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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.

Oh yes. I must say, these days I hate playing multiplayer game modes with leaderboards attached.

Relevant to this thread: I used to play Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's LoL clone) causally with friends. Then one day a colleague dragged me into his team, full of people dozens of levels above me (and otherwise experienced progamers). That was one stressful evening where I could tell everyone hated the noob that was me. My reflexes were OK, but my "meta" wasn't.

I never played a game of HotS with that colleague again.

I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats.

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Well, the history is a bit different. LoL was created as a clone from Dota (Defense of the Ancients) mod for Warcraft 3. So, DOTA 2 is a continuation of that story and Blizzard basically recreated the mod into a standalone game and called it DOTA 2.

I do agree with the sentiment though. The community is definitively not n00b friendly and I gave up soon as well :S

Blizzard did not do that. Valve (the company behind Steam) did that. Much salt was sown around the Blizzard offices during the lawsuits that followed. Valve won.

Blizzard went on to release a remake of the game that spawned DOTA which was universally reviled, a large part of which was due to them killing incentives to build custom maps with their new IP rules designed to avoid another DOTA incident.

Armchair analysis with no expertise or special access to information, accuracy of statements may vary.

In case people are wondering, hes talking about Warcraft 3 Reforged, which is a remake of Warcraft 3. A real disaster of a release, I couldnt imagine anyone could have f* up such a beloved game worse than Blizzard could.

I know the beginning of the story, I played the ur-original DotA the UMS map for W3 (and even earlier UMS variants of the concept for vanilla StarCraft/SCBW) :). But I somehow missed the existence of DOTA 2.

The community has probably never been noob friendly. A common meme shared in the Dota 1 days (before LoL and Heroes of Newerth) was "Welcome to DOTA, you suck."

Also, I believe you meant Valve made Dota 2.

> I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats

Just for the record:

obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats

Is exactly out-thinking the opponent, and we are not even talking of a game where execution enters into play as Heroes is no Dota2, let alone SC2 or Broodwar

What you want isn't real outthinking, you want to feel rewarded for feeling like you out-thought your opponent, be it true or not

Fair enough.

I was a quite good SC/SCBW player back in the day though, and I was up to date with obscure game mechanics and unit stats and "current meta" (way before it was ever called that). Yet with all that, the game still felt like it had much bigger possibility space. Something I never felt about MOBA games.

(Come to think of it, maybe I just don't like the "team sports with strangers!" aspect of the currently popular multiplayer games - MOBAs, Battle Royales, whatever the genre it is Overwatch falls into, etc.)

It's not really your fault. Pro gamers have enough experience to be able to know that dragging a noob into an expert-level match is going to be a bad outcome.

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