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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch.

It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...

As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.

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MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor.

If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time.

If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping.

I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).

I think one big reasons why RTS are having trouble is, that loosing in an RTS, as a new player, can be one of the worst experiences in gaming (not counting player toxicity): you just spend several minutes, maybe a lot of them, playing this game, you finally got your T2 fab, and then the enemy nukes you with his experimental artillery and you are just gone. No way to understand what exactly went wrong. To slow? Wrong build order? No clue! Might you just mismanaged the harvester and you economy suffered early. Compare that to a shooter, an (a)rpg or a racing game. They might be as hard to win, but at least you have a clear understanding of what happens. He saw you, he shot you. She just had the correct breaking point figured out and you hit the wall.

Ofc it’s not always that clear cut and there is a lot in between these examples. But in my experience, RTS and maybe strategy in general, can be really hard to understand what went wrong, even on a basic level.

MOBAs are, imho somewhere on between. High skillcap both in regards or game knowledge and strategy, but also in agility, but also somewhat readable. Sure, you might wonder why your gorillas punch did way less damage than their gorilla, but a look at the KDA or their gear might already give you a hint.

So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and games becoming more and more expensive, the small community that actually enjoys RTS isn’t really „worth“ that money.

> Compare that to a shooter

I wouldn't claim they're quite so opaque, but Quakelike FPS games have a similar problem. They appear to be about shooting, but in fact at least 50% of the game is resource control (and even the combat itself is more nuanced than a new player realises). So when you're a new player losing to an experienced player, it can be super confusing and demoralising. Confusing because you probably don't realise why they are dominating you so hard and what you can do to stop it; demoralising because even if you persist and improve in one or two areas, it'll barely make a difference to the scoreboard. (You've improved your aim and learned to time items? Great, but the other guy knows the maps extremely well and can move around them far quicker than you, knows exactly how to position himself in a fight and when to use each weapon, dodges in unpredictable ways while predicting your own dodging and firing patterns, and so on. Meanwhile your newfound realisation that the armour and health items matter, and increasing ability to keep track of their timers, is making your routes through the map more predictable.)

I've definitely had similar feelings in Half Life 2: Deathmatch. I'm particularly fond of "low grav high kill" servers due to the fast pace (the low gravity enables a lot more movement around the map, and the "high kill" - i.e. weapons buffed / health nerfed such that getting hit by anything results in instant death or close to it - ups the stakes). Unfortunately, such servers often feature "sniper" maps, wherein players "in the know" will scramble to find the "hidey holes" and repeatedly slaughter any of us unfortunate schmucks.

It got to the point that on such servers I'd protest by refusing to use guns at all and used a crowbar and grenades exclusively. Not sure if anyone really took note of what I was protesting against, but it sure got me on top of some monthly crowbar kill leaderboards :)

Oh, tottaly! I was not trying to make a point that shooters do not have complexity at all. They do, even something as blut as CoD (I guess?). But especially for things Quakelikes or Team bases games like Rainbow 6 Siege theres a lot to be learned.

Also AFAIK shooters don't have full post-game replays ?

> I think one big reasons why RTS are having trouble is, that loosing in an RTS, as a new player, can be one of the worst experiences in gaming

Famously one of the Default Taunts on Age Of Empires 2[0] is *You played for two hours to die like this?*

[0] https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Taunts

But can't but agree with the general angle, MOBA's in general are less punishing to players at a deep psychological level, StarCraft 2 "suffered" from what the playerbase called "Ladder Anxiety", which was players simply unable to deal with loss and loss aversion as a consequence of them tying their own ego and self-worth to how well they fared playing StarCraft, to the level that Blizzard on one of the expansions had to release a mode where players simply would not lose MMR/ELO points from loses nor earn them on wins, a ranked-less mode and that alleviated a considerable amount of pressure

> So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and games becoming more and more expensive, the small community that actually enjoys RTS isn’t really „worth“ that money.

Yeah, this is very much the case, at least for large AAA productions and companies, tho AA studios such as KingArt Games or Sunspear Games have been making inroads into creating new RTS titles which make me very happy as an avid RTS fan

> But can't but agree with the general angle, MOBA's in general are less punishing to players at a deep psychological level, StarCraft 2 "suffered" from what the playerbase called "Ladder Anxiety", which was players simply unable to deal with loss and loss aversion as a consequence of them tying their own ego and self-worth to how well they fared playing StarCraft, to the level that Blizzard on one of the expansions had to release a mode where players simply would not lose MMR/ELO points from loses nor earn them on wins, a ranked-less mode and that alleviated a considerable amount of pressure.

This doesn't sound like we disagree at all. Although I definitely felt that ladder anxiety in LoL, I never would have thought about playing SC2 or WC3 ladder. Even watching these games I dont feel like I understand whats going on in detail. For some reason that felt "better" for MOBAs. But that feeling might very well be biased cause I played more MOBAs then RTS in total hours.

