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Comment by diakritikal | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting stats and great leverage of their community by Valve. League of Legends seems to boast a much higher (in number of players but also in toxic trolls) community, but they don't have the distribution/media channels per se although online viewership of League of Legends can surpass 100k on twitch.tv

I think this segment of the gaming arena will really hot up when Blizzard release their competing title directly against Dota2 and leage of Legends.

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Blizzard's making a competing title? Heh. I'm pretty sure the creator of Dota offered Blizzard the chance to create Dota 2 back in like 2009, but they turned him away. He wound up going to Valve and they made Dota 2.

What's Blizzard's new title? Thanks for pointing that out!

Blizzard's new title is called Heroes of the Storm. It's free to play as well, but works in a similar manner to League of Legends, where there is a rotation of free heroes to play every week. If you want other heroes, you earn them through playing the game, or microtransactions. It seems to be aimed more at a casual crowd, though.

I don't know about its weekly hero rotation ( sucks ) but you are right its more at a casual crowd. Also one of the things they are proud about is the amount of time per game is not variable as in other MOBA games, rather short 15mins game is what it takes for one game.

Blizzard will only somehow succeed if they manage to get a nice casual community for this game unlike LOL and DOTA2.

Lot's of people are complaining about the people not speaking in English on Euro and US servers and trolling other all the way. Blizzard needs to keep attention on this point as their did on other games.

Unlike Dota2, Blizzard was able to handle that before because they never had to deal with issue where team mates communicate in different language.

You cannot stop a person from joining a English server if he doesn't want to. MOBA games need to be a team play and that issue is hard to solve, unless they come with a real time language transcriber/translator for in-game text chat. That tool is clearly a possible thing to do.[1]

Since thats a third party tool it isn't perfect but platform developers could work on something similar and smart.

[1] Dota2 Translator http://sletmo.com/ / https://github.com/patriksletmo/Dota2Translator

That's true, you can't stop a person to join a specific server but also speaking in different languages and not respecting other team mates is also not good for the game. This create problems and destroy the gameplay.

So there is no easy solution for this problem.

The creator of DotA (Allstars, the most popular incarnation)[0] works for Riot on League of Legends. The guy at Valve[1] inherited it. The creator of the original DotA also works at Valve, but he came and went long before Allstars blew up. (He actually stopped working on DotA to create a sequel, Thirst for Gamma, which was truly awful and never made it out of the gate.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Feak [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceFrog

>The creator of DotA (Allstars, the most popular incarnation)[0] works for Riot on League of Legends. The guy at Valve[1] inherited it.

I would argue that Icefrog's version was the most popular incarnation. It may have started off as simply an inheritance of Allstars, but Icefrog is the one that actually balanced it and made it something that was competitive. The popularity skyrocketed after Icefrog took over for Guinsoo.

Blizzard turned them down because iirc they were working on Starcraft 2 which the devs were very elitist against Dota. I'm sure they now regret it now since Dota 2 has some insane number of hours racked up on steam (more than any steam game).

I doubt they regret that decision.

>they were working on Starcraft 2

If they were then SC2 did great for the company.

1M copies were sold in the first 24hours and around 3M in the first month itself.

The expansion Heart of the Swarm sold 1.1M in the first 2days of launch.

Dota2 on the other hand is free-to-play, of course there are items to purchase in game but since it isn't required to buy to play most play the game without buying anything.

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