DOTA2

[Thrawn]

I want to try this, but the thought of gold loss on death means I'd probably be penniless and hated by all my teammates. 

You can spend the gold before you back (the items are stored for you to pickup), so as long as you aren't saving up for a huge purchase or making sure you can buy back in their is no reason to lose large amounts when you die.

[HaemishM]

Ahhh, I see. Is that what the whole "mule pets" minons you buy is for? You purchase an item in lane and the mule brings it to you?

[Thrawn]

Ahhh, I see. Is that what the whole "mule pets" minons you buy is for? You purchase an item in lane and the mule brings it to you?

Yep.

[Fordel]

I actually watched a few DotA2 streams this week and as a spectator thing, it seems fairly compelling to me. Having never actually played a 'MOBA' all of the subtleties are lost on me, but the basic core concepts of the game were readily apparent and the spectator tools seem amazing. The dude casting was 'Tobi Won Kenobi' who was entertaining if a little jargon heavy. The games art style is great, but the spells are a little busy at times. The big 5v5 cluster fucks were REALLY hard to keep track of.


I need to watch some competitive LoL matches to see how it compares.

[Setanta]

Just got the invite and jumped in for a few games. My background is starting with HoN and swearing I'd never play a MOBA again to getting hooked on LoL. Denial in DOTA2 is a pain but tolerable. Gold loss on death is stopping the game from being fun.

Being partially colourblind is a big issue with the game for me - it's busy and the avatars don't stand out as friend or foe (hence gold loss on death being an issue :D ). I'll be interested to see how it stands up against Blizzard DOTA and whether Blizzard are going to hone and twist the genre like Riot did or just polish/pretty it like S2 and Valve (in my very limited experience so far) seems to have done.

[Thrawn]

I need to watch some competitive LoL matches to see how it compares.

If you understand both games so you aren't lost, competitive LoL is very, very boring to watch compared to DotA imo.

[Fordel]

Blizzard DOTA doesn't seem like an actual thing. Like, I don't expect Blizzard DOTA tournaments or teams the way you see DOTA2 and LoL ones.


-edit-

How do LoL spectator tools compare to DOTA2? DOTA2 is really slick from a spectator pov, the charts and graphs and even the magic marker whiteboard on the minimap.

[Rasix]

LoL just got spectator mode. Has to be in game at the start still, I think, and it's buggy as hell.   No replay system either.  

The main caster (on own3d) I've seen for DOTA2 is annoying as hell though.  Just shouts gobbleygook into the mic as loud and excitedly as he possibly can.  Makes the action even harder to follow.

Competitive LoL is hit or miss.  Never watch game 3 of a tournament, it'll be the most passive thing you'll ever see.  If you want to see an exciting match, try to catch M5 playing.  They're probably the most aggressive and creative team out there right now. 

[Fordel]

No replays is kinda shitty.

Does LoL allow reconnects for players? That's something I saw in DOTA2, players losing connection but being able to reconnect without much hassle at all. It's something that now that I've seen it, it seems completely obvious and necessary and I seriously don't understand why SC2 doesn't fucking work this way too.

[Rasix]

Yah, you can reconnect, although I'd say the client doesn't handle disconnects the best.   If you're outside of the tournament realm, there's no pause.  One of the last major tournaments had some longish pauses in a semi-final match due to hardware failure.  Online tournaments on the regular tournaments have run into disconnects causing losses as a player was gone for quite some time.

It's kind of a bone of contention with the LoL community that they release new champs every 2 weeks, new skins, weekly to bi-weekly balance adjustments, yet still haven't put in a drop in spectator mode or a basic replay system.  The client, too, is still a bucket of ass, no matter how far it's come.   We know they aren't the same teams, but you have to wonder if they're even prioritizing this stuff or just taking our money and laughing.

edit: The replay thing is a BIG annoyance for me.  I really liked watching my own replays in SC2.  It helped me a lot.  The third party replay application that someone hacked together is a piece of shit.

[Rokal]

In my experience DoTA is a much, much more passive game to watch. The early game is much more farming-focused and gold matters considerably more. This means the carry on the team will usually spend 90% of the game farming minions, where as in LoL you see much more frequent skirmishes: partially because of lower penalties for dying, partially because killing champions is more effective than farming minions after early game.

[Megrim]

Ahhh, I see. Is that what the whole "mule pets" minons you buy is for? You purchase an item in lane and the mule brings it to you?

Its also part of the balance, in a sense, and the reason why recipes are still in the game. Money management. You can save up for one big item, which, if you get it will probably shift the game in your favour, but picking up many smaller ones is far safer.

