Corelli

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Posts posted by Corelli

  1. Posted

    The Rupture "bad" design thing is interesting to me, because it shows the differing design philosophies of Dota and LoL (neither of which I would call the "right" or "wrong" way). Adding a Rupture-like ability to LoL would be a terrible design choice because nothing in that game works that way. LoL designers are very careful to make sure all spells work the way players expect them too, so having one that doesn't would be jarring. But in Dota I think it's totally fine. Dota has tons of things that don't work in a way that is totally obvious, so it's expected that in order to play Dota well, you're going to have to look up some things. When you have to look up some things regardless, the relative cost of one more thing to look up is pretty low.

     

    There's another aspect to the "bad" design that does bother me, the parts of the game that work the way they do because that's how it was in wc3 DoTA, and people are just used to it by now. The best example I know of is the blink mechanics, specifically blink dagger (I think it applies to other blink abilities, but I'm not 100% on that). When you use blink dagger, you click a point, and of that point is within blink dagger's range, you are teleported to that point. If, however, you click a point outside of blink dagger's range, you are instead teleported to a point in that direction, but only 80% if the maximum distance. This strikes me as total horseshit. I've seen people argue that it makes it take more skill to use properly, and while this is tecnically true, it does so in a way that is both arbitrary and purely mechanical. If abilities didn't have hotkeys and you had to click on the icon first, this would also make the game "take more skill", but I can't imagine anyone arguing in favor of that change. When I first started playing, I considered things like denying and neutral stacking to be in this category of "bad" design, but I quickly realized that these add an actual, meaningful amount of strategic depth, so I learned to be ok with it.

    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.

  2. Posted

    Oh, wait, isn't that the perfect description of Quinn? Huh. (And before someone says 'Yeah but Quinn sucks', just watch the upcoming Summer LCS, I guarantee she'll be featured heavily. She's got spells nearly as powerful as Ezreal's and has Vayne's passive damage output, plus monstrous mobility and an even-better gap creator, now that it's been changed).

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

  4. Posted

    Um.

     

    I didn't call you an asshole. Please go read my post again.

     

    But, well, since I guess I already pissed you off somehow, I'll just go a bit further: you are ignorant. You were saying things about Dota that are just plain not true. Lots of people who prefer League tend to do this. And, of course, the same goes the other way, which is why I try to avoid speaking authoritatively on League, and only speak from my own personal experiences. You and others here continue to say things about Dota that aren't true, and it's baffling. If you don't know, then why do you keep talking about it? It's baffling.

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

  5. Posted

    I really don't think there's anything to be afraid of (unless you are afraid that your Dota wife will suddenly have to compete with a LoL mistress  :eyebrow:  ). There's truly nothing to be contentious about between the games. They're both well made, popular, fantastic games. One of them is better in some ways, one of them is better in others, and if you play more of one than the other when you swap you'll feel what's different.

    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.

  10. Posted

    How is DOTA what people want.

     

    It is, amazingly, I just want to know why.

    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.

  16. Posted

    HoNs cool heroes, art wise: Thunderbringer/Zeus, Bubbles/Puck. 

     

    Also your post is full of dumb anecdotes Corelli. I don't even know where to start. If you aren't following DOTA2, don't make a long post about it. You seem like a complete asshole.

    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?

  18. Posted

    Deleric, on 29 May 2013 - 18:58, said:

    I am extremely excited by the thought of a LoMa comparison episode. As someone who has played at least 1000 LoMa matches spread across Dota 1/2/HoN/LoL (league being the least played), I've bottled up a huge list of observations and musings about the nature of the genre. It's so strange how differently I tend to play each game. Imagine having 4 different Counterstrikes or 4 different Starcrafts.

    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.

  24. Posted

    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.