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Comment by gnufied | Hacker News Reader

For the uninitiated:

Dota2 is a massively popular AAA game created by Valve which just came out of beta yesterday. The game is known to be difficult to play and master.

Why Linux release is important: Valve released Steam for Linux couple of months back but apart from TF2 and other Valve titles, Steam for Linux is picking up pace very slowly. Even games like TF2 and L4D are more or less last generation titles. Dota2 on the other hand is brand new, it uses all the new features from source engine and hopefully is capable of pushing Gaming on Linux like no other title.

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Dota2 is also the by far currently most played game on Steam, being 4 to 5 times more popular than any other. See the link below for some statistics.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

How does it compare to League of Legends?

League of Legends is DotA with training wheels. Basically the original DotA started the genre, and LoL strived to take what they deem "anti-fun" mechanics out of the game. Good examples would be denying friendly creeps / towers, lack of stuns and CC, and the inability to dive towers early in the game.

Another main difference is that League of Legends has scaling magic damage. Because of this, spells are significantly weaker in the early game (due to the fact that you can get items to boost their power as the game progresses). There are no +magic damage items in DotA, so spells are significantly more powerful early game but become less effective compared to auto attack damage as the game progresses.

I'm probably fighting windmills but here it goes: DotA did not start the AoS genre which is now called MOBA. In fact the first AoS map was the map Aeon of Strife, made for StarCraft. There were tons of AoS maps before and tons of AoS maps after DotA. But i agree when you say DotA mad the AoS genre popular even though there were other very well known AoS maps beside DotA (EotA, AotZ, DoE, ToB, AoS GT, etc.).

I think you're understating Dota's influence. Its predecessors were tiny blips in comparison. Dota professionalized the genre and had huge popularity, which was only limited by Blizzard's poor infrastructure and support. Many people wondered why Blizzard didn't embrace the mod that far surpassed the popularity of its own games (the answer is probably "WoW"). League of legends took it to the next level with the infrastructure the genre needed.

I hate it when people say LoL is Dota for kids. Even though LoL started as a Dota rip off, removing "hard to master" mechanics from it, LoL added new and fun mechanics and made a unique team game, hence becoming so popular.

Are Dota pro players also LoL pro players? No.

Is it joke time? You do know that 90% of the LoL pro's were Dota 1 pro's right? May want to look up your facts before making bullshit up.

bit of nitpicking

>Good examples would be denying friendly creeps / towers, lack of stuns and CC, and the inability to dive towers early in the game.

this applies to denying creeps/towers only. there are lot of stuns, snares, slow in LoL. also - tower diving early in the game is a common thing.

>How does it compare to League of Legends?

The biggest different between Dota 2 and LoL is pricing model.

Dota 2 is free. Really free. You have access to 100+ heroes from your first game and there isn't a single thing you can buy that has an effect on winning or losing a match. It's all skins, alternate announcers, and other stuff just for fun.

LoL is free... to play. There are a set of heroes that are free at any given time which is constantly rotating. You have to pay to unlock heroes permanently or can unlock them very slowly over time. You will never unlock everyone without paying money. There are additional other systems you have to level up, or can pay to level more quickly, that provide small bonuses to character attributes in game.

This effects more than the price.

For example in Dota 2 one of my favorite modes is "Reverse Draft" where each team picks the OTHER team's heroes. So you try and give your opponent the worst team you can think of. Something like this is impossible in LoL because every person only has access to a small set of heroes.

Well, this gives the false impression that you have to pay to be competitive in LoL. Which is far from true. The only thing that can be bought only with money are: skins, name changes and transfers between regions. The things that make you actually stronger (runes, levels) can't be bought directly with money. You can spend money to accelerate your's account XP progression (by a factor of two). But that's irrelevant for first account, as it's not the account that is the limiting factor - I'm pretty sure any very good player can make a level 1 account and beat me hands down using it, as I can beat with a level 1 account a person who just got max level with XP boost.

