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Sean

Dota Today 9: The Dazzle In Question

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I always thought of the Tango as foraging food. Maybe instead it's a poultice of herbs that needs recently living material to be activated, since you need to buy a set. Not sure what the flavour text is on it though.

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I am actually new to DOTA, and I know you aren't supposed to admit that you came from league but I did. So hearing those tips about turret agro and queuing abilities was really helpful. Thanks for another great episode, looking forward to hearing more ! 

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The surrender option is one thing i like in league over dota.  For me it's really just respecting people's time.  Getting stomped doesn't bother me as long as the winning team actually ends it, but there's been times where they just prolong it as long as they can, that's just not fun.

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Sometimes I find myself in the trap of getting caught up in the moment and fountain camping and then I feel fucking terrible because I hate being that guy and I switch immediately to killing the ancient. Sometimes while some of my teammates yell at me for not fountain camping. And then I feel good.

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I quit Dota 2 due to the lack of a surrender option. I just don't have the time for hour plus matches that I know are lost twenty minutes in, but am guilt tripped into staying in the game to keep from ruining it for my teammates. At least add it to the casual play, Valve. I'm not asking for a free abandon in ranking.

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There are so many ways to come back (and throw) in Dota 2, but it is hard and you actually have to try. Giving people an easy out with a surrender option totally undermines that. From my experience in HoN, there are way too many people for whom the threshold for hitting the surrender button is the support KSing First Blood or guy x on their team not playing Alch "properly".  


I could get behind an MLB style "mercy" rule of some kind, but letting one baby kill the team's spirit by hitting the surrender vote button is the worst.

 

I try to act in Dota (especially when i'm solo) the same way I'd act at a pick-up softball game with people I don't really know; I'm not going to commit to a game unless I have the time and I'm willing to see it though. I'm certainly not going to starting yelling at my team to give up because I don't have time to play a losing game any more than I would call people racial epithets and stomp off the field or start intentionally throwing the ball the wrong way, regardless of how "bad" I think my team is. 

 

Before you complain how "the game" isn't respecting your time, you should think about how you are respecting the time of the 9 other people you've matched up with.  

 

Or play LoL.

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Before you complain how "the game" isn't respecting your time

That's not what he said at all. Read his post again.

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I read Brannigan's remark about "repecting people's time" as the choice of not including the feature being a failure of the game or the designers. If that's not what he meant then I retract the specific admonishment, but not the argument.

I believe that a games like Dota 2, which are reliant on the players to drive the quality of the experience, should not foster behaviors (like choosing to quit when things go bad) that degrade that quality.

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Mm, fair enough. That's not how I read it at all, but I guess I could be wrong, too!

 

For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you. The moments when I want a surrender button are all relegated to those times when the enemy team is full of assholes who refuse to finish. I've had games where I almost got an abandon because they fountain camped so long, and our only saving grace was that one of us sold all of our items to buy a force staff and get an enemy dead in the fountain for XP. At which point they finally pushed. I mean I wish I was exaggerating.

 

But uh tangents aside, those moments are so few and far between that even though I might express immediate desire for a surrender button, I do think the game would suffer for it. But those moments are so fucking frustrating. The single most frustrating gaming moments I've ever had. Ugh.

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I've had far more games ruined by fast surrenders in HoN than I've had stomps in Dota 2 where I wished I could surrender.

Sorry to get all :(

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Thanks for the shout out guys, and as much as I appreciate it I have some bad news for you:

 

The guy who assualted me as been remanded in custody so he won't be able to suscribe. In fact he has been charged with Aggrevated Robbery and from what they tell me, if he is convicted he might get a few years in jail. Even when he gets out I'm not sure he liked the podcast anyway, when approcahed by police he threw my ipod at them. Did he hate the podcast or was he fed up with the lack of surrender option in Dota?

 

Personally I think Dawngate has the best system, you can't surrender unless someone on your team has disconnected/afk'd or you are getting stomped so hard it triggers a vim/gold threshold.

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Mm, fair enough. That's not how I read it at all, but I guess I could be wrong, too!

 

For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you. The moments when I want a surrender button are all relegated to those times when the enemy team is full of assholes who refuse to finish. I've had games where I almost got an abandon because they fountain camped so long, and our only saving grace was that one of us sold all of our items to buy a force staff and get an enemy dead in the fountain for XP. At which point they finally pushed. I mean I wish I was exaggerating.

