robotslave

Twig, Zombie Thumb got the point of my post exactly right. If you can't think of any good reason a viewer might prefer to watch DoTA via Twitch or other streaming services, then you're probably not going to understand anything else about non-player spectators, either. I might prefer the convenience. I might not have or want a Steam account. I might be watching mainly on mobile devices. I might want to conserve space on a computer with a small SSD for storage. I might not want to shell out $10USD for a "tournament pass" to watch the two matches I'm interested in. I might have a mac that can't be upgraded beyond OSX 10.6, or a have wonky Windows driver, or old or half-broken hardware. I might not have permission to install the client on the computer I use. I might, god help me, be fond of the chat on one of the streaming services. I might have a nutball paranoid belief that "install the client for maximum viewing experience" is a manipulative propaganda message in the service Valve's bottom line. I might not watch games often enough to feel installing the client is justified. I might have a weird insecure social circle in which installing the client is considered uncool. I might simply prefer a stream site for reasons I can't articulate. Any of these would be an absolutely valid reason for some given person, provided that person is otherwise willing to watch the game. Pick one and pretend it's my reason. If you want to keep non-player spectators away from the game, then a great way to do it is to imply they're doing something wrong when they say they don't want to watch the game the way you think they should watch it.

But I am not watching in-game, and I am not going to be watching in-game any time soon. Effectively zero non-player spectators will be watching in-game. This is probably the most important thing to wrap your head around when you're thinking about expanding the audience of non-player spectators: We do not play the game. Most of us have never used the game software at all, and few of us ever will.

So I have a lot of thoughts on the question of how to bring more spectators to the game, particularly spectators who do not play the game themselves. A lot. So, Ayesee, if you're checking this thread at all, here's the first and most important idea for attracting non-player spectators: 1. We're already here. And you can start addressing us in casts or coverage any time you like. I've never played a LoMa. I installed Dota2 once, but I never opened it. But I watch a lot of pro games, and read a fair bit of online stuff about the game. I mentioned this in Sean's Twitch chat a while back when he was playing some Saturday Dota, and the reaction was unexpected: Sean seemed shocked, and offered the opinion that what I do is crazy*. And then several other people in that twitch chat piped up, saying they were more or less in the same boat: don't play, do watch. This was in a low-ranking pub match with maybe 50 people watching it: there are many, many more of us non-player spectators watching when you cast big events or well-known teams. So start talking to us. On the Idle Thumbs cast, they're constantly putting the brakes on a conversation about a game with a phrase to the effect of "OK, for those who haven't heard of this game, here's a summary...". Do this in LoMa casts. Assign someone to periodically say "so, for those who haven't played this Lord much..." and just explain Basic Things. Do this for items too. You often have tons of action-free slow time in a game, fill some of it with information instead of banter (but please don't jettison the banter). Don't be afraid to repeat a few Basic Things from game to game (but don't repeat yourself too much in a single game). I'm sure new or infrequent players would appreciate this just as much as non-players. People are smart, we can pick up a lot of jargon from context. What we can't pick up from context are the things you can only get in-game; the two biggest ones are the Items Spreadsheet and the Lords Spreadsheet. Which Lord has what spells, what a Lord's basic stats are, what each spell looks and sounds like, which items do what and which item names** correspond to which icons on the screen. Players get all of this by loading up the game and playing it for 100 hours. Non-players need help, infrequent players need reminders, and new players need tips. Most of all: when you're casting or writing coverage of the game, remember there are already people in your audience who don't play the game. * Um, don't do this if you're trying expand the spectator pool to non-players. I'm not crazy. ** we can handle multiple names for items and lords, we manage to cope with endless nicknames for things in every other sport. *** I have at least two more Important Things To Say, but I'll put them in their own posts.

As of today, Dota Today has been overtaken by Terminal 7 in number of episodes produced. It's interesting that on their show, Nels and Jesse never seem to be lingering over things they don't like about the game (or the metagame).

That brief sample of the lost episode sounds a lot more "deliberately processed" than "glitched" to me, but then my knowledge of audio engineering isn't exactly up to date. And the new theme wasn't used, either... assuming Lord Remo had it done in time.

It's actually a lot worse than that. If you ask older Americans about it, they'll all tell you that Laika was a Siberian Husky. She wasn't. It should have been obvious, given the overwhelming influence of payload mass on the engineering requirements of an orbital launch, that Laika was a very small dog. Today, there are plenty of photos, and it's inarguable that Laika was a Jack Russel mix, weighing at most 12 pounds. And this, unfortunately, casts the whole enterprise of the game Danielle reviewed into a bit of problematic shadow. Laika was not a super-dog; Laika was the most suitable stray dog the program managed to find while roaming the nearby streets. There were no rescue or emergency life-support systems for Laika. There was no re-entry system at all; from the very beginning of the project, it was designed to be a one-way trip; the passenger (dog) was expected to simply die, not return. Laika was chosen solely to be lightweight and disposable. Nobody involved in the program ever had even the slightest expectation that Laika would survive the experience. When you make a game in which Laika is an exceptionally capable being, engaging in all sorts of wide-range roaming and character interactions, you are, consciously or not, burying the fact that Laika was a very small dog, bound to a tight, tiny harness in flight, and monitored not for how well she would adventure in Space, but for which point in the one-way flight she would die. There were people in the Russian space program who, having lived with Laika for the few weeks before they flung her to her death, came to believe that this small, curious, friendly, and exceptionally human-centric dog shouldn't be cast into the void, there to die without so much as a familiar hand to lick. Which might have made for a deeply moving game. But the game under discussion isn't about those Russian aerospace engineers, or about the dog they lived with for a few brief weeks; instead it's about a pretend dog, and that pretend dog apparently does quite a lot to perpetuate the myth of Siberian Husky Laika, and very little to teach us anything about the actual, historical Laika.

