Riot Games MMO
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
James
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Intrinsic
Person of Whiteness
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As you're saying, and as with DotA, the meta changes patch to patch. We (DotA) just seem to always end up with a higher usage percentage at the big tournies because teams tend to follow their meta + their own region's style of play. And meta also seems heavily defined by whatever "flavor of the month" hero everyone forgot about but some pro made work in a random game. So yea, TI will end up with something like 100+ different heroes played. I'm doing my compendium predictions now and having to answer some of those types of questions. Oh, and I don't think anyone in DotA has ever been fined by their organization for picking a certain hero that wasn't "in meta" (which is a story I only barely remember and could have completely out of context). In fact, the whole organizational aspect of LoL is so wildly different it is hard to wrap my head around.
A lot of the initial "dumbing down" aspect of LoL that gave it a bad taste to me back when I started trying to play it (after playing dota for a while), was some more fundamental things that you probably couldn't change.
- No denying creeps
- No turn rate
- Lack of "requiring" multiple screen map awareness b/c of the difference between Flash and a Blink Dagger, for instance
- Immediate access to information on opposing team, their items, skill cooldowns, CS
- Timers on screen for Blue / Red spawns, etc...
- No stacking or denying jungle camps (another level of ward / vision metagame)
- Teleport management
- Courier management
A few things like that, I guess. A few of which have definitely been addressed over the past 4 or so years I've watch LoL. It seems to have become a little more active and not just 15 minutes of a 1v1 PvE game. None of it really makes me thing LoL is any more dumb that DotA, it just makes me think of it as a fundamentally different game. One that I enjoy watching but cannot stand to play after years of playing DotA. Laning in poverty tier LoL is so much easier after years of dota though. I consistently out CS'd everyone in each game. Of course I had no idea wtf any of the heroes or items did, so still ended up losing like 60% of them.
Ravishing
Uninspiring Title
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Oh jesus...
Getting into the Strategy of the game is a massive can of worms.
So many variables.
I don't know how DoTA works in this regard, but in League you can normally slot in a couple champions that can all perform a similar strategy. Does this mean there are less strategies compared to DoTA? I really have no idea. The DoTA meta is alien to me at this level.
Few champions have a meta that revolve around them. If you draft such a champion then you are basically screwed since the enemy team will know 100% how to counter it.
No LoL champion has an ability that can just 100% win the game, there is always "outplay" possibly... up until the point your team has been out-scaled or is gold starved.
The bigger thing is Champion Synergy. 2 or more champions that work together extremely well and create their own "strategy". This is where the % usage lowers, you get compositions that are near-identical due to synergy.
And it's up to other team to break up the synergy... or allow it... if they think they have a counter prepared.
And then there are champions that are just overtuned and have very few lane counters, so they win hard early and scale hard late, and these are the champions usually targeted for nerfs.. and get banned 100% of the time.
Creep denial is always the #1 thing brought up between the 2 games... Would certainly make the game a whole lot different. Mechanically it would increase the skill level.
Strategically I would argue it's less skillful than the psudo-creep denial League has.
Laning requires more timing and strategy to ensure your opponent misses the creeps, or is put at risk for a jungle gank. When to push a lane and when to "back" (tp/courier management) so as to not miss creeps is very important.
Rest of list is kinda mundane. Multiple map screen awareness is definitely required at the higher levels of League.
Timers were added because everyone was using a 3rd party addon for a while
Lack of information is always a top complaint with League. For some reason they refuse to make good tool-tips... I think it's better, but still not perfect.
James
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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It does by your own admission -- niche heroes not being picked in a tournament means their niche isn't as strategically viable as whatever is popular in the meta. Dota Heroes have a much higher representation in the meta because they're designed better.
Also:
Keep in mind that in Dota you are also still trying to ensure your opponent misses the creep, you just have more tools at your disposal to accomplish it. Strategically speaking, laning in Dota is more complex because of this expanded toolset, a design Riot neglected because of the imposition of a burden of knowledge to understand denial mechanics.
Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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League will be forever dead to me when that day comes. Some of us geezers need characters where you just mouse over something and push a button and the thing happens.
I also secretly hope Top Lane Nunu will one day reappear. Nunu is the goddamn poster child for "if this character is ever good nerf this character."
Ravishing
Uninspiring Title
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But this isn't necessarily true... High usage could also mean that most heroes all perform similar functions, and can be plugged into similar strategies...
