Valve announces Dota 2

[Typhon]

I think it's decent argument.  I think the better games will have game mechanics that are gameable in a way that fosters (or is neutral) to suspension of disbelief.

I agree with the general principle, but I don't think it's so much the mechanics themselves as a combination of the mechanics and the dressing (graphics, story, etc).  For example, the mechanic of denial might not be so weird-looking if the "creeps" were represented as boars or something that it might make sense for you to slaughter to deny your opponent their delicious flesh.  Same mechanics but different dressing.

I was thinking the same thing, I just used shorthand to try keep my post from becoming a thesis paper.

Specific to denial: If there was a chance that killing your own creeps could cause a creep uprising I think it would be better received.

Also specific to denial: I think window dressing is only half the problem in the case of denial - game mechanisms that focus on cock-blocking an opponent just tend to be a good way to generate rage.  I think that game designers should have learned in the last 5 years that game mechanics that generate rage amongst your player population are a bad idea to foster player retention.

[Lantyssa]

My word choice was perhaps poor.  I don't mean exploiting as in hacking, but rather using the the extreme situations many of these games encourage.  Basically the difference in mindset of "playing for fun" and "playing to win".

I'm not interested in a PvP game where knowing the intricacies of the base mechanics provides a huge advantage.  "If I do X while Y then a quick A B when L is active, I can ruin their day.  Hahaha, I'm awesome."

[Paelos]

Wow, I guess I didn't realize I was exploiting all these years by understanding how to play games.

Edit: Let me also say, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, this isn't even about exploitation of game mechanics really, like unintended buggy stuff.   This is about, from my perspective, that I play PvP games to be competitive with other people playing them, not to be immersed in the game as if it were real. 

Some things are just stupid though. Bunny-hopping qualifies. It's not that it's "not real" as much as it's ridiculously tedious and eye-rollingly silly. Players will always find an unintended use of game mechanics for an edge, but sometimes it just makes the game worse when it proliferates.

[Kail]

Is a silly argument to make about a game like this.  You may as well argue understanding how to use the mechanics of how guns shoot in Counter Strike makes it about "gaming the mechanics" instead of counter terrorists fighting terrorists, or that in Quake 3 using the plasma gun to boost you up a wall is "gaming the mechanics" instead of about fighting.... I dunno, it just seems like an incredibly naive argument to make about the nature of a PvP oriented game.  Hell, you may as well argue that a Quarterback in american football is "gaming the mechanics" when he does a hard count to get his opponent to jump offsides.

To start with, there is no metaphor to break in football, so the Quarterback analogy doesn't exactly match up.  You need something with a backstory on it.

Second of all, it's a question of degree, not "ALL REALISM ALL THE TIME OR GTFO."  I can deal with characters being able to carry ten rocket launchers or heal themselves instantly by stepping on first aid kits.  It's when the game mechanics incorporate elements that go against their own metaphor that I get pissy.  I'm not sure what you're talking about with relation to Counter-strike, but the game is basically coherent in that it's about shooting people with machine guns.  Imagine if it became score based, and the team with the most kills would win, but it doesn't "count" if someone TKs their own guy.  So now the strategy is to allow your own team to kill you if you get wounded, so that it doesn't count as a point for the other team.  Suddenly it's not a game about shooting the other team, now it's about dicking around with the idiotic scoring mechanics (or at least that part of it is).

I think I get what you're saying, but if someone wants to make their game divorced from reality, then they can do that.  If you want to have blue whirlygigs moving in patterns around green squares to earn points, then you can make a game around that.  But the second you start dressing it up as space marines and fighter jets you start bringing in certain assumptions about the way things behave.

To put it another way, imagine if in the next Starcraft II patch, Blizzard swapped the models for the Space Marine and the Carrier (and rescaled them to stay consistent with the original unit sizes).  So now the game has forty foot tall space marines flying through the sky farting out interceptors while I can train Carriers at my barracks, little blobby things which clip into the ground and fire chaingun bursts from the space where their gun would be if they had one.  No mechanics are changed, though, just the models.  According to your argument, if I understand it right, this would be totally fine, and there's no reason not do do it, because the mechanics haven't been changed, correct?

