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Cheers. I wrote an article about "e-Sports". I know this is a topic you guys are interested in, so I figure, "Why the hell not?" I'll post it here. See how much trouble I get in.
I'd just like to preface this by saying one thing: You're not going to like some of the things I say in the entry and I expect a lot of people will think I am saying these things for the sole purpose of being inflammatory. I'm not. I'm not the first person in the history of this web site to gradually fall out of favor with StarCraft II, and I'm hardly the only person who thinks that the DotA clones are dumbed-down real-time strategy games. And while TeamLiquid is absolutely entitled to choose the games that they cover, it's impossible not to notice that Warcraft III wasn't up to standards a decade ago and the site just began covering a modified, simpler version of Warcraft III. I don't write to be popular, and if I did, I'd be writing Top X Lists. And also, if I was writing to be popular, the article wouldn't be running in the 5,000-word range. I like to at least give the courtesy of a synopsis, though, so here it is:
http://www.learntocounter.com/the-transformation-of-e-sports/
Synopsis: With e-Sports™ officially jumping the shark, it’s time to explain what went wrong. In the past, professional video game tournaments were an extension of long-term interest in select, excellent video games. But now, companies have discovered that they can use these tournaments to advertise new video games. From a company perspective, these tournaments are little more than a form of stealth marketing. However, these tournaments act as a form of mass media, exposing the flaws of these unproven video games on a highly visible platform. In tandem with the impatient and stubborn video game player of today, the outcomes of these tournaments create an expectation that companies will “fix their game” as quickly as possible, instead of allowing players to explore the game. This has hamstrung developers. In order to manage “fun to play”, “fun to watch”, and “fix your game”, companies pursue safe, boring design decisions in the pursuit of “balance”. The result has been a class of video game that neither lives up to its predecessors or relevant video game history, and are hardly the games worth broadcasting to the world. Basically, I now think that the e-Sports marketing model has become detrimental to the actual quality of the games and has become completely antithetical to its original purpose, which was to provide lasting enjoyment of various excellent games as they held to scrutiny over the course of years. Professional video game tournaments are evolving into a form of stealth marketing, which I don't think would be an awful thing if these tournaments and the results of these tournaments turned their player bases into raving lunatics, which subsequently prevents their designers from exhibiting any degree of patience in tweaking their games. At this point, unless you're part of a small percentage of players that can actually make some good money doing this, I completely fail to see the purpose of playing these "e-Sports" (DotA 2, StarCraft II, League of Legends) when there are so many better similar titles out there. I don't expect everyone to agree with that, but that's what discussion is for.
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Katowice25012 Posts
Saying that Dota is a dumbed down version of Warcraft 3 is a very unusual opinion and I suspect if you honestly think that you haven't played it very much (or at all). I can understand how people come to that conlusion but it's very clear you're looking at it from the outside and haven't taken the time to learn how it works or why that is incorrect.
On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: Synopsis: With e-Sports™ officially jumping the shark.
I'm a little curious as to how you reached this as well because I haven't heard that view at all from anyone, including all the people bemoaning SC2's fate a few weeks back.
On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: At this point, unless you're part of a small percentage of players that can actually make some good money doing this, I completely fail to see the purpose of playing these "e-Sports" (DotA 2, StarCraft II, League of Legends) when there are so many better similar titles out there. I don't expect everyone to agree with that, but that's what discussion is for.
I think it's pretty hard to make an argument that there is a plethora of superior alternatives to these three games for a lot of people. I've spent a lot of time in a lot of RTSes and SC2 is pretty strictly better to all of them in a lot of ways, I suspect many feel the same.
Fast forward to recent history, and the staff at TeamLiquid.net (the pre-eminent Western source for coverage of professional and tournament StarCraft) saw some hideous writing on the wall, roughly translating to “Nobody gives a fuck about StarCraft II anymore.” So naturally, in August of 2012, the web site announced that they would begin coverage of tournament and professional DotA 2,
Just a quick clarification that this is not at all how it happened. When I was hired to work at TL in mid-2011 one of the things I was brought on to do was to look towards covering Dota for the future. That whole decision and process took about a year, long before it was popular to say SC2 is dying.
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Do note when I respond to this, I'm sure you've played just as much (if not more) of these games, so believe me, if it sounds like I'm talking down to you or stating the obvious at any point, I'm not. There's other people reading along and they may need the input.
On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote: Saying that Dota is a dumbed down version of Warcraft 3 is a very unusual opinion and I suspect if you honestly think that you haven't played it very much (or at all). I can understand how people come to that conlusion but it's very clear you're looking at it from the outside and haven't taken the time to learn how it works or why that is incorrect. All of the tactics and mechanics within Warcraft III exist within the Defense of the Ancients model, the difference being the things that those systems emphasize. So, for example, experience denial is much more critical in Defense of the Ancients because the effort-to-reward ratio (how much the player gains by investing his time and resources in a specific tactic or play) is far, far greater.
The difference is fairly simple: There are far, far, far more things going on in a game of Warcraft III at any time. That's important to note because Warcraft III is already a fairly limited game of strategy that is buffered by its emphasis on tactics and its excellent soft-counter unit design. (However, good luck explaining that to some of the Total Annihilation die-hards). In Warcraft III, you have to manage a functional base, create your armies from that composition, and pay particular attention to as many as three powerful hero units at any given time, with units spread out across the entire battlefield as controlled by one individual. Defense of the Ancients completely strips away the base construction and large-army micromanagement in favor of a single unit and then leaves all the other stuff to the computer. (And yes, DotA may be a team game where you have to coordinate with others, but Warcraft III also featured team games, and the larger team gametypes were the best game modes in that game.)
The DotA clones try to compensate for this by giving you an absurd array of choice, where you have access to dozens of heroes or Champions, large numbers of purchasable items, and talent trees, but most of these choices are either unintuitive and redundant, and only a small percentage of the mechanics in these systems function within the game structure at any given time. So while there's one-hundred-plus Champions in League of Legends, only ten of them are being used at any time. Each of those heroes is individually less complex with fewer moving parts than any army and base in most real-time strategy games.
You can make the argument that DotA clones are their own genre and should be judged as such, but then the most appropriate comparison is comes with fighting games, and that the DotA clones are some combination of Counter-Strike, Super Smash Bros., and Diablo, a five-on-five versus multiplayer game where fighters use limited input to perform their special moves, a game where the fighters gradually level up over the course of the battle. And if that's the case, then the DotA clones are doing themselves a disservice by bogging themselves down in all the number crunching and grinding, and they should focus more on the things that fighting games do well. (Keep in mind that I didn't really care for the role-playing-style number-crunching in Warcraft III, either. However, it was easier to keep track of in that game than it is in the offshots.) And I have played some Defense of the Ancients. I'm not going to claim that I've played hundreds upon thousands of hours of it, but the reasons I dislike the games have very little to do with any fine-tweaking or unit balancing. I'm just comparing the scope of the games.
On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote: I'm a little curious as to how you reached this as well because I haven't heard that view at all from anyone, including all the people bemoaning SC2's fate a few weeks back. When X number of the professional Korean StarCraft players jumped to League of Legends, it made it pretty clear that professional video game tournaments are just a career choice now. At least with StarCraft II, you could make the argument that Blizzard muscled KeSPA out of the way, so it was generally logical to continue on to the new game. (Just because most of the Western players were playing on an amateur level didn't mean they didn't desire to play in Korea and get paid to do it.) Also keep in mind that you and me obviously differ on the matter of the DotA clones, so when I hear years and years of "we need to protect the skill ceiling in StarCraft" and then I see people jumping to League of Legends, it means something completely different to me. (Edit: While I don't like to change and edit things in my articles after I'm done, I did change "jumping the shark" to a more neutral assertion.)
On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote: I think it's pretty hard to make an argument that there is a plethora of superior alternatives to these three games for a lot of people. I've spent a lot of time in a lot of RTSes and SC2 is pretty strictly better to all of them in a lot of ways, I suspect many feel the same. As far as I've been able to tell, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is basically Command and Conquer with a far more advanced strategy component and incredibly high lethality that punishes players for making the slightest tactical mistake. (Most of the Command and Conquer games were incredibly fast and buildings were made out of paper, but engagements between armies tended to last for a fairly long time and mistakes could be overcome.) And when compared to StarCraft (and Brood War), StarCraft II lacks the soft-counter system that led to interesting matchups like Vultures against Dragoons and Lurkers against Marines, and ends up being an out-and-out rock-paper-scissors design, which is something that's been done far better in games like Supreme Commander and Age of Empires II. That's why the deathball had become such an integral and dominant part of StarCraft II tactics. When combined with the high lethality and the disinteresting unit design, unit composition has become far more important and does much more to dictate the outcome of most battles.
That's a fairly simple explanation for it, but StarCraft II's problems are generally more complex than that (the vast majority having to do with the game engine), but I still do think it's at least a pretty solid tactics-oriented RTS that just happens to be the successor to one of the kings of the tactics-oriented RTS. I'd hardly consider it anywhere near the class of the genre, though.
On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote: Just a quick clarification that this is not at all how it happened. When I was hired to work at TL in mid-2011 one of the things I was brought on to do was to look towards covering Dota for the future. That whole decision and process took about a year, long before it was popular to say SC2 is dying. Noted. Little bit tired, but I'll see what I can amend. Thanks for the input.
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On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote:Saying that Dota is a dumbed down version of Warcraft 3 is a very unusual opinion and I suspect if you honestly think that you haven't played it very much (or at all). I can understand how people come to that conlusion but it's very clear you're looking at it from the outside and haven't taken the time to learn how it works or why that is incorrect. Show nested quote +On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: Synopsis: With e-Sports™ officially jumping the shark. I'm a little curious as to how you reached this as well because I haven't heard that view at all from anyone, including all the people bemoaning SC2's fate a few weeks back. Show nested quote +On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: At this point, unless you're part of a small percentage of players that can actually make some good money doing this, I completely fail to see the purpose of playing these "e-Sports" (DotA 2, StarCraft II, League of Legends) when there are so many better similar titles out there. I don't expect everyone to agree with that, but that's what discussion is for. I think it's pretty hard to make an argument that there is a plethora of superior alternatives to these three games for a lot of people. I've spent a lot of time in a lot of RTSes and SC2 is pretty strictly better to all of them in a lot of ways, I suspect many feel the same.Show nested quote +Fast forward to recent history, and the staff at TeamLiquid.net (the pre-eminent Western source for coverage of professional and tournament StarCraft) saw some hideous writing on the wall, roughly translating to “Nobody gives a fuck about StarCraft II anymore.” So naturally, in August of 2012, the web site announced that they would begin coverage of tournament and professional DotA 2, Just a quick clarification that this is not at all how it happened. When I was hired to work at TL in mid-2011 one of the things I was brought on to do was to look towards covering Dota for the future. That whole decision and process took about a year, long before it was popular to say SC2 is dying. BW?? If you really played it for a long time and feel that sc2 is strictly better, I think you are in the minority. Even most SC2 pros that came from BW say its the better game when asked privately.
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The comparison was being made to all real-time strategy games, not just Brood War.
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On November 19 2012 20:46 MichaelJLowell wrote: The comparison was being made to all real-time strategy games, not just Brood War. So? It was said that sc2 was strictly better than all of them, which includes BW. Cant argue for other games, but if someone claims to have played rts games extensively (incl BW) and thinks sc2 is better than all of them, I cant help but call him out that hes probably in the minority among those ppl who have done the same (aka played BW and SC2 for a significant amount of time).
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Oh, hmmm. Fair enough. Yeah, probably time for me to go take a nap. I'll reply to anything when I come back into being.
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I can't even begin to comprehend how you think dota is a dumbed down war3. the games have totally different goals, totally different methods of reaching those goals and are equally complex in terms of strategy and skills required. actually dota is probably second only to BW in terms of strategy and depth and evolution of play.
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On November 19 2012 21:14 PrinceXizor wrote: I can't even begin to comprehend how you think dota is a dumbed down war3. the games have totally different goals, totally different methods of reaching those goals and are equally complex in terms of strategy and skills required. actually dota is probably second only to BW in terms of strategy and depth and evolution of play. The "depth" is inflated by all the micro patches and the new heroes... Do you realize why they patch those games all the time ? Because it is a very shallow genre (HoN can be pretty fun tho) and they don't want a stale game where people always make the same picks. So they release a new hero/champion, add +1 stats/lvl to another and rework a skill. That's cheaper than making a new game for sure lol. Release new stuff, let the nerds cry, then patch, more tears, rinse and repeat until expansion (Hots) or remake on new engine (Dota2).
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On November 19 2012 21:40 Boblion wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2012 21:14 PrinceXizor wrote: I can't even begin to comprehend how you think dota is a dumbed down war3. the games have totally different goals, totally different methods of reaching those goals and are equally complex in terms of strategy and skills required. actually dota is probably second only to BW in terms of strategy and depth and evolution of play. The "depth" is inflated by all the micro patches and the new heroes... Do you realize why they patch those games all the time ? Because it is a very shallow genre (HoN can be pretty fun tho) and they don't want a stale game where people always make the same picks. So they release a new hero/champion, add +1 stats/lvl to another and rework a skill. That's cheaper than making a new game for sure lol. Release new stuff, let the nerds cry, then patch, more tears, rinse and repeat until expansion (Hots) or remake on new engine (Dota2). ?????????? the depth is created through the multitude of strategies. you clearly don't know dota if you think it's patched all the time. dota is used to getting 1-3 real patches a year at most. the reason valve is patching so much is there are a lot of bugs with the new engine and not every hero in dota is in dota 2 yet. Dota is known for NOT having a stale game, the character choices change fluidly on their own similar to BW. a team( or BW player) brings in a new innovation and everyone adapts and the game changes. it's a natural cycle in dota and bw.
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Dota is one of the most patched games of all time but good try. The changelog alone could probably make a nice book lol. And again the game is not stale because of the constant patching it would have been figured out for a long time otherwise.
I mean i like the idea of having tons of different heroes available but eventually people will figure who are the "top" picks and only play the same pool of heroes. And then the game gets patched
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Yeah. thats 5 years ago. and the majority of patches are bug fixes. god forbid a character be left with a spell that just doesn't function. i guess if blizzard patched BW ever it would invalidate BW as an esport too. oh. wait.
26 patches with legitimate gameplay changes. over 5 years. especially because dota has a stable version and the new version with stable patches lasting a long time. out of those 26 patches, about 10 were stable patches. which means competitive dota was patched twice a year at most.
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1.08 vs 6.67c You really have no idea about what you are talking about lol.
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uhhh. no you have no clue, educate yourself. even a wikipedia search can provide you with your answers. i suggest looking up "brood war" and "dota allstars" since you seem uneducated about both.
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About when competitive dota starts how many patches there were since then, and how many bw patches there are.
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On November 19 2012 20:35 diehilde wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2012 19:25 heyoka wrote:Saying that Dota is a dumbed down version of Warcraft 3 is a very unusual opinion and I suspect if you honestly think that you haven't played it very much (or at all). I can understand how people come to that conlusion but it's very clear you're looking at it from the outside and haven't taken the time to learn how it works or why that is incorrect. On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: Synopsis: With e-Sports™ officially jumping the shark. I'm a little curious as to how you reached this as well because I haven't heard that view at all from anyone, including all the people bemoaning SC2's fate a few weeks back. On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: At this point, unless you're part of a small percentage of players that can actually make some good money doing this, I completely fail to see the purpose of playing these "e-Sports" (DotA 2, StarCraft II, League of Legends) when there are so many better similar titles out there. I don't expect everyone to agree with that, but that's what discussion is for. I think it's pretty hard to make an argument that there is a plethora of superior alternatives to these three games for a lot of people. I've spent a lot of time in a lot of RTSes and SC2 is pretty strictly better to all of them in a lot of ways, I suspect many feel the same.Fast forward to recent history, and the staff at TeamLiquid.net (the pre-eminent Western source for coverage of professional and tournament StarCraft) saw some hideous writing on the wall, roughly translating to “Nobody gives a fuck about StarCraft II anymore.” So naturally, in August of 2012, the web site announced that they would begin coverage of tournament and professional DotA 2, Just a quick clarification that this is not at all how it happened. When I was hired to work at TL in mid-2011 one of the things I was brought on to do was to look towards covering Dota for the future. That whole decision and process took about a year, long before it was popular to say SC2 is dying. BW?? If you really played it for a long time and feel that sc2 is strictly better, I think you are in the minority. Even most SC2 pros that came from BW say its the better game when asked privately.