This was not just in Manhattan, and it was not at all an accident. Play Mechanix put an unprecedented amount of money into fomenting online competition in a cabinet game, and that investment paid off handsomely. Farmville was a big cool thing for a short minute, too (though only an internet short minute), and for a lot of the same reasons. Which drew in exactly the same personality type after the first few seconds of early adoption. And made a very recognizable crowd utterly loathe it five minutes later.

We don't, because they don't break that out in their financial reports, but we do know that unlike other console manufacturers, Nintendo has always aimed to sell their hardware at a profit from launch day. We also know that they were selling the 3DS at a loss from August '11 to around July '12 due to an early price cut, but have had positive margins on the unit since, including all of 2013. I can't imagine the margins on the deeply discounted last-gen plug-in-to-tv consoles were especially good in '13, and as stated, the 3Ds definitely beat Sony and Microsoft on volume. My larger point here is that so much of this idle chit-chat, or wishful thinking about playing Zeldario without having to buy a Nintendo device in addition to ones' Sony or Microsoft device, is based on the premise that Nintendo is a failure as a hardware company, when in reality Nintendo is actually a fantastically successful hardware company.

So what you're saying, then, is that Nintendo's business needs to be restructured because they're successfully and profitably selling both the games and the hardware to play them on? And that the way to fix this dire threat to the company's continued existence is to get rid of that enormous pile of horrible, terrible hardware profits?

The 3DS is not merely "selling well," it was the best selling games console of 2013, and the best-selling games console for December, the first full month of sales for the xBone and the ps4. Handheld hardware isn't a weird little offshoot product that Nintendo does, it's their core business. The weird offshoot is the boxes they make that you have to plug into a TV. I'm not sure how games journalists still manage to not-understand this, unless it's a combination of lazy, habitual leaning on the "console wars" narrative for the stories they have to file, plus an ingrained notion that it's not a console if it doesn't show games on a television. But whatever it is, this completely backwards view of Nintendo's core business is transmitted from the press on to the games-thinking-about public, and it results in endless repetition of a few really terrible ideas about what Nintendo ought to do with itself. Nintendo can keep manufacturing hardware with positive profit margins, marketing that hardware largely via games exclusive to it, resulting in chart-topping unit sales, all the while dabbling in experimental, cheap-to-build hardware of the old clunky plugs-into-televisions variety, possibly with an eye to eventually miniaturizing any successes there and incorporating them into their core product. This is an enormously successful business, yet some people still want them to give all that up and just be Square Enix instead. Why? Why do people cling to this idea that would so obviously be completely awful for Nintendo's business, and quite possibly for their games, too? Is it just because they're at some sort of uncomfortable in-between age where they don't want to be seen playing with a 3DS in public, but they can't credibly tell the clerk "it's for my kid" when they go to the store to buy one?

This is just laughably untrue. If by "mobile" we mean "you carry it around in your pocket," then many, many millions of people do very much want Nintendo to keep making games for mobile, on Nintendo's own hardware platform. Nobody at all is clamoring for Nintendo to abandon their own mobile platform and instead make games for that platform's two major competitors, Android and iOS, but weirdly this rather significant observation is ignored or instantly forgotten when you share it with the sort of people who keep insisting that Nintendo ought to quit making hardware and just make software for their competitors' platforms instead.

Which is precisely why Nintendo still has a very good reason to keep making hardware-- handheld hardware. Again, I really do think we ought to at least consider treating Nintendo like a handheld video-games company, in a discussion prompted by a handheld Nintendo video-game. Maybe we all need to get off the couch and go sit in the back seat of a car for a few hours, before we start wondering if Nintendo should stop making their own hardware and instead just write games that run on Android and iOS.

It was kind of uncomfortable to listen to a discussion of Nintendo's failure as a hardware company that didn't even mention handheld gaming. A discussion prompted by a 3DS game, no less! I was squirming the whole time, I tell you. I mean, sure, we all carry around handheld gaming devices now, with phones built in, but the kinds of games we play on those aren't the same kind that people play on Nintendo's pocket hardware, and that's not just due to licensing decisions.

I like you guys, but I think maybe you should start being a little more self-aware when you say "we should put that on the blog" on the cast. Go look at the blog. Look at it! Tell me what you see.