[Aez]

I'm a total noob at DOTA2 but I still liked this tournament game :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og

I watched a few other top lvl games and I don't see how denial is such a big deal.  Of course the commentators are not focusing the camera on farming since it's not very exiting.

[Malakili]

I'm a total noob at DOTA2 but I still liked this tournament game :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og

I watched a few other top lvl games and I don't see how denial is such a big deal.  Of course the commentators are not focusing the camera on farming since it's not very exiting.

It both denies them gold, and helps keep the lane pushed to the spot you want it.

[Fordel]

I'm a total noob at DOTA2 but I still liked this tournament game :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og

I watched a few other top lvl games and I don't see how denial is such a big deal.  Of course the commentators are not focusing the camera on farming since it's not very exiting.

That's actually one of the games I saw recently too. Where the venommancer guy went 0-20 on k/d 

[Aez]

I'm a total noob at DOTA2 but I still liked this tournament game :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og

I watched a few other top lvl games and I don't see how denial is such a big deal.  Of course the commentators are not focusing the camera on farming since it's not very exiting.

It both denies them gold, and helps keep the lane pushed to the spot you want it.

I understand what it is but not how some think it`s ruining the game.  It seems to have a very low impact on the overall game.

[schild]

It has a massive impact on the game, you absolutely must take part in it, and it's positively boring. It's not only a WCIII design remnant, it's one of the very very few cases where Valve's tunnel vision in terms of some design choices and staying true to the roots of something a bit too much shows through.

Go play DOTA2 and you'll very, very quickly understand how much it matters. By extension, last-hitting matters about a million times more also. Meh.

[Thrawn]

Go play DOTA2 and you'll very, very quickly understand how much it matters. By extension, last-hitting matters about a million times more also. Meh.

That makes me wonder if that is why I made such a huge change to not having deny bother me compared to what I always expected.  Once I come to realize that beyond the obvious basics (don't die) last-hitting is the most important thing for the first 20 minutes or so of a 5v5 League match the shift to DotA is a minor one.

[Kail]

I think it depends on if you're talking about the impact it has on making the game fun to play versus interesting to watch.

I'd compare it to something like having to tap a button to run in a FPS or something.  If you don't mind it, it's fine, but if you find it an annoying mechanic, it can completely kill the game, because you spend so much of your time doing it.  To a casual viewer, though, there's not much impact because it's largely invisible gameplay.  Denying fifty creeps can change the shape of the game, but just denying one is no big deal, so people tend not to notice it, compared to flashy events like ganks and pushes.  It has an impact on things like pacing and positioning, as was noted previously, but again, that's something the average viewer isn't going to associate with denial because it's fairly subtle.

[Megrim]

Protip: if you land a team with instalock Juggs, Morph and Void? Get the fuck out asap. Just ruuuuunnn!

[Fordel]

The Morphling hero just seems crazy in general. Everything it does is an escape mechanism it looks like.

[Lounge]

Couple of things regarding denying from various spots in this thread.

Denying a creep does the following things:
- Removes the ability for any opposing hero to get gold for the last hit
- Removes a portion of the experience for any enemy heroes
- Prevents the creep denied from doing any more damage to the enemy creep thus making your lane less likely to advance position

You can attack your own creep when they are under 50% health.  Often times attacking them under 50% is more important than actually timing the last hit for the deny.  Attacking them as soon as they are under 50% health means they will die faster and you can actually in a lot of cases pull a lane thats pushed too far back to a safe distance (ie closer to your own tower).  This is by far the most lacking part of League of Legends for me.  There is no way for me to impact where the lane is in order to farm safely.

On average most mid level teams (lets face it if you play League you are at best here) will have about 30 denies total with around 10 or so each on a support hero.  That works out to about 1/2 to 3/4 of a creep denied per minute.

Additionally you can deny an allied hero if they have any kind of damage over time spell.  This is useful because the other team will get both no xp and no gold for the kill.  Its somewhat rare to see but is definitely executed at the high level.  In your average non pro game you'll see this about once every 3 months or so.

Tower denying is also a thing and its pretty important.  Killing towers is a pretty significant source of gold income.  By denying a tower you are taking away a significant amount of gold from the other team.

Saying that its a holdover mechanic from Warcraft 3 is the equivalent of saying "I do not understand the impact of this emergent gameplay thus it must be legacy and broken."

[Nonentity]

He's not wrong. The high skill cap for some of these weird emergent systems are why Dota is what it is, for better or for worse. It's not new player friendly in any way, though.

