Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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.

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'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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com