> tho AA studios such as KingArt Games or Sunspear Games have been making inroads into creating new RTS titles which make me very happy as an avid RTS fan

Oh yeah, reminds me that I still need to play some Iron Harvest...

They could just have played team games only in RTS and achieved the same effect of being able to shift the blame onto their teammates ?

Can't speak for every RTS and MOBA, but losing in Dota takes 45-60 minutes (30 at best depending on the current game balance) and feels pretty horrible. And it typically takes hundreds of hours of gameplay to be good enough to even understand why you lost and what you could have done to fix it. Relying heavily on 4 teammates makes it that much more demoralizing, especially when you know that a "good" player probably could have won even with the 4 bad teammates.

Losing as a newbie in Starcraft and AoE feels way less bad.

Yeah, you are totally right, the time factor of losing in MOBAs (I persoanlly played a lot of LoL in the past, and tried some DotA and HotS) pretty much defies my argument in that regard. But when I compare that to losing in Civ (not RTS, but strategy in general), I think I had a better feeling for why we lost.

And it kind of fits in the scheme, as MOBAs are, in a broader sense, at least partially, a game of strategy. Not nesassarily when you start as new player, but winnign consistenly also takes thinking ahead a lot. What risks to take, which weakness to exploit, what item to buy. Theres a lot of just in time decisions to make, while also keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Maybe MOBAs are just "direct action" enough to cater to a wider audiance, but strategy enough to share some of the same problems?

I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.

These were my exact thoughts about CS vs Quake back in the days. Quake had no downtime, all action while CS had time between rounds or just tense moments without anything actually happening. I think this dynamic was an important point behind the success of battle royal games too. An all action game is like an action movie without a moment's pause - it just doesn't work for most people.

Yup this is more important - in starcraft you will lose a game you almost completely won if you stop context switching for a few minutes.

On the other hand you can abandon starcraft game at any moment with no consequences and it doesn't last for 50 minutes. If you got toxic teammates in DOTA you are pretty much stuck with them for almost an hour.

I think this also plays into the human reward pathways. More variation in intensity means more spikes of adrenaline and dopamine.

I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing, playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who didn't play competitively.

This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.

RTS originate from single player where you don't even need balancing: it's perfectly fine if there is a winning move, the joy lies in discovering that winning move and exploiting it until you happen upon a level that introduces a counter, providing you with the nice riddle of what the next winning move might be. The balanced multiplayer variations, though far more impactful once computers started to be connected, always seemed a bit "is that still fun?" to me.

I think this is a really important point. Solo RTS is very engaging even if you actually suck at it. The layers of complexity required to be good are basically unfathomable unless you grind against competitive players and understand the various local maxima of the metas.

Competitive RTS is very stressful. I would say, more stressful than other competitive games as mistakes, or rather, the absence of great moves, compounds quickly into a disadvantage.

You ignored itemization and counterpicking in MOBAs, which is like ignoring build orders, army composition and macro efficiency in starcraft and just focusing on microing your army :)

I was in the same camp when I only played RTS games, but after my friend got me into dota I have to admit there's a lot of depth there that I wasn't aware of.

Also the win conditions are much more obvious in RTS games, just after I switched I had no idea that pulling, stacking, wave cutting, denying was important. Also the vision battle is more involved in MOBAs.

> after my friend got me into dota I have to admit there's a lot of depth there that I wasn't aware of.

But that's kind of the point: you don't have to be aware of it to have a good time. Sure, all of that stuff matters in competitive play, but it can still be fun to just run around killing things if you don't know what you're doing. On the other hand, seeing artillery blasting your base from afar and having no idea what to do about it is really demoralizing.

FWIW, I think this applies more to Dota 2 than it does to LoL. I haven't played the latter in many years, but I remember it being much more rigid and cookie-cutter strategy-wise than Dota, and the micro decisions mattered a lot more, which meant that sub-optimal play was more obvious. In Dota 2, your poor item build can still win the game with a single good team fight or just generally better awareness.

I don’t think it’s just skill. They’re also primarily team based.

If you win, you can feel really good because you had a 17/2 K/D. If you lose, you can blame your teammates. You can also play with your friends. With starcaft even though team matches are supported, they are unpopular, and there’s no easy way to look at the stats for the game and feel like a badass if you win.

Team games are quite popular in StarCraft Brood War - not only 2 vs 2, but often 3 vs 3 or even 4 vs 4. In fact the 3v3 and 4v4 games were usually played by lower skilled players, due to the relatively lower skill cap and relatively random results (at low skills win or lose depends more who you get on your team than your own actions).

