I agree that the professional-level strategy is about equally advanced in each game, but I was just referring to the fact that LoL is a simpler game. I’d love to move from LoL to Dota 2, since Valve’s business model doesn’t force them to compromise their game for the sake of continued cashflow the way Riot’s does, but I’m just having trouble getting past the Dota learning curve all over again.
Yes. You could fit League’s metagame on a postcard, and strategies that become popular against ‘1/1/2 Jungler starts blue’ get nerfed in patches. In Dota all the crazy features and idosyncracies and ‘bugs that are now a feature’ mean that a team can turn the game upside down with enough experimentation. Obviously League is the clear winner when it comes to the learning curve, but their professional matches aren’t terribly fun to watch.
Fair enough, I’m not experienced enough to know.
Anyway, speaking of “bugs that are now a feature” did they carry over that terrible “feature” of attack cancelling into Dota 2? Because if there’s one thing that was stupid about Dota, it was that after every damn move you had to either move or re-click or you’d be standing there like an idiot. And I really can’t see why, other than whining from hardcore fanboys, they’d deliberately recreate what was a legitimate WCIII engine bug.
I’m afraid animation canceling is still in, for exactly the reason you mention. My hope is that they’ll do this “exact replica” thing until the game is actually released, to capture the largest possible portion of the DotA community, then they’ll diverge and start to fix some of these stupid “engine limitations that we pretend are mechanics”.
We can hope.
Thankfully the designers have a good sense of perspective on this. My whopping three bot games so far don’t really qualify me to talk about this, but the controls seem a lot more responsive than WC3 did.
Animation cancelling is a good thing. It greatly improves the responsiveness of the game. If you had to wait for animations to complete, it’d be frustrating to see your hero just standing there out of position instead of reaction to your three dozen clicks to retreat. You can really see this in a game that doesn’t allow it: Dawn of War 2. You just watch your faction leader die as he finishes his 10-second kill animation. A side-effect of allowing animation cancelling is that skillful players are able to use it in order to maximum their hero’s combat uptime, which helps maximize damage output. Knowing how to maximize damage output is important to every role, but especially gankers and carries.
It’s absolutely a good thing that the game allows you to cancel the wasted “follow-through” portion of the attack animations. What we’re arguing is that a game like Dota 2, designed from the ground up for this playstyle, should never have had the wasted portion in the first place. Playing with a basic level of competence shouldn’t involve having to trick the game at literally every step of the process. It’s equivalent to an FPS where, when you empty your gun, it doesn’t automatically start reloading for you, but instead has you run around with an empty gun until you manually press R to reload. Everyone who played a lot would get used to it quickly, and when everyone did it, it wouldn’t affect gameplay much at all, but it’s a pointless barrier that steps up the learning curve of the game, which, in Dota 2’s case, is already Everest steep.
But then animations would look really odd for those times when animation cancelling wasn’t necessary, like while laning or a team fight or whatever. I don’t see how you could remove it.
Also, Dota 2 isn’t designed from the ground up for this playstyle. It’s supposed to be a perfect remake of the first game’s mechanics.
If it’s a perfect remake of the first game’s mechanics, then why even make a sequel at all?
Defense of the Ancients is a custom map for Warcraft 3 with all its archaic systems, like no VOIP, mediocre-for-2001 graphics, no matchmaking, no community management, no spectating, no stats record etc. It’s the most popular mod to ever exist. Now it’s going to have the technical features of a modern game. They don’t need to remake the gameplay. It’s been under continuous improvement since its first release in 2005.
But this is an ascended engine limitation, nothing more. For a while Icefrog TRIED to subvert it, but he was afraid of compromising Warcraft III’s stability, which would make the map ultimately unplayable. Now he FINALLY has an opportunity to do away with the stupid thing, no fuss, and they won’t. Why? Because DotA fans will take any silly thing as a testament to TRUE SKILL, because those who think it’s needless are NUBS, and will bitch and moan endlessly if a design decision is made for the sake of fun and practicality over complexity.
Yes, it has been revised within the strict confines of WC III’s engine. It was a map, rather than a mod, the distinction being that he couldn’t change the underlying source code. Now he has options to subvert any damn thing he wants, but all of the bugs that weren’t even his fault ended up ascending to “features” to the hardcore community.
Yep. There are a couple of options:
- don’t have attacks stop movement;
- Don’t allow animation cancelling (i.e., once you start an attack, you must follow through); or
- The attack only engages at the instant of its completion.
I find the idea of the “metagame”, inasmuch as it refers to figuring out quirks in the engine itself, to be intensely irritating and a turnoff to play.
Yeah, my idea of “metagame” is “Strategy A is really popular right now, but strategy B is a good counter to strategy A, so you should use strategy B. Or at least, use strategy C, which has the potential to morph into B if you discover your opponent using A.”.
Let me pretend for a second that in Dota you always had to wait for the follow thru. I’m almost certain all the fans would be playing the “No, we’re not allowing canceling, you make an attack you pay the price” card.
Dawn of War isn’t a very good example, it’s not the follow thru that’s the problem, it’s the fact that you can’t control the randomness. Much of the time your unit would attack just fine, but sometimes it randomly initiated a fatality animation which interrupted everything. Maybe if Dota had interruptible fatalities I’d agree with you, but it wasn’t the lack of canceling that sucked, it was the fact that it was a complete crapshoot about whether or not your unit would act normally or initiate its 25 minute final fantasy fatality of doom.
Note that I’m not really trying to make an argument from hypothesis contrary to fact, the point was that you can argue that either way adds complexity to play and has valid gameplay ramifications for existing. I just think that the Dota fans want it because that’s what they’re used to so they’ll use any excuse they can to keep it around. I also think that the other way would add legitimate complexity, in that it’s something you have to account for when planning your moves. Alternatively canceling just causes fake, learning curve complexity where there’s no reason for it to be there other than to make the nubs learn to click like a caffeinated monkey reflexively after every move. (imo of course)
How does the new DOTA treat the leaver issue? Having some sort of permanent, single account for matchmaking and leaving punishment alone would make it twice as good as the original.
If you abandon a game, by disconnecting and not returning within 5 minutes, you’re placed in the punishment queue. I don’t any experience with the queue since I don’t abandon games, but I’m told that it takes like 10+ minutes to find a game and everyone is a jackass once you actually do. After a week or so (per offense), you’re allowed to return to the regular queue. If too many people report you for being a dick, you’re also placed in the punishment queue and your account is muted.
I find it works very well. The Dota 2 community is like 10x better than the HoN community.
Er, may I assume that this doesn’t apply to bot games? Otherwise I’m gonna be stuck in the punishment queue forever.
Yeah, all private games are excluded.
Starting to win on Medium now. 
Skeleton King is pretty dope.