 

But uh tangents aside, those moments are so few and far between that even though I might express immediate desire for a surrender button, I do think the game would suffer for it. But those moments are so fucking frustrating. The single most frustrating gaming moments I've ever had. Ugh.

 

I wonder, is there a way to detect fountain camping and set some sort of timer that forces the winning side to end the goddamn game?

 

Honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to be convinced that there should never be any surrender option in games like DOTA 2. All the arguments sound too much like what I've heard for twenty-five years justifying player-unfriendly design choices and behavior in strategy games and wargames. When a new genre's on the rise, people are willing to put up with bad interfaces, poor tutorials, and obtuse gameplay, but that position's not secure forever.

 

Like, I don't know... Has one of those amazing turnaround games you guys talked about ever been the same game where a whiny baby spends the whole time begging the rest of the team to give up? They seem mutually exclusive to me.

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I can say anecdotally that those games happen though I've never seen a game turn around without the baby (I guess calling these guys "babies" is my fault, sorry) debabbifying at some point in the game due to the enemy throwing their lead or the akf carry coming online and housing fools.

I feel like the fast gg is almost always a knee-jerk fight or flight response that is very rarely justified.

It can be hard to let go of the narrative in your head about how the game is supposed to go; if you internalize the defeat, it's a self fulfilling prophesy.

This all sounds like shitty halftime football speech cliches, but I really think that the players' character (their attitude not their Lord) has a lot to do with Dota being rewarding, if not always "fun". The mechanism design of the game should push players to dig deep and let go of their fear of failure (even if it doesn't necessarily do it nicely).

Maybe that's a lesson game design hasn't learned yet and why the game seems so wrong yet efforts to fix the problems seem to diminish the whole.

The idea of expecting the player to conform to the game is verboten for a lot of designers. What would Donald Norman think D: !?

Maybe it is because it is a very "sports" (the activity, not the fake Scoops) thing to say and ew sports ummaright?

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An easy solution to all those problems is making the surrender require unanimity. Anyone who's going to throw because everyone else refuses to give up is going to throw because everyone else refuses to give up regardless of the presence of a surrender button.

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I think that gives aid and comfort to the babies; it changes the situation from "I want to quit but there is no way to do it without cost" to "I want to quit but these other players won't allow me to use the feature in the game that permits me to do so without cost".

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I don't care what it gives them. I care what it gives me.

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I kind of meant it both in terms of the other players and development side.  I rarely had LoL games end early for no reason, and even when someone does try it and the vote fails they tend to keep playing anyway.  I vastly prefer dota in terms of pretty much everything else, I just wish I had the option to forfeit without ruining everyone else's time and getting abandons.

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even when someone does try it and the vote fails they tend to keep playing anyway

And that's the key. People don't give up unless they're going to give up regardless, as I said in my last post.

 

So make the vote unanimous. That way even if one person on the losing team wants to keep playing, they aren't fucked. And the other team doesn't really matter because who wants to play against a team that's already given up, besides people who are going to do shit like fountain camp anyway.

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ahh I kind of skimmed through what was said, missed what you said.  

 

The arguement I've seen most against the surrender option in dota is literally "it's the baby option" which honestly is a bit bs.  I consider it usability.  People already take the "baby option" sometimes, except instead of the immediacy of a vote we get to wait 5-10 minutes for the match to be over.  It doesn't seem like much, except when you're literally stuck doing nothing and making sure you're active enough to not get an abandon.  That is not fun.

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Now that there's ranking, there's no reason not to have a surrender option in more casual games. While you can come from behind in Dota 2, it normally requires the other team to fall apart, so you know by the mid game whether there's any chance, but it can still drag on and on with nothing to learn from the experience. At that point the game is just wasting the losing team's time.

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Uh, ignoring the surrender can of worms, I'd say a good beginner piece of advice (although not as good as that tango one, nice going Sean) is carrying a TP often as early as you can. If I'm mid, I try to get one along with my boots after bottle, if I'm support I might get one before I get boots depending on how the lane is going. It can really help to get you out of some dangerous situations where you're just getting autoattacked down, and you can perform more efficient ganks using one. It also helps you provide early support to a lane if something goes wrong.

 

Another thing that kind of goes along with this: try not to let towers go down easily. Giving your opponent a free tower, especially if they get the last hit, is a huge windfall even if you're getting kills somewhere else. Try to pull creeps past if it's too dangerous to engage, and try to TP early to further back towers so other allies can TP directly to the contested tower faster.

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