Well I think people have opinions and even though to some of us who thinks bw is the better game, some people would even think bw is bad and C&C is the better RTS out there and I agree though because it's a fun game but not really that good from a competitive perspective again it's my opinion.
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So wait i'm naming the last bw balance patch (1.08), i'm linking to the Dota changelog and this guy tell me to go on wiki to know how many patches there are ? Really ? I don't know wtf is wrong with you dude but you are a piss poor debater. Anyway i think that i have made my point clear for the others people in this thread and if you don't get it well too bad i guess.
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Dota is really mainly a teamwork game. If you play it against someone one-on-one then yes it is a very dumbed-down version of Warcraft 3, but most of the skill lies in the teamwork and team strategies.
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You only mentioned this briefly in a response, but man, I really wish SupCom: FAF was a real competitive game. It's just so interesting and deep, with a larger choice space than any other game out there. And it's the only RTS to really successfully pull off naval combat. It's only problem is that the massive scale makes it difficult to spectate.
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On November 19 2012 21:14 PrinceXizor wrote: I can't even begin to comprehend how you think dota is a dumbed down war3. the games have totally different goals, totally different methods of reaching those goals and are equally complex in terms of strategy and skills required. actually dota is probably second only to BW in terms of strategy and depth and evolution of play. The games both have the same goal: You kill the enemy base. The mere presence of discovering a game does not make it deep, and more importantly, it does not make it interesting to play. There is probably an entire school of game strategy dedicated to titles like Angry Birds, but that doesn't make the game deep, nor does it mean that I want to play them.
On November 20 2012 00:34 targ wrote: Dota is really mainly a teamwork game. If you play it against someone one-on-one then yes it is a very dumbed-down version of Warcraft 3, but most of the skill lies in the teamwork and team strategies. As I pointed out above, Warcraft III had large-scale team gametypes as well, and those integrate "teamwork" into the more complex Warcraft III game template. Those team gametypes were fantastic and DotA became popular through 2003 and 2004 because (and I watched this first-hand) all the crappy Four vs. Four Random Team players got sick of losing and switched to the easier game. But this is all ancillary to the point, and I was hoping anyone had the slightest interest in what I think the actual problem with the DotA clones are as it applies to their marketing model.
On November 20 2012 00:55 theonemephisto wrote: You only mentioned this briefly in a response, but man, I really wish SupCom: FAF was a real competitive game. It's just so interesting and deep, with a larger choice space than any other game out there. And it's the only RTS to really successfully pull off naval combat. It's only problem is that the massive scale makes it difficult to spectate. Small player base be damned, at least you can still play it online. A lot of the classic real-time strategy games don't get that privilege these days unless you want to go through the pain and suffering of setting up shop on one of the tunneling programs. Either way, the game's at the top of its genre, without question.
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TLO who is very good at Supcom FA, SCBW and SC2 and creative in all of them as well has the following opinion on the this topic. People should listen to him more often. http://www.twitch.tv/thebigonetv/b/326811752
Great thoughts about RTS design in general
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There are a lot of valid points, but you're stretching a lot of them pretty far if you're holding up warcraft 3 at some godlike combination of genres. One can claim that DotA is one aspect that exists in warcraft3 developed close to it's logical extreme (as far as what is possible for what a single hero can accomplish) and say SC2 is the other aspect (macro management and army controll, composition, and micromanagement). That does not make a game simpler. Elegance and simplicity of core design is sometimes beneficial to the complexity of a game.
If your argument that a game with just more elements has a higher management cap, then what are your thoughts on something like Spore, which has extremely dumbed down elements from almost every genre. Take the comparison between Go and Chess, Go is an almost elemental game with a total of around 3 functional rules. (there are several more for scoring) wheras Chess certainly has many more elements. Yet you cannot claim that Chess is more complex than Go, while computer scientists will tell you that Go is much deeper in computational complexity and harder to compute and calculate than Chess.
Many games are competitive by their nature. The only recent game for whom the game makers are the primary supporters of the game as an esport are probably LoL and Shootmania.
Remember that the BW and DotA competitive scene grew out almost nothing, wheras Blizzard had quite a hand in the Wc3 scene.
It feels like your conclusion was a forlorn one when you wrote the piece and you spent a lot of time trying to piece a coherent argument together without too much success while never taking the time to doubt the validity of your thesis. If your point is that using ESPORTS as a marketing mechanism for games has some sort of inherent or moral problem, you could make a very well formed case; why jump the shark in making your argument aside from an attempt to stir up sensationalist fervor. At the end of the day, you fall prey to the very same trap that you accuse game makers of: using whatever means possible to promote popularity and increase interest.
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Brazil1429 Posts
You ramble too much in your article. Dota being a dumbed down version of Warcraft III (it's not) has nothing to do with discussing the transformation of esports. Feels like you're whoring for attention and attracting flamers.
Instead of random flame, what about discussing what DotA means for the gaming industry?
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On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: There are a lot of valid points, but you're stretching a lot of them pretty far if you're holding up warcraft 3 at some godlike combination of genres. I don't. I believe Warcraft III's strategy component is dreadfully primitive when compared with some of the better examples in the real-time strategy genre and I think there are some bottlenecks that become exposed as the level of play gets higher (particularly those involving unit composition in pretty much any game against an Orc player), and I think the emphasis on fewer resources as played out through modern league play is a very dumb thing. (If anything, the maps should be getting larger and larger.) I consider the game one of the better twitch real-time strategy games that I've played (along with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, StarCraft (as played with Brood War), Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and Armies of Exigo). But the idea that Warcraft III "wasn't good enough" and DotA is good enough is just silly, and the idea that you strip away the mechanics and components in a game and end up with a more complex, deep version of that game is just wrong, and that's one of the lies that the game industry really needs to do away with.
Notice that nobody is suggesting that the Tower Defense genre (which usually features far greater options for building placement than the Blizzard real-time strategy games that inspired them) is deeper than their progenitor, the reason being that Tower Defense is not the hyper-masculine team sport of tomorrow. This idea that "simplicity creates more depth or a more interesting game experience" only applies if the rules being removed were neither meaningful in the first place or detracted from the other available options in the game. This is how you end up with the people who think the bare-bones Nintendo-published versions of Tetris (as designed for the Nintendo and the Game Boy) are the best versions of Tetris and some benchmark for the video game industry that hasn't been topped, despite the fact there have been countless puzzle games (and later iterations of Tetris) which have all but blown away what Pajitnov accomplished in the mid-eighties.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: One can claim that DotA is one aspect that exists in warcraft3 developed close to it's logical extreme (as far as what is possible for what a single hero can accomplish) and say SC2 is the other aspect (macro management and army controll, composition, and micromanagement). That does not make a game simpler. Elegance and simplicity of core design is sometimes beneficial to the complexity of a game. If that's the case, then you have to demonstrate to me how peeling away the real-time strategy model (base construction, large-scale strategy and tactics) and replacing it with a simpler variant has created a more complex, interesting, and ultimately more fun video game. I've already made my argument for how come the DotA clones are more shallow than the real-time strategy games that inspired them.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: If your argument that a game with just more elements has a higher management cap, then what are your thoughts on something like Spore, which has extremely dumbed down elements from almost every genre. The game is a waste of time. Complexity (the size of the rule set) is not a direct determinant of depth, and more importantly, complexity is not a determinant of the pleasure you get from playing a video game. It's that those rules create fun interactions.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: Take the comparison between Go and Chess, Go is an almost elemental game with a total of around 3 functional rules. (there are several more for scoring) wheras Chess certainly has many more elements. Yet you cannot claim that Chess is more complex than Go, while computer scientists will tell you that Go is much deeper in computational complexity and harder to compute and calculate than Chess. As I understand it, Go also has more pieces, a larger available board, and isn't bottlenecked by a small number of meaningful opening moves that largely dictate how the game can and should be played. But to follow on that point, Go and Chess move precisely in the direction that I am suggesting. Chess and Go are not defined by their simplicity, but that every single piece and rule of the game are absolutely essential to their character. If I flipped the Knights and Bishops around, or gave Pawns the ability to move two spaces at any time, Chess is a completely different game. In Quake III, you must master every single weapon and item, and also have firm knowledge of the movement mechanics and map designs in order to win, because every single weapon, item, and movement mechanic will likely be utilized over the course of that said game. Nearly every piece of the Quake III rule set functions within the typical Quake III match and those rules are absolutely essential to its character in every single match.
If I removed most of the Champions and Items from League of Legends, the fabric of the game would remain roughly the same because the vast majority of the rules are not relevant to the current match or situation. The vast majority of items, Champions, spells, and systems in League of Legends are designed to provide an illusion of progress for weaker players, where the mere act of learning the game (along with a Mastery system that provides slight gains in character strength as you play) allows you to progress against other weaker players. League of Legends bears absolutely no comparison to Chess. It is the antithesis of Chess. League of Legends and the other DotA clones are currently the hallmark of bad complexity within console and computer game design. If I was given god powers to redesign the game, I would immediately reduce the number of Champions down to about 20 to 25 (on par with the number matchups you find in some fighting games) and then strive to make all of those individual matchups individually interesting. Every matchup should actually play different, just as they do in fighting games. But you can't do that, because not all of your player base has access to all of the available characters, and your entire business model relies on inserting new Champions that would absolutely break that delicate state of game design. Also, the Mastery System should also be removed outright, and items should be redesigned so their utility is immediately apparent. (Which is not to say that I want items whose uses are superficially obvious, but "Claws of Attack +6" means a hell of a lot more to me on first sight than "+40 Attack Damage UNIQUE Passive: +40% Armor Penetration". "More complexity" in numbers does not mean "more depth".)
As I said earlier: Having large numbers of options is not inherently good. Having large numbers of options which all meaningfully build upon each other is good. As far as I can tell, people are completely confusing the discovery of the League of Legends and DotA 2 metagames with depth. Those games have been played, broken, and beaten out-and-out. There is very, very little new ground to be found, and that leads to the development of intricate strategies and tactics. That is not a measure of a game's quality. If ten million people were playing Angry Birds on a daily basis and people were being salaried to play Angry Birds in front of live studio audiences, Angry Birds would still be an absolute piece of shit. Games don't somehow become better because "the pros" are exhaustively discovering all the tactics in the game. The presence of a professional or competitive video game scene only allows you to more accurately judge the quality of the game.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: It feels like your conclusion was a forlorn one when you wrote the piece and you spent a lot of time trying to piece a coherent argument together without too much success while never taking the time to doubt the validity of your thesis. If your point is that using ESPORTS as a marketing mechanism for games has some sort of inherent or moral problem, you could make a very well formed case; why jump the shark in making your argument aside from an attempt to stir up sensationalist fervor. At the end of the day, you fall prey to the very same trap that you accuse game makers of: using whatever means possible to promote popularity and increase interest. What is incorrect about the thesis? If it's "I think DotA is a good game, so you're wrong", then that doesn't work, because you never provided any evidence for that beyond a handful of generalities about simplicity and complexity. There is a point where subjective opinion falls dead in the face of overwhelming evidence. And if you actually think that having a low opinion of Defense of the Ancients somehow constitutes a form of trolling, then you'll be stunned to hear that a lot of people just like me think that the history of video games (as propagandized through game sites) is mostly a load of bull, where people actually think the best video games ever made include 3D Zelda games, the Final Fantasy series, the Japanese Role-Playing Genre at-large, the random indie or casual game flavor of the week, and just about any popular title for the Nintendo 64. That's not trolling, and if I was trolling, there would be much easier ways for me to get viewing eyes. I do this for the challenge of defending my opinion in front of audiences other than my own.
On November 20 2012 10:51 shostakovich wrote: You ramble too much in your article. Dota being a dumbed down version of Warcraft III (it's not) has nothing to do with discussing the transformation of esports. Feels like you're whoring for attention and attracting flamers. If one believes (as I do) that the DotA clones are stripped-down real-time strategy games, then it absolutely does.
On November 20 2012 10:51 shostakovich wrote: Instead of random flame, what about discussing what DotA means for the gaming industry? It means the real-time strategy genre is going the way of the shoot 'em up (i.e. "banished to extremely niche obscurity") because the custom games that once provided a lower "skill floor" for real-time strategy newbies are being supplanted by the genre where you only have to control one unit at any given time. Despite being a strategically-simple real-time strategy game, StarCraft II is currently viewed as a "super-hardcore" game with incredibly intense competition. That doesn't bode well for its market.
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On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: There are a lot of valid points, but you're stretching a lot of them pretty far if you're holding up warcraft 3 at some godlike combination of genres.
I don't. I believe Warcraft III's strategy component is dreadfully primitive when compared with some of the better examples in the real-time strategy genre and I think there are some bottlenecks that become exposed as the level of play gets higher (particularly those involving unit composition in pretty much any game against an Orc player), and I think the emphasis on fewer resources as played out through modern league play is a very dumb thing. (If anything, the maps should be getting larger and larger.) I consider the game one of the better twitch real-time strategy games that I've played (along with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, StarCraft (as played with Brood War), Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and Armies of Exigo). But the idea that Warcraft III "wasn't good enough" and DotA is good enough is just silly, and the idea that you strip away the mechanics and components in a game and end up with a more complex, deep version of that game is just wrong, and that's one of the lies that the game industry really needs to do away with.
Notice that nobody is suggesting that the Tower Defense genre (which usually features far greater options for building placement than the Blizzard real-time strategy games that inspired them) is deeper than their progenitor, the reason being that Tower Defense is not the hyper-masculine team sport of tomorrow. This idea that "simplicity creates more depth or a more interesting game experience" only applies if the rules being removed were neither meaningful in the first place or detracted from the other available options in the game. This is how you end up with the people who think the bare-bones Nintendo-published versions of Tetris (as designed for the Nintendo and the Game Boy) are the best versions of Tetris and some benchmark for the video game industry that hasn't been topped, despite the fact there have been countless puzzle games (and later iterations of Tetris) which have all but blown away what Pajitnov accomplished in the mid-eighties.
I actually agree that Warcraft 3 is a deep and fun game and that it shouldn't have been treated as "not good enough". But have you noticed that you're doing the exact same thing to a new genre that you happen to dislike and had a poor experience in one of the shallowest entries in that genre?
I believe Warcraft III's hero management component is dreadfully primitive when compared with some of the better examples in the DotA genre and I think there are some bottlenecks that become exposed as the level of play gets higher. And I think DotA explores that component and develops it into a very complex and entertaining game. The tower defense genre is lacking the spirit of competition and human element that defines Esports, so the strawman here is even more laughable than the way you use LoL.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: One can claim that DotA is one aspect that exists in warcraft3 developed close to it's logical extreme (as far as what is possible for what a single hero can accomplish) and say SC2 is the other aspect (macro management and army controll, composition, and micromanagement). That does not make a game simpler. Elegance and simplicity of core design is sometimes beneficial to the complexity of a game.
If that's the case, then you have to demonstrate to me how peeling away the real-time strategy model (base construction, large-scale strategy and tactics) and replacing it with a simpler variant has created a more complex, interesting, and ultimately more fun video game. I've already made my argument for how come the DotA clones are more shallow than the real-time strategy games that inspired them.
You haven't, because you still hasn't addressed how the depth of a game that takes an element of another game and develops it is "stripping down" unless you make similar arguments about how starcraft is a dumbed down version of warcraft 3 (the strategy aspect), oh and so is every rpg with leveling (the rpg aspect), and by the way every shooter is a dumbed down version of Deus Ex because they took the shooting part of the game and made it more complex!
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: If your argument that a game with just more elements has a higher management cap, then what are your thoughts on something like Spore, which has extremely dumbed down elements from almost every genre.
The game is a waste of time. Complexity (the size of the rule set) is not a direct determinant of depth, and more importantly, complexity is not a determinant of the pleasure you get from playing a video game. It's that those rules create fun interactions.
Games create fun interactions. Deep, DotA does that for millions of people, what makes you say the game is a waste of time, all i see is 1) a hate of lol 2) a general dislike for the genre, and 3) florid arguments with little grounding besides meaningless generalities.
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: Take the comparison between Go and Chess, Go is an almost elemental game with a total of around 3 functional rules. (there are several more for scoring) wheras Chess certainly has many more elements. Yet you cannot claim that Chess is more complex than Go, while computer scientists will tell you that Go is much deeper in computational complexity and harder to compute and calculate than Chess.
