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[IronyOwl]

IIRC there was a game like that, but I forgot what it was called... oy. It's probably dead now. Hero Line Wars for Warcraft 3 and Dota 2 is something sorta like that, where you play as a hero (an original set in the WC3 mod and the Dota set in the Dota 2 mod) and try to fend off creeps sent by the enemy team as you send creeps yourself; sending creeps increases your income which allows you to send better creeps (and buy items, of course) and so on. I'm not sure about the status of WC3 Hero Line Wars, but Dota 2 Hero Line Wars is alive and kickin'.

Interesting. I'll have to check that out, though I recall playing WC3 Hero Line Wars and not being terribly fond of it.

Preschool Wars and similar might have been closer to what I'd like. You could build all sorts of things in theory, but since single, strong goons and defensive emplacements were one-time investments and troop producers gave constant returns until destroyed, there was a strong tendency for it to turn into creep waves rushing each other.

Also worth mentioning was Hold the Line, which was sort of an arena-wave hero thing, but the waves that came down were purchased by the other team who was fighting the goons you bought to trash them. Obviously not very MOBA-ish, but it had heroes fighting monsters while thinking of what to throw at the enemy.

I tend to be fairly fond of indirect combat in general, I guess.

Also still functionally a WC3 custom map and sucking on the teat of a decade+ old engine's limitations. Just like DotA2, for what that's worth, and frankly the majority of other AoS knockoffs. As Salmon noted, the AoS knockoff field hasn't so much stagnated as freaking fossilized, to the vicious detriment of the general concept's potential.

... though yeah, as with SG, I still hold out the vague hope someone, some day, will pull their head from file miles inside DotA's cloaca and actually do the play style justice. S'not today, but perhaps one day.

...Yes, that's the entire point. It's a remake of a WC3 map. Made to be functionally a WC3 map. Dota 2 is still a remake of Dota, which is a WC3 map.

Dota 2 Hold the Line probably has an excuse in wanting to be a port, not a full-on project, but that's one of the things that's always bothered me about Dota 2 itself. One of the stated reasons for making it into a full new game was getting out of that quagmire, and then what do they do? Port it over entirely, complete with the laundry list of 30 different ways damage can be applied and prevented. If there's non-legacy reasons to do that, I haven't heard of them and the distinctions aren't communicated outside specialized discussions on the matter.

[Putnam]

That wasn't one of the stated reasons for Dota 2's development at all:

Valve's approach to Dota 2 is unusual in that the gameplay itself is remaining almost entirely untouched. "Our first reaction is to assume that [design elements are] there for a reason," project lead Erik Johnson explains. "IceFrog is one of the smartest designers we've ever met. He's made so many good decisions over the years in building the product. He virtually never makes a decision that doesn't have some reasoning behind it and a way to pick apart the logic behind it." This approach means that Dota 2 basically is DotA-Allstars with new technology.

DotA-Allstars' roster of 100+ heroes is being brought over in its entirety. The single map games take place on is functionally identical to the one that you can download for free today in the Warcraft III mod. Items, skills, and upgrade paths are unchanged. Some hero skills work slightly better due to being freed from the now-ancient Warcraft III engine, but Dota 2 will be instantly familiar to any DotA player.

But this is off topic.

[IronyOwl]

Mm, I could have sworn they mentioned that somewhere, but it'd be ancient if so.

But even if not, my complaints about clarity stand; if there are really, really good design reasons to have seven different types of damage and unique effect/immunity interactions, they should probably still communicate that information in-game instead of on the wiki.

And yeah, mostly off-topic except as it pertains to League being much better about that sort of thing.

[SalmonGod]

I feel like you're deluding yourself, season 1 was probably the time when the game was most heavily balanced in favor of offense.

I started playing before Season 1 - the week that Akali was released.  I distinctly remember it because the friend who was teaching my wife and I the game was kind of a jerk and couldn't resist trouncing us with this assassin.  I couldn't understand on my first day what I was supposed to do about this character that could fly most of the way across the screen and insta-gib me. 

Looking up a timeline now, I thought there was more time from when I started playing to the beginning of Season 1... maybe it feels longer because I played very heavily at that time.  But I definitely remember that after they started pushing for LoL to become its own professional sport that they also gradually pushed for the game design to be increasingly fast-paced and harshly competitive.  I hated the game when I first started, but stuck it out for social reasons until I got good enough to keep up with my friends.  Then I was happy with it for a while.  Then I grew to hate it again, as I found the playstyle that I fell into as both viable and fun for me felt like it became impossible to pull off anymore. 

