Jake

Dota Today 1: QOP Top and POTM Bottom

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I don't really understand why Riot is pumping so much money into esports, and seemingly so little into alternate game modes like dominion. Competitive League, at least as far as I am aware, is more about capitalizing on small advantages that it is about making big plays, and while that is certainly challenging, I don't find it especially interesting to watch. whereas dominion plays well into what I feel are the strengths of the game. I'd go into more detail but I think this post has little enough to do with this podcast episode already.

They just put out a new map (ARAM/Murderbridge/Howling Fjord) and showcased another one at the Allstars event for 1v1/2v2 play. They definitely don't seem to be ignoring the non-base game. Not much of it shows up in the esports part, true, but that's not necessarily bad. I prefer not having to learn a new map every time I watch a tournament.

 

Tangentially, I find League's graphics so much more legible it's not even funny. I know what all the stuff in Dota2 looks like, and it definitely is a more beautiful game but the clarity leaves something to be desired.

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I find League much more difficult to interpret. All those gaudy, bright-ass colors just end up blending together in a mess of modern art throw-paint-at-a-wall garbage.

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i'm sure that helps, but league follows the same format & glancing at some of the patch notes it doesn't look remotely comparable.

 

really I think it just comes back to Icefrog. As a designer, he has got to be almost singular. Moving from a member of the beta team to 

 

m4BTCq8.png

 

in 2005 and turning a haphazard, unbalanced, terribly optimized mod into one of the most popular gamesgenres of all time. Years spent - for no profit - putting out new content and, even as it rose to absurd popularity, constantly making sweeping balance changes and alterations to core mechanics. And to this day his real identity is unknown, which almost like a campy movie ending

 

It's a similar story to Cliffe and Gooseman with Counter-Strike. Though the professional gaming scene was different at that time, Counter-Strike was a tiny-team mod with very tight (public-facing) leadership which spawned a ton of impersonators and popularized the "realistic" multiplayer PC FPS. It was also known for being pretty impenetrable, being played more similarly to a sport than a traditional multiplayer game (given that most people just treated de_dust like the official CS playing field), and it was even known for having a hostile community of outsider-averse jerks. Then Valve hired them and made the sequel.

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They just put out a new map (ARAM/Murderbridge/Howling Fjord) and showcased another one at the Allstars event for 1v1/2v2 play. They definitely don't seem to be ignoring the non-base game. Not much of it shows up in the esports part, true, but that's not necessarily bad. I prefer not having to learn a new map every time I watch a tournament.

 

Tangentially, I find League's graphics so much more legible it's not even funny. I know what all the stuff in Dota2 looks like, and it definitely is a more beautiful game but the clarity leaves something to be desired.

Compare the Ancient being destroyed to the Nexus being destroyed... it's not even close. The art and animation for Dota is absolutely amazing. The portraits for the Dota Lords vs the League Lords, again not close. I enjoy the color palette for LoL much more, though. Everything reads better for me, as well. Some of that comes from the fact that the walls and forests are static. Some of it is straight up that the colorful palette for the map doesn't cross over to the characters - very few bright greens whereas the Dota lords have plenty of muddier colors. Some of it is little stuff - instead of teardrops and 'X's on the map denoting teammates and enemies, League shows a portrait of the champion on the map ringed in the Friendly or Enemy color. So you can tell at a glance who is where.

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Compare the Ancient being destroyed to the Nexus being destroyed... it's not even close. The art and animation for Dota is absolutely amazing. The portraits for the Dota Lords vs the League Lords, again not close. I enjoy the color palette for LoL much more, though. Everything reads better for me, as well. Some of that comes from the fact that the walls and forests are static. Some of it is straight up that the colorful palette for the map doesn't cross over to the characters - very few bright greens whereas the Dota lords have plenty of muddier colors. Some of it is little stuff - instead of teardrops and 'X's on the map denoting teammates and enemies, League shows a portrait of the champion on the map ringed in the Friendly or Enemy color. So you can tell at a glance who is where.

you can have the minimap display faceplates in dota as well, I'm fine with the default though

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i gave DOTA 2 a go (only a few games) and basically LOL and DOTA 2 are exactly the same game i can't believe they can get away with it, i guess if the game is free people don't mind as much if they are just clones, i think what gets people interested in it is buying the items and making perfect builds for each character, but it is a bit of a grind and basically every game is the same, i know this isn't my type of game so that was a bit critical, but i really want to know what is so appealing about it to people, i got no satisfaction in killing the other players and not at all frustrated by getting killed and then the game was over, what am i missing?

 

Edit: i had another read through of what people were saying here and i guess there is more variation in what the items do in DOTA 2 but that isn't really different enough for me not to think of them as the same game, and i think the main reason this type of game doesn't appeal to me is the micromanagement i prefer the passive items i can be bothered to activate them, i don't like the emphasis on last hit because if i play a team based game i think it should be about what you contribute to the team not about what you selfishly take for yourself like in a team based FPS i don't like an emphasis in K/D ratio it should be about what you contribute to the team and i think that is my problem with these games i can only be selfish and do things like get the last hit in single player games so maybe if there were a single player LOMA (not just a bot match) i could be more interested in the mechanics and the micromanagement 

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what am i missing?

