardinal sin. about the animation part, i'll direct you to this dev blog where they show how they do awesome stuff with smear frames and shit on the poppy rework. you probably are mistaking current riot animation with 2009 riot animation. things have change a lot since then

wow it took them 6 years after Dota became playable to acknowledge their crappy art direction lol, have they gotten around to their older characters yet?

but I guess they can not care since they're the number 1 game in the world

i find the hud really easy to follow, important stuff on the center, the periphery stuff is all non essential. i think it looks very pretty, specially in motion, very vibrant and colorful

the HUD looks Maple Story/Gaia Online/FLYFF/Nexon tier, I don't want to spend thousands of hours looking at spreadsheets

wtf? everything is everywhere lol what the hell is going on. All those icons all those fonts and for what

loading times are long, but so are stalker and half life's and those games are pretty good

also maybe u should check your pc, freezes aren't normal in league

No, Stalker and Half-Life take like 2 seconds to load for me. League takes 10 hours to load in the map all the while I can't browse my amazon shopping list or refresh Neogaf.

And I'm packing a GTX 980 with an 8 gig DDR3 stick, a Samsung 850 EVO SSD, 22nm 4th gen Core i5 chip on Windows 10 that stays at a cool 60° under load. My PC is faster than 99% of League player's PC's, there should not be one problem.

i didn't say it's the best game, but i think it's pretty good

league of legends is the best!

you're entitled to your opinion. there are tons of reasons not to like league, and they're all valid, you don't need to resort to lies and misinformation

there is not one lie I said about this ugly korean mmo game

i think i never said a bad thing about hots or doto, at least about their gameplay, so i'm not sure what's this craziness all of the sudden lol

you called it a pachinko rng game

sorry about the wall of text, but since neogaf doesn't moderate doto fanboys and i don't like people outright lying about the game i love, i have to take matters into my own hands

come at me bro I'll defend Guardians of the Galaxy's honor any day of the week

 

[MUnited83]

I can't understand how they can f-up this bad.

DF: Batman - The Telltale Series: Lowest Resolution of the Generation?

Sub 720p on X1 (1600x766 on PS4) with drops below 20 FPS.

Their engine is literally falling apart.

 

[iosefe]

There we go

Proudly joining those 1.4% who have that achievement.

Now enough playing poker and back to saving the country.

complaining always works

 

[Amzin]

I always preferred 'AoS' to 'MOBA,' but if we can transition to Mober I think I'll be OK.

You know what is really crazy? I read through this whole post and can verify it because I literally grew up and played through the entirety of that history.

Trying to talk to Guinsoo over the forums and then eventually Ice Frog about numbers and balance helped me realize a lot of people in places of power (coughGuinsoocough) have no concept of how to balance, and I learned how to do some of my own custom maps shenanigans by picking apart the map in the editor.

I remember the spam of AoS-likes in FT as DotA:A gained traction, with not much competing. Tides of Blood was indeed more popular for a while, but Allstars really killed it, and with good cause. ToB came out and basically never progressed, there wasn't a great deal different between release and 6 months later, whereas Allstars was constantly throwing shit at the wall.

I've played thousands of games of DotA:A, Dota 2, and LoL. I barely touch any of them now though. Dota 2 has higher highs and much , much lower lows than LoL and generally I prefer LoL over anything else in the genre, but they're all so different. I also appreciate the early devs of LoL actually reaching out to us nerds on our forum (not GAF, although maybe here too) in the early beta and actually giving us invites and talking about the game right there. It's ridiculous how far the genre and both big names have come today and to think I have tootled along with it this whole time, sort of peripheral and yet nearly in the thick of things.


Edit: Iron Badger is the first person to ever go on my NeoGAF ignore list I think. Even as someone that enjoys Dota 2, that's just... it's like the worst aspects of Fox news brought to the thread to rail on something for no reason.

 

[Grief.exe]

What do you MOBA/AoS fans think of Paragon from Epic?