[Samwise]

I think I get what you're saying, but if someone wants to make their game divorced from reality, then they can do that.  If you want to have blue whirlygigs moving in patterns around green squares to earn points, then you can make a game around that.  But the second you start dressing it up as space marines and fighter jets you start bringing in certain assumptions about the way things behave.

Many folks here have probably read/heard Valve talking about how they designed the TF2 characters to "tell" you with their appearances what their role was, so that even a new player can intuit from a Heavy's appearance that he's going to be hard to kill in a toe-to-toe shootout but might be easy to outmaneuver. 

I think that'd be a good example of a game's dressing complementing its mechanics and thereby making it easier to pick up.  Note that if you get a lot of satisfaction from finding and exploiting counterintuitive mechanics, you might actually not see that as a plus.

[Malakili]

To put it another way, imagine if in the next Starcraft II patch, Blizzard swapped the models for the Space Marine and the Carrier (and rescaled them to stay consistent with the original unit sizes).  So now the game has forty foot tall space marines flying through the sky farting out interceptors while I can train Carriers at my barracks, little blobby things which clip into the ground and fire chaingun bursts from the space where their gun would be if they had one.  No mechanics are changed, though, just the models.  According to your argument, if I understand it right, this would be totally fine, and there's no reason not do do it, because the mechanics haven't been changed, correct?

It would obviously be silly, but it wouldn't be the deciding factor as to whether I'm going to play the game or not.  I mean "totally fine" might be going too far, but insofar as the gameplay wasn't changed it would really change whether or not I wanted to play the game or not.   But even then, my real problems with it would be with the gameplay changing in subtle ways (like easy of identifying whats going on), not with the fact that its breaking my starcraft immersion.

[Muffled]

I think the counter-intuitive bit is the one that a lot of us are hung up on.  Half here seem to see an advantage which is illogical or inconsistent with the terms that the rest of the game functions inside to be ill gained, while the rest see it as just another demonstration of gaming skill.  

I have to admit that I'm on the fence here when I think of specific examples, largely based off whether I can master whatever the tricky mechanic is ( ).  In theory I would say every game should be self consistent regarding how to gain an advantage, or just in every way, but I'm not sure that's possible in every case without compromising balance or fun.

[Lounge]

Regarding it being counter intuitive, I dont think you can expect every tiny little detail (denying only happens for about the first 5-10 min) of a game to be easily grasped by any new player.  Even a game like team fortress 2 which has pretty straightforward gameplay had to implement a tutorial to cover advanced techniques (rocket jumping for example).

Personally I find DOTA / HON to be a significantly less intimidating environment for a new player than LOL.  The core gameplay is basically the same but the Rune/Talent system can significantly sway the power of the enemy player.  From what i remember there is no easy way to see how someone had specced their summoner prior to a match.  At least with Dota i know after playing a few games what Zeus or Lina are capable of whereas in LOL i might know what a particular champion can do but i have zero idea of what Jimbob32 is capable of because of how he specced his summoner.

[Samwise]

Regarding it being counter intuitive, I dont think you can expect every tiny little detail (denying only happens for about the first 5-10 min) of a game to be easily grasped by any new player.

There's a bit of a difference between saying that you should convey all the information about the game at a first glance and saying that what you do convey should not be misleading.

[Thrawn]

At least with Dota i know after playing a few games what Zeus or Lina are capable of whereas in LOL i might know what a particular champion can do but i have zero idea of what Jimbob32 is capable of because of how he specced his summoner.

He can do the exact same thing except maybe a little bit better.

DOTA has a relputation of having a terrible terrible community for new players coming in, obviously Valve is aware of this and trying to address it with some of the things they are planning to implement.

[Samprimary]

LoL is, in my experience, the most newbie friendly experience of any of the games, by a wide margin. No denies is a big part of that, but the largest part is LoL's battle display. Enemy heroes are very clearly demarcated with red life bars, friendly heroes are very clearly demarcated with green life bars. The benefit this provides new players cannot be understated.