You're not a competitive/team player?

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You're not a competitive/team player?

actually i think that is spot on  :) I'm more of a playing the game should be fun rather than a winning the game should be fun kind of guy

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That implies that the playing isn't fun, but it absolutely is. You're skirting the SEMANTICS FORBIDDEN ZONE by implying that competition isn't part of the game.

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i gave DOTA 2 a go (only a few games) and basically LOL and DOTA 2 are exactly the same game i can't believe they can get away with it, i guess if the game is free people don't mind as much if they are just clones, i think what gets people interested in it is buying the items and making perfect builds for each character, but it is a bit of a grind and basically every game is the same, i know this isn't my type of game so that was a bit critical, but i really want to know what is so appealing about it to people, i got no satisfaction in killing the other players and not at all frustrated by getting killed and then the game was over, what am i missing?

 

Edit: i had another read through of what people were saying here and i guess there is more variation in what the items do in DOTA 2 but that isn't really different enough for me not to think of them as the same game, and i think the main reason this type of game doesn't appeal to me is the micromanagement i prefer the passive items i can be bothered to activate them, i don't like the emphasis on last hit because if i play a team based game i think it should be about what you contribute to the team not about what you selfishly take for yourself like in a team based FPS i don't like an emphasis in K/D ratio it should be about what you contribute to the team and i think that is my problem with these games i can only be selfish and do things like get the last hit in single player games so maybe if there were a single player LOMA (not just a bot match) i could be more interested in the mechanics and the micromanagement

sounds like support is right up your alley! they dont take last hits or anything. There are unwritten rules about who should take last hits. Probably not that apparent going in fresh with other similarly new people. But you want certain heros to take the last hits while someone supports them with healing/stuff. Occasionally you do run into the people who just try take everything, but it's not all that common.

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sounds like support is right up your alley! they dont take last hits or anything. There are unwritten rules about who should take last hits. Probably not that apparent going in fresh with other similarly new people. But you want certain heros to take the last hits while someone supports them with healing/stuff. Occasionally you do run into the people who just try take everything, but it's not all that common.

yeah i like support classes in most multiplayer games, in real life sports i prefer stopping the other team from winning rather than me being the one doing the winning, but most multiplayer games don't really support that style of play, in battlefield i like support or medic, but in say team fortress 2 the only support class is the medic and that guy is really only designed to help one person so i just prefer to play soldier and capture the points or push the cart while other people concentrate on their sacred K/d ratio

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TF2? Engineer is pretty hardcore support if you don't go for mini sentries. Even then, he should still be building dispensers and teleports, although no one ever does because the TF2 community is the worst at playing for the team. Valve used to claim Pyro was support, but that's always been a bit dubious. That said, you can play pure defense as pyro, or demoman, or whatever, which pretty much fulfills your "stopping the other team from winning" dream. I'm not... sure you're playing the same games I'm playing. U:

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yeah i forgot about the engineer, but the engineer is a bit too formulaic, to be a good engineer means basically doing the exact same thing every match (of the same map), there isn't much variety, i started off playing engineer but it soon became to repetative

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you can have the minimap display faceplates in dota as well, I'm fine with the default though

Cool, that is basically a must-have for me.

 

Now I wonder why I never see anyone play with it.

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Cool, that is basically a must-have for me.

 

Now I wonder why I never see anyone play with it.

Colors and simple shapes are more quickly identifiable.

 

I personally have no preference either way, which is why I haven't bothered to change it. I can also press Alt to see the portraits if I feel I need to.

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I have it set where it's just colors and shapes and then holding down alt toggles the portraits.  You can also choose to have Portraits be the default and alt toggles the colors/shapes, or you can have everything be team colors (green and red) and there's also the option to have hero names instead of portraits.  I find player colors too helpful to not have, which is why I don't have portraits all the time, but a lot of pro's I've seen have hero names enables as the default so take that as you will.

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i gave DOTA 2 a go (only a few games) and basically LOL and DOTA 2 are exactly the same game i can't believe they can get away with it

That's like saying Quake and Duke Nukem are the same game.

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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.

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That's like saying Quake and Duke Nukem are the same game.

it isn't, the maps in quake and duke nukem aren't the same, the tone isn't the same, the mechanics aren't the same and the objectives aren't the same, obviously lots of games are similar, but these two are just so similar that if feels like a weak argument to just say "they are just the same genre" when really they are just clones of the same thing, basically if you had to pay for both and DOTA 2 was the sequel to LoL i would be just as annoyed about it as i was when L4D "2" came out, as in they aren't different enough to count as different games, a patch could have done the same thing

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a patch could have done the same thing

ha ha

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Well I was going to leave it at that. But that l4d "controversy" always bugged me. In that it was definitely robust enough to be it's own thing.

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