I gotta believe DoTA is still centered around group compositions and not all 112 champions have an individual strategy... typically you have "group strategies" and you are just trying to plug in champions that suit the overall strat... higher usage just means more available champs can be plugged in.
But again, I don't know if DoTA is like that necessarily, or if their are more individualized strats based on specific champions.
He's the next to be reworked btw.
I hope he isn't made too skill intensive. I love me some Nunu as well.
James
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Yeah, that's how it works in League, for sure. In Dota, you use wildly different strategies to win the game, with hero and item selection typically being the drivers of that strategy.
Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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He's the next to be reworked btw.
I hope he isn't made too skill intensive. I love me some Nunu as well.
I will say that their Sion rework really impressed me. Sion was a character that I played heavily in the beta and in season one and continued to be a pocket character into the later seasons. He was shitty but he was hard to fuck up so if I got stuck mid (support or jungle only pls god nothing else) I could at least not shit all over myself. This was before position preference being a part of matchmaking. After his remake he looked good, sounded good, his animation were good, his chatter was good, and he was fun as fuck to play. There was a good four or five months right after he came out that I was playing basically only Sion and all the nerfs he suffered were a big part of why I gave up on the game for good. I just got tired of constantly needing to find new characters/builds/strategies that fit my criteria of 1. being good 2. being fun and 3. something I could actually pull off. I saw Sion just got nerfed again fairly recently even.
So revamps can go well. I tuned into a streamer last night and thought that Akali just looked like shit from purely aesthetics.
Ravishing
Uninspiring Title
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Yea I like most of the reworks tbh, though I've yet to experience aatrox and Akali.
I've been playing some league again and keep saying I'm going to play akali... and then she's banned so I go Diana as usual. Playing in gold again is so funny compared to what I remember. The players are so bad. Been having double-digit kill games and like 75% win rate with her... compared to march when I was losing every game...I guess the good players are plat now.
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LachiusTZ
Rogue Deathwalker Box
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Ravishing
Lol is less complex. By orders of magnitude.
The heros being used in a single tourney, bkb, orchid, Manta, denies, etc. It has more depth in several categories.
And everything you bring up as Lol specific is in DotA.
Don't get so defensive about it.
I'm sure it's a fun game. And as soon as the dementia starts kicking in, I'll give it another chance.
Himeo
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They took DotA and then slowly, over years, nerfed everything that allows one player to "snowball" or take over the game and win by pure skill. Their original design, based on DotA, was all about Snowballing and having the freedom of not enforcing a meta. They designed many champions early champions without a specific role, and then when they realized the implications of that around 2013, they did a 180 and built champions specifically for the meta and nerfed snowballing. Creating situations where the global win rate for some champions on some patches has been as low as 37%. Meaning if you picked those champions your teammates would rage quit or start trolling.
So you end up with people who have spent years, thousands of games, perfecting one type of playstyle that was really effective at Snowballing. Now it's not. So new people innovate a new method, and then Riot nerfs it. Over and over again. They won't let people be good at their game.
Imagine what the NBA would be like (5v5 game) if they "balanced" Lebron James to be slower and shorter. Or they "balanced" Larry Byrd by making him miss more three pointers.
But it's so much worse than that. They designed the game with Anti-Snowball features. You do really well for the first 30 minutes of the game and create a big lead for you and your team? Well, one of your team mates makes a mistake and now your huge lead is the other teams huge lead. You lose. Isn't this fun?
After all that, you need to factor in the "prisoner's dilemma" of LoL.
These games are anywhere from 25-50+ minutes long. You can't leave, you can't "pause". You exist at the whim of the 4 retards who are on your team. This feeling of helplessness, designed into the game, brings out the worst of pretty much everyone who plays it.
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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Was it last year or the year before that they changed the top lane tower to make 2v1 lanes stop happening? "We want lane swaps to have an inherent risk and by risk we mean we want the LCS to look like solo queue so we'll make it so punishing to lose the first tower and the top tower so weak that no one will ever allow a 1v2 situation to happen to them there."
jayrebb
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The landmark of that shift in design was when LeBlanc (a champion that was irrelevant in ranked and not viable) was nerfed during regular season because "She was not fun to play against in normal games". So they cut blanc's snowball 2-shot power away against other poorly played squishy champs.
To nerf a champ that was truly not playable in ranked, and unable to carry a team in Normal due to toolkit restrictions, and to make a balance change based on the lowest common denominator of normal mode-- that was when I quit because I realized the original vision had changed.
Homogenized fun is no fun.
