do you still play? i figured everyone on SB stopped.
i quit (early/mid 2018, i think? i still followed the pro league until they shut that down, though) because i consider playing these sorts of games to be very specifically psychologically unhealthy for me and having become aware of that, i can’t ever un-know it.
in my brief dabbling since then (maybe 5 games total over the last 18+ months), i must say the game is still very enjoyable as a one-off experience. i just can’t get sucked into the endless timesink of giving a shit about anything that happens in a match in these games beyond my immediate enjoyment
haven’t been able to stop playing which probably means I’m some kind of addicted to it? I feel like in another world it becomes the best moba just because of its out-there hero designs and actual focus on objectives that aren’t the same every game and games taking 20 minutes usually, but since the overwatch heroes started coming in that conception of the game started going away
like, blizzard is really good at designing character interactions on a moment to moment basis but really doesn’t understand the ripple effects of doing so - it’s like a drug almost? the actual best way to play the game is misunderstood by 90% of the people who play it and the hero designs actively fight against the game’s desire to have you participate in XP gain and mercenary camp management
so the “healthy” thing is to go soak your lane and get your camps at the right time blah blah, but the fighting is so fun that it’s constantly tempting you away from doing it, hence the drug analogy
this game should probably be ARAM all the time; or, at least it should remove the minions and have only camps and objectives be the way you gain XP, which lets specialists continue to do their thing but realigns the “fun” part of the game with the parts of the game that actually end up with you winning
so as a result of me playing through this I get mad and frustrated all the time whenever I’m playing it
incidentally, the game has been at its best since they gave up on unique brawls that people just pounded out for loot boxes and made it a permanent ARAM rotation
I actually have it uninstalled because I was hitting up the ol’ brawl too much
Yeah I mean in a way it helped me excise a part of me that was terrible, but I think it’s way too easy to never have that personal revelation and just be angry and shitty forever.
I think you can better yourself with it the same way you can with any competitive game, but I would say the specifics of MOBAs or DOTAs don’t do you any favors. You’d be much better off in a game with either a consistent team (no randos) or a solo game. I think blame dispersal is the #1 reason people are so toxic in these games.
The burden of knowledge you need to play is the #2 reason; it’s super easy to hit local maximums or blind spots, where you think you’re playing well but you aren’t. There’s just way too much information and there’s no way to collate or filter it without dedicating insane amounts of time to it.
I was having a good time with Underlords, and I’m excited to get back to it with their big update, which should release soon. They have a lot of nice twists on the formula, and they’re adding a duos mode so I can play w/ a buddy.
the thing with dota is that it’s actually pretty obvious what’s going right for you on an individual basis
your strength is based around your items and the gold you have to buy your items, and so most of the experience is structured around how to get that engine going - if you’re doing well in your lane, you’re allowing yourself time to get those minion last hits to get gold and denying the opponent in your lane the same thing. then 5 minutes later it manifests in team fights when you blow people up and their lane counterpart hasn’t managed to do a thing. that’s a pretty logical structure all told, modeled after the way people think of your average action RPG but distilled into an hour long experience against an opponent that’s trying to do the same thing
so when you’re doing well, you really know THAT you’re doing well, even if you don’t exactly know why. and when you’re not doing well, it really shows in your damage numbers or items or however they measure things
I feel like I’ve actually had a worse attitude playing blizzard dota because this structure literally does not exist in the game, and your power level is a direct result of how well your team as a WHOLE is doing, since all of you gather XP at the same time and contribute to a team-wide level that determines whether you get Talents before they do
so normally I’d say this is a good thing since it obfuscates who the weak person on the team is and abstracts that individual performance away which prevents finger pointing
but the problem is that what’s good for your team is pretty subtle and obscure most of the time and hard to communicate - a lot of the time games can be won simply because someone stayed in one lane and soaked XP while the other 9 players killed each other the whole game, so the team with the single laner ends up ahead on levels just as the big death timers start hitting and team fights result in big losses
it’s not that people feel like they’re bad at the game causes them to lash out - it’s that you don’t actually know if it’s you or if it’s someone else? and the fact that the game lets you bring up the damage stats and deaths and stuff is pretty bad because it lets you /kind of/ point fingers but not to the extent that someone can actually be correct about whether someone’s performance is affecting the entire team or not. I would really rather have overwatch’s thing of like, not really tracking any stats until the end where it hands out the rewards as opposed to what it is now
so most games end up with someone slowly losing over 20 minutes and not knowing why and the worst games have people yelling at each other about it
Yeah, totally have the same feelings about HotS. I remember wishing I could just do what I did in LoL when my team sucked, which is farm endlessly and ignore them, then mid/late game start showing up to teamfights and just blow everyone up.
