I hope this thread doesn't exist somewhere. Some background:
I've been playing dotalikes since aeon of strife in ~2000. I've since moved on to dota, hon (tried league, didn't like) and quickly back to dota2.
I notice there are a lot of leaguers here, so I've got a few questions! First, did you start with league? Why do you play it over dota? Have you tried other dotalikes? If so, for how long and what didn't you like? What keeps you in league over the others?
For my part, outside of hard casuals I don't understand the appeal of league, especially to magic players (_who I associate with enjoying complexity and being rewarded for knowledge and optimal decision making, which I feel dota has far more of)
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Play LoL, have tried DotA/DotA2, couldn't get into them.
First, every single game in this genre is intensely competitive. There is no such thing as a casual moba. There are games with steeper and less steep learning curves, but even the easiest games in the genre are staggering in depth. That's one of the main things that keeps me on LoL rather than switching - I don't have time to play two major competitive games at anything like an acceptable level.
My most recent foray out of LoL was DotA2, so I'll respond just for that one: I don't like a lot of the more counterintuitive design elements of DotA2. I don't like denying. I don't like the itemization of the game, which is incredibly dense and virtually opaque; figuring out reasonably good item choices in DotA2 is very difficult until you're very used to it, unlike in LoL. Obviously the flip side of that coin is a lot more diversity of item builds in DotA2, but optimizing those kinds of things isn't something I find all that engaging anyway so it's not much of a loss for me.
There are a lot of just plain wild abilities in DotA2, and that's cool, but then the flip side of it is there are a lot more cases where you just can't do anything, your enemy has an overwhelming advantage. LoL has somewhat more generic abilities, but it's rare to be in a position where you can't do anything about even a fed, out of control opponent, your margin of error tends to be slim when you're behind but you're not literally out of the game.
There are some neat ideas in there (the strength vs agility hero divide is something LoL keeps creeping towards, because the constraints on a melee vs on a ranged attacker character are so different), but on balance I think LoL is a better designed game, and even if DotA2 is a fairly well-designed game, I don't have the time to master two, so I'll stick with LoL.
.shrug I don't like getting involved in game wars/console wars/that whole type of argument, just throwing out my own experiences with the two.
I technically played DotA and HoN a tiny bit before league but I never got into them at all. I got into league largely because a lot of the other college freshmen I met played it, but now I play it over DotA mostly because I'm used to it and I also feel like the games are a little more resilient to being ruined by one person. In particular, when I try to get into dota, the movement system really bugs me, because LoL has conditioned me to position while keeping in mind that I can turn on a dime. I think it's very common in this genre for people to stick to the first game they try, because fine-tuned game knowledge is so important.
Despite this I've played a total of 50ish games of DotA/DotA 2, I'm at the stage in it where I know things like ward placements, pulling camps into sidelanes, etc - a lot more than the general people I get matched with who often don't understand the basic concepts of lane control (down to auto-attacking creeps constantly). Now here's the thing: if I was at the level of these people, I wouldn't think DotA was a complex game at all. When DotA players call league simpler and more casual, I have to say they usually end up being in exactly the kind of state I am, but reversed. I particularly find it funny when I see people say this and they turn out to be garbage at DotA. If you get very decent at LoL at all, you'll probably find that like DotA it's far more complex and knowledge-oriented than most games, and that the amount of "skill" required for either is pretty negligibly different. There are differences between the games and the kind of skills that are required are probably a little different, though. Another reason people think of LoL as casual is that there's admittedly a larger volume of really *****ty and truly casual players, but that's due to its popularity not a lack of depth. You can play DotA very casually, too.
Oh yea also, I fully admit that I'm ******* atrocious at managing multiple units and that doesn't hurt in LoL. Never got too good at RTS games, though I loved Total Annihilation.
And the out-of-control carry thing I hear a lot from leaguers. That only applies at low MMR games - once you get to high level play, snowballing single heroes just doesn't happen.
My greatest suspicion is that leaguers can't get used to the movement in dota, which is more about awareness and less twitch-based. A few friends I've converted said that was their most difficult challenge.
I'm no lol noob myself, though - a but under 800 games under my belt, And a bunch of my old buddies are diamond ranked. I don't buy the whole 'its just as challenging' thing, though. The league meta is painfully stale, and the patches do little to spur change. Because of a lack of interactivity (items, environment, ect) I never found the game to be challenging, which is why I never stuck with it.
Another question: isn't the pay-to-unlock champs thing an issue for you guys? I couldn't imagine playing on such an uneven field.
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I got into LoL because the custom games in WC3 were a nightmare. I'm staying now because of commitment. Of course, it helps that it holds an overwhelming (like 80% share) of the Moba market, the US government has declared it a sport (THANKS OBAMA!), and it is in fact more popular than several REAL sports.
LoL player here. Wanted a fun game that wouldn't end tastelles after a few days (which happened to me with MMORPGs like TERA and some others). Never played DOTA and DOTA", nor HoN (although I heard about those games on the LoL Player Behavior forums from some pretty much toxic or self centered players). I usually play it only during the weekend because the toxicity can be tiring in the worst case and URF (Ultra Rapid Fire, a new game mode that's really broken) is way too fun and abherent to be played too much.
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Casual crazy magic player, otaku maniac, unrully cosplayer, what did you expect me to be?
Eh. The movement seemed pretty similar. The itemization was the hardest thing to adjust to for me.
I don't really buy the "DotA is more challenging" thing, a lot of the "difficulty" is just artificial b.s. you have to learn to get used to. DotA tests you at the strategy level a lot more - can you put a team of very different heroes together? Can you itemize them appropriately? Can you manipulate the whole game to fit them ideally? LoL tests you more at the tactical level - can you dodge that spell, then dodge the followup? Can you line up a shot to hit those two enemies? Can you jump that wall and immediately follow up with a combo while avoiding being caught and killed in the process?
There are pros and cons to each approach. I don't know that I prefer one over the other, except that I got into LoL first. The rest of the differences are less relevant to that.