 

[The Dear Leader]

What do you MOBA/AoS fans think of Paragon from Epic?

Well as a non-MOBA/AoS fan, I think it's pretty fun and looks fantastic, if my non experienced opinion matters.

 

[Amzin]

What do you MOBA/AoS fans think of Paragon from Epic?

I feel like those are the kinds of games to push the genre forward. Overwatch gets compared a lot but I still don't feel like it's a MOBA - probably we'll need to break down the genre even more going forward. LoL is pretty much the height of the AoS evolution while still staying true to the core, whereas Dota 2 maintains the older, crotchety gameplay of old.

Paragon looks unique enough where I'm not sure what audience it will compete with but I doubt it'll be a big chunk of Dota 2 or League's.

 

[The Hermit]

hey guys

wheres no man's sky?

pls

 

[Deleted member 144138]

hey guys

wheres no man's sky?

pls

August 12th

 

[rtcn63]

hey guys

wheres no man's sky?

pls

no mas sky

 

[Platy]

People on my twitter found some old tweets and discovered that the Women's Judo Gold Medal is a .... TIBIA fan !

Been a loooooooooooooong time since I heard about Tibia ... does NOT bring good memories =P

 

[Endruen]

no mas sky

no mas zky

 

[tioslash]

So I decided to buy Doom from the Humble Store just before the offer ended since I still had a 10% discount coupon.

Geez, this will take forever.

It will be worth the wait.

 

[rtcn63]

no mas zky

If there be spiders afoot

 

[shintoki]

AoS-DotA-MOBA would be an acceptable genre name progression, but AoS was unquestionably the original term. And good point about HoN.

As to ownership, no one should own DotA. It's a community effort that exists in the first place due to the good graces of Blizzard and its respective community. Even looking past Blizzard's involvement creating the tools and systems in WC3, there are legions of testers, modellers, animators, artists, and creative/design consultants that have gone uncredited and unpaid in Dota 2 because it was alpha tested while it was a custom map in WC3. So yeah, curator is the right term for those helming DotA's development because no one person truly created it, or should truly own it; especially now.

Like, Valve should have done the right thing and made their own, original take on DotA and relinquished the name to Blizzard for their irrelevant game, so we could be spared having a company with a single acronym for two of their games. Then Valve could have also avoided getting into the unsavoury spot of monetising a user-made mod for their own (huge) benefit, while Blizzard's HotS/DotA could be languishing over there just as it is now. It would be a better world.

Also, you've reminded me how weird it is that Ice Frog is still just a user name after all these years. Like, c'mon.


MOBAs, man. They stoke a fire in me and I don't even play them anymore.

AoS is a very different title more akin to a traditional RTS. DOTA is when the idea of an RPG hero unit was possible. The map is AoS, but DOTA itself was a combination of Hero Arena in WCIII meets AoS.

2nd, it doesn't really exist due to the good graces of Blizzard, hence why the new ToS include their ownership of mods. Basically, they got beat to the punch by Valve and Riot.

As I said, my issue is MOBA makes no sense at all. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can mean anything from Unreal to CS. As long as it involves an Arena.

 

[Stallion Free]

I can't understand how they can f-up this bad.

DF: Batman - The Telltale Series: Lowest Resolution of the Generation?

Sub 720p on X1 (1600x766 on PS4) with drops below 20 FPS.

Setting the resolution to 4K on PC obviously doesn't render at 4K internally. There are enough jaggies in scenes to make me question if it's even 1080p internal.

 

[Ascheroth]

complaining always works

Everytime.
Still an awful achievement.

 

[TheLetdown]

AoS is a very different title more akin to a traditional RTS. DOTA is when the idea of an RPG hero unit was possible. The map is AoS, but DOTA itself was a combination of Hero Arena in WCIII meets AoS.