If you do not edit together the Hat Baron saga and release it as a standalone, then, um, I guess I'll have to do all that work myself. Also, if you do not get that Captain Invictus fellow on the show for a Very Special Episode, then I will have to find names other than Remo, Rodkin, Breckon and Vanaman for my next four cats (why start with just one?).

Regarding the music of the 80s... Oh gosh yes, so much schlock. So, so much... And yet. Sonic Youth Huusker Du Prince. So much Prince. The Replacements Negativeland. Show me a band since that's been as avante-garde as Negativeland... the Go-Gos, even. Or Cyndi Lauper. or Joan Jett not to mention the foundation and early chart success of... uh, hip-hop I mean, there's crap nostalgia, and yet there's entirely justifiable nostalgia, no?

OK. So, I'm like 1/4 way into this podcast, and y'all are talking about Spelunky and rage-quitting games... I came to Spelunky after playing Dwarf Fortress for a couple weeks (let's pretend it was only a couple weeks). And as a consequence, the experience of dying on spikes or a frog was... hilarious. I mean, just completely side-splitting. This got me through to where I could almost but not quite get through the third (ice-alien-yeti) world, most runs, and still crack up every time I died. This was the initial PC version, I've never played the newfangled xboxlive one, but I gather it's basically the same game. Have you played Dwarf Fortress, thumbs? Have you googled "losing is fun", and found a DF link at the top of your results?

DoTA2 may be in beta, but it's not the only LoMa out there. And I'm still completely flabbergasted at the fact that to the untrained eye, every LoMa appears to be exactly the same game, played on exactly the same board, with exactly the same pieces. How on earth did we get to where "make a carbon copy of this one particular mod, updating the graphics a bit" is apparently an entire and viable sector of the game development industry? I do understand the difference between the way announcers view a match and the way the audience in turn views the cast; that's part of why I'm asking not for instant replay, but for highlights/replays after the match.

I don't want to belabor the NFL comparison, because it's just not a constructive discussion, and I apologize for bringing it up. But for the love of Pete, why don't LoMa-casts have highlights and replays at the end of the match? Team fights in particular would be so, so much easier to understand and appreciate when replayed in slow motion, with good analysts doing a breakdown of the action. There might even be time to briefly remind the audience of the specifics of an ability or two. Is it just a budgetary/manpower thing? You might need an extra A/V tech or two to rewind the tape and cue up the clips or whatever is involved there, but the volunteer army of LoMa-casters must include tons of people who are willing to play a part other than "on-air talent," no?

@12 Fair enough, but if you feel a separate or supplementary commentary would be necessary for people who don't play the game*, then still: why don't such commentaries exist? At all? And thanks for the definitions to a few seemingly ubiquitous bits of terminology, but why isn't there a place where I can just go and ctrl-f to find crap like that? How many would-be fans are going to just throw up their hands and give up, rather than go to a forum and ask a question about this apparently basic terminology, and then patiently wait to possibly maybe get a more or less cogent explanation some time within the next few days? The NFL would be nowhere today if it catered solely to an audience of men who had played comptitive tackle football at the high-school level or higher. Is the LOMA industry interested in attracting fans who don't play the games themselves? Or not? * among which would be people who do not have the (considerable) free time to invest in learning to play the game, no?

I, too, am a non-player of this game, though I suspect my not-playing is rather advanced. I've listened to all the Dota Today podcasts. I've read the "Welcome to Dota, You Suck" on the internets. I've watched a half dozen pro matches, and about as many "casts" of non-pro matches. I've even watched a bit of a League of Lords game (astonishingly, it appears to be exactly the same game, played on exactly the same pitch, except with retrogamey cartoon graphics instead of the Standard Fantasy Gloom approach inherited from Warcraft 3) I feel like I've soaked up some of the basics, but there are still some apparently very simple, fundamental things that I just don't understand, e.g. "what is a bottle, and why does everyone get so excited about them?", "what's that thing that you pick up when you kill Roshan, and why does it matter?", "What is a BKB, and why does it matter?" "Why is a 'carry' called that?" The glossaries I've looked at are useless; they have maybe one in four of the abbreviations or idioms I'm trying to look up, and there's no mention of why the particular thing is important enough that people use shorthand or slang to refer to it. Also, I get it that a central part of this game is solving spreadsheet problems. Games like that aren't generally to my taste, which is fine, that's just my taste. But where are the online, interactive-but-single-page Lords Spreadsheet, and also Items Spreadsheet, complete with keys thoroughly explaining the column headers? It ought to be possible, if not easy, to be a fan of a game without playing it yourself. Is the LOMA industry simply not interested in this audience? Someone in this week's episode referred to this obliquely, saying that when asked by his (spouse?) about the game, instead of cheerfully explaining what it was about, as he usually would, his reaction was something along the lines of "I can't get into it" or "it's not worth it." That's a problem. There seem to be plenty of resources available for people who want to learn how to play this game; why isn't there even one video out there titled "How To Watch LOMAs"?