As I understand it, Go also has more pieces, a larger available board, and isn't bottlenecked by a small number of meaningful opening moves that largely dictate how the game can and should be played. But to follow on that point, Go and Chess move precisely in the direction that I am suggesting. Chess and Go are not defined by their simplicity, but that every single piece and rule of the game are absolutely essential to their character. If I flipped the Knights and Bishops around, or gave Pawns the ability to move two spaces at any time, Chess is a completely different game. In Quake III, you must master every single weapon and item, and also have firm knowledge of the movement mechanics and map designs in order to win, because every single weapon, item, and movement mechanic will likely be utilized over the course of that said game. Nearly every piece of the Quake III rule set functions within the typical Quake III match and those rules are absolutely essential to its character in every single match.
Dota has more pieces than Wc3, a larger map, and isn't bottlenecked by a small number of meaningful opening builds that largely dictate how the game can and should be played. DotA is not defined by its simplicity, but that every single piece and rule of the game are absolutely essential to their character. If I flipped the stats of two heroes around, or gave a new hero the ability to blink at any time, Dota is a completely different game. (See: half the major patches that have impacted DotA in this way)
Do you how hollow your arguments on the basis of game complexity are?
If I removed most of the Champions and Items from League of Legends, the fabric of the game would remain roughly the same because the vast majority of the rules are not relevant to the current match or situation. The vast majority of items, Champions, spells, and systems in League of Legends are designed to provide an illusion of progress for weaker players, where the mere act of learning the game (along with a Mastery system that provides slight gains in character strength as you play) allows you to progress against other weaker players. League of Legends bears absolutely no comparison to Chess. It is the antithesis of Chess. League of Legends and the other DotA clones are currently the hallmark of bad complexity within console and computer game design. If I was given god powers to redesign the game, I would immediately reduce the number of Champions down to about 20 to 25 (on par with the number matchups you find in some fighting games) and then strive to make all of those individual matchups individually interesting. Every matchup should actually play different, just as they do in fighting games. But you can't do that, because not all of your player base has access to all of the available characters, and your entire business model relies on inserting new Champions that would absolutely break that delicate state of game design. Also, the Mastery System should also be removed outright, and items should be redesigned so their utility is immediately apparent. (Which is not to say that I want items whose uses are superficially obvious, but "Claws of Attack +6" means a hell of a lot more to me on first sight than "+40 Attack Damage UNIQUE Passive: +40% Armor Penetration". "More complexity" in numbers does not mean "more depth".)
Cool, every matchup does play differently in Dota, and heroes are far most distinct than they are in LoL, using a significantly inferior strawman to attack a genre is like saying. "The modern CoD has no depth, thus FPS as a genre is invalid". or "I played a terrible JRPG the other day, classics like sora no kiseki must suck"
As I said earlier: Having large numbers of options is not inherently good. Having large numbers of options which all meaningfully build upon each other is good. As far as I can tell, people are completely confusing the discovery of the League of Legends and DotA 2 metagames with depth. Those games have been played, broken, and beaten out-and-out. There is very, very little new ground to be found, and that leads to the development of intricate strategies and tactics. That is not a measure of a game's quality. If ten million people were playing Angry Birds on a daily basis and people were being salaried to play Angry Birds in front of live studio audiences, Angry Birds would still be an absolute piece of shit. Games don't somehow become better because "the pros" are exhaustively discovering all the tactics in the game. The presence of a professional or competitive video game scene only allows you to more accurately judge the quality of the game.
Not even angry birds has been exhaustively been "broken and beaten out-and-out". The DotA (and to a lesser extent) LoL metagames change on a monthly basis. But you know which games have? The ones without competitive human elements, aka the "3D Zelda games, the Final Fantasy series, the Japanese Role-Playing Genre at-large, the random indie or casual game flavor of the week, and just about any popular title for the Nintendo 64." Does that stop you from loving those games? If not, than what is the argument you're trying to make here aside from trolling and flamebaiting?
On November 20 2012 10:15 Kupon3ss wrote: It feels like your conclusion was a forlorn one when you wrote the piece and you spent a lot of time trying to piece a coherent argument together without too much success while never taking the time to doubt the validity of your thesis. If your point is that using ESPORTS as a marketing mechanism for games has some sort of inherent or moral problem, you could make a very well formed case; why jump the shark in making your argument aside from an attempt to stir up sensationalist fervor. At the end of the day, you fall prey to the very same trap that you accuse game makers of: using whatever means possible to promote popularity and increase interest.
What is incorrect about the thesis? If it's "I think DotA is a good game, so you're wrong", then that doesn't work, because you never provided any evidence for that beyond a handful of generalities about simplicity and complexity. There is a point where subjective opinion falls dead in the face of overwhelming evidence. And if you actually think that having a low opinion of Defense of the Ancients somehow constitutes a form of trolling, then you'll be stunned to hear that a lot of people just like me think that the history of video games (as propagandized through game sites) is mostly a load of bull, where people actually think the best video games ever made include 3D Zelda games, the Final Fantasy series, the Japanese Role-Playing Genre at-large, the random indie or casual game flavor of the week, and just about any popular title for the Nintendo 64. That's not trolling, and if I was trolling, there would be much easier ways for me to get viewing eyes. I do this for the challenge of defending my opinion in front of audiences other than my own.
There's nothing to post if you're going to use LoL as a strawman to attack Dota2, the arguments against LoL has been made time and time again that it is already a stripped down version of DotA with a business model heavily dependent upon superficiality. At no point did you address the point I made about how taking a part of a game and developing it further is something utterly different than stripping it down.
I don't think having a low opinon of Dota is trolling, but I think that if you have a low opinion of Dota because you have a low opinon of lol is trolling.
With e-Sports™ evolving into little more than a career choice, it’s time to explain what went wrong. In the past, professional video game tournaments were an extension of long-term interest in select, excellent video games. But now, companies have discovered that they can use these tournaments to advertise new video games. From a company perspective, these tournaments are little more than a form of stealth marketing.
this is valid, and like I said, is what a lot of your evidence suggests toward and you'd have a piece that most people would agree with here (hence a lack of views).
However, these tournaments act as a form of mass media, exposing the flaws of these unproven video games on a highly visible platform. In tandem with the impatient and stubborn video game player of today, the outcomes of these tournaments create an expectation that companies will “fix their game” as quickly as possible, instead of allowing players to explore the game. This has hamstrung developers. In order to manage “fun to play”, “fun to watch”, and “fix your game”, companies pursue safe, boring design decisions in the pursuit of “balance”. The result has been a class of video game that neither lives up to its predecessors or relevant video game history, and are hardly the games worth broadcasting to the world.
I think applying this to Dota because you hate lol and how casual it is is trolling. And I definitely think you're trolling if you cite warcraft 3 as a game free from these elements and basic problems.
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Brazil1429 Posts
On November 20 2012 12:29 MichaelJLowell wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2012 10:51 shostakovich wrote: Instead of random flame, what about discussing what DotA means for the gaming industry? It means the real-time strategy genre is going the way of the shoot 'em up (i.e. "banished to extremely niche obscurity") because the custom games that once provided a lower "skill floor" for real-time strategy newbies are being supplanted by the genre where you only have to control one unit at any given time. Despite being a strategically-simple real-time strategy game, StarCraft II is currently viewed as a "super-hardcore" game with incredibly intense competition. That doesn't bode well for its market. Nope.
Question: why is a developer investing millions of dollars in a game that possess just one level/stage?
Please imagine a comercial game designer deciding to create a triple-A, action multiplayer game that has only one map. To say it's counter-intuitive is a severe understatement. To understand what DotA means to the industry is to understand how this is possible.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
As far as I can tell, people are completely confusing the discovery of the League of Legends and DotA 2 metagames with depth. Those games have been played, broken, and beaten out-and-out. There is very, very little new ground to be found, and that leads to the development of intricate strategies and tactics. Either you and I are not watching the same games or you can't tell very far. The Dota metagame has changed an incredible lot over the past few years. How long have you been watching Dota and LoL to come to this conclusion?Or, what kind of games have you been watching that occured in the past?(while more stale even the LoL meta-game has changed quite considerably compared to a year ago).
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Gonna respond to what I feel is pertinent. Not staying up all night.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: I actually agree that Warcraft 3 is a deep and fun game and that it shouldn't have been treated as "not good enough". But have you noticed that you're doing the exact same thing to a new genre that you happen to dislike and had a poor experience in one of the shallowest entries in that genre? Absolutely. I already implied above that I'm cognizant of the more traditional strategy game player's gripe about the Command and Conquer and Warcraft-styled real-time strategy games when I mentioned that Total Annihilation players look down on the strategy component of those games. Now, if I was saying that Warcraft III was a paragon of strategic complexity within the real-time strategy genre and shaming down on DotA clones, I could understand the point you're making because my argument would be complete bullshit, but that's not the case here.
As far as I can tell, you're trying to argue that I'm biased because I enjoy Warcraft III and view the subgenre spin-off as a series of lousy real-time strategy games. Of course I'm biased. Everybody is biased. I am biased towards tactics-oriented real-time strategy games and biased against DotA clones because that is the impression I have gotten from my experience with playing video games. There is no such thing as an "objective" game review. Everybody is going to have a different perception of a game or genre based on their gaming and life experiences. What's important is that one can present these subjective opinions and they stand to scrutiny against other subjective opinions.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: The tower defense genre is lacking the spirit of competition and human element that defines Esports, so the strawman here is even more laughable than the way you use LoL. I don't care about e-Sports as a philosophy or a commercial endeavor. e-Sports is a bullshit marketing phrase and this community would be better off disowning it. The fact that Tower Defense games are not "competitive" does not invalidate Tower Defense games unless you're making the argument that versus multiplayer titles are universally superior to a "non-competitive" single-player experience, and I wish you luck in arguing that dozens upon dozens of our most esteemed genres are complete shit.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: Cool, every matchup does play differently in Dota, and heroes are far most distinct than they are in LoL, using a significantly inferior strawman to attack a genre is like saying. "The modern CoD has no depth, thus FPS as a genre is invalid". or "I played a terrible JRPG the other day, classics like sora no kiseki must suck" Which goes back to the original point of the entire piece in the first place: DotA 2 is the superior game (an argument that I see no reason not to accept) and yet, all of the "skilled players" (the people who would be some of the first to recognize if one game is better than another) all stick around to play League of Legends. Professional gaming is now a career choice and one that has nothing to do with extended enjoyment of the games.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: Not even angry birds has been exhaustively been "broken and beaten out-and-out". The DotA (and to a lesser extent) LoL metagames change on a monthly basis. That is because Riot Games has issued 74 (!!) balance or game updates since the game came out in 2009 and not because players are gradually improving. Defense of the Ancients have been patched dozens of times in that same period of time. That's why the metagames change. It has nothing to do with continuing developments in player skill. The changes in the metagame are completely dependent upon the changes made by the designers. You even admit this when you say that "half the major patches that have impacted DotA in this way", referencing major game balance updates.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: But you know which games have? The ones without competitive human elements, aka the "3D Zelda games, the Final Fantasy series, the Japanese Role-Playing Genre at-large, the random indie or casual game flavor of the week, and just about any popular title for the Nintendo 64." Does that stop you from loving those games? If not, than what is the argument you're trying to make here aside from trolling and flamebaiting? The presence of an intensely competitive player base does not discourage my enjoyment of any video game. A game does not become "good" or "better" because it is being played at tournaments by salaried players, is an "e-Sport", or has "competitive human elements". The quality of the craftsmanship in the game code has absolutely nothing to do with the player base that is banging pots and pans on top of it, just as "originality" and "price" have nothing to do with the quality of a game. A game is either good or bad, and certainly, "the DotA clones are popular" does not make those games good, particularly when most standout works in modern popular culture tend to get worse as they appeal to more people. For every Serious Sam 3, Call of Duty sells another ten million copies. Do you honestly think that Defense of the Ancients exploded in popularity during late 2003 and early 2004 because the DotA player base (most of whom had below .500 records and were absolutely terrible at the melee modes) decided that "This is a harder, more complex, more satisfying game than Warcraft III, and I can't wait to test myself?" (You can make the same argument for Total Annihilation, which got to watch StarCraft run away with the financial success of the genre.)
And no, I don't think you want to make the argument that Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time have not been thoroughly explored by their communities, because I guarantee you right now that there's some idiot out there right now running around trying to max out his characters for the X'th time.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: There's nothing to post if you're going to use LoL as a strawman to attack Dota2, the arguments against LoL has been made time and time again that it is already a stripped down version of DotA with a business model heavily dependent upon superficiality. At no point did you address the point I made about how taking a part of a game and developing it further is something utterly different than stripping it down. Because there has never been another genre where that worked. "Action-runners" (lol) like Temple Run, Canabalt, and One-Bit Ninja will never be as good as conventional platformers with actual movement capabilities. (Hell, those action-runners aren't even as good as Chelnov, and that game came out 20 fucking years ago.) Portal is not half as interesting as Quake and Half-Life because Portal takes compelling weapons and combat and replaces them with a single gun which is then used to solve rudimentary, simple puzzles built upon limited movement mechanics. (Not to mention that Unreal Tournament implemented the very-similar Translocator side-by-side with its fantastic combat.) And of course, Tower Defense games will never be as good as the real-time strategy games that inspired them. The reason that there is such a limited body of knowledge on this topic is that, until recently, video game designers were never stupid enough to say "Hey, let's take one small portion of an established game template and turn it into its own game! That will make for a more complex and immersive video game experience!" But now, it's not only profitable to do this, but when ThatGameCompany makes a piece of trash like Journey, a game which completely strips away any meaningful mechanics or design, people are calling it a Game of the Year candidate. It's not only profitable, it's critically successful!
On November 20 2012 15:03 shostakovich wrote: Question: why is a developer investing millions of dollars in a game that possess just one level/stage?
Please imagine a comercial game designer deciding to create a triple-A, action multiplayer game that has only one map. To say it's counter-intuitive is a severe understatement. To understand what DotA means to the industry is to understand how this is possible. Riot Games invests millions of dollars in a game that possesses one level because that game makes money and they are probably under some financial obligation by Tencent to continue making that money. In addition, the success of that game and its persistent nature probably make it difficult for the company to rapidly acquire staff in the production of a new game, just as the success of World of Warcraft caught Blizzard completely by surprise. Therefore, they continue to work on the existing title. I don't understand your point. If you're saying that DotA clones are special because they merit comparison to "real sports" that use a small standardized playing field, then you're basically saying that you're okay with regression in video games (some of which have featured hundreds and even thousands of "standardized playing fields") and I can't really help you.
On November 20 2012 15:23 Kipsate wrote: Either you and I are not watching the same games or you can't tell very far. The Dota metagame has changed an incredible lot over the past few years. How long have you been watching Dota and LoL is my question to you?(while more stale even the LoL meta-game has changed quite considerably compared to a year ago). I just posted the Defense of the Ancients changelog above. The game has been significantly impacted by balance updates. That's why the metagame changes.
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Gonna respond to what I feel is pertinent. Not staying up all night.
You're going to try to answer the questions you can come up with arguments for, OK
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: I actually agree that Warcraft 3 is a deep and fun game and that it shouldn't have been treated as "not good enough". But have you noticed that you're doing the exact same thing to a new genre that you happen to dislike and had a poor experience in one of the shallowest entries in that genre?
Absolutely. I already implied above that I'm cognizant of the more traditional strategy game player's gripe about the Command and Conquer and Warcraft-styled real-time strategy games when I mentioned that Total Annihilation players look down on the strategy component of those games. Now, if I was saying that Warcraft III was a paragon of strategic complexity within the real-time strategy genre and shaming down on DotA clones, I could understand the point you're making because my argument would be complete bullshit, but that's not the case here.
As far as I can tell, you're trying to argue that I'm biased because I enjoy Warcraft III and view the subgenre spin-off as a series of lousy real-time strategy games. Of course I'm biased. Everybody is biased. I am biased towards tactics-oriented real-time strategy games and biased against DotA clones because that is the impression I have gotten from my experience with playing video games. There is no such thing as an "objective" game review. Everybody is going to have a different perception of a game or genre based on their gaming and life experiences. What's important is that one can present these subjective opinions and they stand to scrutiny against other subjective opinions.