Regarding pay to unlock champs:
Was never an issue for me. I think I paid $20 for a bundle when I started, then just unlocked the rest (I own the entire roster now) by playing. You will pretty much never run into a competitive game where it's an issue in any way whatsoever. There are far more champions in LoL than anyone could possibly master (it'd take you the better part of a month playing 40 hours a week just to get through the whole roster once each) and the game balance is close enough that I don't think I've ever actually NOTICED that one of my teammates didn't own a champion that we really wanted to have on our team; the one exception is that a bunch of people used to pretend not to own supports in order to get out of playing that role, but they were mostly just plain old lying. I mean, I play ADC mostly, and I own literally every one, and I rarely play the consensus top two because others suit my playstyle better and that matters way more than the slight discrepancies in champion balance. Hell, even at the professional level something like half the roster will see play over the course of a season. There are a few outliers in power, but they just get banned out pregame anyway.
So, no, it never bothered me at all.
(Then there's: LoL has fewer things that make my game designer sense itch - denying is the classic example but there are a bunch of others - things that are actively counterintuitive, which typically have to be explained to a player for them to realize that they're important.)
I read a lot about DotA and LoL when trying to decide which I should get into. In my eyes, most of the mechanical changes LoL made to the formula seemed to be clear improvements, cleaning up weird little artifacts of the Warcraft 3 engine. Notably: adding ability scaling, removing creep denial, changing the Str/Agi/Int system into something more transparent, and putting armor and magic resistance on an even footing. I do like some things about DotA, such as the more diverse jungle and the potential to strategically destroy trees, but overall I think the Riot team put serious thought into the question, "Our game is no longer a Warcraft custom map, so how can we make it better than one?", and came up with good answers.
And on a purely subjective basis, the aesthetic of DotA2 is just... weird, to me. The models and voice-acting are as close as they can get to the original game's assets without getting sued by Blizzard, and as someone who remembers Warcraft 3 fondly, it's like watching and listening to people doing poor impersonations of old friends. I thought we'd moved on from the "characterization through bad accents" school of game design, anyway. And the less said about naming conventions in DotA, the better - the original team had an absolute tin ear.
Are you sure about that? When I heard about DotA2's ability draft mode, my second thought, after "That sounds really cool", is "Pity it wouldn't work in LoL." Many of LoL's characters are mechanically integrated in a way you don't see in DotA: you can't easily break apart a kit like Elise's or Orianna's. And then there's the whole alternate resource systems thing.
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LoL tests you more at the tactical level - can you dodge that spell, then dodge the followup? Can you line up a shot to hit those two enemies? Can you jump that wall and immediately follow up with a combo while avoiding being caught and killed in the process?
Hardly. LoL just rewards you for getting things down to muscle memory and executing quickly. It's a lot like sports in that sense, it barely involves any thought process at any level below Challenger. You can just pick the same character 50 times in row and play well. Most of the "tactics" involved in laning are completely self-explanatory and usually fall into categories such as "stand behind minions" or "wait for them to lasthit and then cast your spells". I would be alarmed if someone age 15+ couldn't grasp them relatively quickly.
DotA just took the maximal approach to strategy, which created insane knowledge requirements but ensured a rich and deep playing field. In terms of strategy that is, the actual game often grinds to a boring halt where neither side does anything, which makes game lengths insanely unpredictable and a fair bit of the games boring beyond belief. It's also easier to capitalize on mistakes people make to snowball game out of control. Even at higher levels, because then getting an item just a minute or two early can completely throw the game.
Having played my fair share of both, I can't really say I'm particularly happy with either anymore. I certainly got my money's worth out of each though, and perhaps having the sheer number of games that I have skews my perspective. They both suffer from severe issues: LoL has very, very limited pool of optimal strategies that cannot be enriched due to the monetization model. DotA has slow-paced and often dull gameplay. Both of these issues are something that gets worse the better you get at the games as well.
In LoL this lead to me just throwing games on intention once I got to high enough MMR to get paired with low diamonds / high platinums last season. The game simply stopped being interesting, because you were constrained to a very predefined set of options. Then I had to deal with "OMG PLAT CARRY US AHUAUAEHAHUAE" at lower MMRs afterwards, and frequent flaming if I ever did a mistake or picked an unoptimal character. "OMG PLAT AND TROLL WTF?!?!?". Yeah, not making your game fun to play to the best of the players ability is a pretty ridiculous achievement. Eventually it lead to me just quitting the game, because it was impossible to play it casually without being really bad at it.
In DotA, well, the constant need to play safe and grind for 30 minutes in row at random killed it for me. You know it's good when you can play bejeweled at the same time as you play DotA, because there's no reason to leave your base because you know your team can turtle and the opponents haven't maxed out their items yet, and you don't even need to farm because it's optimal to give it to your carry. You just click follow on them, talk ***** on vent and play bejeweled. Yeap. Great game, amazing design. Very engaging.
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Hardly. LoL just rewards you for getting things down to muscle memory and executing quickly. It's a lot like sports in that sense, it barely involves any thought process at any level below Challenger. You can just pick the same character 50 times in row and play well. Most of the "tactics" involved in laning are completely self-explanatory and usually fall into categories such as "stand behind minions" or "wait for them to lasthit and then cast your spells". I would be alarmed if someone age 15+ couldn't grasp them relatively quickly.
I don't think that's even remotely a fair description of LoL, but then, this is the exact type of insane hyperbole that keeps me out of anything that even smells like it might eventually become a 'console wars' situation, so I think I'm going to let it slide.
Are you sure about that? When I heard about DotA2's ability draft mode, my second thought, after "That sounds really cool", is "Pity it wouldn't work in LoL." Many of LoL's characters are mechanically integrated in a way you don't see in DotA: you can't easily break apart a kit like Elise's or Orianna's. And then there's the whole alternate resource systems thing.
Pretty sure, but you're right about the 'kit' perspective. Actually, in discussing character design in the two games with a friend, I made pretty much that exact point: that DotA tends to have more unique, conceptually larger and flashier single skills, whereas LoL tends to have more finely crafted kits of skills with more interplay between the skills (both are fair ways to approach the problem of designing awesome characters, by the way). LoL has more skill reuse, but they tend to recombine them in novel ways (setting aside their obvious problem cases - most heavy fighters play similarly to each other, most marksmen play similarly to each other, so around 30 champs fall into one of two heavily reused, generic playstyles, or about 1/4 of the roster).
