Dota 2

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I usually just troll b*tchy people, I have had matches on LoL where people are trying to b*tch me out and calling me a noob and all that stupid stuff....usually I just stop trying in the match and troll them, though more with actions in game than words. If its just one person on the team I don't do that since everyone else probably wants to have a good match...but when there's a crap load of toxic people then I do because by then I don't feel like giving it my all...but also I don't want to be penalized for leaving a game early.

HotS is likely to go free 2 play upon release; their newsfeed for the game constantly says "yep, we're gearing up for release now!! !!" which I can sorta see with what they're doing, since they're up to like 7 maps and a very nicely filled in roster with room for additions later.

And yes. There is a "rivalry". Sort of. It's MOSTLY in the Dota VS LoL camp. The truth of it: Most of the Dota fanbase WONT TRY ANY OTHER GAME. Why? Because Dota started it all, and all of the other games are just so easy and kiddy before the Great and Mighty Dota. They dont take any skill! You dont have to last hit as much (push button at right time... THERES a concept that's new to gaming...) or deny (Already made a joke on that one; I cant make it any funnier than it already is at this point) or do bizarro things like pulling (not going to even try to explain that one; let's just call it "HOLY UNINTUITIVE, BATMAN!! !" and go with that). And that fanbase will go around to videos of other games and such, and sit around saying things like "Oh look at all of the babies playing this silly game, they should play a real MAN'S game, you know, DOTA". It's worth noting that the people saying this are often alarmingly terrible at the game they are trying to show off (meaning, it's too hard for them, yet they're bragging about that fact, and.... UGH DOES NOT COMPUTE). What really gets me about this is that this exists and happens during a time when so many games are WAY TOO EASY, and people whine and complain about difficulty when it DOES appear, yet here you have this, and.... yeah, I just dont even.

And then there's LoL's equally stupid "rivalry" with the world, but theirs is simpler to explain: Imagine, say, 100 unusually stupid monkeys/apes/whatever. Imagine them really, REALLY jacked up on caffiene and given some sort of other chemical that just makes them, like, hate the universe. They hate their friends, they hate the floor, they hate whatever they're holding, and that air in front of them is SUCH a snot and needs a beatdown. So they all shriek incoherantly for about 30 hours and just randomly throw anything at everything, getting louder all the time. They also think this is funny, but funny things are stupid and this makes them angrier yet. Try to reason with them and you'll just get a flying table to the face in return. Which probably has a troll face drawn on it. And that sums up the LoL camp. I say this as someone that actually likes the game decently enough.

When you get players of either going to other games, is when the stupid begins. I often find that people that START in one of the others just... doesnt have that pointless hate. It was never drilled into them. Or, you get some that didnt so much come from one of the other games as they RAN AWAY from them. Like "OMG I used to play Dota and LoL BUT EVERYONE BREATHED PURE EVIL, so I'm going to try this game now instead, lets all be friiiiiiends.....". But if you get one that just waddled over from one of the other two, and is one of the zillionty players that is part of the problem, well... yeah. The dumb begins. But it still ends up being pretty mild, and... yeah, it's no worse than your typical online shooter or... whatever. The fighting game community is alot worse than the non-Dota/LoL moba groups.

Also you're right about that Blizzard thing: I dont know why they do that. "The real fun begins at level 60!! !!11" I once heard WoW described with. I'm sorry, but I prefer the fun start when I fire up the game the first time....

When I say "expects you to use your brain" I mean games where you have to think about your decisions, where you're thinking both about how you're going to do what you do and what you're doing in the first place. Perhaps, I've just played too much of the damn game, but League bores the hell out of me because I don't feel like I'm forced to actually make decisions and learn anything because the champions are so similar to each other and things like mana costs and cooldowns are trivialities instead of resources that require intense management. Dota 2's beauty is that every one of your actions is important in deciding the game. The "skill" that Dota 2 requires besides the "boring stuff" like strategy and tactics and time management is timing your skill usage and Starcraft-esque mechanical skill. It really doesn't go out of it's way to try to make every single one make you feel good about yourself and make you feel "skillful" regardless of your actual skill level. I think that all that skillshots add to League of Legends is a cheap mechanic for making twitch gamers like yourself happy, but very little meaningful interactivity to someone like myself that has realized how most of them are practically interchangeable with each other and that "moar skillshots" is exacerbating the game's underlying problems. Champion variety is also pretty poor, in my opinion. Every other League champion feels like a random amalgamation of 3 of the 4 following types of skills: A disabling spell, a gap closer, a skill shot, and a damage nuke. I suppose, ultimately, I have a personal beef with League of Legends and the variety of Dota 2 is incredibly appealing to someone like myself that gets bored playing 95% reflex-based games like FPS.

Hmm, to elaborate, I dont disagree about League.