2nd, it doesn't really exist due to the good graces of Blizzard, hence why the new ToS include their ownership of mods. Basically, they got beat to the punch by Valve and Riot.

As I said, my issue is MOBA makes no sense at all. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can mean anything from Unreal to CS. As long as it involves an Arena.

AoS was also brought into WC3, with the hero leveling and item system that entailed. WC3 was definitely when that genre's depth multiplied. I remember that transition.

As for nomenclature, if gaming as a community understands what MOBA now signifies, who cares? Language is adaptive and not at all beholden to lexicography.

 

[Grief.exe]

No Man's Sky FOV options for the PC version confirmed in the AMA

Setting the resolution to 4K on PC obviously doesn't render at 4K internally. There are enough jaggies in scenes to make me question if it's even 1080p internal.

Do you have an example shot to show?

 

[Servizio]

People on my twitter found some old tweets and discovered that the Women's Judo Gold Medal is a .... TIBIA fan !

Been a loooooooooooooong time since I heard about Tibia ... does NOT bring good memories =P

I'd never heard of Tibia until recently, and the context was "games that were ruined by rampant cheating."

Someone should double check that she didn't bot her way to the medal.

 

[def sim]

Dang, no deals at all for NMS huh? 😔

 

[Mikurden]

Edit: Iron Badger is the first person to ever go on my NeoGAF ignore list I think. Even as someone that enjoys Dota 2, that's just... it's like the worst aspects of Fox news brought to the thread to rail on something for no reason.

 

[Sch1sm]

Dang, no deals at all for NMS huh? 😔

Not one. Join the corner with Bboy AJ and cry a little.

 

[The Dear Leader]

Dang, no deals at all for NMS huh? 😔

Better off finding a deal on a Steam card at this point.

 

[Eila]

People on my twitter found some old tweets and discovered that the Women's Judo Gold Medal is a .... TIBIA fan !

Been a loooooooooooooong time since I heard about Tibia ... does NOT bring good memories =P

Well, it is the national sport of Brazil and Poland. Tibia, that is.

 

[def sim]

Not one. Join the corner with Bboy AJ and cry a little.

This corner sucks. 😭

Better off finding a deal on a Steam card at this point.

Yeah, I'll probably hit someone up over in the BST thread if I'm still down for it Friday.

 

[Jawmuncher]

What do you MOBA/AoS fans think of Paragon from Epic?

I liked the beta,played it recently and they added a bunch of stuff. I hate it now.

 

[~Kinggi~]

No Man's Sky FOV options for the PC version confirmed in the AMA

Do you have an example shot to show?

Yeah dem hot FOV options got me happy

 

[someguyinahat]

Some impressions for no reason! Suits: the Business RPG.

The story:You play some kind of manufactured executive in a world where all executives are manufactured...it's like a world that just exists to be corporate. At first, your mission is to do your job. But the story changes later on. Spoilers!

Spoiler

You lose your job, join a revolution of collectivists to take on the CEO, etc.

It's...very simple, but there was a lot of stupid humour infused into it. I'll explain later.

The gameplay: The game is more or less your standard RPGMaker game, with a few exceptions: one, there's no healing points and no healing spell until late in the game, and by then you'll be used to healing with items (which to be fair, are reasonably cheap and drop by many mobs,) and two, there's no option to run from any fight. Not that you want to run when you're in trouble, cause you rarely will be; but you'll want to run because you already feel overlevelled and you just want to move on. The skills feel a bit unbalanced: your main character uses "Tech Skills" that take a while to build up. You eventually get a skill to build up tech, but you can actually MISS and end up wasting even more turns...then, your tech skills seem to have a high miss rate and/or don't seem much more powerful than your main attack! So you just end up never using them. Your second character uses "fuel" and he fares slightly better with skills. He's weaker, but he has a move that can sometimes stun the opponent for a few turns. He also learns three tiers of an all-enemy move, but it's VERY rare that you get more than one opponent, so again, that gets wasted. Your final character also uses tech, but his are useful: drain health, poison an enemy, that sort of thing. Given all that, even without the balancing, it's pretty easy. The only time I ever used the resurrection items was when an enemy used an instant-death move, and only two enemies that I can recall did that.