I'm saying that you have no clue what you're talking about. Have you played DotA to any meaningful amount? Total annihilation certainly had a lot of "strategic components" than say brood war, but brood war has a much higher mechanics requirement, you cannot make a categorical comparison that one game is "more complex" than another with either next to next knowledge and a bunch of vague generalizations. Or you run once again into the spore argument I pointed out before, Spore is a shit game, but it has a lot of elements, thus every game containing one or more, but not all of the elements must be a poor stripped out copy right? You can say "i hate game A", you can't say "Game B is categorically better than Game A because i think so" the same way I wouldn't be able to say "you an uninformed flamebaiting troll" even if I think it without providing proof, as I have done and intend on continuing to do until you start addressing some of your logicial fallicies with actual facts instead of sweeping generalizations based on uninformed opinon.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: The tower defense genre is lacking the spirit of competition and human element that defines Esports, so the strawman here is even more laughable than the way you use LoL.
I don't care about e-Sports as a philosophy or a commercial endeavor. e-Sports is a bullshit marketing phrase and this community would be better off disowning it. The fact that Tower Defense games are not "competitive" does not invalidate Tower Defense games unless you're making the argument that versus multiplayer titles are universally superior to a "non-competitive" single-player experience, and I wish you luck in arguing that dozens upon dozens of our most esteemed genres are complete shit.
Of course, I've never said that a competitive game is inherently superior to one that is not. I'm saying the fact that you're using it as a inept strawman comparison just because they were both inspired in some way by the warcraft 3 mod scene is like saying Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is the same as Counter Strike source because they're both made in the source engine.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: Cool, every matchup does play differently in Dota, and heroes are far most distinct than they are in LoL, using a significantly inferior strawman to attack a genre is like saying. "The modern CoD has no depth, thus FPS as a genre is invalid". or "I played a terrible JRPG the other day, classics like sora no kiseki must suck"
Which goes back to the original point of the entire piece in the first place: DotA 2 is the superior game (an argument that I see no reason not to accept) and yet, all of the "skilled players" (the people who would be some of the first to recognize if one game is better than another) all stick around to play League of Legends. Professional gaming is now a career choice and one that has nothing to do with extended enjoyment of the games.
The Koreans do, mostly because Koreans did not have a game like DotA fill that niche due to the popularity of brood war and the korean WC3 map Chaos, DotA 100% sprang as a competitive community based on extended enjoyment of the games. The game was community driven to its logical extreme, without even the proper release, advertising and distribution venues of games like Quake or Brood war.
Again, Teamliquid doesn't cover LoL, if you want to go flame LoL please go to na.leagueoflegends.com/forums (or something like that)
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: Not even angry birds has been exhaustively been "broken and beaten out-and-out". The DotA (and to a lesser extent) LoL metagames change on a monthly basis.
That is because Riot Games has issued 74 (!!) balance or game updates since the game came out in 2009 and not because players are gradually improving. Defense of the Ancients have been patched dozens of times in that same period of time. That's why the metagames change. It has nothing to do with continuing developments in player skill. The changes in the metagame are completely dependent upon the changes made by the designers. You even admit this when you say that "half the major patches that have impacted DotA in this way", referencing major game balance updates.
Are the below not your own words? (bolded for emphasis)
As I understand it, Go also has more pieces, a larger available board, and isn't bottlenecked by a small number of meaningful opening moves that largely dictate how the game can and should be played. But to follow on that point, Go and Chess move precisely in the direction that I am suggesting. Chess and Go are not defined by their simplicity, but that every single piece and rule of the game are absolutely essential to their character. If I flipped the Knights and Bishops around, or gave Pawns the ability to move two spaces at any time, Chess is a completely different game.
Again, I'm just pointing out the continuous stream of logical inconsistencies in everything you attempt to argue. Please start remembering the bullshit you continuous to spew out, because at this rate, congratulations, you just called chess casual, go bring your "uninformed flamebaiting trolling" to that community.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: But you know which games have? The ones without competitive human elements, aka the "3D Zelda games, the Final Fantasy series, the Japanese Role-Playing Genre at-large, the random indie or casual game flavor of the week, and just about any popular title for the Nintendo 64." Does that stop you from loving those games? If not, than what is the argument you're trying to make here aside from trolling and flamebaiting?
The presence of an intensely competitive player base does not discourage my enjoyment of any video game. A game does not become "good" or "better" because it is being played at tournaments by salaried players, is an "e-Sport", or has "competitive human elements". The quality of the craftsmanship in the game code has absolutely nothing to do with the player base that is banging pots and pans on top of it, just as "originality" and "price" have nothing to do with the quality of a game. A game is either good or bad, and certainly, "the DotA clones are popular" does not make those games good, particularly when most standout works in modern popular culture tend to get worse as they appeal to more people. For every Serious Sam 3, Call of Duty sells another ten million copies. Do you honestly think that Defense of the Ancients exploded in popularity during late 2003 and early 2004 because the DotA player base (most of whom had below .500 records and were absolutely terrible at the melee modes) decided that "This is a harder, more complex, more satisfying game than Warcraft III, and I can't wait to test myself?" (You can make the same argument for Total Annihilation, which got to watch StarCraft run away with the financial success of the genre.)
So this argument is that casual games are bad, it depends on where on the spectrum you're from, personally I found FFVII and OoT significantly dumbed down compared to their 2D predecessors in terms of both difficulty and gameplay, mostly shouldered by their "shiny new systems and their graphics" That doesn't mean i'd dismiss them out of hand the way you seem to casually do just because you didn't personally enjoy lol.
I think DotA exploded in popularity because it's a different type of game and a pioneer of the genre, it exploded in popularity because it filled a gap in places the same way brood war or counter strike did. It had an environment that fit the niche and grew, in this case a fun, contained game that was playable with multiple players. Most of all, it was new and interesting. I don't know if you played WC3 during 03-04 but that's when the multiplayer scene died. It died because metagame was dull and uninteresting. As a game designed for and balanced 1v1, forcing players who wanted a team environment to play an unpolished multiplayer meta, people didn't abandon it because they were bad at melee, they abandoned it because multiplayer melee was dull and boring and custom maps were fun and exciting. DotA emerged from that scene as the most competitive among the competitive multiplayer WC3 custom maps.
Individually, Quake is more "complicated than counter-strike" but the fact that counterstrike was designed as a teambased game made it completely different in terms of execution and the skill at the highest level. Sure you can make some sort of silly "omg individual skill" argument, but you'd be completely disregarding the multiplayer aspect of game design.
And no, I don't think you want to make the argument that Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time have not been thoroughly explored by their communities, because I guarantee you right now that there's some idiot out there right now running around trying to max out his characters for the X'th time.
The idiocy of this argument is incredible. The fact that there are people still playing a game doesn't mean that the game hasn't been completely figured out, nor does it preclude it from a good game, as you did in your original post. Somewhere out there people are playing tic tac toe too, but that fact proves nothing, which has been the lynchpin of your logic, citing poorly constructed strawman that prove nothing.
On November 20 2012 13:12 Kupon3ss wrote: There's nothing to post if you're going to use LoL as a strawman to attack Dota2, the arguments against LoL has been made time and time again that it is already a stripped down version of DotA with a business model heavily dependent upon superficiality. At no point did you address the point I made about how taking a part of a game and developing it further is something utterly different than stripping it down.
Because there has never been another genre where that worked. "Action-runners" (lol) like Temple Run, Canabalt, and One-Bit Ninja will never be as good as conventional platformers with actual movement capabilities. (Hell, those action-runners aren't even as good as Chelnov, and that game came out 20 fucking years ago.) Portal is not half as interesting as Quake and Half-Life because Portal takes compelling weapons and combat and replaces them with a single gun which is then used to solve rudimentary, simple puzzles built upon limited movement mechanics. (Not to mention that Unreal Tournament implemented the very-similar Translocator side-by-side with its fantastic combat.) And of course, Tower Defense games will never be as good as the real-time strategy games that inspired them. The reason that there is such a limited body of knowledge on this topic is that, until recently, video game designers were never stupid enough to say "Hey, let's take one small portion of an established game template and turn it into its own game! That will make for a more complex and immersive video game experience!" But now, it's not only profitable to do this, but when ThatGameCompany makes a piece of trash like Journey, a game which completely strips away any meaningful mechanics or design, people are calling it a Game of the Year candidate. It's not only profitable, it's critically successful!
Quake started out as single-player focused game but gained popularity when that was stripped away and the multiplayer competitive side was developed. Portal is an acclaimed success and just because you personally didn't enjoy it says absolutely nothing about genre. Again your strawmans fall apart the second anybody informed looks over them and you're even having to resort your personal experience and views to try to prove "facts". For example, with your logic I can say, I personally believe that "you are an uninformed flamebaiting troll", and then write a bunch of random florid sentences, it doesn't make it concretely factual, or does it? No, I'd have to prove it my pointing out logical fallacies, attention-whoring, poorly constructed strawmen, counter-factual arguments, etc. etc.
I'm doing that.
On November 20 2012 15:03 shostakovich wrote: Question: why is a developer investing millions of dollars in a game that possess just one level/stage?
Please imagine a comercial game designer deciding to create a triple-A, action multiplayer game that has only one map. To say it's counter-intuitive is a severe understatement. To understand what DotA means to the industry is to understand how this is possible.
Riot Games invests millions of dollars in a game that possesses one level because that game makes money and they are probably under some financial obligation by Tencent to continue making that money. In addition, the success of that game and its persistent nature probably make it difficult for the company to rapidly acquire staff in the production of a new game, just as the success of World of Warcraft caught Blizzard completely by surprise. Therefore, they continue to work on the existing title. I don't understand your point. If you're saying that DotA clones are special because they merit comparison to "real sports" that use a small standardized playing field, then you're basically saying that you're okay with regression in video games (some of which have featured hundreds and even thousands of "standardized playing fields") and I can't really help you.
Please hate on LoL by hating on LoL, not the genre, similarly, I don't hate on all bloggers who share their posts on teamliquid just because I think "you an uninformed flamebaiting troll".
I'm not calling you biased, I'm calling you an uninformed flamebaiting troll
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If you haven't played DotA competitively or at least at a high level in scrims then you probably shouldn't be making the comments you're making about the game. The claim that developers are transforming games to be popular esports and therefore harming the quality of the games is complete bullshit if you want to apply that to Valve since Dota 2 replicates DotA in every way possible and Dota wasn't developed to be a popular esport. It was a mod that was loads of fun and people started competing against eachother in it and the game has evolved through metagame shifts and patches ever since. There was no clear design for how the game was and is meant to be played. Players over the years have figured out ways of playing it and icefrog has attempted to balance it accordingly and this has shaped the game into what it is today. It's an extremely confusing and complicated game that has many different variables wide open for interpretation leading to a very strategically deep game.
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Basically, I now think that the e-Sports marketing model has become detrimental to the actual quality of the games and has become completely antithetical to its original purpose, which was to provide lasting enjoyment of various excellent games as they held to scrutiny over the course of years. Scrutiny gets harder every year for "e-Sports" games. You can't sell these games over and over again, and if these companies screw up the sequel (or don't even make it) well "lasting enjoyment" will die eventually, it's a symptom of the industry as it is now. The model evolved to make money, just as the video game industry evolved to make their titles more purchasable for the casual market. As it is now the trend of marketable e-Sports games is too new a development really, and most industry companies probably don't want to take a step into it yet. What you're describing is actually more endemic of the industry and consumer base at large, and has not much to do with e-Sports. You have to start with an interested playerbase first.
as for dota comments, i can safely say a few things
That is because Riot Games has issued 74 (!!) balance or game updates since the game came out in 2009 and not because players are gradually improving. Defense of the Ancients have been patched dozens of times in that same period of time. That's why the metagames change. It has nothing to do with continuing developments in player skill. The changes in the metagame are completely dependent upon the changes made by the designers. You even admit this when you say that "half the major patches that have impacted DotA in this way", referencing major game balance updates. Incorrect, though the individual skill ceiling has already been reached by many players around when Dota2 was released. teamwise theres still a lot of ground to cover. Another point is that as a patch game, it is inevitable that the metagame will change and many, such as me, welcome such a thing.
And honestly the vast majority of fighting game meta for a single game gets stale, same thing with FPS. I feel it is not very useful to talk about how bad the meta is in Dotalikes if you want to bring up other kinds of staple genres that have changed through many sequels.
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MOBA games are completely different experiences from RTS games. One reason MOBA games are so stimulating is that come mid game you are continuously reacting to 9 different players. Even before this, you constantly have to make split second reactions to fresh situations. It's bracing and great.
MOBA games aren't dumbed down RTS games - they're something different.
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On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: You're going to try to answer the questions you can come up with arguments for, OK If it makes you feel better about yourself, sure. I'm picking and choosing which questions to respond to because my time is better spent dissecting the arguments that are not tedious, minutiae, or otherwise lead to pointless conclusions. So, for instance, I'm not going to acknowledge your colorful assertion "every shooter is a dumbed down version of Deus Ex because they took the shooting part of the game and made it more complex" because I'm not sure whether you have even played the game or understand what makes Deus Ex interesting.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Have you played DotA to any meaningful amount? Yes. I played it enough to understand it and what the problems with it are. No, I'm not going to amaze you with my knowledge of the metagame, because I don't and didn't play these games enough to do that. I believe the last time I played Defense of the Ancients was sometime in 2008. And no, I have not played the game at a "world-class" or "high level" of play. I have a large number of the fundamentally similar real-time strategy games, I have played them competently. And in the process of playing those games well, I was able to understand those games well and create a personal game design philosophy that allows me to compare those games to each other, and whether to assert that they are "good" or "bad". I am not precluded from commenting on the games because "LOL U SUK".
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Of course, I've never said that a competitive game is inherently superior to one that is not.
The tower defense genre is lacking the spirit of competition and human element that defines Esports, Alright. Just the Tower Defense genre?
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: I'm saying the fact that you're using it as a inept strawman comparison just because they were both inspired in some way by the warcraft 3 mod scene is like saying Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is the same as Counter Strike source because they're both made in the source engine. Both come from similar origins, popularized through the casual underbelly of the same real-time strategy community, games which strip away the Warcraft III game template and then try to insert complexity elsewise. It's worth looking at, and the comparison is worth mentioning in passing.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: The Koreans do, mostly because Koreans did not have a game like DotA fill that niche due to the popularity of brood war and the korean WC3 map Chaos, DotA 100% sprang as a competitive community based on extended enjoyment of the games. The game was community driven to its logical extreme, without even the proper release, advertising and distribution venues of games like Quake or Brood war. I did not lump Defense of the Ancients into that class of game, unless you are making some leap that DotA 2 is merely an "enhanced remake" and not a sequel.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Again, I'm just pointing out the continuous stream of logical inconsistencies in everything you attempt to argue. Please start remembering the bullshit you continuous to spew out, because at this rate, congratulations, you just called chess casual, go bring your "uninformed flamebaiting trolling" to that community. "Giving Hero X +100 damage to its special attack" is not essential to its character. "Giving Hero Y a Blink ability" is not essential to its character. They may lead to changes in the Tier Listsfor those games, but those Tier Lists are not essential to their character, either. When I talk about "essential to its character", I talk about changes that fundamentally redefine how the game is played. There is eventually supposed to be a time that you take faith in your work and let the game sit, and you let people explore the game. If the developer of the game must continue to make changes in order to repeatedly respond to imbalance, then it is probably not a good game and you're making those balance updates as a means to hide it.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: So this argument is that casual games are bad, it depends on where on the spectrum you're from, personally I found FFVII and OoT significantly dumbed down compared to their 2D predecessors in terms of both difficulty and gameplay, mostly shouldered by their "shiny new systems and their graphics" That doesn't mean i'd dismiss them out of hand the way you seem to casually do just because you didn't personally enjoy lol. Final Fantasy VII was one of my favorite games growing up as a kid. I put a couple hundred hours into it. I now acknowledge that the game is awful, and I do not cede to the hive mind that propagandizes games like Final Fantasy VII as a high point of video game role-playing. The same goes for Ocarina of Time, a game which I never enjoyed at any point, a game which has absolutely laughable combat, a complete lack of difficulty, piss-poor dungeon design, and lays all of these things into a game overworld which is not only painful to explore, but poses no threat to the player, something that the Souls games and Dragon's Dogma have recently done very, very well. I don't really care what Game Journalism Consensus has to say about these games because most of those people have absolutely no clue what they're talking about. Just because IGN has given it a perfect score does not mean it is good, just because the randoms on GameFAQs vote the game as "BEST EBAR" does not mean it is good.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: I think DotA exploded in popularity because it's a different type of game and a pioneer of the genre, it exploded in popularity because it filled a gap in places the same way brood war or counter strike did. It had an environment that fit the niche and grew, in this case a fun, contained game that was playable with multiple players. Most of all, it was new and interesting. I don't know if you played WC3 during 03-04 but that's when the multiplayer scene died. Warcraft III melee gametypes took a hit because of the new Matchmaking System (essentially a test run for what would eventually be used in World of Warcraft and StarCraft II) and all the players who were playing for a shiny icon or a pretty record all quit. The game recovered just fine and peaked in 2006, when advanced multitasking techniques and full utilization of the rock-paper-scissors model really began to take off, and then Orcs figured out around 2007 that they don't have to do much more than Grunt/Raider/Spirit Walker/Blademaster/Shadow Hunter. (But even today, you get variations on this, and there's been much more Witch Doctor play as of recent, and you got these changes in the metagame without having a single major balance patch in over five years. You eventually take confidence in what you have and you sit on it.)