After all, we talk about a game where you have over 100 champions with completely different skill sets, over 100 in-game items to buy, all creating a huge array of possible plays and counterplays... That at the same time requires split-second reflexes, maintaining map awareness and, the hardest part, good teamwork.

Nobody is saying you can spend a lot of money and suddenly be able to beat a "very good player." Instead, you can spend money and gain a competitive advantage.

Actually my main problem with LoL is that you have to spend money to access champions. In DotA I'm used to having access to a huge complement of heroes, and a common strategy is choosing heroes specifically because they are powerful against the enemy team (counter-picking). In LoL it's a lot harder since you only have like 20 (or fewer?) heroes available.

Paying for champions is paying for additional content -- content that's free in DotA 2.

>Actually my main problem with LoL is that you have to spend money to access champions.

No you don't because of Influence points. Playing games acquires you IP which you can use to buy champions. All champions can be bought with IP

Oh. Well, that mitigates my complaint. Just as a matter of curiosity, do you know how many games are needed to unlock every champion?

They won't reply to this, because it's rumored around 6000 games to unlock them, since they keep coming out with new ones.

That's true, but you also don't need (or usually want) to unlock every single champion. Most players have at most 20 champs they're really good with and will typically play. There's also the new mode they recently added, ARAM, that will randomly assign you a champion from the pool of all champions. Playing ARAM gives you the opportunity to try out other champions for free, and if you decide you like one of them you can spend your IP to unlock it.

The total cost of all champions available right now is 443100 and the average number of IP per game won is 110.5 and 72 for loss. This gives a total of 4855.9 games at 50% win rate. Sounds high, but you may still need triple of that to actually know how to play all those champions ;)

No, you don't have to pay to be competitive in LoL. But a lot of players don't want to be competitive, they just want to have all the options of the game available to them (which they never will unless they pay money).

I don't agree that not owning all (or many) champions hinders your gameplay or skill cap. People have reached the top 10 with a single champion.

Runes on the other hand, do allow for slight advantages during a game. They're also free (as in, you can't even buy them with real money), but once you've gathered an amount of in game currency (Influence Points), you have to choose between using those IP to buy runes or champions. So while everything that's able to give you an advantage in the game is free, those investing real money will have a wider range of champions and/or runes sooner.

It is feasible to unlock all the champions without paying money: the metagame evolves constantly and the pool of really viable champions is not nearly close to them all.

League of legends is probably the most mass market online game running right now when considered worldwide, except perhaps for World of Warcraft - and at this point I think it probably easily dwarfs WoW.

"As of October 2012, Riot Games claims League of Legends has over 32 million registrations and averages 12 million players worldwide per day;[5] global concurrent users online regularly peak at over 5 million players, as of March 2013.[6] In July 2012 Xfire released a report stating that League of Legends was the most played PC game in North America and Europe, with 1.3 billion hours logged by players in those regions between July 2011 and June 2012.[48]"

In terms of gameplay, many regard the original DotA game as more hard-core compared to League of Legends. Champions in DotA generally have higher burst capabilities, which can punish mistakes harder. There's also the concept of denying minions, which add another element of micro-management to the game.

League of Legends on the other hand add a bit of depth to the genre by giving customisation options to champions outside of the main game (runes, masteries, summoner spell). The learning curve should be smoother, as people need to reach level 30 on their "summoner" (account) before they can enter ranked games. They also need to "buy" at least 16 champions on order to participate in ranked games. This will force the player to learn a bit of the game before entering the competitive scene.

Currently League of Legends is definitely the most competitive MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game around and Riot invests heavily in keeping it that way.

MOBA gets my award for worst initialism ever. It's hopelessly meaningless, as it describes everything from WoW to PBEM Chess.

Agreed. According to wikipedia, it is also known as "action real-time strategy (ARTS)." That's marginally better, but I'd guess that'll never catch on.