The problem with League as I (and many others) see it: Lanes and positions are MUCH TOO STATIC. I honestly ONLY see this problem in this one game; the other mobas? They dont have this issue, PARTICULARLY HotS, where the devs go out of their way to give you about 10 bazillion reasons to be making use of the entire map, because objectives and important things are everywhere, and deciding on just what to do and how to do it isnt easy (unless you're playing against AI, naturally...) But in League? There's not much reason to roam. Gank, maybe, but that's the only reason for moving between lanes until the "teamfight" phase happens. I like the game... but only to a point. At least, since I found all of the others. Much like with Dota, I just dont really play League very often. There's too many better options. Oh I'll play it sometimes mind you, it's still an okay game, but yeah, not as much as the others.

As for the skillshots, see, that's the thing: If Dota requires so much skill, why not have all of the current "strategy" elements AND the skillshots? The point of skillshots is to make it so you can MISS. So that you have to use the skill properly, at the right time, and take your opponents movements, moveset, and tactics into mind JUST to hit with it. Many skillshots in these games are very... odd. Hitting with them is difficult, and it takes real skill to do so while AT THE SAME TIME juggling all of the other stuff that's going on. Note, that I actually DONT mean League as an example here; I mean the others. League is... ah... well, too many skills are the same. You have your straight shots, and.... your straight shots. You know what I mean. It makes me think of something like Street Fighter VS Guilty Gear. Street Fighter is very "technical"... but it's also very slow, and the movesets arent even remotely creative when compared to other games. Each move has a very specific use, and are not hard to make contact with, and combos involving them are, even at high levels, simple. Wheras Guilty Gear has movesets that get downright absurd, with very few specials that are "traditional" style ones (most of these are specific to Ky and Sol only), while the rest are very... strange. Just USING the special requires skill in and of itself, and combos involving them get a little crazy. The technical aspect is there, definitely, but it ALSO has the movesets themselves requiring alot of skill to use. In a game that is quite fast and gives each player extreme mobility. Wheras Street Fighter, I get bored worrying about the technical stuff, but actually performing the moves, making contact, and doing combos couldnt be simpler to me, compared to what I"m used to. League is like SF in the dull design of the movesets, but this doesnt really carry over much to the other games (which arent afraid to get weird.

Dota feels like SF to me in specific regards to the technical aspect, but it is of course not a fighting game. The combat ends up honestly feeling like a turn-based game... or even moreso, an MMO... to me in many ways; click the spell, click your target, it *wont* miss, and bam, you've hit them. Stats and buffs/debuffs then apply (as in any of these games) to then produce the result. That, to me, is boring, and doesnt fit the idea of this game that is supposedly oh-so-difficult. Simply timing usage and positioning and stuff is not enough for me, and I dont deal with "slow" things very well. Now, granted, I have a *very* warped idea of difficulty, so take that in consideration with my comments; I'm aware that this stuff is difficult for most players. But that ends up being my own opinion regardless, as I have to base it on what I get out of it, not what others get out of it.

The strategy stuff, also, isnt what I meant of as "boring". Last-hitting is boring (and mindless). "Pulling" is boring. "Warding" is *really* boring, but as it was typically done quickly and there's at least positioning to think about, I was always able to tolerate that one. Those are not strategic elements. What I think of as strategy has nothing to do with those little techy elements. When do you attack a tower? When do you go and gank, and how exactly do you make your approach, and do you ask a teammate to come with you? When do you make your run to the shop, and what do you do when a teammate is busy doing that themselves, thus not being around for a short time? What items do you buy, and why? When do you go to try to take out the "boss" monster that exists in basically every single moba? And how do you prepare for the high possibility of the enemy team's arrival during this process? And of course there are plenty of other examples with varying degrees of complexity. These sorts of decisions are quite stale in League, as I'd said before, but that's just not the case in the others. Smite in particular gets complicated and weird with this stuff at higher levels (almost to a fault). That sort of thing is what I meant, and Dota is just not the only one that can claim to have alot of it.

And when the strategy elements of that sort are combined with the complicated, loopy combat, that's pretty much what I'm after. Currently, neither Dota or League really provide this. I still hop onto League sometimes... it depends on my mood... and I'd probably do that with Dota *if* it had the bloody surrender option; I just dont have the undying patience to tolerate the boring wait for the end of the sort of match that is a very obvious loss OR win. Either is dull. If they should put that in, I'll likely get back to my previous position of playing it sometimes, just not as much of the others. I dont actually think it's a bad game. I know I sound negative, but... I always sound negative. About everything. I often will sound like this even for things I really like. Like, say, Minecraft... I love the heck out of that game, but I could write you a five-page rant/essay on the problems I think it has, and I'll sound sarcastic and unpleasant the entire time.

Some friends recently got me into dota, and I've been meaning to try HotS (since it's from Blizzard, I'll probably like it). Dota reminds me a lot of Warcraft 3, since it started as a WC3 fan map.

The number of heroes that play very differently is pretty fun, but a lot of the game mechanics would be considered bugs in any other game (like killing your own units...). Some mechanics, like giving all of the gold from killing an enemy hero to the last hitter, appear to exist only to make teammates fight with each other.

I think a lot of dota players confuse 'strategy' with reflexes, or having a fast internet connection.