LoL player here. Wanted a fun game that wouldn't end tastelles after a few days (which happened to me with MMORPGs like TERA and some others). Never played DOTA and DOTA", nor HoN (although I heard about those games on the LoL Player Behavior forums from some pretty much toxic or self centered players). I usually play it only during the weekend because the toxicity can be tiring in the worst case and URF (Ultra Rapid Fire, a new game mode that's really broken) is way too fun and abherent to be played too much.
Oh god, that reminds me of ARAMDM WTF mode from original dota - fun times!
Eh. The movement seemed pretty similar. The itemization was the hardest thing to adjust to for me. ...morestuff
See, this is the fundamental difference to me - In Dota, success depends on who plays smarter. In LOL, success depends on who plays faster. I don't like a primarily twitch game - its why I hate FPS games. Since LOL has flat MS, instant turning, instant cast, the challenge is to click fast (which is brainless to me). Dota strikes the balance where the primary mechanic is planning/strategy, and there are minor but VERY rewarding twitch elements (denying, some spells have a .25 second delay on damage that you can evade with certain items, ect). In all, its far more satisfying for me to have a gank succeed because we predicted enemy movement and strategy rather than clicking, and once in a random while having some crazy reaction-time thing blowing up. To me, that IS more difficult.
Dota has 108 unlocked champs, and i can rotate through them in a week and a half pretty easily. This also suggests that the league meta is even more stale than i thought - in competitive play, nearly EVER dota hero gets play time, and if they dont, valve aggressively patches the hero into being competitive (recent changes with sniper/drow), regardless of how popular it is in casual. Riot seems to balance more for casuals (if at all).
I read a lot about DotA and LoL when trying to decide which I should get into. In my eyes, most of the mechanical changes LoL made to the formula seemed to be clear improvements, cleaning up weird little artifacts of the Warcraft 3 engine. Notably: adding ability scaling, removing creep denial, changing the Str/Agi/Int system into something more transparent, and putting armor and magic resistance on an even footing. I do like some things about DotA, such as the more diverse jungle and the potential to strategically destroy trees, but overall I think the Riot team put serious thought into the question, "Our game is no longer a Warcraft custom map, so how can we make it better than one?", and came up with good answers.
And on a purely subjective basis, the aesthetic of DotA2 is just... weird, to me. The models and voice-acting are as close as they can get to the original game's assets without getting sued by Blizzard, and as someone who remembers Warcraft 3 fondly, it's like watching and listening to people doing poor impersonations of old friends. I thought we'd moved on from the "characterization through bad accents" school of game design, anyway. And the less said about naming conventions in DotA, the better - the original team had an absolute tin ear.
While I do agree that riot approached those questions, I think what they asked was not "how can we make it better", but "how can we make it more accessible to casuals", and in that regard they succeeded. I don't think that that has made a BETTER game, though - simplification doesn't make for a more rewarding experience for me.
On the aesthetic - really!? The voice acting in dota 2 is one of THE highlights of the game for me - with a good hour and a half of dialogue per hero, individual ***** recorded for each item, and inter-hero dialogue on kills and denies, I get random laughs all the time. I dislike the cartoony aesthetic of lol, personally.
Are you sure about that? When I heard about DotA2's ability draft mode, my second thought, after "That sounds really cool", is "Pity it wouldn't work in LoL." Many of LoL's characters are mechanically integrated in a way you don't see in DotA: you can't easily break apart a kit like Elise's or Orianna's. And then there's the whole alternate resource systems thing.
I think this speaks to dota's design more than anything - while abilities are more interchangeable, heroes play in more interesting ways that make them feel more diverse. Also, a lot of the KINDS of abilities, while unique, interact in really cool ways in AD.
I don't think that's even remotely a fair description of LoL, but then, this is the exact type of insane hyperbole that keeps me out of anything that even smells like it might eventually become a 'console wars' situation, so I think I'm going to let it slide.
It kinda IS a console wars thing - pendragon and guinsoo really ****ed the dota community when they left, so there is a ton of bad blood between the old guard of dota and 3-year league players.
I've got over 1000 games of LoL under my belt (and have quit multiple times, thinking this last time is "for good"). I've played several other DotaLikes as well - I've logged ~100 hours on DotA2, I played a bit of SotIS on SC2, and I participated in the betas for Realm of the Titans and Infinite Crisis.
Overall, I'd say LoL is my favorite of those games. I find that its system provides a good balance of eliminating unnecessary fiddly bits from the game (like recipes, crazy inventory management, secret shops, couriers), tones down a lot of the most obnoxious things about DotA2 (Hypercarries especially with the 8 seconds of Full Magic Immunity item, Crazy-ridiculous Crowd Control like 6 second AOE full stuns and 15+ second Silences, Denying, gold loss on death, crazy-limited mana, etc), and provides a more balanced approach to the genre. I also like how Runes, Masteries, and Summoner Spells allow an additional level of customization.
My reasons for quitting pretty much lie in the business model of the game. I played it from the beginning of open beta, and when they first announced the IP pricing of champions, they claimed that A) pricing for future champions would fall across all of the pricing tiers, and B) pricing would primarily be based on complexity.
They quickly proved that both of these statements were lies, and within a year were in their permanent parade of 6300 IP champions (the most expensive pricing). Add that to the blatant cash grab that was the additional Rune Pages, and the change to the way the IP system worked to punish quick victories, and I got extremely fed up.
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Hypercarries especially with the 8 seconds of Full Magic Immunity item, Crazy-ridiculous Crowd Control like 6 second AOE full stuns and 15+ second Silences, Denying, gold loss on death, crazy-limited mana, etc
Er.. You've not played a lot of dota if you think that this is in any way what the game is actually like (as far as disables and spell immunity)
Denying, gold loss on death, no free recalls, actual limited mana and no flash for everyone means you actually have to plan your moves instead of flailing wildly.
One more aside: Can we agree that no voice chat in league is absolutely criminal? I don't know how I'd get by without voice in dota.
