March 22nd, 2014

Why I Believe DotA 2 is an Inferior Game to League of Legends

Isaiah LOTO Peterson

Let me preface this by saying a number of things. The first of which is that the first game in the respective genre I played was indeed DotA 2. My friend was trying to get me into MOBAs and he told me to install DotA 2 and play a game with him. The second is that I am playing on a rather low-end laptop. I was only able to run DotA 2 at absolute minimum settings and even then only at about 30fps, so if any of my complaints are resolved by cranking your graphics settings then I would very much like to firmly extend a middle finger towards Valve for making their game only enjoyable at higher settings for people with better machines then I. Any problems I have with the game that could reasonably be attributed to performance Ill put an asterisk next to (*). The third thing is I dislike Valve. My first experience with DotA happened before I began to hate the Snorlax of a company and my second experience takes place shortly before this essay was written. Why I dislike the company is irrelevant and is a story for another time. My first experience with DotA 2 is a little hazy as it only lasted about 20 minutes in a match with bots, in which I played Templar Assassin. My friend whom I will name Brad for the sake of anonymity took me through the game and showed me the general idea of a MOBA, that is, destroy turrets, blow up big thing in enemy base, dont die. Initially I was very open minded as I hadnt experienced really anything in the genre and wanted to learn. About the only thing I remember from my first experience was the troubling camera and Miss Assassins incredibly annoying voice. See, by default the camera is unlocked, meaning it operates the same as a standard RTS, which for a MOBA game is VERY BAD. Since you have little need to see whats going on away from you on a regular basis, its best to keep the camera locked to your champion because thats all that matters unless something really importants going on that you really need to see. DotA 2s locked camera seems to be operated by someone on acid while taking regular swigs from a bottle of tequila. The camera (even when locked) is programmed to follow your mouse in a small area around your hero, so if you move your cursor to one side of the screen the camera will remain with your hero in the center-ish and have a bit of wiggle room to pan slightly. This is really hard to explain unless youve actually played the game but for those who have, it makes sense. Honestly, the hardest part of the locked camera was actually getting it to lock and stay locked. Brad told me that double-clicking my heros portrait will lock the camera, but DotA 2s got this retarded system where itll register 2 clicks as only 1 if theyre in too quick of succession.* Another problem with the camera is that it never STAYS locked. Touch the side of the screen with your cursor? It unlocks. Press escape? It unlocks. Enter options menu? It unlocks. Its like Valve wants every player to have exactly the same experience; a completely developer guided one. Contrast that with League of Legends ( Im just going to abbreviate it as LoL from now on), and if you press Y the camera locks on and stays locked until you unlock it manually, AND the camera doesnt dynamically adjust according to cursor position and nauseate the hell out of me.

March 22nd, 2014

The hero select blows. You get into a match and a single-file line of fully animated character portraits blast into view and for a first time player you get the duty of sorting through absolutely every single sodding one in the entire god-damned game and decide which one of the 112 heroes best fits your playstyle. And how do you determine that? Well by reading what their abilities do, what their stats are, how they contrast with other heroes, what their backstory is, their favourite breakfast cereal and the name of the uncle that touched them at summer camp last year. And normally I wouldnt mind that, I mean the more information there is on each character the more, well, CHARACTER they have. But the thing is; you know how long you get to decide all of these incredibly important factors? 1 minute and 35 seconds. Thats just over 1 second per hero. And yes, before all the rabid Valve fanboys jump down my throat, I know that LoL has the same kind of champion select too, but the thing about LoL is theyve done a few things to make it actually god-damned palatable. The first (and arguably most important) is not all of the champions are unlocked from the start. In fact, none of them are. Riot gives you roughly 10 champions on a somewhat weekly basis that are free to play for that week. So that means in champion select, instead of having 112 to sort through in a minute and a half, you instead have 10 champions that you can look at for a whole 88 seconds. Thats more than 8 seconds per champion. Not only that, but theyre arranged in a much more user friendly way. Its a big grid of champion portraits and when you hover over one it displays all of the necessary information, including their passive, all their abilities and a nice idea of what theyre best at and where they should go. This isnt even mentioning the new mechanic they added wherein new players are already given a selection of free champions that are easy to start off with until they hit a high enough level to have experienced the game and different champions, and by that time youd have accumulated enough points to purchase pretty damn near any champion in the game. This game is a clusterfuck. Thats the only real way to put it. Especially for a new player. When you get into your lane, all the creeps kind of blend together into a big green and brown blob and they really dont stick out very prominently.* Then you look at the minimap and its even worse! If its not obvious by the massive difference in quality, League of Legends minmap is the one on the left. On the LoL map, can you point out which one is Teemo? What about the DotA 2 map? Which one is Pudge? Cant figure it out? Neither can I. From my experience this game needs a MASSIVE UI cleanup and extensive work in the usability area. I believe the correct word for this is conveyance and I think thats a fitting name. Also, the screen going grey and your champion crying out in pain made you feel bad for dying, and it was a much better indicator of death.