The ARTS name predates the MOBA name iirc, but the ARTS term was unpopular because it's plainly obvious that they aren't RTS games and they were only called that because they fell out of the modding tools for Blizzard's RTS games. Ironically the existing genre they resemble most is ARPGs since they're basically ARPG gameplay and progression mechanics in a team vs team setting, but people get grumpy when you bolt the term "RPG" onto something with no plot to speak of.

Well, they are descendants of RTS games in that they retain many mechanics and conventions of the genre.

IMO, that's really what makes DOTA/clones uninteresting to me - an interesting and strategic action game saddled with a non-relevant RTS interface.

To answer your child post. There is SMITE a third person MOBA. First person MOBA wouldn't work as well because you couldn't see your character do the cool move.

https://account.hirezstudios.com/smitegame/

I wonder if there are any FPS-adaptions of MOBA/ARTS/DOTA? Maybe a Call of Duty/Left for Dead/Quake mod?

Look up 'Monday Night Combat'. Devs like to experiment by mixing and matching genres, so in my experience things like this often exist somewhere. It was a pretty average game, but the idea is sound.

http://www.savagexr.com

It's a RTSS Real Time Strategy Shooter sort of thing. It's an FPS game that is sort of like a strategy. Not really any of those, but sort of close.

If the bots would not crash constantly, it might do for me. I would like some more strategy for the commander and a game mode which works for few players in a LAN.

I've been trying to think of a better name, the best I have so far is TTD - Team Tower Defense. If you have a better idea I would love to hear it.

Tower Defense is already a genre, where you build towers to prevent enemies from reaching a goal, so unfortunately this name won't work.

I would argue that Dota is just tower defense which predates the common form of tower defense made popular on mobile phones. There are towers, creeps follow established patterns, and the creeps attempt to destroy those towers. That's tower defense.

I find it quite adequate : there's a lot of similarity between a DotA match and a WoW (or any MMO) arena match.

IMO, only initialism worst than MOBA is ARTS.

The gameplay is very similar. League of Legends is heavily based on the original Dota but with different characters and slightly different mechanics where Dota 2 is a port of Dota 1 from a Warcraft III map to a standalone game.

I personally prefer Dota 2 but it's largely subjective.

The biggest difference is probably in business models. While both games use micro-transactions Dota 2 only sells cosmetic items, League of Legends requires you to buy (either via $ or points earned in game) access to champions/heroes.

Also, in LoL, you unlock runes the more you play(or masteries, can't remember exactly). These give small bonuses (e.g. +4% attack speed, turrets do splash damage). This means that people who have played the game more have an advantage in terms of stats and also champion choice. As mentioned, DotA 2 only sells cosmetic items, or access to streams of events. This means that the game itself doesn't change whether you're new or experienced. You have access to the exact same heroes, and no extra bonuses.

>This means that people who have played the game more have an advantage in terms of stats and also champion choice.

untrue. you can get full rune page quite fast (~ month). and once it's done, there's no disadvantage anymore. if you play smartly from very beginning, you can get that done around lvl 30, right when you are allowed to start playing game competitively.

also - champion choice is not that important. especially in low level. and it's better to learn few champions thoroughly than "gotta catch em all" and being good at none.

however, you don't often play with people with a large rune advantage or disadvantage.

runes also let you massage a champion a teeeeny bit towards your preferred style of play for a character (defensive or offensive).

I actually really like the marketing of not offering all champions directly, KNOWNING that you can acquire champions without money but with points you get from playing the game.

When you start playing LOL you have to choose from, I think 6 different champions? Which is pretty limited but let you master those 6 before changing them the next week to 6 new champions. I learned the game without problems this way.

DOTA2 let you play with all the champions directly, oh boy was I lost and still am 200hours of games later. I only play "random" so I can learn every hero but I still haven't played 25% of them I would guess.

Also I know many friends who bought champions on LoL, I think it's a very good source of income.