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And the out-of-control carry thing I hear a lot from leaguers. That only applies at low MMR games - once you get to high level play, snowballing single heroes just doesn't happen.
When did I say that? I actually meant the exact opposite, it seems to me a lot easier for a single person to do stupid ***** and get caught out with blink daggers and the insane burst and cc ults that are in DotA.
My greatest suspicion is that leaguers can't get used to the movement in dota, which is more about awareness and less twitch-based. A few friends I've converted said that was their most difficult challenge.
League positioning is INCREDIBLY awareness (and knowledge) based. It's not "twitch-based" at all until you **** up and realize your positioning is off. Once again, same as in DotA - blinking a magnus blink RP is twitch (ideally with readiness granted you by awareness), but you should just make sure you aren't in magnus' blink RP range in the first place... at least not alongside your team. The reason LoL players, myself included, have trouble adjusting to positioning and movement is that it's different. Not "more awareness-oriented".
Another question: isn't the pay-to-unlock champs thing an issue for you guys? I couldn't imagine playing on such an uneven field.
It's annoying as hell, but it's not an uneven field. A lot of the super highly ranked players are highly ranked because they focus on one or very few champs.
See, this is the fundamental difference to me - In Dota, success depends on who plays smarter. In LOL, success depends on who plays faster.
Completely and utterly incorrect and you would only realize this if you knew LoL better. In fact, my impression is the opposite, but I have no illusions - it's because I'm not accustomed to DotA.
I'm no lol noob myself, though - a but under 800 games under my belt, And a bunch of my old buddies are diamond ranked. I don't buy the whole 'its just as challenging' thing, though. The league meta is painfully stale, and the patches do little to spur change.
This is one thing that a lot of LoL players say themselves, but I always disagree with. The meta isn't stale at all. The structure of teams in lane locations is pretty stale - and even with that we've had a lot of meta shifts with the phase of dive jungles, 3v1 pushing and 2v2 defending as junglers, 4v1 pushing with top+jungle+duo, top leeching from jungler, etc.
But if you look at the actual meat of the meta - composition and strategy - it changes pretty wildly. We had an assassin-focused meta where everything was about posturing to get a free kill on the enemy team and exploit that advantage, that kind of evolved into a pick-based meta where you do the same thing by making the enemy team make dangerous map movements (instead of straight-up diving into them and killing the squishy), to now a siege-focused meta where waveclear and poke are typically important. Obviously other styles of play have been viable at all of these times, but especially if you look at the mid-lane champion pool shifts (from e.g. zed and fizz in assassin meta to e.g. ahri in pick meta to e.g. ziggs and nid in siege meta) it's very obvious.
If anything, I would say Riot tries too hard to change the meta. Just look at the vision changes recently - first riot did something that amounted to everyone having a free ward, which obviously had major impacts, and then they made it so that you can't use the trinkets in the first 2 minutes of the game to encourage "more interesting level 1 play". And I bet you these things are going to change more soon. Then there's their explicit attempts to undermine the 3v1 push meta by increasing early tower armor... although admittedly that hasn't done too much, just made it a lot less punishing to send your duo top lane since they kill the tower relatively fast in exchange for being away from dragon. If anything they kinda encouraged 2v1 in a weird way.
One more aside: Can we agree that no voice chat in league is absolutely criminal? I don't know how I'd get by without voice in dota.
Frankly, knowing the LoL audience, I'm glad there's no voice chat. That's the same way I feel about DotA voice chat though.
You'll probably say it's a *****ty substitute and in some ways it definitely is, but I really do feel LoL's ping system became very good when they revamped it.
When did I say that? I actually meant the exact opposite, it seems to me a lot easier for a single person to do stupid ***** and get caught out with blink daggers and the insane burst and cc ults that are in DotA.
Others have suggested this, and I hear it a lot from league casuals that play 10-20 matches of dota and drop the game. Crazy overfarmed carries are common in low tiers where teamplay hasn't developed, but in games that matter this is completely untrue.
League positioning is INCREDIBLY awareness (and knowledge) based. It's not "twitch-based" at all until you **** up and realize your positioning is off. Once again, same as in DotA - blinking a magnus blink RP is twitch (ideally with readiness granted you by awareness), but you should just make sure you aren't in magnus' blink RP range in the first place... at least not alongside your team.
Well, since league doesn't have cast times/turn times/ms variations on a wider scale than league, league naturally is FAR more twitch based than dota. same thing applies to HoN, where all movement is instantaneous - you just end up having to play reflexively far more than strategically. I'm not claiming that league has NO strategy or map awareness required - just that it focuses more on and rewards twitch play far more than dota does.
It's annoying as hell, but it's not an uneven field. A lot of the super highly ranked players are highly ranked because they focus on one or very few champs.
Same with Dota - most higher ranked players are good with a handful. To me, its more like one player being restricted to standard playable cards to a tournament and the other building a modern deck because he bought the old set DLC - If both players have identical options, its more of a "sport" and less of a pay-to-win thing. This is especially important in DotA, where counterpicking is an insanely important part of the game and having some heroes unavailable would cripple gameplay.
Completely and utterly incorrect and you would only realize this if you knew LoL better.
While I've played far more dota than lol, I'd hardly say that I don't know the game well enough to make that judgment. You cant deny that tactically, DotA is a far more diverse and complex game than league (linear strats, same items, same lane placement, same summoner spells - flash on everyone). Minor nitpick - mag's ult ISNT twitch. You can shift click all your actions beforehand.
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...I'm saying that dodging magnus blink RP with blink (or puck w or whatever) is twitch.
you're hitting all the dota-fan-*****ting-on-lol troll buzzwords (LoL pay to win? lol) and you don't seem to be listening to what LoL fans are saying despite making a thread to solicit them, so I'm going to go ahead and just assume you're either a troll or one of those fools that actually believes regurgitated troll lines after hearing them enough
I very much am denying that DotA is more diverse and complex tactically. Or at least, significantly so. "Linear strat" doesn't even make sense. "Same items" is as applicable to dota builds as LoL builds. "Same lane placement" and "flash on everyone" are the only true things, but hey - DotA doesn't even have summoner spells. It also has no runes and no masteries. It's funny you describe the homogenization of an added element as a lower level of complexity.
