Sean

Dota Today 2: The Lord's Pitch

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Re: surrender vote. Thousand times yes, dota needs this badly. It's the one thing I like in LoL over dota.

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Re: surrender vote. Thousand times yes, dota needs this badly. It's the one thing I like in LoL over dota.

ugh yes please

 

I mean there are a thousand counter-arguments that are semi-legit, but fuck it, I don't care, I'm tired of getting stuck in a miserable situation, and knowing it won't end for another fifteen minutes because the other team is being several piles of shit.

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Good show. I think it's really interesting how even though Brad appreciates League's more player-friendly design decisions that he still prefers DotA. I've been getting really into Dark Souls lately and I think it's that same appeal where the game is engaging precisely because it is so ruthless to the player. I still find it perplexing given the polished games in Valve's catalog that they're making DotA 2 what it is. 

 

Although I understand why, I'm a little sad that Brad didn't talk about Brazen. I would've loved to learn more about how he'd design that kind of game. Even more so than Valve, I can't imagine Double Fine making a game as difficult as DotA or Dark Souls. I guess Massive Chalice is being billed as a roguelike, but so far I haven't seen a strategy game that really behaves like a roguelike because even though some characters may die the campaign proceeds and in the end it's a binary win/loss. What I like about the modern roguelike games is that even when you reach a fail condition you can feel like you've made some progress, so it's possible to have fun even with frequent failure.

 

Re: Surrender option. It encourages people to "gg" early and prematurely end games that could turn into comeback situations. Also it could create tension because some people just don't like to surrender and always think they can come back (I'm guilty of this often). However yeah, those problems exist without the surrender option so you might as well have it.

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Lords Pitch for me = http://www.lords.org/

 

Brad is right, it's very British.

 

 

 

Edit:  When I heard Brad talking about backers having their name in Massive Chalice I considered upping my pledge, but then I realized my last name would be a pretty lame game to come up.  I'm still considering it, but "Baron" just seems boring.  I wish I had a cooler name.

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Edit:  When I heard Brad talking about backers having their name in Massive Chalice I considered upping my pledge, but then I realized my last name would be a pretty lame game to come up.  I'm still considering it, but "Baron" just seems boring.  I wish I had a cooler name.

 

Not just the name, coming up with a sigil and motto also sounds intimidating. 

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When I heard Brad talking about backers having their name in Massive Chalice I considered upping my pledge, but then I realized my last name would be a pretty lame game to come up.  I'm still considering it, but "Baron" just seems boring.  I wish I had a cooler name.

Man my last name is Rust.

 

But I think it was originally pronounced like Roost, so I may add an umlaut.

 

Lord Rüst, at your service.

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Great cast so far. Laughed hard at Brad's "I love that guy" with respect to Lifestealer. That bloody grotesque monster of a man: he's a good guy! :P

 

The design talk was interesting too. I was really glad to hear the design talked about from an audience perspective. Yes, from a mainstream perspective it's very punishing, but that's just because it feels like it's designed to punish errors very strongly. It's a hard discussion to have, games are supposed to be played and thus playable to some extent, but I appreciated the statement not just being "this is bad design, period."

 

Hmm, the item hotkey thing I talked about in the last thread came up, I'm honestly a bit surprised Nick uses default hotkeys, and that probably explains some of his lack of ability in that arena.

Oh, in terms of actual Dota content, specifically regarding Nick's comments on Blink Tinker, if anyone is playing they should definitely change from the default hotkeys for items. You don't really need the full 6 under your hand, but get at least 3 or 4 you can reach easily. Use a couple side mouse buttons,  space bar or number keys you aren't likely to use for groups. Being able to use an item well can really help your team. Good use of phase boots for positioning, or support force staff can really help and give you a lot more utility. I'm honestly a bit shocked the default item hotkeys are so bad, they discourage using items early because of how awkward they are. Maybe it's not a good idea for new people to jump into having 6 different slots to micro on top of your skills, but even drilling in the idea of using one item while doing everything else is an important hurdle, in my opinion.

Edit: Oops, listened ahead a little more, those are definitely mapped to the number pad by default, at least they used to be. Maybe they've been changed.

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"Lord's Pitch" is singular. Which one lord is it that owns or otherwise controls the pitch, and what did they do to attain that right?

Perhaps "Lords' Pitch" could be used to avoid this sort of question.

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Double Fine apparently managed to steal my idea before I actually got around to making it or even telling anybody about it.

 

Saves me the trouble, I guess.

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With that one offhanded reference to Purge I find exigence for bringing up this absolutely hilarious dota game

 

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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.

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"Lord's Pitch" is singular. Which one lord is it that owns or otherwise controls the pitch, and what did they do to attain that right?

Perhaps "Lords' Pitch" could be used to avoid this sort of question.

 

Well, Brad came on to pitch his game so I couldn't handle doing it any other way.

 

Note that Nick and I discussed the plurality of Lord's at length when naming this episode.

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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.

haha what

 

that is totally dumb

 

I just asked a friend, and I guess it was supposed to be a nerf from back when blink didn't have a cooldown. But it's dumb and blink distance should either be reduced to 80% of its maximum to match that or clicking outside the range should do the maximum. Bleh. I'd be fine with either, if that's what they decide they need to do. But yuck.