If anything, my delusion may be failing to account for graduation to higher levels of matchmaking, but I definitely remember watching defensive items and abilities get continually nerfed while offense was continually buffed for a long time, back when I was into the game enough to read all the patch notes.  On the other hand, you may not be accounting for how much the game changed over the year-long course of Season One, and making a blanket statement about that entire period based on what it was like at the end.  Regardless, I remember many epic 60-90 minute games, many of those coming back from the losing side of a 3-1 difference in mid-game score ratio, and my fully built 100% defense Mundo being evenly matched in a duel against a fully built 100% offense Yi.  I finally got fed up and quit (aside from ARAM), probably somewhere around halfway through Season Two, because those things just stopped happening altogether.

Think of it this way. Everybody is godmode. Then which team wins? Whichever one can siege harder. Nobody will die except in a minute long full on engage, and even then the most eventful thing likely to happen is Banshee's gets popped a bunch. The game turns into a grindfest where everybody knows who has won already, it's just an hour long formality as your inhibitor turrets lose 100 every wave, and 25 fucking creep waves later you maybe finally get a fight, but nobody dies and it is a sound defeat for your team and they take an inhib. The next 5 minutes are the enemy team cautiously approaching your nexus turrets, getting 1 or 2 potshots off at the turrets, maybe destroying 1 turret before having to kill the inhibitor again, eventually after far too long finally managing to kill your nexus. It doesn't matter if you get the jump on them and start a fight heavily in your favor because they can just disengage and go heal and continue sieging, and even if you kill them, what are you going to do? You maybe take an inhib and baron before they respawn, they stall out the game a bit then resume their previous dominance because it's purely a matter of teamcomp and who can waveclear better at that point.

I understand what you're saying, but you're relying too much on hyperbole to make your point.  Making gameplay more forgiving isn't the same as everyone is godmode.  I think that major consequences should be the result of major mistakes, not the result of stepping a few pixels out too far a split second off-time.  And in absence of major mistakes, advantages should be limited and result in slow advance.  I recognize that this is a fundamental difference between us in what we see as fun, and I've debated this enough to understand that what Riot is doing isn't necessarily bad game design because lots of people like you enjoy it.  I just don't believe that it's the only way this genre of game can be balanced, and it's frustrating to me that the majority of players do. 

Where you see that as wasting time delaying the inevitable, I see it as allowing opportunity for the disadvantaged side to compensate.  I'm not a quick-thinking tactical or precise reflex-type gamer.  Instead, I methodically test boundaries and develop a strong intuition and flow for navigating and pushing those boundaries over the long term, and I'm good at applying that to action games.  I like to play snipers in FPS - normally the favorite of ultimate twitch gamers.  In my case, I get a feel for the most opportune positioning and land shots by reading people's motions, putting my crosshairs a half second ahead of them, and releasing the mouse button when they walk through it.  Back in my Quake days, I would get a feel for the movement of hot spots around the map and develop a route for picking things up and hitting encounters at the right times, often landing rockets in doorways just as people were walking through them without even thinking about it.  And in early Season One of LoL, I would get a good feel for how many hits I could take and how quickly I could build myself back up to take some more.  Out-sustaining my opponent was my preferred style, and I was also amazing at letting myself get worked down to low health, drawing my opponents into a tower dive, popping Fortify, and walking away one hit from death.

I guess the crux of my style as a gamer is I rely heavily on intuition, which is built on initial exploration of boundaries.  If the game design doesn't allow for some forgiveness of mistakes, then I am pretty well fucked as a player.

[Putnam]

Mm, I could have sworn they mentioned that somewhere, but it'd be ancient if so.

But even if not, my complaints about clarity stand; if there are really, really good design reasons to have seven different types of damage and unique effect/immunity interactions, they should probably still communicate that information in-game instead of on the wiki.

And yeah, mostly off-topic except as it pertains to League being much better about that sort of thing.

The main thing about that is that almost all interactions there are regarding magic immunity, which is only given by one item and a few skills (two off the top of my head, and all the skills have the same particle effect with different colors to show what they're doing). It barely comes up at all except in a few fringe circumstances.

EDIT to stay on topic: While League seems to want to have as few of such things as possible, which (while making the game easier to learn) removes a good chunk of the variety in the game (especially since, from what I've read here and heard from my brother, many many skills are straight-line projectile skillshots to the level that he didn't know that a skillshot could be anything but).