But also, it’s pretty easy to think you have an advantage in DotA or LoL and then squander it. I’ve had too many games where my character gets super strong, I think we’re winning, and then we start to gradually lose over the next 30 minutes. It’s nearly impossible to point to a reason why, and knowing I was strong at one point makes me feel even worse.
I hope this hasn’t already been said, I kind of don’t want to spend an hour catching up so apologies if it has been (it probably has been but I’m gonna go ahead anyways).
I’m so sad that Blizzard couldn’t properly balance a game if their lives depended on it. I played a bunch of HotS for a while with friends, and it was fun, but mostly just because it was with friends. It’s just baffling how bad the game is balanced. I havent played it in ages, so maybe it’s changed but I seriously doubt it. It had all the big no-no’s of draft gaming.
Stupid power creep as new heroes were released. Older heroes having niche, specific playstyles with very particular skill sets, while newer heroes are released with EVERYTHING (almost the same as previous issue, but still needs to be mentioned explicitly). A wide array of maps, which is cool in theory, but any given map heavily favors some heroes, and hates others, so it’s a rush to first-pick the right heroes, and ban or pick their counters.
Combine all that, and I felt like it was way too often that my team lost the second drafting was over, because the other team got that sick newly released hero plus the couple heroes that dominate this map.
It actually really sucks, because I want a game that I can play when I want to scratch my MOBA itch but don’t want to actually think and tryhard like I have to in DotA. And if I want to introduce a friend to MOBAs, DotA is such a huge turnoff to many folks due to its steep learning curve. It’s honestly a miracle I managed to get into it, and I think the only reason I did was because my girlfriend pretty much twisted my arm into continuing to play it, until like 250+ matches in I must have finished climbing that invisible hump of learning enough shit to actually know what’s going on any given moment, and I was like “oh, wait, I enjoy this now. That’s crazy.” But it’s not very reasonable to just expect anyone to do the same, and I get that.
I wish there was a MOBA that was simple enough to just casually play (without being completely braindead) but was relatively well balanced like DotA.
Also, 80% of the fun for me was playing Cho’Gall with my friend and just dominating everyone because nobody in the lower brackets knows how to play against a really good Cho’Gall but then Blizzard nerfed the crap out of him and it was all over.
as it turns out the mode that is actually balanced in this game is their ARAM mode (which is listed under brawl and it’s just there permanently)
they’ve had so many problems dealing with the two competing balance vectors (exp/soak vs. teamfight ability) in this game. turns out when you base your team’s power level on mechanics that aren’t well messaged and aren’t fun to perform, people stop wanting to do those things. and that coupled with the gutting of the balance team means that the ded game memes are totally true
but that said I never really wanted this game to be anything but dumb dota so now that the ARAM is in that’s all I really play these days
honestly given the way their design decisions have put them in this inescapable hole of balancing map control vs. teamfight ability, that might be for the best
I go into it a bit earlier in the thread but there really isn’t any way for blizzard to balance this game “correctly” without fundamentally changing the leveling structure, which they already changed from traditional mobas by making it a team-wide measure
it just doesn’t work, really. centering the entire team’s power level around a single EXP pool while SIMULTANEOUSLY centering an individual’s contribution to that power level around traditional moba mechanics removes any ability to find nuance in the way that an individual contributes to the team other than how much damage they did in the teamfight. it doesn’t allow one person to overly exert their individual skill past a certain point by getting fed and it also doesn’t give players the opportunity to really understand what they’re doing wrong outside of the bombast of 5v5 teamfights
(and this is all despite the fact that soak and PvE interactions in general are incredibly important)
and you can really see how this dissonance manifests through blizzard’s design decisions on everything that isn’t strictly hero vs. hero - they’ve removed tower ammo, changed XP from proximity to minion death to these XP globes, tried to reclassify heroes based on their contributions to teamfights (zagara as ranged assassin lol), added catapults to fort kills, etc. etc.
none of those decisions really makes any sense because there’s no framework with which you can judge them on. hero balance changes are much easier to understand because the framework you’re basing those decisions (and evaluations) on is centered around how the heroes interact with each other. but there’s no real central philosophy you can look at for how PvE interactions work and thus it looks arbitrary
which is why I don’t really care about the moba aspects of this game anymore. they were super interesting when I first started playing because they hadn’t really centered their design philosophy around ONLY PvP interactions, and that’s how you got heroes like abathur or sgt. hammer or w/e. but ever since the overwatch heroes entered it’s really evident where their design focus was and that’s probably why the balance seems so out of whack