Not that those things are very complex, but hey, very little individual things in LoL and DotA are. The complexity of both games comes from the sheer amount of things that, at a top level of play, need to kept track of and kept in mind. Do you know how hard it is to keep track of all 5 enemy's flash cooldowns? And also keep track of the flash of your midlaner, who doesn't communicate it to you? Not that bad, until you keep in mind all the other stuff you're doing. By the same token in dota you have rune and ancients spawns and, like LoL, ult cooldowns and where everyone visible on the map is and where everyone not visible could be by now given when they left visibility and how fast their hero and build moves and if they can go over walls and on what cooldown and what their initiation range is and whether you can turn on them and also don't miss last hits and plan your next objective moves.
Something like the lack of a denial mechanic is so ******* minor compared to everything else there is. Especially because in LoL, denial is just replaced by zoning (yes I know it exists in dota also).
I challenge that you know LoL well enough. 800 games means nothing, I've met plenty of people with 2k games that are terrible at the game. You're probably a lot better than them especially since you play DotA, but come on. I don't know your rank, what rank your diamond friends are means nothing, I can tell by things you say that you are not very good at LoL. Sorry.
...I'm saying that dodging magnus blink RP with blink (or puck w or whatever) is twitch.
Blink isn't twitch because cast time and turn time. If you aren't positioned correctly, you die even if you see it coming.
you're hitting all the dota-fan-*****ting-on-lol troll buzzwords (LoL pay to win? lol)
What else would you call a system that, all other things being equal, someone can gain an advantage by either 1) playing an insane amount of time to unlock a feature or 2) pay to unlock it?
I very much am denying that DotA is more diverse and complex tactically. Or at least, significantly so. "Linear strat" doesn't even make sense. "Same items" is as applicable to dota builds as LoL builds. "Same lane placement" and "flash on everyone" are the only true things, but hey - DotA doesn't even have summoner spells. It also has no runes and no masteries. It's funny you describe the homogenization of an added element as a lower level of complexity
Linear strats references one of the biggest complaints every season in competitive league - the meta is insanely stale, as are item builds on league heroes, where in dota, you have far more flexibility with how you build your items since items do more than scale your damage.
Flash on everyone is AWFUL, though. If anything makes league a twitch game, its that.
Masteries are also linear - Ad carries just go down one side of the attack mastery tree, ect.
You can't honestly believe that by taking out nearly all in-game interactivity and replacing it with masteries and runes, that riot has made a more complex game, can you?
Something like the lack of a denial mechanic is so ******* minor compared to everything else there is. Especially because in LoL, denial is just replaced by zoning (yes I know it exists in dota also).
Disagree. Completely changes the laning phase and rewards skill and positioning. I think adding denies would be a huge positive change for league.
I challenge that you know LoL well enough. 800 games means nothing, I've met plenty of people with 2k games that are terrible at the game. You're probably a lot better than them especially since you play DotA, but come on. I don't know your rank, what rank your diamond friends are means nothing, I can tell by things you say that you are not very good at LoL. Sorry.
I'm not diamond ranked myself - I dropped the game before they added the new system. However, I still have a few friends that play regularly that are and they are not much better than me (At the very least, I can keep pace when I log with one of their accounts). By no means do I know EVERYTHING about lol, but I do know enough that I can recognize it as a simpler game. My confusion stems from people who are fanatical about the game defending everything from the removal of complex in-game interactions to the locked heroes (someone on these forums defended the locked champs as a positive thing), which I just find nutty. I think that you might want to spend a little more time brushing up on dota before you claim that league is more complex
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What else would you call a system that, all other things being equal, someone can gain an advantage by either 1) playing an insane amount of time to unlock a feature or 2) pay to unlock it?
Hardly. LoL just rewards you for getting things down to muscle memory and executing quickly. It's a lot like sports in that sense, it barely involves any thought process at any level below Challenger. You can just pick the same character 50 times in row and play well.
I guess we probably should have seen this coming. One LoL-hater claiming that its a pay to win system, another claiming the game is so shallow that you can just play the same champ over and over and cruise through wins. Argue with one, concede the other, even though the truth is in the middle (that you need 12-15 champs unlocked to be at no disadvantage; that there can be an advantage just in picking underused champions; that LoL balance on the whole is good enough to keep nearly all of the champions on the roster within a few percent of as powerful as the best champs, so even small advantages in opponents not having much experience playing against your underplayed champ can matter).
But then, it's not like this thread hasn't come up 5000 times across various boards. When a DotA player asks why LoL players like LoL, it's rarely for any reason except to assert their superiority.
Not hating on Lol; just trying to figure it out. if you don't like the term pay to win, make up another - I don't really care, I just think that that particular bit is stupid and you agreed with me on that.
Do you really have no better thing to say about the game beyond claiming I'm a hater? :/
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I've been playing dotalikes since aeon of strife in ~2000. I've since moved on to dota, hon (tried league, didn't like) and quickly back to dota2.
I notice there are a lot of leaguers here, so I've got a few questions! First, did you start with league? Why do you play it over dota? Have you tried other dotalikes? If so, for how long and what didn't you like? What keeps you in league over the others?
For my part, outside of hard casuals I don't understand the appeal of league, especially to magic players (_who I associate with enjoying complexity and being rewarded for knowledge and optimal decision making, which I feel dota has far more of)
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First, every single game in this genre is intensely competitive. There is no such thing as a casual moba. There are games with steeper and less steep learning curves, but even the easiest games in the genre are staggering in depth. That's one of the main things that keeps me on LoL rather than switching - I don't have time to play two major competitive games at anything like an acceptable level.
My most recent foray out of LoL was DotA2, so I'll respond just for that one: I don't like a lot of the more counterintuitive design elements of DotA2. I don't like denying. I don't like the itemization of the game, which is incredibly dense and virtually opaque; figuring out reasonably good item choices in DotA2 is very difficult until you're very used to it, unlike in LoL. Obviously the flip side of that coin is a lot more diversity of item builds in DotA2, but optimizing those kinds of things isn't something I find all that engaging anyway so it's not much of a loss for me.