Well then u have never played original DotA then, most veteran/hardcore DotA player i know never play LoL for this reason, and also other reasons such as changed game mechanics and game points benefit. It removes the originality and thrill of DotA from the game, thats why we rejoice as Dota2 came out, and we played dota for almost 8 years.

I'm talking about a new players point of view, and even for a veteran of DotA coming to LoL, he doesn't know the champions so he would have to learn them. And I think the method of changing the default champions every week is a good way to do that. Just my 2 cents.

* Access to all 100+ heroes at the start, no need to purchase heroes.

* Much higher level of polish in terms of graphics, animations, voice acting, music, sound effects, ambiance. It has the Valve touch.

* More varied hero play styles, lane formations, and overall build and game strategies.

* Items are much more varied and there are many more items that have abilities.

* Higher skill cap.

League of Legends has about an order of magnitude greater number of players. However, Dota 2 has until recently been in open beta, and League of Legends came out years earlier. Although the beta keys are essentially obtainable for anyone, the extra step in obtaining said keys may be enough of a disincentive for many people to not play.

Source for LoL numbers: http://www.riotgames.com/articles/20130312/700/league-legend...

"open beta" is a bit of a misnomer - if you didn't get into the selective invite phase you had to buy a beta pass for $30. Later on (I'm not sure if dota 2 was already the most popular valve game at this point) people with accounts were given a large number of invites to give away. Now that it's been released, dota 2 is free.

Valve (or whoever is responsible for the beta keys) was giving out a huge number of keys to some gamers. One of my close friends received 32 (!) beta keys, if I recall correctly, a few months ago. He gave one to everyone in our circle of friends.

Not only that, but I told everyone who was interested (myself included) to apply for an invite, and we all got one a few days later, so it was definitely rather open to play.

The price of invites on the Steam Marketplace has been about $0.03 since January (and there were several bots that collected invitations and handed them out to applicants).

League of Legends was made with complexity/difficulty != fun in mind.

It's easier to master mechanically, but I feel it is all around a much better made game. For one, it actually runs smoothly. This could just be my PC, but super lowest settings and custom config on DotA2 still runs sluggishly, while LoL is very responsive and satisfying to play.

Gameplay-wise, DotA is very cutthroat in that a single hero can go rambo and 1v5 the other team if he gets out of control, while LoL generally allows you to come back if you play smartly with your team. The item shop in DotA is terribly confusing, but I suppose you'll learn it if you play long enough.

The only negative things I can say about LoL is: the leveling system and runes/masteries, while helping new players ramp up to competitive level, seem to take a long time to fill out to get on par with a "normal" player. DotA 2 allows you to jump in straight away on the same level of play and with all heroes available. You have to unlock champions in LoL (it takes a while if you take the free route as most do).

TL;DR - LoL is a polished, simplified, beautiful take on the MOBA genre that DotA popularized. Hardcore DotA fans will call it easy/noob-friendly/etc, but in reality it's just different and in my (biased) opinion, better.

> Gameplay-wise, DotA is very cutthroat in that a single hero can go rambo and 1v5 the other team if he gets out of control, while LoL generally allows you to come back if you play smartly with your team.

The same thing happens in Dota, too (especially if you play smart). The game has very good comeback mechanics. If you're losing you'll be fighting closer to your base (so it takes less time to buy stuff and to go back and heal), you'll probably be around your towers (so you'll have additional firepower), you'll also have better vision and a position on higher ground (same as in real war - higher ground = better position to fight), you'll probably be underleveled and respawn faster if you die, so you can come back into the fights faster, if you kill the higher leveled enemy you get a LOT of gold and experience, etc.

1v5ing in Dota only happens in very low level games where most people don't know the game and their characters. Sadly, many players don't know it and think it's Quake or something :)

> Gameplay-wise, DotA is very cutthroat in that a single hero can go rambo and 1v5 the other team if he gets out of control

Well it only happens if there's too much of a skill gap between the 1 and the 5. The same exact thing would happen between an experienced Quake 3 player vs 5 noobies.

