Corelli

I completely agree with everything you said. There are some hangovers in DOTA 2 that have migrated from the WC3 engine - tower aggro, creep stacking, ward blocking (which is gone now, thank you Icrefrog) for instance that actually are bad design and needlessly muddle the game. But like you said, denial and rupture are not in that category at all - they are completely appropriate for DOTA and a big part of what makes it so awesome. But no amount of convincing is going to make me change my mind that the way tower aggro works in DOTA is anything short of silly, and again that's because WC3 handled it in such an odd way and that legacy design has persisted.

Yeah, Quinn is going to be a monster and we're going to see her mid a lot.

Fair enough, sorry about that.

What did I say that wasn't true? Again, I really like and play both games. I just slightly prefer one to the other.

I don't blame them. I wouldn't do it. Well at least I wouldn't do it and talk about it on the podcast. It's like the console wars, maybe worse. I mentioned that I slightly preferred one game over the other and explained why and the first two replies called me an asshole. And this is a good forum.

If you want to know how important it will be for DOTA 2 to crack the Korean competitive scene, check out this: Valve is already making TV commercials for DOTA 2 in Korea.

lol pretty much

League's graphics are much more legible to the casual fan, I think. It's much easier to watch a game of League and know what's going on. Again, the small map size helps with this. But DOTA2 is so much more aesthetically pleasing on the whole that I'm not sure it matters much.

web address makes it

It's an experience you can't get anywhere else. It combines aspects of RTS, RPG, and multiplayer team coordination in a way that basically no other genre does. It forces you to learn constantly. There are super high highs and very low lows. It's sports with dungeons and dragons.

I really like summoner spells but I've been thinking about why for a while now and I can't explain the reasoning very well. Suffice to say, I miss them when they're not there.

That's hilarious. I have been playing LoL forever and I never realized you could only buy runes with IP. Oh well, I look silly now.

I hate runes/masteries in League. It's one of those things that just feels like it's mostly in there for monetization. However, I love summoner's spells. They are an awesome addition, even if some of them rarely see competitive play.

Thanks! They're different games and I really like both of them.

Because that stream is totally borked. Edit: Well, seems to be working now.

I play lots of DOTA2 and watch competitive stuff all the time. I'm watching Tobi's stream right now! How much league do you play?

Completely agree that League's splash art is totally awful. DOTA2 is so much more visually pleasing it's not even funny.

Yeah, this is a super interesting topic. Most people don't have your kind of experience. Being good at any of these games requires a sizable time investment, and if you don't invest that time into each of the LOMAs then you probably don't have a good enough understanding of what actually makes them different. I started playing DOTA when it was a War3 mod. I moved onto HoN, LoL, and Dota2, and even though they share similar core objectives and mechanics, they're all very different games. Even DOTA2, which is purportedly a remake of DOTA, feels very different from DOTA. Any analogy is going to break down if you take it too far, but I think the two best games at this point are LoL and DOTA2, and if you're going to compare the two, you could reasonably say that if LoL is basketball, then DOTA2 is soccer. The basic goals are the same - put a ball in a net. But the playing fields, the positions - these are all different. There are so many minute differences - attack animations, summoners spells, runes, and masteries in LoL, and a super varied item pool in DOTA2 just to name a few, and you quickly realize why people are such ardent fans of one or the other. They really are very different games built on very similar premises. I think the biggest differences are map size and visual fidelity. I don't need to go into visual fidelity. One look at the game makes it clear that DOTA2 is a much more attractive game visually. Mapwise, LoL feels a bit claustrophobic compared to the size of DOTA2's map, but I do think this significantly heightens the mental aspect of the game - map awareness is incredibly important because ganks can come a lot faster. It also emphasizes warding, and as there's no limit on wards like in DOTA2, ward control becomes a big part of most matches. Obviously ward control is important in DOTA2 as well, but maybe not as much so. The thing about DOTA2 is that it's mechanically more difficult than LoL, which means it's simply harder for players to glance at the mini-map because CSing, denying, and using items (as well as courier management and the higher number of minion-based champions) consume the players' attention. I love the champion/hero diversity in DOTA2 but overall I think the champions in LoL are better designed. Sure, you have incredibly interesting heroes in DOTA2 like Rubick/Invoker, but there are also just a lot of heroes that are in bad places or are plain uninteresting both in terms of design and player experience. The reason for this, I think, is that LoL's meta is much more static. Now this is an interesting thing, because the meta in competitive LoL is just as static as the meta in competitive DOTA2 (which is to say that they are both fairly varied but have a solid foundation that doesn't change all that much), but if you jump into a random game of DOTA2, you will see a much greater diversity of team compositions. That's because Riot designs LoL with a specific meta in mind (top lane, duo-lane, jungle, mid lane). DOTA2 has a much less design-directed meta. So maybe DOTA2 is a bit crazier, but LoL has more champs with easily defined roles. Another example of this is jungling. There are really only about 7 or 8 heroes in DOTA2 for whom jungling from level one is even possible, but you can take a sizable minority of the League champions into the jungle and clear, although they may not be especially successful supports/gankers. This is something I like about League (and to be fair, this is a fairly new development as jungling in seasons 1 and 2 of League was about as brutal as it is in DOTA2) but you also lose something with that, which is that mechanically-intense or variant heroes like Keeper and Enchantress aren't present in League. Also, and this doesn't matter too much, but a lot of the DOTA2 heroes are embarrassingly vapid. This is just my opinion, but some of them are just... lazy, I guess? Especially thematically. Things like Tiny or Queen of Pain. Shots fired, I guess. When you compare it to stuff in League like Zac or Annie - well, they're just a lot more interesting. The competitive scenes are similar but LoL's is a bit better, I think. The League scene has a higher general skill level because of two factors: 1) more money from Riot, and 2) The Korean scene. The Korean pro-gaming scene is the most developed of anywhere, basically, and they have an infrastructure of sponsors, coaches, and veteran players that far outstrip any other region. And then of course the production values of the LCS, LPL, and OGN are far better than the myriad of tiny DOTA2 tournaments that are going on at any time (obviously the International is an outlier here). Whew, that's a wall of text and I feel like I barely addressed the differences between the two games. If it's not clear from all that, I'm a big fan of both games and try to follow their competitive scenes and general meta as much as I can. It's hard to play both and have a life, so I play more LoL than DOTA2, but I try to play both as much as I can.

Oh man I am so in on this.

I have like an hour and a half or so left to go in Bioshock: Infinite and I don't think I will ever finish it.

XCOM really is so much better on hardcore. Edit: fuck, I meant ironman.

THIS THIS is SO good.

Not much more to say than this.

Tom is reading my mind re: Lords Management games and the types of players that play them. I've been thinking this for awhile. Edit: Basically what I'm saying is Tom is smart. Edit 2: I love 3MA. There is no other public forum where this kind of informed discussion occurs about strategy games.

No no no no no no no