[Dtrain]

Red bad, green good is a bragging point for LoL's UI? I never played DoTA or HoN, but that's just amazing.

No cut on you samprimary, because I get your point, but to say that LoL is the better newbie experience is like saying Flight 93 is the better 9/11 experience. LoL doesn't have a learning curve as much as it has a learning chasm.

[schild]

Red bad, green good is a bragging point for LoL's UI? I never played DoTA or HoN, but that's just amazing.

No cut on you samprimary, because I get your point, but to say that LoL is the better newbie experience is like saying Flight 93 is the better 9/11 experience. LoL doesn't have a learning curve as much as it has a learning chasm.

LoL does have the better newbie experience though. I've tried on multiple occasions to learn HoN and DotA and was never able to, at least not in any effective way. And even then, by the time I learned about denying, my designer sense decided that was too retarded to ever have in any game.

LoL however I picked up in like one game. Everything about the newbie experience is better and the GUI has only gotten more superb since launch minus a few hiccups in the shop menu which they were tweaking a lot for a while.

Red bad, green good, is a great example of "little things go a long way."

[Typhon]

For me, the largest part of LoL being more friendly was the consolidated shop, updated item buying menu and item suggestions (yes, I realize that often there are better things to buy than the suggested items).

Having fewer/easier champs as your only option also streamlines things a bit.

[Rendakor]

The shop was my favorite "newbie friendly" feature in LoL; I liked how you could find an advanced item then directly buy it's parts from the same screen.

[Samprimary]

Red bad, green good is a bragging point for LoL's UI? I never played DoTA or HoN, but that's just amazing.

It's not difficult to understand. LoL's UI gives direct and easy friend/foe identification that supersedes and eases the cognitive attentive requirement that players use for determining, during play, which characters are targetable, hostile heroes and which are allies. The effect of LoL's pronounced UI friend/foe differentiation is profoundly and immediately helpful for players new to the game, and especially for players new to the moba genre. They have the compounded learning cliff level difficulty of trying to differentiate friends from foes in combat situations when they don't have the hero lineup memorized ("Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster is one of my enemies? Great! Hey sam! What does Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster look like!") but that's merely a compound of the issue.

LoL's ui is excellently designed in that it not only severely assists new players, but is also a cognitive aide with benefits for players of all skill levels. If you could hack HoN to use the same life-bar schema, it would make you straight-out a better player to the extent that it would be considered cheating.

[Typhon]

Are you practicing thesis writing on f13?

[Mrbloodworth]

Skiing in tribes was a bug, technically.

[Thrawn]

Skiing in tribes was a bug, technically.

and fans raged when it was going to be "fixed" in Tribes 2. 

[Samwise]

It was only a bug insofar as they didn't mean for it to be that easy to negate friction.  If you imagine that the player is wearing roller skates to go with his jetpack (as I always envisioned) it makes perfect sense as a feature.   

[Thrawn]

It was only a bug insofar as they didn't mean for it to be that easy to negate friction.  If you imagine that the player is wearing roller skates to go with his jetpack (as I always envisioned) it makes perfect sense as a feature.   

Might of not been so broken if you couldn't do it as heavy just as well.  FLYING MORTAR DEATH FROM ABOVE AT 100MPH! 

[Megrim]

Red bad, green good is a bragging point for LoL's UI? I never played DoTA or HoN, but that's just amazing.

It's not difficult to understand. LoL's UI gives direct and easy friend/foe identification that supersedes and eases the cognitive attentive requirement that players use for determining, during play, which characters are targetable, hostile heroes and which are allies. The effect of LoL's pronounced UI friend/foe differentiation is profoundly and immediately helpful for players new to the game, and especially for players new to the moba genre. They have the compounded learning cliff level difficulty of trying to differentiate friends from foes in combat situations when they don't have the hero lineup memorized ("Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster is one of my enemies? Great! Hey sam! What does Rexxxolar Loxsxnarl, the Bloodfeaster look like!") but that's merely a compound of the issue.