[schild]

Saying that its a holdover mechanic from Warcraft 3 is the equivalent of saying "I do not understand the impact of this emergent gameplay thus it must be legacy and broken."

Calling the abuse of a holdover mechanic that couldn't have been designed out of the game when the mod was made "emergent gameplay" is not understanding the idea of emergent gameplay. Not to mention, good designers account for what a pack of assholes is deciding to label as Emergent Gameplay in gaming.

Competitive team-based games are absolutely no place for such a thing. We can cite other examples of decisions made, but this isn't the equivalent of Valve purposefully making sure rocket jumping and grenade jumping was in TF2.

[Aez]

Not to mention the Ancients staking abuse/strategy.

[HaemishM]

Thanks to Mr. Hat, I got an invite to this and tried it at lunch. HOLY SHIT. This is WAY beyond LOL for skill level. The interface feels sluggish, or it's just me not knowing WTF I was doing. I died a SHITTON. This will take some study.

[Rasix]

Thanks to Mr. Hat, I got an invite to this and tried it at lunch. HOLY SHIT. This is WAY beyond LOL for skill level. The interface feels sluggish, or it's just me not knowing WTF I was doing. I died a SHITTON. This will take some study.

How is this different than LoL? 

[Thrawn]

Thanks to Mr. Hat, I got an invite to this and tried it at lunch. HOLY SHIT. This is WAY beyond LOL for skill level. The interface feels sluggish, or it's just me not knowing WTF I was doing. I died a SHITTON. This will take some study.

It took me 5 or 6 games before I even won a vs bot game.    They kept kicking my ass in lane.

[HaemishM]

Thanks to Mr. Hat, I got an invite to this and tried it at lunch. HOLY SHIT. This is WAY beyond LOL for skill level. The interface feels sluggish, or it's just me not knowing WTF I was doing. I died a SHITTON. This will take some study.

How is this different than LoL? 

I died a lot quicker even when I wasn't being overly aggressive and sticking my dick in a grinder. 

[Lounge]

Saying that its a holdover mechanic from Warcraft 3 is the equivalent of saying "I do not understand the impact of this emergent gameplay thus it must be legacy and broken."

Competitive team-based games are absolutely no place for such a thing. We can cite other examples of decisions made, but this isn't the equivalent of Valve purposefully making sure rocket jumping and grenade jumping was in TF2.

Neither of these things are required to go in and have fun in TF2.  If you want to play the game at a competitive level then yeah probably.  The exact same thing applies to dota and denies.  

[schild]

Neither of them are required, but they do ADD fun.

Your precious shit legacy mechanic is in no way emergent does not. Yes, the high level play would change without it, but the barrier for entry into that little cuntwaffle community would be lowered immensely.

[Fordel]

So to the guys who've played both. If Valve put in a "No Deny Casual Mode", would DotA2 be superior to LoL and crush it outright, or is LoL still holding all the momentum of the player base?

[Bann]

League feels more simple to me. I'm not any good at DOTA 2, but I find myself appreciating what I perceive to be more depth. To make a comparison, I recognize that Magic is much more complicated and interesting game once you understand how all the different mechanics can interact with each other,  or the timing of how things go onto and resolve off the stack. I never quite understood all that, but I recognized it was there and probably made it a more interesting game then the Pokemon TCG.

[ezrast]

Got in and played around with it. It's like they went out of their way to introduce QoL problems just to make it more like it was in WC3. Giving commands to your hero automatically deselects enemies? Your hero will allow itself to be blocked by slower-moving pets instead of simply pathing around them? Range indicators appear when you hover over abilities but not when you activate them? Buying items while dead doesn't automatically place them into your inventory? You can't buy when your hero isn't selected? Whyyyyyyyyyy?

[Thrawn]

So to the guys who've played both. If Valve put in a "No Deny Casual Mode", would DotA2 be superior to LoL and crush it outright, or is LoL still holding all the momentum of the player base?

DotA 2 will never touch Leagues numbers, a lot about league is more casual friendly than just the deny mechanic.

Got in and played around with it. It's like they went out of their way to introduce QoL problems just to make it more like it was in WC3. Giving commands to your hero automatically deselects enemies? Your hero will allow itself to be blocked by slower-moving pets instead of simply pathing around them? Range indicators appear when you hover over abilities but not when you activate them? Buying items while dead doesn't automatically place them into your inventory? You can't buy when your hero isn't selected? Whyyyyyyyyyy?

Yeah, this kind of stuff is what's horrible about DotA 2 right now imo.  I can see character icons on the mini map, but only if I hold alt?  Whyyyyyyyyyy?