There are a lot of just plain wild abilities in DotA2, and that's cool, but then the flip side of it is there are a lot more cases where you just can't do anything, your enemy has an overwhelming advantage. LoL has somewhat more generic abilities, but it's rare to be in a position where you can't do anything about even a fed, out of control opponent, your margin of error tends to be slim when you're behind but you're not literally out of the game.
There are some neat ideas in there (the strength vs agility hero divide is something LoL keeps creeping towards, because the constraints on a melee vs on a ranged attacker character are so different), but on balance I think LoL is a better designed game, and even if DotA2 is a fairly well-designed game, I don't have the time to master two, so I'll stick with LoL.
.shrug I don't like getting involved in game wars/console wars/that whole type of argument, just throwing out my own experiences with the two.
Despite this I've played a total of 50ish games of DotA/DotA 2, I'm at the stage in it where I know things like ward placements, pulling camps into sidelanes, etc - a lot more than the general people I get matched with who often don't understand the basic concepts of lane control (down to auto-attacking creeps constantly). Now here's the thing: if I was at the level of these people, I wouldn't think DotA was a complex game at all. When DotA players call league simpler and more casual, I have to say they usually end up being in exactly the kind of state I am, but reversed. I particularly find it funny when I see people say this and they turn out to be garbage at DotA. If you get very decent at LoL at all, you'll probably find that like DotA it's far more complex and knowledge-oriented than most games, and that the amount of "skill" required for either is pretty negligibly different. There are differences between the games and the kind of skills that are required are probably a little different, though. Another reason people think of LoL as casual is that there's admittedly a larger volume of really *****ty and truly casual players, but that's due to its popularity not a lack of depth. You can play DotA very casually, too.
Oh yea also, I fully admit that I'm ******* atrocious at managing multiple units and that doesn't hurt in LoL. Never got too good at RTS games, though I loved Total Annihilation.
My greatest suspicion is that leaguers can't get used to the movement in dota, which is more about awareness and less twitch-based. A few friends I've converted said that was their most difficult challenge.
I'm no lol noob myself, though - a but under 800 games under my belt, And a bunch of my old buddies are diamond ranked. I don't buy the whole 'its just as challenging' thing, though. The league meta is painfully stale, and the patches do little to spur change. Because of a lack of interactivity (items, environment, ect) I never found the game to be challenging, which is why I never stuck with it.
Another question: isn't the pay-to-unlock champs thing an issue for you guys? I couldn't imagine playing on such an uneven field.
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I don't really buy the "DotA is more challenging" thing, a lot of the "difficulty" is just artificial b.s. you have to learn to get used to. DotA tests you at the strategy level a lot more - can you put a team of very different heroes together? Can you itemize them appropriately? Can you manipulate the whole game to fit them ideally? LoL tests you more at the tactical level - can you dodge that spell, then dodge the followup? Can you line up a shot to hit those two enemies? Can you jump that wall and immediately follow up with a combo while avoiding being caught and killed in the process?
There are pros and cons to each approach. I don't know that I prefer one over the other, except that I got into LoL first. The rest of the differences are less relevant to that.
Regarding pay to unlock champs:
Was never an issue for me. I think I paid $20 for a bundle when I started, then just unlocked the rest (I own the entire roster now) by playing. You will pretty much never run into a competitive game where it's an issue in any way whatsoever. There are far more champions in LoL than anyone could possibly master (it'd take you the better part of a month playing 40 hours a week just to get through the whole roster once each) and the game balance is close enough that I don't think I've ever actually NOTICED that one of my teammates didn't own a champion that we really wanted to have on our team; the one exception is that a bunch of people used to pretend not to own supports in order to get out of playing that role, but they were mostly just plain old lying. I mean, I play ADC mostly, and I own literally every one, and I rarely play the consensus top two because others suit my playstyle better and that matters way more than the slight discrepancies in champion balance. Hell, even at the professional level something like half the roster will see play over the course of a season. There are a few outliers in power, but they just get banned out pregame anyway.
So, no, it never bothered me at all.
(Then there's: LoL has fewer things that make my game designer sense itch - denying is the classic example but there are a bunch of others - things that are actively counterintuitive, which typically have to be explained to a player for them to realize that they're important.)
And on a purely subjective basis, the aesthetic of DotA2 is just... weird, to me. The models and voice-acting are as close as they can get to the original game's assets without getting sued by Blizzard, and as someone who remembers Warcraft 3 fondly, it's like watching and listening to people doing poor impersonations of old friends. I thought we'd moved on from the "characterization through bad accents" school of game design, anyway. And the less said about naming conventions in DotA, the better - the original team had an absolute tin ear.
Are you sure about that? When I heard about DotA2's ability draft mode, my second thought, after "That sounds really cool", is "Pity it wouldn't work in LoL." Many of LoL's characters are mechanically integrated in a way you don't see in DotA: you can't easily break apart a kit like Elise's or Orianna's. And then there's the whole alternate resource systems thing.
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Hardly. LoL just rewards you for getting things down to muscle memory and executing quickly. It's a lot like sports in that sense, it barely involves any thought process at any level below Challenger. You can just pick the same character 50 times in row and play well. Most of the "tactics" involved in laning are completely self-explanatory and usually fall into categories such as "stand behind minions" or "wait for them to lasthit and then cast your spells". I would be alarmed if someone age 15+ couldn't grasp them relatively quickly.
DotA just took the maximal approach to strategy, which created insane knowledge requirements but ensured a rich and deep playing field. In terms of strategy that is, the actual game often grinds to a boring halt where neither side does anything, which makes game lengths insanely unpredictable and a fair bit of the games boring beyond belief. It's also easier to capitalize on mistakes people make to snowball game out of control. Even at higher levels, because then getting an item just a minute or two early can completely throw the game.
Having played my fair share of both, I can't really say I'm particularly happy with either anymore. I certainly got my money's worth out of each though, and perhaps having the sheer number of games that I have skews my perspective. They both suffer from severe issues: LoL has very, very limited pool of optimal strategies that cannot be enriched due to the monetization model. DotA has slow-paced and often dull gameplay. Both of these issues are something that gets worse the better you get at the games as well.