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Individually, Quake is more "complicated than counter-strike" but the fact that counterstrike was designed as a teambased game made it completely different in terms of execution and the skill at the highest level. Sure you can make some sort of silly "omg individual skill" argument, but you'd be completely disregarding the multiplayer aspect of game design. The "skill cap" for team multiplayer has no bearing on my ability as an individual to derive pleasure from the game's systems and aesthetics. Some games are more fun as single-player games and others are more fun as multiplayer games. The existence of a higher theoretical skill cap for a team-based multiplayer shooter has absolutely no bearing on there's more to versus multiplayer games than skill ceilings.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Quake started out as single-player focused game but gained popularity when that was stripped away and the multiplayer competitive side was developed. Doom multiplayer was already very popular at the time of its release and the Quake multiplayer was not tacked on as some random side-jib. The company had to create QuakeWorld because almost immediately after the game's release because people were complaining about the netcode, of which there was none. (They settled on the client-server model that the Apogee guys had used earlier in the year.)
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Portal is an acclaimed success and just because you personally didn't enjoy it says absolutely nothing about genre. Once again, "the journlolists liked it" is not a measuring stick. You'll be surprised how many games don't hold up to scrutiny once you open your mind about them.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: For example, with your logic I can say, I personally believe that "you are an uninformed flamebaiting troll", and then write a bunch of random florid sentences, it doesn't make it concretely factual, or does it? No, I'd have to prove it my pointing out logical fallacies, attention-whoring, poorly constructed strawmen, counter-factual arguments, etc. etc. I'm going to take it that you're mad I was critical of a genre that (looking at your post history) you overwhelmingly enjoy.
On November 20 2012 16:19 zMuffinMan wrote: If you haven't played DotA competitively or at least at a high level in scrims then you probably shouldn't be making the comments you're making about the game. Just to note, I adressed this when responding above.
On November 20 2012 16:19 zMuffinMan wrote: The claim that developers are transforming games to be popular esports and therefore harming the quality of the games is complete bullshit if you want to apply that to Valve since Dota 2 replicates DotA in every way possible and Dota wasn't developed to be a popular esport. And now Valve has placed direct financial incentive on themselves to create game updates which will maximize profit from the existing player base. They did the same thing with Team Fortress 2, and no, I don't think that having people running around in silly hats makes a video game more compelling or immersive. (I understand that DotA 2's cash shop clothes will all fit within the context of the game, but who knows what they'll come up with elsewise.)
On November 20 2012 16:59 rabidch wrote: Scrutiny gets harder every year for "e-Sports" games. You can't sell these games over and over again, and if these companies screw up the sequel (or don't even make it) well "lasting enjoyment" will die eventually, it's a symptom of the industry as it is now. The model evolved to make money, just as the video game industry evolved to make their titles more purchasable for the casual market. As it is now the trend of marketable e-Sports games is too new a development really, and most industry companies probably don't want to take a step into it yet. What you're describing is actually more endemic of the industry and consumer base at large, and has not much to do with e-Sports. You have to start with an interested playerbase first. It goes an exceptionally long way in keeping a disinterested player base from going in different directions. Imagine if all the chaos that happened a couple of months back took place while the KeSPA Brood War were still going strong and those KeSPA tournaments had muscled out StarCraft II in South Korea. I feel pretty confident stating that there are a lot of players (both salaried and elsewise) who now stick with StarCraft II because "the scene is gone", and that the salaried players don't have a goal to shoot for in Brood War.
On November 20 2012 16:59 rabidch wrote:And honestly the vast majority of fighting game meta for a single game gets stale, same thing with FPS. I feel it is not very useful to talk about how bad the meta is in Dotalikes if you want to bring up other kinds of staple genres that have changed through many sequels. Then if the game becomes boring, you move on to a new game instead of creating a potato chip comfort zone within the old game and its occasional, artificial balance updates. (And yes, there have been good sequels and bad sequels. While I'm no savant of fighting games, even things as superficially similar as the early Street Fighter II games have major changes and additions which improved the game beyond "new characters" or "balance tweaks". And even the balance tweaks were not done in the dead-ahead pursuit of 5/5 matchups.) You go play and enjoy other excellent video games, of which there are absolutely no shortage of. Whether the best players have completely explored all available strategies in a game is unlikely to have any bearing on your experience when you pick it up for the very first time.
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I have two problems with responding to you.
The first is that the entire article comes out as a sermon, which you yourself are the firmest believer in the content of. The second, is that it is pants on head retarded.
Comparing Warcraft 3 and Dota2 is like comparing Broodwar and Starcraft 2: In any context it is pointless. Your entire argument is constructed of points that have no actual relation to one another, that you've forced into sentences side by side to fit your logic.
The newer games are certainly promoted in attempts to gain profit, there is no denying that. On the one side (while you are totally engorged in it) there is a bit more of a top-down model than there used to be. But the simple fact is that Dota 2 didn't explode because it had a pillar crafted for it and was placed upon it; it exploded because it was a giant anyway. It doesn't NEED a pillar and neither does Starcraft 2.
Yes it's still developing. Yes you can argue that there should be more testing first. You can huff and puff till you're blue in the face that it should have to "earn" it's place; but it's not going to. It's not an indy game by some off-developer. It's a born giant from preceding leviathan parents. Yes it might get a leg up and yes it might help, but none of them have actually needed it; they are what they are. You're comparing to a reality that just doesn't apply to them. From the games themselves to the support their developers give them to the hype that community has for them before they're even out.
What you genuinely fail to understand is that the current games you are so concerned about have developed and occurred as they have because they are extensions and offspring of Warcraft 3 and Broodwar and Counterstrike and everything preceding them, not in spite of it.
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On November 20 2012 19:52 Angel_ wrote: I have two problems with responding to you.
The first is that the entire article comes out as a sermon, which you yourself are the firmest believer in the content of. What, you think I would have written and published such an assertion if I didn't believe it? Hey, at least that's an upgrade over the previous assertion that I'm trolling in this thread.
On November 20 2012 19:52 Angel_ wrote: Comparing Warcraft 3 and Dota2 is like comparing Broodwar and Starcraft 2: In any context it is pointless. Your entire argument is constructed of points that have no actual relation to one another, that you've forced into sentences side by side to fit your logic. Two things: One, you can make a comparison between any games in any genres, so long as you know what you're talking about and have a reasonable thought process to back it up. You can compare Space Harrier to Grim Fandango. It may be nearly impossible to do it without sounding like an ass, but there's no reason it can't be attempted. By extension, a comparison of StarCraft: Brood War to StarCraft 2 is probably one of the easier high-profile comparisons that can be done. And second, I find it amusing that a couple of you have taken the angle that "you can't compare these games" when you have two separate threads in the General discussion forum which feature lively discussion of game-ranking across multiple dissimilar genres. And despite my own post in one of those threads pointing out how much effort has to go into any cross-genre discussion (let alone a ranking of all games), it seems like people don't have a problem with the idea until someone uses it to attack their favorite game of the month.
On November 20 2012 19:52 Angel_ wrote: The newer games are certainly promoted in attempts to gain profit, there is no denying that. On the one side (while you are totally engorged in it) there is a bit more of a top-down model than there used to be. But the simple fact is that Dota 2 didn't explode because it had a pillar crafted for it and was placed upon it; it exploded because it was a giant anyway. It doesn't NEED a pillar and neither does Starcraft 2. I'm not going to dispute the notion that a sequel to a critically and financially successful video game necessarily needs the e-Sports marketing model (or any marketing) in order to find its target audience. Most of the marketing is already done. But marketing is marketing, and companies aren't pouring X number of dollars into these tournaments because "we love our fans so much and we're doing this for no reason other than charity". It's a very effective marketing model but it comes with a price.
And also, I am of the opinion that Blizzard Entertainment needed to get KeSPA and their Brood War tournaments out of the picture in order for professional StarCraft II to become successful worldwide and for StarCraft II to become successful in the South Korean market. And even after being able to do that, I do not believe Gametrics has recorded a single day where StarCraft II was more popular in Korean PC Bangs than StarCraft: Brood War. If Blizzard had not done this, then the game was probably going to fail as a doctrine and business strategy for Blizzard intellectual property rights and Blizzard e-Sports. (It may still fail, but we have to wait and see.)
On November 20 2012 19:52 Angel_ wrote: What you genuinely fail to understand is that the current games you are so concerned about have developed and occurred as they have because they are extensions and offspring of Warcraft 3 and Broodwar and Counterstrike and everything preceding them, not in spite of it. Once again, my perspective completely exists on the point of view that DotA clones aren't that good, and I hope it dwells on people that this is something I have given a ridiculous amount of thought to and I'm not going to change my opinion on it in the course of a single discussion thread. If I can't convince you of that, then it's pretty tough for you to say "Well, the newer crop of 'e-Sports' are kind of crap, so maybe he has a point here."
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Then your problem is that your starting point is far from most peoples. You'd be better off making a thread explaining why DOTA isn't a good game, than trying to discuss e-sports on a foundation no one's going to agree with. Having said that, you wouldn't be much better off, because you'd get similar reactions you got to this thread - people telling you you don't understand DOTA.
The problem is they are probably right. You may have "given it a ridiculous amount of thought", but so have countless TL hardcore BW players, staff and progamers, and have found a lot to like in DOTA. Seems the odds are it's you who's wrong.
To pick on one point:
"valuing game balance over interesting unit design, by fixing “problems” with rash design decisions, you gut the depth of your games. As we’ve seen in StarCraft II and League of Legends, we have now gotten to the point where the development of playstyles is not centralized around improvements in player skill and the process of exploring a game, but around the game balance updates themselves, where the illusion of depth is created every time Riot Games creates a new Champion or recreates the skill set for an old one."
I don't play SC2 (doesn't run on my computer), but playstyles in LoL often change because of a pro-teams unique style (see moscow 5 or CLG.EU), rather than balance patches.
Also, can't depth be reached through different routes? Can't we have both the elegant simplicity of a game like Go, and the insane complexity of a game like Magic the Gathering. Why can't both kinds exist?
To use sport, can't we have tennis and cricket? Or music - art songs and symphonies?
Depth isn't as simple as you make out.
Finally, your writing seems pointlessly abrasive, e.g "Woah, hold back on the butthurt, DotA fans. I don’t think StarCraft II is very good, either."
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It's no because the "overwhelming majority" believes ,soemthing that it is true. Imbd's ranking are a testimony to the crapiness of the majority opinion when it comes to evaluate products. I haven't given much thought on the matter, but I'm clearly leaning toward's MichaelJLowell side.
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also all the arguments about dota he makes are "well LoL is like this" his only argument against dota is "it's made from war3 engine therefore i must compare it to war3" and then his knowledge of actual professional dota is so minimal he clearly just looks at the complete basics *how many units do you have? how do you get money?*, he's writing like a math student or a sensationalist, not like a scientist or statistician and especially not like a legitimate journalist.
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He's not doing science or journalism either, and I suggest you read him more closely.
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I read the whole article. and article btw implies journalism. or an indefinite object, which certainly could apply i guess.
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On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: You're going to try to answer the questions you can come up with arguments for, OK
If it makes you feel better about yourself, sure. I'm picking and choosing which questions to respond to because my time is better spent dissecting the arguments that are not tedious, minutiae, or otherwise lead to pointless conclusions. So, for instance, I'm not going to acknowledge your colorful assertion "every shooter is a dumbed down version of Deus Ex because they took the shooting part of the game and made it more complex" because I'm not sure whether you have even played the game or understand what makes Deus Ex interesting.
Tedious minitae like facts sure do suck when they get in the way of your sensationalism doesn't it. For instance, you're not going to address the fundamental gap in Logic here but instead of an ad-homiem attack because you cannot avoid the FACT that your convoluted logic cannot get around the fact that: Just because the elements of a game as existent in part in a different game and becomes more developed, the second game cannot be called a stripped down version of the first. I've said nothing about Deus Ex, just that your central argument that DotA or indeed anything in that genre contains a nonsensical leap in logic that happens to be one of the lynchpins of your so called "argument". My comparison is a parallel, not some sort of snide commentary on Deus Ex, to your silly, groundless claims.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Have you played DotA to any meaningful amount?
Yes. I played it enough to understand it and what the problems with it are. No, I'm not going to amaze you with my knowledge of the metagame, because I don't and didn't play these games enough to do that. I believe the last time I played Defense of the Ancients was sometime in 2008. And no, I have not played the game at a "world-class" or "high level" of play. I have a large number of the fundamentally similar real-time strategy games, I have played them competently. And in the process of playing those games well, I was able to understand those games well and create a personal game design philosophy that allows me to compare those games to each other, and whether to assert that they are "good" or "bad". I am not precluded from commenting on the games because "LOL U SUK".
There's a difference between your claim of "I played the game competently" and my claim of "you're an uninformed flamebaiting troll", let's go over a bit of the claims you've made about DotA
MichaelJLowell wrote: Do you honestly think that Defense of the Ancients exploded in popularity during late 2003 and early 2004 because the DotA player base (most of whom had below .500 records and were absolutely terrible at the melee modes decided that "This is a harder, more complex, more satisfying game than Warcraft III, and I can't wait to test myself?"
First of all, the cornerstone to nearly all of your groundless claims have been personal experience somehow moved into fact, is that true of the above as well or as you just completely pulling shit out of your ass now instead of the limited personal experience that has been your modus operandai thus far.
You've tried DotA and this is the only evaluation of it you give, every other point you make is aimed at LoL implies that you've played LoL far more. You appeared to have been playing DotA in 2008. So I must ask you then "Do you honestly think that LoL exploded in popularity during late 2009 and early 2010 because the LoL player base (most of whom had below .500 records and were absolutely terrible at DotA)" decided that "This is a harder, more complex, more satisfying game than DotA, and I can't wait to test myself?"
Is this not what you did, given what appears to be your imitate knowledge about the LoL game structure, metagame, and business model. You appear to be the very subjects the Riot appealed to, congratulations, you bought into a game, it sucked, and now you somehow think the entire genre sucks. Grow up.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Of course, I've never said that a competitive game is inherently superior to one that is not.
The tower defense genre is lacking the spirit of competition and human element that defines Esports,
Alright. Just the Tower Defense genre?
The lacking of that element is why, as I said, those games cannot be considered competitive and thus you cannot compare their ability to "be solved" to those of games involving human factors and human opponents. The exact same point I made about popular RPGs and other single player games to point out that your point about games like DotA being figure out was factually untrue, that your logical extension that that somehow makes a bad game is completely laughable.
If you're having to quote cherry-picked pieces of what the last person wrote and still unable to come up with compelling factual elements, I recommend you just stop trying.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: I'm saying the fact that you're using it as a inept strawman comparison just because they were both inspired in some way by the warcraft 3 mod scene is like saying Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is the same as Counter Strike source because they're both made in the source engine.
Both come from similar origins, popularized through the casual underbelly of the same real-time strategy community, games which strip away the Warcraft III game template and then try to insert complexity elsewise. It's worth looking at, and the comparison is worth mentioning in passing.
You can't just keep on saying "striped away" while providing no factual arguments to back that up. Both games come from the warcraft 3 engine, just as the two games I mentioned come through the source engine, that is a factual parallel. What your claims of stripping away are personal opinion that you yourself cannot be bothered to defend.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: The Koreans do, mostly because Koreans did not have a game like DotA fill that niche due to the popularity of brood war and the korean WC3 map Chaos, DotA 100% sprang as a competitive community based on extended enjoyment of the games. The game was community driven to its logical extreme, without even the proper release, advertising and distribution venues of games like Quake or Brood war.