Not to mention the hitboxes for examining things are weird: some things you can't examine unless you're below them. If there's a crate to the left and a crate above you, you'll only examine the one above, EVEN IF you're facing left. All in all, it's highly unpolished and could have used balancing/testing.

The dialogue and humour: Do you like 420 jokes? How about several dozen of them, over and over? Oh, you don't think that's funny? How about "dabbing at 7:10?" How about homosexuality jokes? No? Obvious references to youtubers like Pewdiepie, and fish-in-a-barrel targets like Justin Bieber, Donald Trump and the Big Bang Theory? Well...if you like that, pick up this game immediately!

The graphics: Black and white, a combination of pixel and hand-drawn. It's...um. Some are good, some aren't. Well, don't play this game for the graphics. There are a few cutscenes that didn't work in fullscreen and I'm not sure if they ever worked (it was just blackscreen with audio for me,) so there's that.

The length: Just short of 5 hours, and that's to get all the achievements. It's short for an RPG, about right for a comedy RPGMaker game of this length.

The verdict: Now, you might say "someguyinahat, you just skewered this game! How can you possibly say anything except avoid it?" Well...it's a dollar. And for a dollar, it's not THAT bad. Especially if you can get it for even cheaper on sale. I actually was expecting something a bit more poignant, given that they put it in black-and-white, but that would probably have pissed me off more, so I'm giving this a pass. Do I recommend it? ...I'd say your mileage may vary. Do you have a spare dollar and a few spare hours, and don't mind referential humour and weed jokes? Then maybe you'll get a few giggles out of this. If not, then you can safely give this a pass.

 

[uncredited male]

TIL Steam does not have the steam.com domain.

 

[someguyinahat]

TIL Steam does not have the steam.com domain.

You just learned that now? You didn't wonder why all this time they used steampowered.com?

 

[uncredited male]

You just learned that now? You didn't wonder why all this time they used steampowered.com?

I figured they would have scooped it up years ago with all that hat money.

 

[ussjtrunks]

Did they post all the grapics options in no mans sky yet? Sitting hear hoping for 60fps and at least 1440p

 

[Corpekata]

Did they post all the grapics options in no mans sky yet? Sitting hear hoping for 60fps and at least 1440p

I mean, they're not a Japanese dev so I think that's a given.

 

[The Dear Leader]

I figured they would have scooped it up years ago with all that hat money.

THIS DOMAIN IS NOT FOR SALE SIR, I SAID GOOD DAY!

Seriously though, I wonder if Valve somehow got an offer to the owner and for how much.

 

[someguyinahat]

THIS DOMAIN IS NOT FOR SALE SIR, I SAID GOOD DAY!

Seriously though, I wonder if Valve somehow got an offer to the owner and for how much.

My guess? Valve casually asked how much they want for it, got an outlandish response, and said "fuck it, we don't need steam.com" and that was that.

 

[Backlogger]

No Man's Sky FOV options for the PC version confirmed in the AMA

Do you have an example shot to show?

Nice, I saw that in another thread. Why does it say Cancelled though?

 

[gabbo]

You didn't like Max Payne 1&2?! Well, nothing's in a vacuum I guess. It was eye-openingly glorious in its day.

I think you misunderstood why he's upset with you

 

[Corpekata]

Nice, I saw that in another thread. Why does it say Cancelled though?

It's Murray poking fun at how much he is asked about it.

 

[zkylon]

what round is this? 3? 4?

typical League fanboy always attacking everyone

????