 

There are also things like Lion's stun which has a shorter target range than the actual distance of the spikes. That's a bit weird, but (I think) acceptable, as you're sacrificing skillshot for targeted shot.

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One thing that should be added, about that League of Legends post that is about 'fun' and game design: They've said frequently, you can break these rules, just that you should know what you're doing when you do. Some of them are more stringent than others, such as the burden of knowledge rule(which ironically, is broken at least lightly, by the champion named after him, Zilean- his bombs mean you really don't want to go near friendlies with them on). But they've willingly broken or twisted their own rules several times- even with their own examples:

 

Use Pattern Mis-matches Surrounding Gameplay
I won't go into too much detail on this, but the simple example is giving a melee DPS ability to a ranged DPS character -- the use pattern on that is to force move to melee, then use.

 

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).

 

I'd also really say that I disagree rather heavily with Brad on League's champion design. I can understand some of the complaints about Champions being samey, such as the "Every melee has a gap closer" one, but haphazard design is almost assuredly one that I could never share.

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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.

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

For any melee getting sent there, yeah. Except Zed- he'll probably still beat her. But she'll also be strong top- and I think with an aggressive support, she'll be fantastic bottom too. Still will lose against a Caitlyn, but eh, range is range.

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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.

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Great podcast, guys! Nice to have Brad Muir there to talk about Massive Chalice. Continuing not to play the game while enjoying the cast a lot.

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I'd also really say that I disagree rather heavily with Brad on League's champion design. I can understand some of the complaints about Champions being samey, such as the "Every melee has a gap closer" one, but haphazard design is almost assuredly one that I could never share.

 

I definitely remember having the same sort of ability burnout he did. "Oh look, another free-damage bruiser. This one has *X's* Q, *Y's* W, etc". I mean, there are only so many things you can do that are in the realm of balanced, and some of them do damage while some prevent it so they're going to feel the same. I am long since past that, but I took a break and then came back. Lords do similar things in different ways.

 

But you can look at Zac and then the to-be-released Aatrox and say "Oh heh two health-based champions with a revive skill passive". Or him and Lissandra "cool two champions released in a row with a free Zhonya's built in".  When you get right down to it, every lord has 4 skillable abilities and a passive and you can get SUPER reductive about how they do what they do. But then on the flip side people freak out about Jayce and Nidalee and Elise because they're all "THEY HAVE 7 SKILLS INSTEAD OF 4 RIOT PLS".

 

I think over the last year or so they have done a fantastic job with champion DESIGN. It's not all boobs and breastplates, they have been creating some extremely fun and likable and unique characters. I will probably play Vi forever because her attitude and big punchin' fists match her playstyle.

 

 

 

e: I don't want to hijack another Dotato thread, but Riven is the best. I <3 Riven.

 

I do not love battle bunny Riven, sadly. Redeemed Riven is where it's "at".

 

Nami is apparently coming in a huge way. I bet you'll see her in the LCS this season.

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I definitely remember having the same sort of ability burnout he did. "Oh look, another free-damage bruiser. This one has *X's* Q, *Y's* W, etc". I mean, there are only so many things you can do that are in the realm of balanced, and some of them do damage while some prevent it so they're going to feel the same. I am long since past that, but I took a break and then came back. Lords do similar things in different ways.

 

But you can look at Zac and then the to-be-released Aatrox and say "Oh heh two health-based champions with a revive skill passive". Or him and Lissandra "cool two champions released in a row with a free Zhonya's built in".  When you get right down to it, every lord has 4 skillable abilities and a passive and you can get SUPER reductive about how they do what they do. But then on the flip side people freak out about Jayce and Nidalee and Elise because they're all "THEY HAVE 7 SKILLS INSTEAD OF 4 RIOT PLS".

 

I think over the last year or so they have done a fantastic job with champion DESIGN. It's not all boobs and breastplates, they have been creating some extremely fun and likable and unique characters. I will probably play Vi forever because her attitude and big punchin' fists match her playstyle.

 

Yeah, their design over the past year, year and a half has gone from "Pretty good, at least matching DotA's quality" to outright "Holy cow everything they release is gold."

 

Lissandra is a squishy yet short range CC-heavy mage who is forced to all-in with every fight because of her range.

 

Zac is one of the scariest ganks in the game- a jump with the range to jump the whole river? Nuts. Also, the 'collecting pieces of yourself' mechanic is super fun.

 

Quinn I've already spoken about, but the idea of a character who is that mobile, that much of an Assassin, yet that wildly difficult to play well, gah.

 

 

Vi is like you said.

 

Nami isn't as popular in the west, but in Korea she's nearly as popular as Sona- mostly 'cause she has insane teamfight power that puts most supports to shame, but NA/EU can't stop fapping over early game.

 

Zed. Elise. Kha'zix & Rengar. Syndra. Diana. Zyra, Jayce, Draven. I mean, what the fuck. Each one of these has awesome design choices behind them that really feel a step away from the standard.  Only after all those do you hit Darius(who is a trainwreck of design). That's just good shit.

 

Also, once again, Riven is the best thing that's ever happened to LoMas.

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For the record, the person at BTS who Sean said was really good at talking and explaining stuff is most likely LD.  And Aysee does have a super sexy radio voice.

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