Brood War also has custom maps with relatively crude, but still use programming (loops and triggers) that allowed players to build thousands of various custom maps. MOBA genere and (probably) tower defense comes from StarCraft Brood War custom maps. There were many other categories (e.g. bound maps, puzzle maps, control maps) that are poorly represented even nowadays.

In Zero-K big team games are called "lobsterpots". Also "big" starts around 5vs5 :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al3jvLYsmHI

I really don't think the MOBA comment works for Dota 2. Its not really about the characters, its about the map, position, and timing (itemization + push timing). The characters are important, but frequently people pick meta characters and get bopped. This wouldn't be an issue if dota had new people playing the game, but I want to say that dota is at this point filled with people who have been playing for a long time. So, you'll see people who at low levels just destroy people with characters that are supposed to be bad because they just know where to stand and abuse the map or creep aggro. Its wild.

Just as a specific example. If you take two teams of equal MMR and one had all the character counters so they "should" win. If the team with the better characters doesn't know how to pull the safelane, they will just straight up lose. Full stop. They will get gold starved and unless the other team throws (which is very common lol) they should lose.

Also, losing like this in dota is anti-fun. Its really not a good time for like anybody, the winner of the loser. Its just one team dumpstering another and it happens at all levels.

> specific type of gunship-based commander sniping

I see someone's played Supreme Commander. I love the game but it's the archetypal example of what you're talking about: winning depends on detailed knowledge of dozens of different units across four factions and simultaneous maximally-efficient economy building. Building a tutorial for it is impossible. It's only playable by the sort of people who will read wikis and watch videos and lose and lose and lose until they have some idea what's going on.

This causes the other problem with RTSes: the (small, dedicated) community has been running for fifteen years and is incredibly unfriendly to new players. Having less than ~150 hours playtime is often grounds for being kicked from games, which doesn't help expand the playerbase.

Unfortunately, RTSes simplified enough to avoid these problems aren't nearly as fun. The genre just works better as a community passion project than a commercial enterprise.

"I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad."

One day maybe there'll be games with just one move... just to dumb games down to the lowest common denominator and not leave anyone out.

Check out Divekick. It's a 1v1 fighting game with two moves: Dive and Kick. And it's got a very high skill ceiling. :)

This is just hungry hungry hippos.

As much as I loved it, Assassins Creed had a combat system like this.

We’re getting close! PSO2:NGS has a button for “Simplified Movement” which will trigger whatever attack it deems appropriate at the time.

Nidhogg and One Finger Death Punch come to mind

surprisingly a good amount of depth from just one move, if played right

This is not necessarily a bad thing, there is beauty in simplicity. Take Downwell for example. It's surprisingly engaging for a mobile game with only 3 on screen buttons.

> I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).

Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.

Also, MOBAs give you that team play experience, which reduces the amount of weight/pressure on you as an individual. 1v1 ladder anxiety is a huge under-appreciated issue and one of the things RTS's can do to avoid it is a bigger focus on team PvP.

MOBAs are far from the first genre of video game that are easier to learn than RTS, so I’m not sure you’ve explained why MOBAs specifically have put competitive pressure on RTS. Is it just because MOBAs look very superficially like RTS games, with a top-down view of fighting units?

MOBAs were invented as RTS mods. For example, DOTA 2 is the successor to a Warcraft 3 mod.

I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort.

That's a big initial bite to get down.

I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through.

But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go.

I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.

But you don't have to know any of that straight off the bat, because you have other players on a team to rely on. You can play with a friend who'll carry you if need be. SC2's relentless focus on 1v1 is a huge detriment, and it seems like the entire RTS genre has decided "well, that's what we do".

Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health, armor, etc.

To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"...

Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.

Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies, but that's also offset by most abilities having a geometric component to how they're targeted or have area of effect.

Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game.

There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).

> There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along

But that's something that MOBAs can do that RTS games can't. Which is another reason why MOBAs ate RTSs lunch. I'm not sure why you're focusing on win rate when there are plenty of people who play MOBAs who are quite frankly garbage at the game(s).

RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring.

You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.

Yep, although there are now new games which kinda balk the trend - Iron Harvest has a pretty good SP campaign, Total War series is still going strong with its SP focus as well.

SC2’s co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It lacks much strategic depth, but it’s still surprisingly fun if repetitive.

MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft.

I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.

Zero-K is a surprisingly good free (open source), community driven RTS. When you look past the dated graphics, it gives you a deep TA style game that tries to also give a few quality of life features to reduce APM count a bit. It's not for everyone, but it can be a lot of fun.

Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.

With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.

> If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.

That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos.

That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.

You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.

I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :)

Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.

If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been growing over the past year with the release of the definitive edition

I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.

I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes).

RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop.

If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.

Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved.

I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.

> It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...

This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.

The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3 games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful and annoying.

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