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[Frumple]

... I could swear that's been 80% of matches since somewhere around '03, though...

[Heron TSG]

How have you guys been liking the new patch? (Meaning either 7.00+ or the current one, 7.04.) I've gotten back into tryharding at dota again, and I think I actually really like this patch. There's nothing absurdly first-pickable, except maybe Abaddon for flexibility reasons.

[frostshotgg]

It's absolutely horrid. Giving T4s regen was the worst change the game has ever had. It's way too easy to just turtle on high ground forever. Plus, the addition of shrines made carries way safer in laning so they can comfortably farm, and the halving of jungle camp spawns means that a team which has total control of the map but can't quite push hg gets way smaller of a gold advantage, especially if they don't have megas.

I've had more 100+ minute games since 7.00 than the rest of my dota career combined. I'd sooner take Hoohoo Haha over this shit. I've started banning Naga, AM, and co. out of spite. One game we had to use fucking X Marks + NP Teleport to slowly backdoor the T4s waiting a minute between attempts for bkb, and of course if bkb expired before kunkka reacted we'd have to wait another 3 minutes because NP would be dead and we need to wait for spawns, so the T4 would regen and we'd be back at square 0.

[umiman]

Everyone I know has stopped played for quite a few patches now.

I've watched some singsing games and it seems to be more of the same though. Though I've noticed he has more really long games too.

[Heron TSG]

I don't really feel the T4 regen change has changed much about the game; if you've already lost all your barracks, you either have a team that can fight mega creeps or you don't, towers be damned. The new jungle also gives slightly _more_ gold per minute than the old one, if you happen to farm every camp. That's because of the extra two large camps and ancient camps, plus changes to jungle creep bounties. I was a little unsure about shrines at first, but I think they do add another level of strategic depth to the game.

I still haven't calibrated a solo MMR, but I've managed to raise my party MMR back above 4k. That's been kinda neat; we've been fighting through the Chinese stacks that queue on USW for easy games. Usually they'll have 4-4.5k party MMR, but 5-6k solo MMR. I wish it'd balance for solo MMRs a little better, but my group has had some amazing games trying to beat stacks that are just way better than us. We've gotten really good at cheese push.

[Wysthric]

Trouble I find with Dota is Discipline, more so even than team work. If everyone in your team is disciplined (i,e, don't chase into bad situations, don't go for ganks when all enemies are missing, remember to place wards at 50 minutes) then you have a great chance, even if your carry has 200 ping. The problem being that being disciplined for a game after I've been disciplined for 8 hours in work isn't always fun.

[umiman]

I noticed there's a big thread on the Dota 2 subreddit right now talking about the game's playerbase dwindling so I decided to see what it is now.

Holy christ:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's pretty painful.

Shit's just sad.

[MrRoboto75]

>[Game] loses 30 players

G A M E ' S
      D Y I N G

[umiman]

>[Game] loses 30 players

G A M E ' S
      D Y I N G

Look back a page and see Frostshotgg trying to justify the drop when I talked about it before. That was in December.

Look at what it fell to now. Hell, even Frostshotgg admitted earlier up that the game fucking sucks right now on the current patch, which amused me to no end.

----

However, my pettiness aside, the thread mostly talks about how the game's shitty optimization and poor performace for third world country computers (aka, 90% of the audience) is driving people away.  Apparently it's so terrible that

Everytime i make a complaint about some performance issue (like my 50 fps radiant base vs 35 fps dire base) they use the flaw of my rig to invalidate my complaint. You guys clearly don't realize that the vast majority of people who play dota are from developing nations and clearly don't get the picture of what it is to live in a developing nation

Considering I used to live in Malaysia, I am somewhat aware of this problem. When Faceless Void's chronosphere literally kills an FPS from 60 to 30, I can see how people can get upset. I didn't know Dire was more resource intensive than Radiant though.

[MrRoboto75]

7.0 is one hell of a drug.

I do know that World of Tanks has largly unimpressive graphics due to most of its player base being in Russia/eastern europe, and mostly using low spec computers.  Its especially jarring when you look at the PS4 port of it, which looks quite wonderful.

[umiman]

7.0 is one hell of a drug.

I do know that World of Tanks has largly unimpressive graphics due to most of its player base being in Russia/eastern europe, and mostly using low spec computers.  Its especially jarring when you look at the PS4 port of it, which looks quite wonderful.

Yup.

What also interests me a lot, and I think a lot of people outside of the developing world don't realize, is that Dota 2 and LoL's competitors aren't on PC. They're mobile games. There are a lot of meh-ish Dota-clones in iOS that are stupidly popular. When I went back in January, I saw many of my friends just play those in impromptu LAN sessions at coffeeshops and stuff. These were the guys who used to go to the cybercafes to play Dota 1.