Well no; the prize pools are meant to keep the competitive scene alive, they expose the good competitors and show companies who to sponsor. And Dota is bigger than all of them you're just salty at dat success breh

Valve making dat paper lol

dude, i'm happy for doto players, i really don't care about prizepools enough to be salty. that's exactly why i asked you why should i care aside from the penis thing

you still haven't really replied to anything of substance so yeah

Everyone in TI is sponsored and get paid by Valve to travel and make money off streams and donations etc. etc. like every other professional esports player

that's cool, i was just explaining how that the data you're using to suggest league players are underpaid is incomplete and biased

shit that's it? That's not even enough to cover rent, Riot are jokes

weird, if i earned 12500 usd every six months i'd be pretty happy. i guess it's not the same everywhere, but that's what sponsors, team salaries, streaming, etc. is for

wow it took them 6 years after Dota became playable to acknowledge their crappy art direction lol, have they gotten around to their older characters yet?

i don't have a problem with league's art direction, i've always liked it, my issues were mostly gender/race representation and they've been doing great work about that lately. they have gotten to their older characters, not everyone, but ryze, sivir, tristana, sion, poppy, etc. have gotten major visual updates and look awesome now.

but I guess they can not care since they're the number 1 game in the world

well like i said they're changing these things so clearly they care

the HUD looks Maple Story/Gaia Online/FLYFF/Nexon tier, I don't want to spend thousands of hours looking at spreadsheets

then don't? like i said all you need to look at is on the center (or the minimap)

what is confusing you here? the chat? the completely standard kill stream on the right? the tutorial text that you're only gonna see once in your entire league history?

wtf? everything is everywhere lol what the hell is going on. All those icons all those fonts and for what

mind you i find doto ui as confusing as you do league's. i don't find doto's ui trash, i just don't know how to play doto lol

ui's for complex games are confusing if you don't know how to play em!

No, Stalker and Half-Life take like 2 seconds to load for me. League takes 10 hours to load in the map all the while I can't browse my amazon shopping list or refresh Neogaf.

And I'm packing a GTX 980 with an 8 gig DDR3 stick, a Samsung 850 EVO SSD, 22nm 4th gen Core i5 chip on Windows 10 that stays at a cool 60° under load. My PC is faster than 99% of League player's PC's, there should not be one problem.

idk what to tell you dude, loading games is pretty quick for me and my computer is shit compared to yours

there is not one lie I said about this ugly korean mmo game

there's many, i've provided evidence of all the things you've said that are lies

you called it a pachinko rng game

that was the fun teasing part dude! are you being dense on purpose?

also when i say "league's the best" it's clearly a joke post, i don't think anyone took that as a serious statement

come at me bro I'll defend Guardians of the Galaxy's honor any day of the week

no thanks, you're the one that brought it up, i really don't care about guardians of the galaxy

have you seen that new anime?

it looks uglier :<

yeah it's pretty bad

berserk deserves better

What do you MOBA/AoS fans think of Paragon from Epic?

i don't care much for the artstyle and i'm not sure i want shooting in my mobas (part of the reason i don't care about gearbox's game... i forgot it's name ;_. it's too grey and too "dudes with guns" for my liking, at least from the quick glance i've given it. haven't followed it much more closely than that, i watched the giantbomb quicklook and it looked alright, i just think that from that camera angle i would want to play something more actiony that looks more like the kind of things i like. it didn't have like a jungle implemented so i don't think it was that great of a show for me

i think if i were to play a more actiony moba i'd try smite, maybe?

it looks like less of a departure from league and it looks more colorful and fun

As I said, my issue is MOBA makes no sense at all. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can mean anything from Unreal to CS. As long as it involves an Arena.

it is bad but it's like rpg or adventure game, why bother fighting it when it's useful

i wouldn't have any issues calling these games dotalikes but seems like moba stuck

 

[Stallion Free]

As a Patriots fan I understand what it's like to feel persecuted.

Do you have an example shot to show?

 

[Enter the Dragon Punch]

 

[uncredited male]

...

I actually went back to IE and Opera. Opera does not have a built in history clear so I use IE for the clandestine stuff.