In LoL this lead to me just throwing games on intention once I got to high enough MMR to get paired with low diamonds / high platinums last season. The game simply stopped being interesting, because you were constrained to a very predefined set of options. Then I had to deal with "OMG PLAT CARRY US AHUAUAEHAHUAE" at lower MMRs afterwards, and frequent flaming if I ever did a mistake or picked an unoptimal character. "OMG PLAT AND TROLL WTF?!?!?". Yeah, not making your game fun to play to the best of the players ability is a pretty ridiculous achievement. Eventually it lead to me just quitting the game, because it was impossible to play it casually without being really bad at it.
In DotA, well, the constant need to play safe and grind for 30 minutes in row at random killed it for me. You know it's good when you can play bejeweled at the same time as you play DotA, because there's no reason to leave your base because you know your team can turtle and the opponents haven't maxed out their items yet, and you don't even need to farm because it's optimal to give it to your carry. You just click follow on them, talk ***** on vent and play bejeweled. Yeap. Great game, amazing design. Very engaging.
and acts without effort.
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I don't think that's even remotely a fair description of LoL, but then, this is the exact type of insane hyperbole that keeps me out of anything that even smells like it might eventually become a 'console wars' situation, so I think I'm going to let it slide.
Pretty sure, but you're right about the 'kit' perspective. Actually, in discussing character design in the two games with a friend, I made pretty much that exact point: that DotA tends to have more unique, conceptually larger and flashier single skills, whereas LoL tends to have more finely crafted kits of skills with more interplay between the skills (both are fair ways to approach the problem of designing awesome characters, by the way). LoL has more skill reuse, but they tend to recombine them in novel ways (setting aside their obvious problem cases - most heavy fighters play similarly to each other, most marksmen play similarly to each other, so around 30 champs fall into one of two heavily reused, generic playstyles, or about 1/4 of the roster).
Oh god, that reminds me of ARAMDM WTF mode from original dota - fun times!
See, this is the fundamental difference to me - In Dota, success depends on who plays smarter. In LOL, success depends on who plays faster. I don't like a primarily twitch game - its why I hate FPS games. Since LOL has flat MS, instant turning, instant cast, the challenge is to click fast (which is brainless to me). Dota strikes the balance where the primary mechanic is planning/strategy, and there are minor but VERY rewarding twitch elements (denying, some spells have a .25 second delay on damage that you can evade with certain items, ect). In all, its far more satisfying for me to have a gank succeed because we predicted enemy movement and strategy rather than clicking, and once in a random while having some crazy reaction-time thing blowing up. To me, that IS more difficult.
Dota has 108 unlocked champs, and i can rotate through them in a week and a half pretty easily. This also suggests that the league meta is even more stale than i thought - in competitive play, nearly EVER dota hero gets play time, and if they dont, valve aggressively patches the hero into being competitive (recent changes with sniper/drow), regardless of how popular it is in casual. Riot seems to balance more for casuals (if at all).
While I do agree that riot approached those questions, I think what they asked was not "how can we make it better", but "how can we make it more accessible to casuals", and in that regard they succeeded. I don't think that that has made a BETTER game, though - simplification doesn't make for a more rewarding experience for me.
On the aesthetic - really!? The voice acting in dota 2 is one of THE highlights of the game for me - with a good hour and a half of dialogue per hero, individual ***** recorded for each item, and inter-hero dialogue on kills and denies, I get random laughs all the time. I dislike the cartoony aesthetic of lol, personally.
I think this speaks to dota's design more than anything - while abilities are more interchangeable, heroes play in more interesting ways that make them feel more diverse. Also, a lot of the KINDS of abilities, while unique, interact in really cool ways in AD.
It kinda IS a console wars thing - pendragon and guinsoo really ****ed the dota community when they left, so there is a ton of bad blood between the old guard of dota and 3-year league players.
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Overall, I'd say LoL is my favorite of those games. I find that its system provides a good balance of eliminating unnecessary fiddly bits from the game (like recipes, crazy inventory management, secret shops, couriers), tones down a lot of the most obnoxious things about DotA2 (Hypercarries especially with the 8 seconds of Full Magic Immunity item, Crazy-ridiculous Crowd Control like 6 second AOE full stuns and 15+ second Silences, Denying, gold loss on death, crazy-limited mana, etc), and provides a more balanced approach to the genre. I also like how Runes, Masteries, and Summoner Spells allow an additional level of customization.
My reasons for quitting pretty much lie in the business model of the game. I played it from the beginning of open beta, and when they first announced the IP pricing of champions, they claimed that A) pricing for future champions would fall across all of the pricing tiers, and B) pricing would primarily be based on complexity.
They quickly proved that both of these statements were lies, and within a year were in their permanent parade of 6300 IP champions (the most expensive pricing). Add that to the blatant cash grab that was the additional Rune Pages, and the change to the way the IP system worked to punish quick victories, and I got extremely fed up.
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Er.. You've not played a lot of dota if you think that this is in any way what the game is actually like (as far as disables and spell immunity)
Denying, gold loss on death, no free recalls, actual limited mana and no flash for everyone means you actually have to plan your moves instead of flailing wildly.
One more aside: Can we agree that no voice chat in league is absolutely criminal? I don't know how I'd get by without voice in dota.
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Completely and utterly incorrect and you would only realize this if you knew LoL better. In fact, my impression is the opposite, but I have no illusions - it's because I'm not accustomed to DotA. This is one thing that a lot of LoL players say themselves, but I always disagree with. The meta isn't stale at all. The structure of teams in lane locations is pretty stale - and even with that we've had a lot of meta shifts with the phase of dive jungles, 3v1 pushing and 2v2 defending as junglers, 4v1 pushing with top+jungle+duo, top leeching from jungler, etc.
But if you look at the actual meat of the meta - composition and strategy - it changes pretty wildly. We had an assassin-focused meta where everything was about posturing to get a free kill on the enemy team and exploit that advantage, that kind of evolved into a pick-based meta where you do the same thing by making the enemy team make dangerous map movements (instead of straight-up diving into them and killing the squishy), to now a siege-focused meta where waveclear and poke are typically important. Obviously other styles of play have been viable at all of these times, but especially if you look at the mid-lane champion pool shifts (from e.g. zed and fizz in assassin meta to e.g. ahri in pick meta to e.g. ziggs and nid in siege meta) it's very obvious.