March 22nd, 2014

After some time in my lane, last hitting creeps and denying the enemies the same, I suddenly died. I didnt even notice I was getting hit. I suppose you could tack this up to me paying too much attention to the creeps health bars and not my own, but in a game that provides feedback to the player better than DotA (see League of Legends), the screen flashes red and your health bar, which is much bigger in LoL than DotA is noticeably going down. Now, once again, this could just be chalked up to my having the game running on low, but my point is it shouldnt be. If I have to have a gaming specific PC in order to enjoy the game, or even to play it properly, then I would like to refer to my previous statement on the subject in paragraph one. Furthermore, the aiming/targeting things for when you activate an ability in LoL arent present, instead replaced with a little reticule thats shaped like 4 triangles pointing inwards. This is regardless of the ability being a skillshot or a targeted ability. Even if its a long range ability, it gives no path for the direction its going to go and no range, just where its going to end up. This makes skillshots damn near impossible because you have no idea if itll hit anything on the way or if it CAN hit anything along the way. Compare this to LoL, where clicking on an ability will show you its range, its method of attack, (skillshot, targeted, global, etc.), how fast its going and how thick the projectile actually is. This makes landing abilities a much simpler affair without making it any easier. This could just be personal preference but the lack of recalling and denying creeps just seems like the most ass-backwards mechanic to have in a game. For those of you who dont know, LoL lets you teleport back to your base at any time by pressing the B key and standing still for 8 seconds. This helps keep the game flow up so you can get right back into the action after being knocked down to 10 health and barely escaping with your life. You can just rock back over to the shop and pick up what you need and get back to helping your team before you can say couriers are retarded. Lets talk about denying. Yes, it is important to deny your opponent CS, and therefore one of the most efficient methods of gold income, but its so counter-intuitive to last-hit your own units for no benefit (correct me if Im wrong on that one), when theres clearly an enemy hero right there you could set up to attack as they go in for that extra last hit. Why would you want to decrease your own numbers anyway? This game also feels like shit to play. The abilities are unsatisfying to use as they lack the same punch and the almost euphoric sound effects to compliment them and make them feel like they have an impact. The movement feels flaccid and boring, the creeps die in a very unsatisfying way, nothing looks or feels like it has any sense of weight, hell, even the cursor kind of feels big, bulky and awkward. Its not very kinaesthetically pleasing. This, for people who dont know, essentially is the aesthetics of movement and interaction. It doesnt feel like your hero is traversing this terrain. It feels like a walk cycle is being completed and looped over a pretty looking background. Now, I dont complain about this in League of Legends because the game doesnt try to pass Summoners Rift off as a real place. Its a fictional battleground. It doesnt have a day/night cycle, and it most certainly doesnt look certifyingly fucking beautiful. Yes, DotA 2 looks absolutely amazing (in the few seconds before I dropped my settings to 0 anyway). The trees look like actual trees instead of plastic, the environment looks real, the characters are well modeled for the most part and the effort Valve put into making you think youre in a real place is stunning, which is why its so jarring when you see a character just gliding along the incredibly well modeled terrain. It doesnt look convincing. It looks like the character model is completely disconnected from the place theyre walking on. Again, LoL doesnt try to fool you into thinking it takes place in an actual world, so it can get away with it.

March 22nd, 2014

This could be considered a nitpick, and Ill keep it rather short because of it, but the team names always bothered me. Now, I dont know about you, but when I hear the team names are the radiant and the dire, I immediately think good and evil respectively. I different DotA playing friend of mine whom I will name Mark told me theres a lore reason behind it, but he didnt know it because he never bothered to look it up and therefore neither shall I. It creates this weird scenario in which youd have good heroes fighting alongside evil heores while on the dire side to defeat a team made entirely of evil characters whore on the radiant team! What kind of lunacy is that? Its like having Luke Skywalker and Han Solo teaming up with Darth Vader, Boba Fett and Captain Piett in an Imperial Star Destroyer to defeat the menace that is the Gungans whore entrenched on Hoth. Do you see how this makes absolutely no sense? In League of Legends, however, they just keep them as blue team and purple team, distinguished by their health bars, the color of their minions and the color of their base. A common misconception is that theyre Demacia and Noxus from the lore, but theyre not. This makes it a lot more sensible when Garen will one minute be fighting alongside other warriors from Demacia and then two hours later hes cracking skulls open with Draven on the other team. See, theyre not lore teams. Its like Blu and Red in TF2. You dont swear allegiance to Red team any more than youd swear allegiance to the color purple. You can be on any damn team youre summoned on and in the lore the champions just have to deal with it because thats how it goes in LoL. So much for keeping it short, huh? And at last we come to the final stage of my game of DotA. Now keep in mind this was a custom game with bots that Brad and I started up to get me used to the game, so Im lucky this didnt happen in a ranked game or anything. About 15 or so minutes in, I was moving down my lane when suddenly a window popped up saying Ive been disconnected from the game and returned to the main menu. WHAT. So youre telling me that DotA 2 will disconnect a player for no readily apparent reason and send them back to the main menu with NO WAY to reconnect? In a MOBA? Not even HoN does that! I presume theres some sort of punishment system for leaving a game, especially a ranked one. Imagine if this happened a few times in a row and you got banned. How awful would that be? You just sunk hundreds of hours into this game and because Valve cant run their servers properly all that time is now gone forever. Now this is a pretty extreme scenario, but from what Ive seen online this seems to be a pretty common problem faced by a lot of players. Now, every game will occasionally disconnect you, even LoL, but the difference here is that League does NOT let you immediately launch into a completely different game after you quit! Once you disconnect, the only option is to reconnect to the game you left. You cannot browse the shop, you cannot spectate another game and you most CERTAINLY cannot play another game. You also get a temporary time ban and a stern warning as well as the knowledge you just screwed over your former teammates. Well thats pretty much everything I have to say on the subject. Hopefully, youll have some sort of constructive criticism of my opinions or maybe even correct me (politely) on any facts I might have gotten wrong to help broaden my understanding in the event Im mistaken on anything. Im open to your CONSTRUCTIVE feedback, whether positive or negative. This was a pleasure for me to write and, even though I left some things out such as the ugly characters, the characters themselves having, well, not much character at all and the mess of a main menu the game has, I feel my point was delivered quite well. At over 2661 words over 4 pages I think Im done.