I did not lump Defense of the Ancients into that class of game, unless you are making some leap that DotA 2 is merely an "enhanced remake" and not a sequel.
Same lead developer, same mechanics, same heroes, same numbers, better engine. I don't know, is say OoT MQ an enhanced remake because it probably changed about as much about the game as Dota2 did.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Again, I'm just pointing out the continuous stream of logical inconsistencies in everything you attempt to argue. Please start remembering the bullshit you continuous to spew out, because at this rate, congratulations, you just called chess casual, go bring your "uninformed flamebaiting trolling" to that community.
"Giving Hero X +100 damage to its special attack" is not essential to its character. "Giving Hero Y a Blink ability" is not essential to its character. They may lead to changes in the Tier Listsfor those games, but those Tier Lists are not essential to their character, either. When I talk about "essential to its character", I talk about changes that fundamentally redefine how the game is played. There is eventually supposed to be a time that you take faith in your work and let the game sit, and you let people explore the game. If the developer of the game must continue to make changes in order to repeatedly respond to imbalance, then it is probably not a good game and you're making those balance updates as a means to hide it.
A blink change did redefine the way the game is played, I have to chalk this up to the
"First of all, the cornerstone to nearly all of your groundless claims have been personal experience somehow moved into fact, is that true of the above as well or as you just completely pulling shit out of your ass now instead of the limited personal experience that has been your modus operandai thus far."
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: So this argument is that casual games are bad, it depends on where on the spectrum you're from, personally I found FFVII and OoT significantly dumbed down compared to their 2D predecessors in terms of both difficulty and gameplay, mostly shouldered by their "shiny new systems and their graphics" That doesn't mean i'd dismiss them out of hand the way you seem to casually do just because you didn't personally enjoy lol.
Final Fantasy VII was one of my favorite games growing up as a kid. I put a couple hundred hours into it. I now acknowledge that the game is awful, and I do not cede to the hive mind that propagandizes games like Final Fantasy VII as a high point of video game role-playing. The same goes for Ocarina of Time, a game which I never enjoyed at any point, a game which has absolutely laughable combat, a complete lack of difficulty, piss-poor dungeon design, and lays all of these things into a game overworld which is not only painful to explore, but poses no threat to the player, something that the Souls games and Dragon's Dogma have recently done very, very well. I don't really care what Game Journalism Consensus has to say about these games because most of those people have absolutely no clue what they're talking about. Just because IGN has given it a perfect score does not mean it is good, just because the randoms on GameFAQs vote the game as "BEST EBAR" does not mean it is good.
You see how you're able to analyze those games, and LoL, because you know something about them? You see how you've never said anything factual about DotA of that nature? This is why I called you an uninformed flamebaiting troll, because the rest of your quote explains why you're a flamebaiting troll.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: I think DotA exploded in popularity because it's a different type of game and a pioneer of the genre, it exploded in popularity because it filled a gap in places the same way brood war or counter strike did. It had an environment that fit the niche and grew, in this case a fun, contained game that was playable with multiple players. Most of all, it was new and interesting. I don't know if you played WC3 during 03-04 but that's when the multiplayer scene died.
Warcraft III melee gametypes took a hit because of the new Matchmaking System (essentially a test run for what would eventually be used in World of Warcraft and StarCraft II) and all the players who were playing for a shiny icon or a pretty record all quit. The game recovered just fine and peaked in 2006, when advanced multitasking techniques and full utilization of the rock-paper-scissors model really began to take off, and then Orcs figured out around 2007 that they don't have to do much more than Grunt/Raider/Spirit Walker/Blademaster/Shadow Hunter. (But even today, you get variations on this, and there's been much more Witch Doctor play as of recent, and you got these changes in the metagame without having a single major balance patch in over five years. You eventually take confidence in what you have and you sit on it.)
Oh thank god, there were some facts in that last quote, with, dare I say it, evidence?! This is a not totally inept analysis of the recent war3 Orc meta, it seems to say that the game became somewhat dull because Orc became more or less figured out and there's only been one major metagame shift? That's what generally happened in DotA, a stable version will undergo metagame shifts over a year or more before it reached a state where things became "figured out" and some sort of shift is made, thus avoiding some of the problems (along with lack of new maps and designs) that so plagued WC3. Maps constantly change the game and introduce new elements while serving as a balancing factor. This is what made brood war live longer than any other game, because of constant change and introduction of new metagame developments.
The fact that the most recent major Wc3 tournament still uses Bable TM EI, is one of the reasons it died. http://gleague.gamefy.cn/view_26781.html League is here if you're interested because you seem to enjoy wc3 and for good reason.
see how much more productive talking to you can be when there's factual evidence and knowledge that could be used instead of the uniformed generalities you tend to use otherwise?
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Individually, Quake is more "complicated than counter-strike" but the fact that counterstrike was designed as a teambased game made it completely different in terms of execution and the skill at the highest level. Sure you can make some sort of silly "omg individual skill" argument, but you'd be completely disregarding the multiplayer aspect of game design.
The "skill cap" for team multiplayer has no bearing on my ability as an individual to derive pleasure from the game's systems and aesthetics. Some games are more fun as single-player games and others are more fun as multiplayer games. The existence of a higher theoretical skill cap for a team-based multiplayer shooter has absolutely no bearing on there's more to versus multiplayer games than skill ceilings.
??? not sure I follow you here. Games are fun, but you used low skill cap as a piece of evidence on your critique of games in the DotA genre and you're now admitting that it doesn't exist? Please elaborate on how being fun is had because that's sure as hell how LoL has a giant playerbase, because it's fun.
I'm somewhat befuddled here. You've stated some points that don't seem pertinent and seem to contradict your previous views.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Quake started out as single-player focused game but gained popularity when that was stripped away and the multiplayer competitive side was developed.
Doom multiplayer was already very popular at the time of its release and the Quake multiplayer was not tacked on as some random side-jib. The company had to create QuakeWorld because almost immediately after the game's release because people were complaining about the netcode, of which there was none. (They settled on the client-server model that the Apogee guys had used earlier in the year.)
People complaining about engine limitation and terrible netcode leading to them creating an enhanced, single element-oriented remake?! Sounds like the exact same thing Dota2 does.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Portal is an acclaimed success and just because you personally didn't enjoy it says absolutely nothing about genre. Once again, "the journlolists liked it" is not a measuring stick. You'll be surprised how many games don't hold up to scrutiny once you open your mind about them.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: For example, with your logic I can say, I personally believe that "you are an uninformed flamebaiting troll", and then write a bunch of random florid sentences, it doesn't make it concretely factual, or does it? No, I'd have to prove it my pointing out logical fallacies, attention-whoring, poorly constructed strawmen, counter-factual arguments, etc. etc. I'm going to take it that you're mad I was critical of a genre that (looking at your post history) you overwhelmingly enjoy.
? I'm mad because I've calmly identified elements where you were a) uninformed, b) flamebaiting, and c) trolling. I was also able to have the insight to notice that it was all often in the same paragraph. It's not mad, it logical conclusions made due to overwhelming evidence, something you seem to have trouble doing and addressing.
Oh yeah, once again failing to address.
Let me recap this for you
You have a working knowledge of wc3, LoL, and many single player RPGs
You hate LoL and its business model.
Go make a well informed article about how the marketing elements and the way the business model forces a certain mode of game design in LoL, compare it to wc3 and RPGs instead of wasting time defending an uninformed, sensationalist one. (hint: this is a good time to pack up instead of embarrassing yourself further)
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MichaelJLowell wrote:Show nested quote +zMuffinMan wrote: If you haven't played DotA competitively or at least at a high level in scrims then you probably shouldn't be making the comments you're making about the game. Just to note, I adressed this when responding above.
I can't be fucked reading through all the junk to find that particular response and it's most likely a bad one because you lack a true understanding of the game and therefore can't criticise it for the skill and strategy involved until you do understand it fully.
MichaelJLowell wroteShow nested quote + zMuffinMan wrote: The claim that developers are transforming games to be popular esports and therefore harming the quality of the games is complete bullshit if you want to apply that to Valve since Dota 2 replicates DotA in every way possible and Dota wasn't developed to be a popular esport. And now Valve has placed direct financial incentive on themselves to create game updates which will maximize profit from the existing player base. They did the same thing with Team Fortress 2, and no, I don't think that having people running around in silly hats makes a video game more compelling or immersive. (I understand that DotA 2's cash shop clothes will all fit within the context of the game, but who knows what they'll come up with elsewise.)
Hello. DotA became a popular esport without Valve's help so I'm pointing out that this particular argument of yours is plain wrong. There is no inherent design behind the game to make it simple and easy and therefore be a popular esport as you are suggesting there is.
Obviously there is work being done to make some serious money out of Dota 2 where fun elements (items and different couriers) are being added by Valve, but these are superficial and irrelevant to the game as a competitive esports title. Aesthetic changes are completely seperate from the balance of the game so none of what you are saying fucking matters in the slightest.
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It goes an exceptionally long way in keeping a disinterested player base from going in different directions. Imagine if all the chaos that happened a couple of months back took place while the KeSPA Brood War were still going strong and those KeSPA tournaments had muscled out StarCraft II in South Korea. I feel pretty confident stating that there are a lot of players (both salaried and elsewise) who now stick with StarCraft II because "the scene is gone", and that the salaried players don't have a goal to shoot for in Brood War. Brood War is still very popular in Korea, the player base is not dead there by any means and IIRC it is still more popular than SC2. The pro playerbase is a very small population there and if SC2 has changed any playerbase drastically it is the Western playerbase which is now unsurprisingly stagnating, but not because of e-Sports. And even then In general, if players want to switch to newer (not even better) games then splintering the playerbase is of course the the natural option, so I see no point of making a fuss about it when you want to see more influx of different games as you want.
And again, this is a developers problem, if SC2 was rightfully seen as the successor of Brood War by the majority of the playerbase then Koreans would have flocked to it, the fact is that SC2 did not live up to its predecessor, similarly with Quake 4 and CSS. On the flip side you can see successful transitions in most Fighting Games, Quake 2 and 3, and now apparently DotA and Dota2.
Then if the game becomes boring, you move on to a new game instead of creating a potato chip comfort zone within the old game and its occasional, artificial balance updates. (And yes, there have been good sequels and bad sequels. While I'm no savant of fighting games, even things as superficially similar as the early Street Fighter II games have major changes and additions which improved the game beyond "new characters" or "balance tweaks". And even the balance tweaks were not done in the dead-ahead pursuit of 5/5 matchups.) You go play and enjoy other excellent video games, of which there are absolutely no shortage of. Whether the best players have completely explored all available strategies in a game is unlikely to have any bearing on your experience when you pick it up for the very first time. I still play some fighting games with other people, what I mean is that I don't play or watch those games for the meta, I play them because it's a different kind of game just like FPS, RPG, Puzzle, etc.
And as for "artificial balance updates", a lot of DotA changes have been significant enough comparable between ST2 and 3rd Strike, and depending on how far back you look, comparable between the first Street Fighter II and MvC3.
On November 21 2012 00:18 corumjhaelen wrote: He's not doing science or journalism either, and I suggest you read him more closely. reads like an Opinion article.
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: Then your problem is that your starting point is far from most peoples. You'd be better off making a thread explaining why DOTA isn't a good game, than trying to discuss e-sports on a foundation no one's going to agree with. Having said that, you wouldn't be much better off, because you'd get similar reactions you got to this thread - people telling you you don't understand DOTA.
The problem is they are probably right. You may have "given it a ridiculous amount of thought", but so have countless TL hardcore BW players, staff and progamers, and have found a lot to like in DOTA. Seems the odds are it's you who's wrong.
To pick on one point:
"valuing game balance over interesting unit design, by fixing “problems” with rash design decisions, you gut the depth of your games. As we’ve seen in StarCraft II and League of Legends, we have now gotten to the point where the development of playstyles is not centralized around improvements in player skill and the process of exploring a game, but around the game balance updates themselves, where the illusion of depth is created every time Riot Games creates a new Champion or recreates the skill set for an old one."
I don't play SC2 (doesn't run on my computer), but playstyles in LoL often change because of a pro-teams unique style (see moscow 5 or CLG.EU), rather than balance patches.
Also, can't depth be reached through different routes? Can't we have both the elegant simplicity of a game like Go, and the insane complexity of a game like Magic the Gathering. Why can't both kinds exist?
To use sport, can't we have tennis and cricket? Or music - art songs and symphonies?
Depth isn't as simple as you make out.
Finally, your writing seems pointlessly abrasive, e.g "Woah, hold back on the butthurt, DotA fans. I don’t think StarCraft II is very good, either."
It'd just be even worse in a thread like that.
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I'll split this into three posts so things don't get messy here. But yeah, after this, I'm basically finished with the thread, because it's becoming really prohibitive for me to waste my time on it. (And before any of you say that I'm "chickening out" or whatever nonsense you want to peddle, it's should be clear that I've invested a lot of effort into defending my opinion.)
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: Then your problem is that your starting point is far from most peoples. You'd be better off making a thread explaining why DOTA isn't a good game, than trying to discuss e-sports on a foundation no one's going to agree with. Having said that, you wouldn't be much better off, because you'd get similar reactions you got to this thread - people telling you you don't understand DOTA. I'll do it at some point in the future. It's been on my "to write" list for a very long time. But obviously, I want it to be thoroughly and utterly exhaustive when I do it, and that takes some time. (I also have some regular readers on my web site who also like the DotA clones and are no doubt sick of the input I give on the topic there as well. I don't want this to turn into a crusade.)
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: The problem is they are probably right. You may have "given it a ridiculous amount of thought", but so have countless TL hardcore BW players, staff and progamers, and have found a lot to like in DOTA. Seems the odds are it's you who's wrong. I'm going to put this in bold so everyone can read it:
Playing a handful of games within a limited spectrum of genres for X number of years does not make you an expert or authority on game design.
I've read plenty of input and discussion from those placed on the pedestal in this community, and most of "the pros" are either clueless on the topic of game theory or aren't very good at expressing themselves beyond the way that mechanics and variables operate within an extremely tight-knit state of game balance. And I don't care if it sounds arrogant coming from someone like me, a guy who has never won a major StarCraft tournament. It's just as arrogant for people to play three or four games for a dozen years and think they have game design figured out. "Your ability to play the game" does not equal "comprehension of the topic". Because I'll tell you right now that all of the things I was told "could not be done in StarCraft II" ("hero units", greater strategic complexity, unit movement automation) have been done extremely well in other games and those lessons could have salvaged the game if all the "StarCraft experts" weren't sitting around saying they wanted to play the exact same game. You're judged by what you know about the topic, whether you design games or you write about them, and that has nothing to do with how fast you can operate the mouse. I'll tell you right now that Chris Taylor, Louis Castle, Bill Roper, and Sandy Petersen have never won a major video game tournament. Hell, most of those dudes have been programming games for X number of years, which means they haven't had time to settle down and play what's new. But you bet my ass that I would value their knowledge on the topic of real-time strategy design before any of yours.
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: Also, can't depth be reached through different routes? Can't we have both the elegant simplicity of a game like Go, and the insane complexity of a game like Magic the Gathering. Why can't both kinds exist? Ideally, the more complex with less erroneous parts, the better. There's two points to be made: One, "elegant simplicity" is often confused with "depth" or "quality of the work" because they see their grandmother pick up Angry Birds and somehow come to the conclusion that "Wow, Angry Birds is easy to learn and hard to master!" (It's not. It's easy to learn and pathetically easy to master.) And two, as I allude to in the article, there has been a general movement in game design towards large numbers of erroneous moving parts because 1) It's easier to monetize those erroneous moving parts and 2) Most players don't know the slightest thing about depth, so it is easier for them to visualize "large number of "choices" as depth. Just as an example, look at shooters like Half-Life, the Serious Sam series, Doom and Doom II, Quake, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and so forth. There is hardly a redundant design mechanic in any of these games, and even the ones that are redundant tend to be exceptionally satisfying to use. Magic: The Gathering-style complexity is all fun and good, but it's also a business model that relies on people buying large amounts of cards, a business model that features a large number of outright worthless cards (i.e. needless complexity) as part of that business model. (I stopped playing in 2000 or so, and I've heard about the absurdly-powerful new-age card design, but I'm sure this still applies.)