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I watched a bit of the last worlds, there were some good games and some of the champion designs are cool, and there were a bunch of "non traditional" meta shit going on iirc, people switching lanes, playing double bruiser bot to kill the enemy ADC, people running more than one teleport on team so they could play as 5 for side objectives more often(dragon shit mostly). It wasn't so bad, although there were still some meh stuff. And a lot of games ended up with like 10kills total, with the first kill often being 15+mins and often meaning that the game was now lost for that team(because generally if a kill happened, there was already a big lead). Mind you, I haven't watched that many games so the overall average stats might have been different from what I've seen.
I think it was better than the year before, but it was still kinda boring to watch, imo. The speed at which games end also felt very disapointing, leaving you wanting for more. You have this often long build up where everyone eeks out farm all over the map, pushes and counter pushes different lanes, basically avoiding the enemy and maximizing economy which is perfectly fine. And then there's one baron fight, and one team who killed 3 of the cores in the enemy team just strolls down the mid lane and kill the nexus before people can respawn? Like how anticlimatic is that shit really.
I'm obviously partly biased because I still prefer dota a lot, but watching pro dota games, the game that don't end at 20mins from a one way stomp(which are similar to LoL games) often end up having a lot of crazy shit going on. It isn't uncommon for a mid to late game dota fight to have more than 10kills in a single fight with buybacks and TP. The end scores for games going over 30mins are often in the 60-80total kills. I also like the bigger impact supports have in the lategame, partly due to items' actives being relevant the whole game versus LoL tamer +good stats approach to itemization. Winning a fight lategame often translates into objectives, but not an autowin, even farmed heroes have trouble pushing all the way to the end because the buildings aren't made of paper, unless you play heroes that specifically make buildings look like paper. You often have to win more than one fight to win a game, which gives opportunity for comebacks and thrilling endgame.
I think it was better than the year before, but it was still kinda boring to watch, imo. The speed at which games end also felt very disapointing, leaving you wanting for more. You have this often long build up where everyone eeks out farm all over the map, pushes and counter pushes different lanes, basically avoiding the enemy and maximizing economy which is perfectly fine. And then there's one baron fight, and one team who killed 3 of the cores in the enemy team just strolls down the mid lane and kill the nexus before people can respawn? Like how anticlimatic is that shit really.
I'm obviously partly biased because I still prefer dota a lot, but watching pro dota games, the game that don't end at 20mins from a one way stomp(which are similar to LoL games) often end up having a lot of crazy shit going on. It isn't uncommon for a mid to late game dota fight to have more than 10kills in a single fight with buybacks and TP. The end scores for games going over 30mins are often in the 60-80total kills. I also like the bigger impact supports have in the lategame, partly due to items' actives being relevant the whole game versus LoL tamer +good stats approach to itemization. Winning a fight lategame often translates into objectives, but not an autowin, even farmed heroes have trouble pushing all the way to the end because the buildings aren't made of paper, unless you play heroes that specifically make buildings look like paper. You often have to win more than one fight to win a game, which gives opportunity for comebacks and thrilling endgame.
Penance
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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LOL as an esport has always been inferior to DOTA. Creating opportunities is so hard in that at pro levels when everyone is playing like a bitch. You end up watching a farm fest for the first 20 minutes. Then barron spawns and that team fight decides the game. Everything is almost always warded, there are no items like smoke to setup ganks. The map is small so there are like 5 choke points in the fog. But as a game to play casually I like it more then DOTA just because there is less to learn. I know what I'm getting into going top or bot or jungle or whatever. There is something nice about that. However, recently their design philosophy has been to introduce completely meta changing patches every other week. As a casual who has very little time to learn power spikes and matchups this fucks with me something heavy. I really liked DOTA design philosophy of one or two big patches a year.
Needless
Toe Sucker
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Dota has done patches every 2 weeks now as well for the past 5 or so months, I think they planned on doing it for 6 months to see how it rolls. It's pretty disruptive (with the expcetion of if that thursday lands during a tournament, theyll wait until the tournament is done) but yeah, hopefully they go back to their bigger patches less often lol.
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Vimeseh
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I prefer to play league, but I prefer to watch DoTA tournaments. Everything said about the depth of the two games is spot on with DoTA being the much deeper game from item builds to strategy. Which makes for a much better spectator experience. However from a mechanical standpoint league is hands down harder. Everything blinks and dashes around with eighty bajillion skill shots. Outside of a few notable heros like Meepo DoTA doesn't have the mechanical floor that I want when actually playing a game.