That's the games I see my friends migrate to. Since their iPhones are straight up way more powerful than their computers.

[frostshotgg]

Look back a page and see Frostshotgg trying to justify the drop when I talked about it before. That was in December.

I wasn't saying that there wasn't a drop, I was saying that the chart was fucking godawful for showing it. Bad math is bad math. Do you work on nvidia's graphs or something?

As it is, the game gets worse in performance with every patch which kills the 3rd world playerbase (e.g. most of dota's players) and also 7.0 added a ton of changes that sped the game way up, but then also make highground fucking impenetrable. So instead of before where if you win the game early, you're done - you now win the game early, then spend another 30-50 minutes trying to push highground and end, and hope nobody throws while you're doing it because comeback gold is insane. At least before the patch if a game went for an hour it was because it was legitimately close. Now it's just that sieging and ending is fucking impossible.

EDIT: Also, it doesn't help that Valve is pretty much content to leave anything that isn't directly balance alone forever. They put out battle passes/compendiums every 3 months and they're always buggy as shit. They haven't touched matchmaking in years, outside of the one week where they tied it to geographic location, and then immediately stopped it because how dare NA players be matched with people actually in the north american continent!

[umiman]

Look back a page and see Frostshotgg trying to justify the drop when I talked about it before. That was in December.

I wasn't saying that there wasn't a drop, I was saying that the chart was fucking godawful for showing it. Bad math is bad math. Do you work on nvidia's graphs or something?

Now now, you don't have to be embarrassed that I'm right and you're wrong. After all, I'm always right 100% of the time. Here's a graph:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[EnigmaticHat]

Its like, I want to defend this game...

I left due to frustrations with the community.  And here's the thing, I've done this before and come back.  Through watching, reading about, and playing DOTA I've learned the general outline of how ever single hero in the game plays.  The current patch threw all that shit out the window.  EVERY hero now not only plays at least slightly differently before, but they have multiple different ways they can go.  The value of experience and when it causes you to reach power peaks has changed, the way runes work has changed.  I can only assume there's been a million subtle changes to how positions 1-5 play and relate to each other, to when you should fight and how quickly games end and such.

Its just like... I'm not going back.  I can't.  I didn't learn 100+ heroes (and the 400+ accompanying abilities) just to relearn half of it.  Plus my original frustrations with the community are highly unlikely to go away.

The mentioned in the thread how people were bleeding off into OW.  This is happening for a lot of competitive games where English speaking, American players are getting siphoned off.  For me its pretty much a nobrainer.  I know so many people that play OW, that I can assemble an entire team out of personal friends I talk to outside the game, and I could host a 6v6 custom game and have every single person involved be someone I know (not that they would ever be on at the same time).  Most of these people aren't particularly gamers.  The thing is that in "first world" nations is a lot of people have good computers but don't game.  Overwatch is brilliant at pulling those people in.  It has the additional advantage that you can run it on a 4 year old laptop with an integrated chip, but it also can look very good with a "future proofed" gaming rig.

DOTA tho... I can't get anyone to play this game with me.  I literally have a hardcore gamer friend that plays permadeath games and paradox grand strategy games and has tried multiple MOBAs and I got him to try the game but he still didn't last more than a few games.  And it was actually kinda embarrassing explaining some of the game mechanics, like I started to explain to him that jungle camps won't respawn if he stands in a mostly-invisible box and his response was just a flat "wat."  And don't get me wrong, DOTA is an aquired taste.  Its an intensely skill based, intensely memorization based game that's also cooperative.  And its fine for that to be a little niche, but for a game that's mostly fun in a stack it sure is hard to get a stack going.

Basically, how many people I could get to play a game with me if I wanted:
OW: 20+
LoL: 4
DOTA 2: 0 (excepting you guys I guess but like I said I doubt I'll ever relearn how to play)

Also worth pointing out: every youtuber I watch who plays TF2, DOTA 2, SC2, or CS:GO has tried OW, and half of them are playing it fulltime now.  Even Jimben has released about as much content for OW lately as he has for DOTA 2.

[MrRoboto75]

I knew there was an exact box you couldn't be in, but I originally learned it as "If you can see a jungle camp, it won't respawn"

And OW is great and all, but in all honesty its balance these days is just awful.  70% of my games is pussy-footing around roadhog to not be instantly dead, and the rest of it is either shooting inanimate barrier shields, or shooting tanks that get healed by supports.  And every time they try to fix the boring boring meta, its by slathering the game in either mass buffs or new mechanics.