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: Finally, your writing seems pointlessly abrasive, e.g "Woah, hold back on the butthurt, DotA fans. I don’t think StarCraft II is very good, either." Do you honestly think anyone who likes Defense of the Ancients and got that far down the page said "Well, I was on his side until he called me a butthurt DotA fan"?
On November 20 2012 23:55 corumjhaelen wrote: I haven't given much thought on the matter, but I'm clearly leaning toward's MichaelJLowell side. Now do note, I'm not casting a blanket statement on all things popular. There have been many excellent, excellent commercially successful games (Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Metroid Prime, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, StarCraft, and Half-Life all come to mind). But generally speaking, players have so much access to entertainment these days (and models to group around that entertainment) that if something gets popular, it's always good to take a second look at it and try to figure out why. A basic example would be Super Meat Boy, a game that has sold over a million copies because it's "super-hardcore", but not only does the audience in question have limited question with actual "super-hardcore" game experiences (top-notch action games such as shoot 'em ups and other arcade luminaries), but it doesn't make sense that such a game would become so popular at a time when the entire game industry is moving away from mechanics that actually provide difficulty. And of course, when you actually look at the game, you realize it's actually an easy game because it is simply stripping out all punishment for death and "removing the aggravation" from platforming. (If the game had three lives and you had to continue at the beginning of a world, absolutely nobody would have played it. And the game would still suck, but that's a topic for another year.)
On November 21 2012 00:16 PrinceXizor wrote: also all the arguments about dota he makes are "well LoL is like this" his only argument against dota is "it's made from war3 engine therefore i must compare it to war3" and then his knowledge of actual professional dota is so minimal he clearly just looks at the complete basics *how many units do you have? how do you get money?*, he's writing like a math student or a sensationalist, not like a scientist or statistician and especially not like a legitimate journalist. No, "failing to have a comprehensive memory backlog of various game variables in the DotA clones" does not mean I cannot provide a good opinion of a game because the things that make most games "good" or "bad" are usually rooted in lower-level design principles that have nothing to do with the damage and cooldown of Meepo's spells. Some various excellent games are made better by their fantastic game balance (Doom, StarCraft, Serious Sam, Quake, various iterations of Guilty Gear) but the very specific interactions between those weapons are not the primary reason that video games are awesome escapist fantasy.
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On November 21 2012 00:53 Kupon3ss wrote: Tedious minitae like facts sure do suck when they get in the way of your sensationalism doesn't it. For instance, you're not going to address the fundamental gap in Logic here but instead of an ad-homiem attack because you cannot avoid the FACT that your convoluted logic cannot get around the fact that: Just because the elements of a game as existent in part in a different game and becomes more developed, the second game cannot be called a stripped down version of the first. When you strip down the elements in a game so they compare unfavorably to real-time strategy games and then end up with a game that compares unfavorably to 1) the expansive inventory and item selection in dungeon crawlers, and 2) the nuanced design of top-notch fighting games, then yes, you can make that statement. (And no, let's not pretend for a second that, after roughly twenty years of completely and utterly failing to make anything resembling a crop of good Western fighting games and beat 'em ups, that Riot and Icefrog magically figured out those lessons in a completely different genre.)
On November 21 2012 00:53 Kupon3ss wrote: I've said nothing about Deus Ex, just that your central argument that DotA or indeed anything in that genre contains a nonsensical leap in logic that happens to be one of the lynchpins of your so called "argument". My comparison is a parallel, not some sort of snide commentary on Deus Ex, to your silly, groundless claims. So you made a metaphor or comparison for a game that you don't actually know anything about? That goes a long way in explaining your position in this thread. If you haven't noticed, pretty much all of the comparisons that I have made to other games in this thread come from the fact that I have actually played those games and understand those games. And in the rare case where I don't know the game particularly well (mostly fighting games and shoot 'em ups), I mingle with an audience that knows a lot about the games and has taught me a lot about them. That probably explains why you responded to my assertion that Ocarina of Time and Portal are "not very good" by saying that "the critics said the game was good so who are you to question them?" You don't actually know anything about them and deferred to the lowest common denominator (the mainstream vidya gaem journalist) to find those answers. (And before you say, "But you base your impressions of fighting games off of what other people say, too!", the people I discuss the topic with know the topic, and when I draw their precedent into this conversation, I'm not only confident in their opinion, I'm confident that I can defend their opinion as though you're having that discussion with them.)
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Is this not what you did, given what appears to be your imitate knowledge about the LoL game structure, metagame, and business model. You appear to be the very subjects the Riot appealed to, congratulations, you bought into a game, it sucked, and now you somehow think the entire genre sucks. Grow up. Yes, because "I don't have utterly exhaustive knowledge of League of Legends' variables" means "I'm making a leap to conclusions." You're making the same mistake as everyone else. Hell, I don't think anyone has otherwise suggested that League of Legends is a superior game to Defense of the Ancients, so unless your argument is "Yeah, it sucks, but I don't want you saying that", then I don't know where you're coming from.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: The lacking of that element is why, as I said, those games cannot be considered competitive and thus you cannot compare their ability to "be solved" to those of games involving human factors and human opponents. Any game with a goal can be competitive, and it is inherently impossible not to have goals when you are playing a video game, however meaningless those goals may be. Minecraft can be competitive. Angry Birds can be competitive. Tower Defense games can be competitive. You're making the argument that a versus multiplayer game like Defense of the Ancients inherently has more depth because the presence of adaptable human intelligence will allow that game to hold up to scrutiny for a longer period of time and I'm making the point that "depth and complexity are not the only thing that makes a video game fun to play", that "the presence of a 'metagame' does not make the game fun to play". I'll discuss that a little more in a couple.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: You can't just keep on saying "striped away" while providing no factual arguments to back that up. Both games come from the warcraft 3 engine, just as the two games I mentioned come through the source engine, that is a factual parallel. What your claims of stripping away are personal opinion that you yourself cannot be bothered to defend. The Tower Defense model removes unit strategy and tactics and focuses on the placement of defensive structures. The DotA genre automates unit production, strategy, and tactics and focuses on the use of powerful hero units. That constitutes "stripped away". "Stripped away" is the appropriate phrase regardless of what negative connotation you are subconsciously attaching to it.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: You see how you're able to analyze those games, and LoL, because you know something about them? You see how you've never said anything factual about DotA of that nature? This is why I called you an uninformed flamebaiting troll, because the rest of your quote explains why you're a flamebaiting troll. How do you think I got to the conclusion that Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII are lousy games? By comparing them to titles in other relevant games and genres. When compared to Ninja Gaiden, or Bayonetta, or even a game like God of War, the combat in 3D Zelda games is not good. (There's a reason that Darksiders was able to find a small but hugely devout audience by taking the Zelda dungeon model and combining it with God of War's combat model.) When compared to the strategic complexity of SRPGs and the choice presented by WRPGs, Final Fantasy VII (and by extension, the entire Japanese Role-Playing Genre) is largely crap. "Good" and "bad" are statements and comparisons that are completely rooted in that comparison process. (And this may surprise you: Through all of my combined playthroughs and time spent with Ocarina of Time, I've probably played the game about once. I have never played it all the way through from start to finish. I just know that the multitude of problems within the game are completely indefensible and you don't need an exhaustive knowledge of minutiae like equipment and hidden locations in order to figure that out.) So yeah. The reasons I dislike DotA clones have absolutely nothing to do with higher-level design functions and everything to do with lower-level design functions that do not compare favorably to other genres. I am not going to end up enjoying DotA if I play a thousand games and assume mastery of most heroes because the individual skill sets of those heroes have very little to do with the reasons that I am repulsed by the Defense of the Ancients game model, and those reasons come from relevant comparisons to other games.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: That's what generally happened in DotA, a stable version will undergo metagame shifts over a year or more before it reached a state where things became "figured out" and some sort of shift is made, thus avoiding some of the problems (along with lack of new maps and designs) that so plagued WC3. Maps constantly change the game and introduce new elements while serving as a balancing factor. This is what made brood war live longer than any other game, because of constant change and introduction of new metagame developments. Here's the difference: Change through a higher-level function like "map design" is good because the variables that have changed are utterly and obviously overt (map design being inherently visual) and don't infringe upon the lower-level design of units, buildings, and other moving parts. On the other hand, rote memorization of new numbers (as applied through game updates) is boring. New maps provide immediate visual feedback and more interesting functional applications, where the player has to figure out how the utility of his units (rather than their damage output) apply to the design of this new environment. TAnd yeah, I'm fairly familiar with the problem that the Warcraft III Anonymous Matchmaking System posed for the rotation of maps, since Blizzard never wanted to regularly update the map pool. I don't consider the StarCraft system of player-hosted maps to be superior, but a matchmaking system requires a bare minimum level of commitment on the end of the developer. Map redesign is good. Tweaks to invisible game variables that repeatedly compromise the illusion that comes with visual feedback (where a hero deals 100 damage one day and 120 damage the next) are bad.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: ??? not sure I follow you here. Games are fun, but you used low skill cap as a piece of evidence on your critique of games in the DotA genre and you're now admitting that it doesn't exist? Please elaborate on how being fun is had because that's sure as hell how LoL has a giant playerbase, because it's fun. "Fun" is completely subjective, but it's primarily rooted in immersion, i.e. "how well the game sucks you into the illusion". Depth and complexity are two routes to immersion, but they're not the only ones, since those game rules have to be justified with interesting visuals, mechanics, and narrative in order to sustain that illusion. (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, a game that has been maligned for its white-bread third-person shooting, is one of my favorite video games from this generation.) So, for example, there are ways that games with shallow learning curves can be more interesting and fun than games with deeper learning curves, but those lessons don't apply to this particular instance because there is hardly anything compelling or immersive about the art direction in most DotA games. (When compared to relevant games and genres, of course.)
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: People complaining about engine limitation and terrible netcode leading to them creating an enhanced, single element-oriented remake?! Sounds like the exact same thing Dota2 does. Do you know what QuakeWorld is? QuakeWorld is not an "enhanced remake". QuakeWorld was a complete oversight by the id Software game developers (who were playing the game through the internet on their state-of-the-line internet services) to provide decent netcode for Quake. It is not a "remake", it was a tool that was intended for use with valid copies of Quake.
On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Go make a well informed article about how the marketing elements and the way the business model forces a certain mode of game design in LoL, compare it to wc3 and RPGs instead of wasting time defending an uninformed, sensationalist one. (hint: this is a good time to pack up instead of embarrassing yourself further) Since this is the last post I'm making in this thread, I'll go ahead and be thorough about this. No, you're not going to like the things that I say, but you'd be wise to value them. And while it would normally be a little bit creepy to see what input you have on the topic outside of this web site, your post history (which is pretty much nothing but DotA 2) made me curious. So I looked at your YouTube profile, which is pretty much nothing but DotA 2. Then I looked at your Steam account, which features only one thing: About four-hundred hours of play history with DotA 2. That is the only game on the account. You only play one video game, and like most of the other people on the internet that only play one video game, I value your opinion as such.
Would I be interested in listening to what you have to say about the inner workings of DotA 2, and which variables within the game are "good" and "bad"? Hearing about which heroes are "good" and "bad"? Which tactics are "good" and "bad"? Whether Player X is "good" or "bad"? Sure, why not? And I've never denied anybody on this message board the right to do that with the games that this message board specializes in. I would love to hear what any professionally-paid player or commentator has to say about StarCraft II. But when it comes time to discuss the matter of whether DotA 2 is "good" or "bad" (as determined with relevant comparisons to other games), you offer absolutely nothing to me because you only play one video game, and I sure-as-hell don't want to hear a defense of the only game you play because "I'm not good enough to make that criticism", i.e. I have not pooled my video game efforts into becoming a respected savant of a genre that I think is boring. That would be more irrational than an outsider opinion that the DotA clones aren't very good.
I'm not going to make the argument that crunching through thousands of games immediately makes you an expert on the topic, just as it wouldn't for watching movies or reading books. There are people on my own, small message board who have played a lot more video games than I have, and a lot of them play and understand certain genres better than I do. The question would obviously be whether or not they can provide better criticism of the topic than I could, and the mental mechanisms that provide that criticism are fairly detached from the process of playing the games. But there comes a time where a lack of experience with the greater medium becomes an absolute detriment to that pursuit of criticism. The idea that an expert at StarCraft or an expert at DotA or an expert at Halo is an expert on the topic of video game criticism is just horseshit.
You seem to be perfectly okay with all the criticisms that I have applied and leveraged to other games. That's the exact same philosophy and thought process that led to my opinion of the DotA clones. You can either accept that, you can disagree with my opinion, but you can't come to the conclusion that "Your opinion on every game except the one I like is good, and your opinion on that game FUKKIN SUKS MAN." And even if you disagree with my opinions, you may be interested in knowing that there are hundreds and thousands of other excellent games out there waiting to be played. That would be a better idea than than elevating games to the status of "spectator sport" and using that status as a blanket dismissal for the opinions of outsiders who otherwise have an excellent comprehension of video games. That's my input, thank you for the discussion.
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On November 21 2012 01:19 zMuffinMan wrote: Obviously there is work being done to make some serious money out of Dota 2 where fun elements (items and different couriers) are being added by Valve, but these are superficial and irrelevant to the game as a competitive esports title. Aesthetic changes are completely seperate from the balance of the game so none of what you are saying fucking matters in the slightest. Pouring money into tournaments and making them a part of the "DotA 2" experience will inevitably end up having an impact on the player base and their expectations for what in the game will get balanced. It is impossible not to think of a situation where this will not have a negative impact.
And just to note, aesthetics and mechanics are inseparable from each other in game design. Form fits function.
On November 21 2012 07:45 rabidch wrote: Brood War is still very popular in Korea, the player base is not dead there by any means and IIRC it is still more popular than SC2. The pro playerbase is a very small population there and if SC2 has changed any playerbase drastically it is the Western playerbase which is now unsurprisingly stagnating, but not because of e-Sports. And even then In general, if players want to switch to newer (not even better) games then splintering the playerbase is of course the the natural option, so I see no point of making a fuss about it when you want to see more influx of different games as you want. At least as far as what I've seen on Gametrics, Brood War has been trailing off as League of Legends runs away with the rankings. (Brood War was somewhere around 5.5% of playtime shortly after the release of StarCraft II and is now about half of that. I don't know how that compares any numbers prior to 2010.) There is little doubt in my mind that the presence of a healthy, stable Brood War scene, even if it's one that has an aging player base and a lack of new talent, would have helped to maintain some of that popularity. And in spite of everything that Blizzard did to muscle KeSPA out of the way, the game is probably still going to "fail", i.e. "trickle off onto obscurity as the Koreans affix themselves to the new flavor of the month". But most video games suffer that fate, so it's not like it would be surprising.
On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: It'd just be even worse in a thread like that. I had absolutely no intention of making this a DotA thread and that's what it turned into. Obviously, there's only so much writing I am willing to do on that topic and I'll step aside. So enjoy.