[Flying Dice]

That's not entirely true, Putnam, regarding skillshots, both because there are a fair number of champions who either have distinctively shaped skillshots (Diana and Malzahar both come to mind) or whose "straight-line" projectiles have a unique quality (Ziggs, Ahri, Liss, &c). Even champs like Lux or Xerath whose entire kits are built around skillshots aren't just a set of straight-line projectiles with no dynamic mechanics. Actually, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single champion with more than two abilities that are straight-line projectiles (except for Ezreal, heh), and there are a large number who either don't use skillshots or don't have any of that particular sort. Granted, they tend to be noticeable, but most of them are what they are because they're stuns/binds, which are probably best kept in predictable patterns, given how much a stun/bind that lands can affect a match.

In other words, most of the straight-line projectiles are either hard CC (Lux Q, Morg Q, etc.) or high damage (Lux ult, Nid Q, etc.), both of which have very good mechanical reasons for being linear and relatively easy to see coming. Like, imagine if there was a champion with a stun that had the same curving structure as Diana's Q, that'd be absolutely absurd to have to deal with.

[Putnam]

Since I'm used to playing a game where most stuns are unit-target and only avoidable if you can disjoint it or dodge somehow, it doesn't seem too ridiculous to have a stun shaped like that

See Sven's Storm Hammer. That projectile is homing and causes an AOE 2-second stun on hit. It cannot be avoided except by giving yourself magic immunity while it's heading towards you or disjointing.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, there are things like that (see: Taric's stun, Ryze's bind), but I think that the common consensus is that "no-save" hard CC is only really acceptable when it's relatively short ranged or someone's ult; skillshot stuns/binds give the potential for longer range catches without being absurdly OP. Or in other words it allows for more counterplay.

[Cthulhu]

But what  counterplay happens when counterplay counters the counterplaying counterplayer with some counterplayed counterplay?

Personally I think we need more on-target CC.  There's so many get out of jail free cards in the game and right now it seems like that's only going to get worse.  I couldn't be impressed by a Lee Sin video if he jumped out of the game and punched the enemy player IRL.  Yasuo's dashes are ridiculous, now Lucian has infinite dashes too, it's silly.  It's all about that flashy reddit outplay shit.

Also there's so many god damned ranked smurfs in the level 20-something normals.  Pretty much every game is decided by which team has the better smurfs.  Last time Gold 2 lucian vs unranked level 20s, but I've seen D1 Rivens before too (that one I got fed as fuck off a dumb Katarina mid so it didn't matter)

[Flying Dice]

There are only a relative handful of inbuild cleanses in the game, and the way things flow, getting hard CCed is going to mean death unless the enemy players are completely out of position. Yes, there are more than enough dashes and jumps, but movement doesn't keep you from being locked down and melted unless you can actually use it well -- that's not 'get out of jail free', that's 'execute a jailbreak'.

I hate to be harsh about it, but if you can't land a Blitz grab/Karma snare/Lux binding/whatever, then maybe you shouldn't be playing that champion. High-skill plays oriented around those abilities happen more often than the flashy movement plays, and they're often more of a game-deciding factor than someone outplaying their opponent in a 1v1 or 1v2. :/

[Putnam]

I hate to be harsh about it, but if you can't land a Blitz grab/Karma snare/Lux binding/whatever, then maybe you shouldn't be playing that champion. High-skill plays oriented around those abilities happen more often than the flashy movement plays, and they're often more of a game-deciding factor than someone outplaying their opponent in a 1v1 or 1v2. :/

Wow, people are bad at Pudge (his Q is basically Blitzcrank's grabby thing AFAIK) in Dota (and he's the most popular hero in the game!) and that game doesn't have nearly as many movement options as League tends to.

[frostshotgg]

To be fair, Dota in general has a lot more confounding factors. Like your allies getting in the way. With skillshots like Blitz's Q, it's a matter of you being able to predict your enemy correctly.

[Jopax]

Did you guys try the doombots?

I have...


HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!?!?!

Edit:

And fuck Annie, with a flaming tank if at all possible, that little bullshit spewing bitch.

Edit2:

AND WE FUCKING WON WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

All it took was a backdoor and some intense pushing while the rest of the team was amusing the bots in our base

Also fuck Lux and Morgana too, INFINITE SNARES EVERYWHERE!!!!

[Skyrunner]

NA doesn't have doombots yet~

[Frumple]

... doombots? Is that what I'm thinking that is (CD-reduced and/or less bots)?