If you watched Marc Merrill's candid interview with Reckful, he says a line that's 100% true: "League is nobody's first game".
That's a bit odd with League of Legends if you think about it. It was the first game for a bunch of us, at least this kind of game. Defense of the Ancients was niche and difficult to get started with while League was that style of game but accessible. This was the first big esport title for a lot of us as well. Back then it felt like you could just queue up with a bunch of your friends and just play. Over time the roster got bigger and the game more mechanically complex. It all just seems so serious.
How is their design philosophy terrible?
Their core principals of play-counter play and limiting burden of knowledge impose a significant limit on their design scope, and are borne out of a philosophy that says you need to keep your mechanics dumb to cater to a wider variety of people. League of Legends Champions are objectively less diverse and interesting than Dota Heroes because of it.
I don't think Riot has a good enough design team to come up with a fresh new take on the MMO scene. They're going to copy something that already exists, and try to refine it according to their design standards, which are awful.
Riot has been Un-Dumbing every champion. No more point & click... everything is skill-shots & twitch movement.
Their philosophy has been to make things MORE complex, from Champions to the map.
Why shouldn't they be defended?LoL fanboys going all-out to defend Riot up in here.
I'd say the second line directly counters the first line, and that you should qualify "skill-shots" differently. Using Enigma's Black Hole is totally instant, but pulling off a 5 hero black hole requires an incredible amount of skill that wouldn't have the same impact at all if you had to channel/telegraph it first. The key aspect to League of Legends "skill-shots" is that you are telegraphing your move so that your opponent can make a counter-play off of it, but is no more "skillful" than innate or instant abilities. Riot limits their design by developing only telegraphed abilities.
There are just tons of skillshots that you will never escape if you wait for the "telegraph". Either the player is bad at aiming or the other player is predicting... both aspects require skill.
Any more or less skill than the awareness required to determine that your team is clumped too close together and Enigma isn't showing on the map? Riot has chosen to define "skill" in a manner that suits them, and they design their game around it while wearing blinders to anything that doesn't fit their definition. It's an awful philosophy.
AFAIK DoTA strives to feed a super-carry... in LoL you can have multiple carries on a team.
Dota has an incredibly fluid meta, I'd be very surprised if LoL's lane/champion set up is as fluid or more than Dota's, don't you have to have a jungler still? Champion vs Hero usage statistics would suggest that as well, with Dota's major tournament utilizing 95% of the hero pool compared to LoL's what, 60% at best?