Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:
Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
The game has a dozen or more such heroes
icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I’m not in a league/clan/whatever
From this I could deduce:
There’s no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
Causal play is out; likely can’t pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times
I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.
The appeal would be with a limited albeit large set of characters, items, & rules, you can have effectively an infinite set of outcomes due to the dice rolls of teammates but also champions/heroes chosen on team. It is almost impossible to see the same game twice unlike. There is skill expression & build mechanics that allow a player to outplay or recover matchups & adjust to the state of the game on the fly. With every game starting over at zero, you don’t get invested in building a specific character, but in mastering the gameplay which can go from micro mechanics to macro. I think a lot of folks liked it coincidentally at a time with better broadband for communications for this style of game, developers doing frequent patches to force meta shakeups & e-sports + streaming also taking off. But also a sunk cost fallacy of having invested the time to git gud not bothering to learn any game too similar.
The DoTAs and League of Legends kinda games.
Never understood the appeal honestly.
They were joking about the apostrophe in
MOBA'sSame here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:
From this I could deduce:
I’m not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It’s too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I’m familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn’t overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn’t steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.
The appeal would be with a limited albeit large set of characters, items, & rules, you can have effectively an infinite set of outcomes due to the dice rolls of teammates but also champions/heroes chosen on team. It is almost impossible to see the same game twice unlike. There is skill expression & build mechanics that allow a player to outplay or recover matchups & adjust to the state of the game on the fly. With every game starting over at zero, you don’t get invested in building a specific character, but in mastering the gameplay which can go from micro mechanics to macro. I think a lot of folks liked it coincidentally at a time with better broadband for communications for this style of game, developers doing frequent patches to force meta shakeups & e-sports + streaming also taking off. But also a sunk cost fallacy of having invested the time to git gud not bothering to learn any game too similar.