LoL's ui is excellently designed in that it not only severely assists new players, but is also a cognitive aide with benefits for players of all skill levels. If you could hack HoN to use the same life-bar schema, it would make you straight-out a better player to the extent that it would be considered cheating.

Except, you can set the team colours in DotA to be grouped by team, and you can also enable hp bars to be shown all the time (instead of just when you press Alt), in the options menu.

[Der Helm]

You kind of made his point for him, there.

[Samprimary]

You sure could. It was, in fact, so preferable that we used a third party program to keep the life bars permanently visible prior to wc3 incorporating that option into the game. And you usually had to keep individual player colors on so that you could differentiate which ally/enemy was which on the minimap. Onscreen, the color differentiation was shit; all heroes lifebars are the same, and many heroes had little or no color differentiation in their models (void was always blue no matter what, for instance)

All great examples of what lol took and improved.

To great effect!

[Megrim]

If you say so. At this point you're just arguing that you couldn't tell the difference, therefore LoL is better. Not everyone wants to play with always-on lifebars, you know.

[Typhon]

No, he's pretty much arguing the same thing that he's been arguing all along - LoL is easier than DotA for a beginner.  Having played both I'd say that I'd think someone was mentally challenged or just being contrary if they were to say otherwise.

But by all means feel free to continue nitpicking about health bars.

[Megrim]

Yep, i sure am. Go hard son.

[Samprimary]

If you say so. At this point you're just arguing that you couldn't tell the difference, therefore LoL is better.

That's .. pretty remarkably far from what I'm arguing. :/

[Megrim]

Well fair enough. It just seemed to me, that you picked out two things to use as examples which (once again) to me, and to the reasonably broad number of people i've played DotA with, were never a issue.

 

* Edit: ah, i see where the confusion lies. You were responding to Dtrain being smarmy, and talking about the ui being broadly "better", rather then the aforementioned specifics. As i said, fair enough, but i suspect you'll find that the player base (along with the unforgiving nature of losing a team game) plays a far bigger role in turning people away, rather then the technical specifics of the ui.

[Dtrain]

But that's just the thing, right? Those sound like people that "passed the test" already and bought into the game. In any event, I don't think it has to be any one (or two,) things that make the game newbie unfriendly, but a combination of many factors that can each be understood for what it is. How about the fact that mod communities tend to self-excluding almost by definition?

[Samprimary]

but i suspect you'll find that the player base (along with the unforgiving nature of losing a team game) plays a far bigger role in turning people away, rather then the technical specifics of the ui.

Strangely, we even had an anecdotal control for that — inhouse games. HoN still just couldn't get enough purchase into moba conversion. Then, everyone turned pretty suddenly from HoN to LoL, and everyone started being part of inhouse games.

[Sophismata]

I kind of thought the whole creep deny system in DotA was a limitation of the WC3 engine.

It's an arbitrary hold-over from a game engine limitation.

Under no circumstances does it make logical sense to kill your own guy. It's a logical bug that results from the way different rules interact. It's like when a fighting game maker makes a move with too much hit stun and another move that closes distance and now you have a 2-hit infinite loop, they intended both moves to work the way they do but the way they combine was not intended.

Just though I'd chime in to point out that this isn't the case. The ability to deny creeps is intentional, and not an engine limitation. It started as such, but the problem of preventing heroes attacking their own team was solved long before the competitive effects of denying creeps was discovered.

This is why you can attack creeps and towers below a health threshold, but not above it. It is trivial for Icefrog to change the deniable health % to 0.

As for gameplay, I agree that denial makes no sense and could (along with last hitting) be axed to aim for a more interesting laning experience. There are other AoS's that do this and are (in my opinion) better designed and more fun than DotA as a result.

[Prospero]

I'm curious to play DotA and deal with denial again. I was a terrible DotA player in college and found denial really frustrating, but having played a lot of LoL the last year it actually sounds appealing. I like the idea of having another variable thrown into the laning phase. It seems like overall it could add a higher skill ceiling to the game. I don't really have an issue nuking my own dudes; if you go with the lore of LoL then they aren't real people just magical creations for the sake of the game.