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On November 21 2012 11:07 MichaelJLowell wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2012 16:07 Kupon3ss wrote: Go make a well informed article about how the marketing elements and the way the business model forces a certain mode of game design in LoL, compare it to wc3 and RPGs instead of wasting time defending an uninformed, sensationalist one. (hint: this is a good time to pack up instead of embarrassing yourself further) Since this is the last post I'm making in this thread, I'll go ahead and be thorough about this. No, you're not going to like the things that I say, but you'd be wise to value them. And while it would normally be a little bit creepy to see what input you have on the topic outside of this web site, your post history (which is pretty much nothing but DotA 2) made me curious. So I looked at your YouTube profile, which is pretty much nothing but DotA 2. Then I looked at your Steam account, which features only one thing: About four-hundred hours of play history with DotA 2. That is the only game on the account. You only play one video game, and like most of the other people on the internet that only play one video game, I value your opinion as such. Would I be interested in listening to what you have to say about the inner workings of DotA 2, and which variables within the game are "good" and "bad"? Hearing about which heroes are "good" and "bad"? Which tactics are "good" and "bad"? Whether Player X is "good" or "bad"? Sure, why not? And I've never denied anybody on this message board the right to do that with the games that this message board specializes in. I would love to hear what any professionally-paid player or commentator has to say about StarCraft II. But when it comes time to discuss the matter of whether DotA 2 is "good" or "bad" (as determined with relevant comparisons to other games), you offer absolutely nothing to me because you only play one video game, and I sure-as-hell don't want to hear a defense of the only game you play because "I'm not good enough to make that criticism", i.e. I have not pooled my video game efforts into becoming a respected savant of a genre that I think is boring. That would be more irrational than an outsider opinion that the DotA clones aren't very good. I'm not going to make the argument that crunching through thousands of games immediately makes you an expert on the topic, just as it wouldn't for watching movies or reading books. There are people on my own, small message board who have played a lot more video games than I have, and a lot of them play and understand certain genres better than I do. The question would obviously be whether or not they can provide better criticism of the topic than I could, and the mental mechanisms that provide that criticism are fairly detached from the process of playing the games. But there comes a time where a lack of experience with the greater medium becomes an absolute detriment to that pursuit of criticism. The idea that an expert at StarCraft or an expert at DotA or an expert at Halo is an expert on the topic of video game criticism is just horseshit. You seem to be perfectly okay with all the criticisms that I have applied and leveraged to other games. That's the exact same philosophy and thought process that led to my opinion of the DotA clones. You can either accept that, you can disagree with my opinion, but you can't come to the conclusion that "Your opinion on every game except the one I like is good, and your opinion on that game FUKKIN SUKS MAN." And even if you disagree with my opinions, you may be interested in knowing that there are hundreds and thousands of other excellent games out there waiting to be played. That would be a better idea than than elevating games to the status of "spectator sport" and using that status as a blanket dismissal for the opinions of outsiders who otherwise have an excellent comprehension of video games. That's my input, thank you for the discussion.
I LOL'd
PS: I looked up "MichaelJLowell" and no steam account exists, by his own logic he must not play games PSS: No youtube either, must not watch any videos
how dare he comment on video games if he doesn't watch/play any of them, too bad he'll never post here on this topic to assuage the questions of my heart
On November 21 2012 11:07 MichaelJLowell wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2012 01:19 zMuffinMan wrote: Obviously there is work being done to make some serious money out of Dota 2 where fun elements (items and different couriers) are being added by Valve, but these are superficial and irrelevant to the game as a competitive esports title. Aesthetic changes are completely seperate from the balance of the game so none of what you are saying fucking matters in the slightest. Pouring money into tournaments and making them a part of the "DotA 2" experience will inevitably end up having an impact on the player base and their expectations for what in the game will get balanced. It is impossible not to think of a situation where this will not have a negative impact. And just to note, aesthetics and mechanics are inseparable from each other in game design. Form fits function. Show nested quote +On November 21 2012 07:45 rabidch wrote: Brood War is still very popular in Korea, the player base is not dead there by any means and IIRC it is still more popular than SC2. The pro playerbase is a very small population there and if SC2 has changed any playerbase drastically it is the Western playerbase which is now unsurprisingly stagnating, but not because of e-Sports. And even then In general, if players want to switch to newer (not even better) games then splintering the playerbase is of course the the natural option, so I see no point of making a fuss about it when you want to see more influx of different games as you want. At least as far as what I've seen on Gametrics, Brood War has been trailing off as League of Legends runs away with the rankings. (Brood War was somewhere around 5.5% of playtime shortly after the release of StarCraft II and is now about half of that. I don't know how that compares any numbers prior to 2010.) There is little doubt in my mind that the presence of a healthy, stable Brood War scene, even if it's one that has an aging player base and a lack of new talent, would have helped to maintain some of that popularity. And in spite of everything that Blizzard did to muscle KeSPA out of the way, the game is probably still going to "fail", i.e. "trickle off onto obscurity as the Koreans affix themselves to the new flavor of the month". But most video games suffer that fate, so it's not like it would be surprising. Show nested quote +On November 20 2012 23:29 Tal wrote: It'd just be even worse in a thread like that. I had absolutely no intention of making this a DotA thread and that's what it turned into. Obviously, there's only so much writing I am willing to do on that topic and I'll step aside. So enjoy.
I LOL'D some more
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This guy is clueless when it comes to DotA/Dota 2. Don't bother with him anymore.
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What can I tell you? You may eventually expand your taste in video games beyond a handful that are being actively worshipped as "sports", and quite honestly, if we're going to finish this conversation on "Yeah, I don't disagree that you know the topic, except for your opinion on the one video game that I pour most of my time into"...somehow, I'm not going to feel like I'm making a mistake by holding my ground.
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On November 21 2012 16:13 MichaelJLowell wrote: What can I tell you? You may eventually expand your taste in video games beyond a handful that are being actively worshipped as "sports", and quite honestly, if we're going to finish this conversation on "Yeah, I don't disagree that you know the topic, except for your opinion on the one video game that I pour most of my time into"...somehow, I'm not going to feel like I'm making a mistake by holding my ground.
You're getting sad now, at least have the convinction to stick to a statement like "this is the last post I will make here".
Your baseless arguments have fallen apart. You've shown to have no idea what you're talking about regarding DotA. You've been shown to have consistent logical inconsistencies in your bullshit laced statements, and the best you can come up with is. "Damn you don't play anything besides DotA". as some sort of poorly constructed ad hominem attack.
Guess what, people play more than 1 game. I've personally played through every major title we've mentioned game made in the last pages of discussion (cept spore, that game was too shit to look at for more than 30 minutes). I don't know about what genres you've played and such, but just the very fact that you had to backpedal when called out on the fact that FFVII and Oot, the games you yourself tried to cite as personal favorites and admitted to have grown up with, are mediocre, shows that we grew up different ages of video games. I'm not going to make any sweeping bullshit generalizations about how many game you've played the way you wantonly do as a self-defense mechanicism, but I can tell you least in the field of RPGs and JRPGs, the level of experience that we've had don't even come close. You haven't even shown a proper understanding of the popular titles available in English, let alone scratch the treasure trove of what's available in their native languages.
I've been more than courteous when talking to you about games that you have the bare minimum of knowledge to produce working factual statements about, why can't you try to do the same for a game that you've admitted that you know shit about and that we're apparently some sort of devote all-knowing worshipers of.
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I don't know why you bother to argue with these guys Michael, they are just defending their little game and Esports™. Btw that's coming from someone who has spend the last year playing HoN lol but i don't feel offended when someone tells me that the genre itself isn't that great. I mean i like the game a lot but i have played enough different games to see the bigger picture.
And now they are just arguing semantics and bragging about having played more Jrpgs than you lol.
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On November 21 2012 17:09 Boblion wrote: I don't know why you bother to argue with these guys Michael, they are just defending their little game and Esports™. Btw that's coming from someone who has spend the last year playing HoN lol but i don't feel offended when someone tells me that the genre itself isn't that great. I mean i like the game a lot but i have played enough different games to see the bigger picture.
And now they are just arguing semantics and bragging about having playing more Jrpgs than you lol.
I feel like arguing about semantics and bringing up experience in other genres is the only thing left when he dodges every factual argument and writes 1000 word ad-hominem attacks based on how many games he's supposed to have played.
I don't actually think the genre is that great, there are tons of issues with DotA and its transitions to Dota2 despite being the origin and the best game of that genre. But any logical argument regarding those issues seem impossible with a guy who's literally admitted that he knows nothing about DotA and that he hates on LoL, the only game in the genre he's had any experience in.
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He said he played a bit of Dota till 2008 if i'm not mistaken ? It's hilarious how you guys are trying to disregard his opinion because he doesn't know the line up of the most successful Dota2 teams or the current "metagame" (dumbest word ever lol).
I don't really know what you are arguing tbh. I mean you admit yourself that Dota has flaws and isn't the greatest game ever made but you still try to argue again and again wtf ?
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no, we're disregarding his opinion because his entire piece is revolves around using LoL as a poorly constructed strawman to attack a genre, as well as the fact that he has yet to make a single point about DotA aside from calling it a "stripped down version of warcraft3" that he is unable to defend when challenged.
It has flaws, but this guy has no clue what they are, nor any idea of any of the inherent problems inside the genre aside from LoL's inherent business model and design limitations. I simply called him out on the fact that he's an uninformed flamebaiting troll every time he writes anything about DotA.
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I think his arguments made a lot of sense actually and that's pretty much my opinion for a long while tbh.
Btw mind to explain the flaws of Dota with your uber knowledge of the intricacies of the "metagame" ?
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DotA's main problems at the moment are manifold, and they have nothing to do with the metagame, but rather the roots of the game's model of promotion, community, and related business model.
Firstly, you have to realize that DotA has a game is an entire game structure built upon every element, it cannot be compartmentalized and broken down with replaceable elements the way LoL is without it turning into a completely different game. This, along with the wishes of the established community and of Icefrog, the lead developer, causes a no-compromise stance on the singular issue of heroes availability: the game will not be subdivided into free-and-paid-to-win tiers.
This causes problems on both the business end and on the entry end of the game. On the business end you cannot argue that purely selling cosmetics will have nearly the same level of profitability (even if valve is the best company in the world at selling e-hats) as a competitive game in which paying money will give players tangible gameplay advantages over others in a situation with equal user-base. Obviously the nice thing about valve is that their business plan does not necessarily rely upon Dota2 itself making any money, since any attraction of players to steam, with its social and purchasing system as a platform will, in the long term, far offset any amount of money lost on Dota2, as well as give Valve huge opportunities moving into regions like CIS, China, and South America, where Steam has thus far not met with particularly high amounts of success. Then the question becomes, is DotA a game to be developed in and for its own sake or as a promotional title for steam?
While that works out as an ecosystem, you'll note that thus the point of Dota2 is to draw players, something Dota by its very nature is pretty terrible at. Due to the lack of compartmentalization of heroes and the lack of "buffer zones" with kids gloves, as well as the inherent team-based nature of a game in which a single playing doing poorly will often have far more impact than a player doing well, DotA suffers from being one of the most rancid and newb-unfriendly communities of all time. While the attraction of complexity and of its competitive, team-based nature are very strong points and a large reason that it caught on, it nevertheless turns away many players. While this was not necessarily a problem in the past, the emergence of LoL on the scene, with it's far more business-oriented and scruple-less mode of operations, as well as doing a far better job at catering to a casual audience, causes a huge problem for DotA.
Basically the necessity of balancing its community-borne, hardcore roots, and the business and audience realities of today.
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I ask you what you think about the flaws of the game and you make a mini essay about profitability and how the game isn't noob friendly. Wtf who cares ? You gonna make movie reviews according to box office numbers too ?
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Your time is better spent on other things, Kupon3ss. MichaelJLowell clearly doesn't know enough about DotA to make the comments he does about it and should stick to the things he does know about. Also, playing a few hundred pubs does not mean you know this game for anyone who wants to throw their support behind this guy.
And by the way, he isn't a troll, just an outspoken individual talking about certain things he really has no idea about. I'm not going to argue against anything he has said outside of Dota 2 (because I know better than that), but I can confirm that he is wrong about everything he has said regarding Dota 2.
MichaelJLowell, the aesthetic changes in Dota 2 as far as items and couriers go do not affect the gameplay. Nothing Valve has done has taken away from the quality of the competitiveness of the game that was DotA.
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On November 21 2012 18:18 Boblion wrote: I ask you what you think about the flaws of the game and you make a mini essay about profitability and how the game isn't noob friendly. Wtf who cares ? You gonna make movie reviews according to box office numbers too ? that's because the flaws of dota aren't in terms of the game itself, but in the experience you have playing the game.
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I played World in Conflict ( which is highly comparable to Dotalikes) and C&C: Renegade at the highest levels, both games that feature more complexity in terms of teamplay while also retaining more depth at the individual level and I can therefore say with confidence that dotaclones suck noodles. Cheers.
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On November 21 2012 20:51 PrinceXizor wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2012 18:18 Boblion wrote: I ask you what you think about the flaws of the game and you make a mini essay about profitability and how the game isn't noob friendly. Wtf who cares ? You gonna make movie reviews according to box office numbers too ? that's because the flaws of dota aren't in terms of the game itself, but in the experience you have playing the game.
So DotA's gameplay is flawless?
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On November 21 2012 23:44 Surth wrote: I played World in Conflict ( which is highly comparable to Dotalikes) and C&C: Renegade at the highest levels, both games that feature more complexity in terms of teamplay while also retaining more depth at the individual level and I can therefore say with confidence that dotaclones suck noodles. Cheers. Most readable post I've seen in this Blog so far.
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On November 21 2012 23:44 Surth wrote: I played World in Conflict ( which is highly comparable to Dotalikes) and C&C: Renegade at the highest levels, both games that feature more complexity in terms of teamplay while also retaining more depth at the individual level and I can therefore say with confidence that dotaclones suck noodles. Cheers. I ... I think I love you, man.
Also, C&C Renegade was a fucking masterpiece.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina114 Posts
I have to agree with Mr. Lowell on this one - DotA genre is not 'e-sports' worthy, 'e-sports' is a bullshit marketing phrase, and the games from DotA genre are incredibly simplified, even though to the untrained eye it doesn't seem like it because of their similarity to the RTS games.
Kupon3ss, you have made a fool out of yourself in just about every possible way in this thread, even stooping so low as to say that he is an "uninformed flamebaiting troll who is attention-whoring". At that point, you really lost all credibility and everything you said after that was insignificant.
Also, the French Archon steamrolled everyone in this thread.
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United States47024 Posts
There's been a lot of tangential argument on this thread that seems to have gone way off course from what Mr. Lowell here seems to posit as his primary argument. In an effort to try and curtail this, I'm going to try and address points post-by-post, and hopefully have a more granular back-and-forth rather than trying to argue 10+ disparate points of his article all at once.
On November 19 2012 19:10 MichaelJLowell wrote: Basically, I now think that the e-Sports marketing model has become detrimental to the actual quality of the games and has become completely antithetical to its original purpose, which was to provide lasting enjoyment of various excellent games as they held to scrutiny over the course of years. Professional video game tournaments are evolving into a form of stealth marketing, which I don't think would be an awful thing if these tournaments and the results of these tournaments turned their player bases into raving lunatics, which subsequently prevents their designers from exhibiting any degree of patience in tweaking their games. At this point, unless you're part of a small percentage of players that can actually make some good money doing this, I completely fail to see the purpose of playing these "e-Sports" (DotA 2, StarCraft II, League of Legends) when there are so many better similar titles out there. I don't expect everyone to agree with that, but that's what discussion is for. From what I gather, your argument is that "E-sports" as a concept has been more or less used by developers as a means to create undue hype and media attention to a game, giving it undue popularity and creating an artificial longevity out of a playerbase that has no real interest in the gameplay (which is likely to be shallower than that of games that can stand on their own two feet) but rather in the mass media hype surrounding the "professional" game. If this is an inaccurate assessment of your point, please correct me before we continue with further discourse.
What you fail to reconcile is that DotA was more or less a "successful game" long before E-sports entered the picture. Icefrog was posting figures of a playerbase 10 million players strong outside of China and a similar figure within China before TI2, or "official" DotA tournaments ever existed. DotA was doing this before Valve entered the picture, before SC2 was released, before Riot ever had any E-sports aspirations. It was essentially an indie game--a one man show (though that "one man" was different at different points in time). You simply cannot expect that "E-sports" is being used to prop up DotA 2 as a game and that it would not stand on its own merits, because DotA has already PROVEN that it stands on its own without such things.
(I am aware that I have not distinguished between a "popular game" and a "good game" in adequate manner here and I have a feeling you're going to present an argument related to the distinction between the two--as I have used such arguments in the past. Unfortunately, I'm not currently at a time or place where I can adequately address this right now and it will probably have to wait for your, or someone else's response)
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I am not for or against anyone The author merely expressed his OWN opinions on this matter of e-sports. He even said himself that his article is biased. No need to call shit on him or anything. Just stick to your own opinions and views and don't let other people's affect that.
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On December 07 2012 09:21 GG_DotA2 wrote: I am not for or against anyone The author merely expressed his OWN opinions on this matter of e-sports. He even said himself that his article is biased. No need to call shit on him or anything. Just stick to your own opinions and views and don't let other people's affect that. Do you know what public discourse is?
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Northern Ireland22201 Posts
On December 07 2012 09:21 GG_DotA2 wrote: I am not for or against anyone The author merely expressed his OWN opinions on this matter of e-sports. He even said himself that his article is biased. No need to call shit on him or anything. Just stick to your own opinions and views and don't let other people's affect that. Saying something is your opinion doesn't make you immune to criticism, that's the shitty cowardly way out.
User was warned for this post
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