If anything, I would say Riot tries too hard to change the meta. Just look at the vision changes recently - first riot did something that amounted to everyone having a free ward, which obviously had major impacts, and then they made it so that you can't use the trinkets in the first 2 minutes of the game to encourage "more interesting level 1 play". And I bet you these things are going to change more soon. Then there's their explicit attempts to undermine the 3v1 push meta by increasing early tower armor... although admittedly that hasn't done too much, just made it a lot less punishing to send your duo top lane since they kill the tower relatively fast in exchange for being away from dragon. If anything they kinda encouraged 2v1 in a weird way. Frankly, knowing the LoL audience, I'm glad there's no voice chat. That's the same way I feel about DotA voice chat though.
You'll probably say it's a *****ty substitute and in some ways it definitely is, but I really do feel LoL's ping system became very good when they revamped it.
Others have suggested this, and I hear it a lot from league casuals that play 10-20 matches of dota and drop the game. Crazy overfarmed carries are common in low tiers where teamplay hasn't developed, but in games that matter this is completely untrue.
Well, since league doesn't have cast times/turn times/ms variations on a wider scale than league, league naturally is FAR more twitch based than dota. same thing applies to HoN, where all movement is instantaneous - you just end up having to play reflexively far more than strategically. I'm not claiming that league has NO strategy or map awareness required - just that it focuses more on and rewards twitch play far more than dota does.
Same with Dota - most higher ranked players are good with a handful. To me, its more like one player being restricted to standard playable cards to a tournament and the other building a modern deck because he bought the old set DLC - If both players have identical options, its more of a "sport" and less of a pay-to-win thing. This is especially important in DotA, where counterpicking is an insanely important part of the game and having some heroes unavailable would cripple gameplay.
While I've played far more dota than lol, I'd hardly say that I don't know the game well enough to make that judgment. You cant deny that tactically, DotA is a far more diverse and complex game than league (linear strats, same items, same lane placement, same summoner spells - flash on everyone). Minor nitpick - mag's ult ISNT twitch. You can shift click all your actions beforehand.
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you're hitting all the dota-fan-*****ting-on-lol troll buzzwords (LoL pay to win? lol) and you don't seem to be listening to what LoL fans are saying despite making a thread to solicit them, so I'm going to go ahead and just assume you're either a troll or one of those fools that actually believes regurgitated troll lines after hearing them enough
I very much am denying that DotA is more diverse and complex tactically. Or at least, significantly so. "Linear strat" doesn't even make sense. "Same items" is as applicable to dota builds as LoL builds. "Same lane placement" and "flash on everyone" are the only true things, but hey - DotA doesn't even have summoner spells. It also has no runes and no masteries. It's funny you describe the homogenization of an added element as a lower level of complexity.
Not that those things are very complex, but hey, very little individual things in LoL and DotA are. The complexity of both games comes from the sheer amount of things that, at a top level of play, need to kept track of and kept in mind. Do you know how hard it is to keep track of all 5 enemy's flash cooldowns? And also keep track of the flash of your midlaner, who doesn't communicate it to you? Not that bad, until you keep in mind all the other stuff you're doing. By the same token in dota you have rune and ancients spawns and, like LoL, ult cooldowns and where everyone visible on the map is and where everyone not visible could be by now given when they left visibility and how fast their hero and build moves and if they can go over walls and on what cooldown and what their initiation range is and whether you can turn on them and also don't miss last hits and plan your next objective moves.
Something like the lack of a denial mechanic is so ******* minor compared to everything else there is. Especially because in LoL, denial is just replaced by zoning (yes I know it exists in dota also).
I challenge that you know LoL well enough. 800 games means nothing, I've met plenty of people with 2k games that are terrible at the game. You're probably a lot better than them especially since you play DotA, but come on. I don't know your rank, what rank your diamond friends are means nothing, I can tell by things you say that you are not very good at LoL. Sorry.
What else would you call a system that, all other things being equal, someone can gain an advantage by either 1) playing an insane amount of time to unlock a feature or 2) pay to unlock it?
Linear strats references one of the biggest complaints every season in competitive league - the meta is insanely stale, as are item builds on league heroes, where in dota, you have far more flexibility with how you build your items since items do more than scale your damage.
Flash on everyone is AWFUL, though. If anything makes league a twitch game, its that.
Masteries are also linear - Ad carries just go down one side of the attack mastery tree, ect.
You can't honestly believe that by taking out nearly all in-game interactivity and replacing it with masteries and runes, that riot has made a more complex game, can you?
Disagree. Completely changes the laning phase and rewards skill and positioning. I think adding denies would be a huge positive change for league.
I'm not diamond ranked myself - I dropped the game before they added the new system. However, I still have a few friends that play regularly that are and they are not much better than me (At the very least, I can keep pace when I log with one of their accounts). By no means do I know EVERYTHING about lol, but I do know enough that I can recognize it as a simpler game. My confusion stems from people who are fanatical about the game defending everything from the removal of complex in-game interactions to the locked heroes (someone on these forums defended the locked champs as a positive thing), which I just find nutty. I think that you might want to spend a little more time brushing up on dota before you claim that league is more complex
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I guess we probably should have seen this coming. One LoL-hater claiming that its a pay to win system, another claiming the game is so shallow that you can just play the same champ over and over and cruise through wins. Argue with one, concede the other, even though the truth is in the middle (that you need 12-15 champs unlocked to be at no disadvantage; that there can be an advantage just in picking underused champions; that LoL balance on the whole is good enough to keep nearly all of the champions on the roster within a few percent of as powerful as the best champs, so even small advantages in opponents not having much experience playing against your underplayed champ can matter).
But then, it's not like this thread hasn't come up 5000 times across various boards. When a DotA player asks why LoL players like LoL, it's rarely for any reason except to assert their superiority.
Do you really have no better thing to say about the game beyond claiming I'm a hater? :/
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