Actually, same thing happens in LoL too.

It's quite fun running around with fully stacked: mob boots, infini, lich bane, mejai, occult, rabadon Shaco

and finishing game with score something like 25/2/whatever

Agreed, and league of legends managed to 'removed' this feature thus preventing the actual fun and competitiveness of Action RTS, i conclude that league of legends are of new players that come and go, play a few games and then left, while DotA/dota2 players are the opposite.

Dota 2 on my PC runs pretty smoothly, I do play it at lower settings as higher setting and bloom gets distracting.

Dota 2 is really hard to get around for beginners as compared LoL. But once you are use to it, believe me it is much much better.

As the case of Rambo, it is really a team effort to make one carry hero be given farm and experience, that's the motive of the carry class here for late game.

I single well fought team clash can easily turn the table around. I have won many games playing smart with other team being overpowering. So there is a chance most the time to comeback. Valve has cleverly created suggested items for each phase of the game very well for an easier shopping experience.

I think valve has done a really good job in bringing Dota 2 with perfected balancing.

That all said I think the individual opinion is mostly affected by the game he has played more and start to love the characters and feel of the game.

I found the gameplay of LoL to be a bit stale and DOTA2 much more dynamic.

Also, 'buying' champions to play with did not sit well with me at all.

Edit: Also, yes, LoL was made to run with much lower-spec PC's than DOTA2. That being said, DOTA2 has much higher levels of polish when it comes to characters, voicing and environment.

League has a lower skill cap, generally lower in complexity and mechanics.

One assumes the fact that it just launched is partially responsible for that. We should see it take a more stable, but lower, position in the next month.

Dota 2 has been the most popular game on Steam for a while now, and with the gradual rollout of beta keys the number playing has been steadily climbing - you can see a graph of the number of players on steamgraph[1].

[1]: http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&jstime=1&appid=...

No, it's been the most popular Steam title for well over a year now. It's been several times more popular than the second most (usually Team Fortress 2) for quite some time as well.

Furthermore, even though they've just announced that they've come out of Beta, almost none of the new players have been invited in yet as they're inviting people via waves.

Once all new players actually get in, and Dota 2 opens up in other countries such as China and Korea, these figures will skyrocket by several magnitudes - probably well overtaking World of Warcraft in number of players.

Partially responsible, sure, but DotA has a very dedicated fanbase, stretching back to the days of the first DotA map in Warcraft 3. Also, it's a game that offers huge replayability, meaning the current number of people playing the game will likely stay stable, if not increase.

Dota2 being the most commonly played game on Steam has been true for several months. During which time it was "Beta", not that it was hard to get your hands on a beta key.

It didn't really just launch though, its been called beta but in reality it has been released for a very long time.

"created by Valve" I should add to this, DotA2 was developed within Valve but DotA has been around since 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

I wouldn't say it's difficult to play, you get the jist pretty quick, but yes it is hard to master as there are a lot of good/seasoned players and takes a lot of time learning all of the playable characters skills. It's really fun.

If you assume a company doesn't want to port games, but decide to support linux at the beginning of their development cycle, we'd really need to wait a few years for proper titles. That is making the assumption they are interested right now though, which is less than likely.

However, there are currently many indie games available for linux. Even some well-known hits, like Kerbel Space Program and Surgeon Simulator (by chance, they both happen to use the Unity engine, which natively includes linux support).

Just out of interest, what was the timeline for OSX steam like? I don't use a Mac, so I'm not sure.

I know that their Linux initiative is a recent development, but if they want it to succeed, they really need to get more current generation titles out there. I play Counterstrike: GO, its the only reason I still use Windows. Instead of wasting the effort to port Counterstrike Source, they should have put those resources into porting the latest version.

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