 

[LurkerPrime]

The truth hurts, Enter the Dragon Punch.

You know what is really crazy? I read through this whole post and can verify it because I literally grew up and played through the entirety of that history.

Trying to talk to Guinsoo over the forums and then eventually Ice Frog about numbers and balance helped me realize a lot of people in places of power (coughGuinsoocough) have no concept of how to balance, and I learned how to do some of my own custom maps shenanigans by picking apart the map in the editor.

I remember the spam of AoS-likes in FT as DotA:A gained traction, with not much competing. Tides of Blood was indeed more popular for a while, but Allstars really killed it, and with good cause. ToB came out and basically never progressed, there wasn't a great deal different between release and 6 months later, whereas Allstars was constantly throwing shit at the wall.

I've played thousands of games of DotA:A, Dota 2, and LoL. I barely touch any of them now though. Dota 2 has higher highs and much , much lower lows than LoL and generally I prefer LoL over anything else in the genre, but they're all so different. I also appreciate the early devs of LoL actually reaching out to us nerds on our forum (not GAF, although maybe here too) in the early beta and actually giving us invites and talking about the game right there. It's ridiculous how far the genre and both big names have come today and to think I have tootled along with it this whole time, sort of peripheral and yet nearly in the thick of things.


Edit: Iron Badger is the first person to ever go on my NeoGAF ignore list I think. Even as someone that enjoys Dota 2, that's just... it's like the worst aspects of Fox news brought to the thread to rail on something for no reason.

Heh. I don't know this from deep research or anything--I, too, lived that life. Couldn't count the number of DotA matches I played. Also played LoL for a while, but almost no Dota 2... by then the spell had worn off.

Before Steam, there was Battle.net. It was a good time.

AoS is a very different title more akin to a traditional RTS. DOTA is when the idea of an RPG hero unit was possible. The map is AoS, but DOTA itself was a combination of Hero Arena in WCIII meets AoS.

2nd, it doesn't really exist due to the good graces of Blizzard, hence why the new ToS include their ownership of mods. Basically, they got beat to the punch by Valve and Riot.

As I said, my issue is MOBA makes no sense at all. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can mean anything from Unreal to CS. As long as it involves an Arena.

That's not entirely accurate. Starcraft had hero units, they just didn't have that many differences from normal units, with some exceptions. Heroes by default had better HP and damage, and all upgrades unlocked; there are a few exceptions like Sarah Kerrigan, who lacked the Ghost range upgrade and could never acquire it, and Infested Duran used Zerg armor in place of Terran infantry armor and also regenerated like Zerg units. Maybe some more, too. But their damage, armor, health, and name were fully moddable in the editor; like every unit in Starcraft. (There were even a handful of "extra" units that were hacked into the game with modded map editors. You could also work dark magic to colourise the names... somehow.)

In place of hero levels, a lot of map makers took full advantage of custom triggering and the hacked 1-255 upgrade tree (vs. 1-3 in the base game) and moddable damage bonuses to give them a lot more scalability or abilities. Many also replaced units at a certain point ("classed up" a la Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem, basically) to give them better stats, as well. It led to some really fun maps.

Back to MOBAs, AoS 1 had heroes with special abilities, lanes, towers, and creeps; intentionally or not, it was a definite genesis for the concept of "DotA" and MOBAs as a whole. And AoS 2 made it competitive; might've even had items (there were ways to do that in SC1, generally involving controlling a Drone, SCV or Probe, and moving it to certain locations in your "inventory." Clever stuff.)

Man. Someone should make a sequel to Starcraft's map editor. Though WC3 did good work--you could actually make new units, buildings, upgrades, and spells in that, not to mention full-blown cinematics, which opened up a lot of doors that were previously closed.

 

[zkylon]

hmm, enhanced steam seems not to be working for me today (firefox)

i uninstalled and reinstalled but no help

weird