I am writing this post in response to the 2 friends of mine who keep trying to get me to join them in DOTA 2 matches. I’ve played enough with you two, and I’m done. Before I have not been able to explain why I dislike the game so much, but I have it figured out.
Just for reference, I have played a handful of MOBAs. By all accounts, I am still a baby i the MOBA world, but I have spent 15-20 hours between the mix of them I have played. During the Christmas Sale on Steam, I tried Rise of Immortals, I have given both Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat a go, and most recently I tried to like DOTA 2. I’ve played with friends, random internet strangers, and bots. So far, I have found none of these games even remotely tolerable. While it has taken me a while to quantify my core issue, I think the problems that I have are just 2 simple things:
- The cost of getting into the game is too damn high; and
- Too often, games just become Boat-Races.
Boat-Races
For those of you who are not familiar with the sport term boat race, it is a way to describe a competition where a single player (or team) gets an early lead, and runs away with the victory, as a result of those first moments. The term originates, from the fact that in sailing, when one team pulls into the lead at the beginning of a race, the momentum they have and the fact that they are already in the “good” wind mean that as long as they do not screw up, they are almost guaranteed victory. The concept cross applies to any game where an early advantage becomes insurmountable quickly. Boat-Races become a problem in games that take time to complete, where players must wait patiently for their inevitable demise. Every single MOBA I have played appears to have a strong ability to become a boat-race.
Many games have mechanics to deal with breaking these “too far out into the lead” mechanics. Games that are less competitive give advantages to the losing player (rubber-banding), and others take no shame in players conceding their game (chess, curling). Unfortunately, neither of these mechanics can be easily implemented into an online game. Creating a rubber-banding effect will ruin any proper competitive effect of the game, as good players will figure out if there is a way to exploit the timing of the rubber band, and use it to gain an unintended advantage.
Some MOBAs do allow teams to surrender. The problem with surrender is that with a team of 5 people, if there is any disagreement on the current state of the match, you probably cannot end it, but the players who have already stated that they want it end may decide that the best course of action is to speed up how quickly the end is reached, or to just quit. Many games track how often you quit, and punish you for frequently abandoning your team, which makes people throwing the match more likely. If the match is being thrown by one player, it is almost immediately not fun for anyone (at least on the losing side). So we are struck with the problem of figuring out how to end a match that has a clear outcome without ruining the experience for some players.
MOBAs are poorly designed for new players
Too Many Heroes
If there are any serious players of MOBAs reading this, I am sure that you are currently thinking that this issue is only (of chiefly) one for new players. I don’t disagree. Because of the way that the genre has grown, MOBAs are a painfully incestuous community. The people who play DOTA probably have played LoL, or RoI, or one of the many others. They have often spent hundreds of hours perfecting their best heroes, mastering Last Hitting, and Denials. And as a result, a new player will always get raped. The first time I loaded into the DOTA 2 beta, I was totally overwhelmed by the shear number of heroes available. I’d ask my friends who to play as, and they would direct me at a wiki or name someone that matches the hero they like. More than once, I was sent to solo the mid path, with no idea what the hell I was doing. And more often then not, the other player on the mid path would get a kill or two against my not having a damn clue what I was doing. Then a few more because of their level advantage. And then they would use that to feed their carries. The game was over, I had no idea what happened, and now I had to wait for 30 minutes for everything to play out. It is just an exercise in futility. If the MOBA genre is going to become fully mainstreamed into gaming, and not just a large niche, these games need to hold the hand of a new player to help them get some concept of how to play.
To start, there are simply too many heroes available. When I am starting out, I do not have the ability to make any intelligent decision between the seemingly endless mix of heroes in DOTA 2. This is something that I am hoping Valve fixes when the game goes live. In addition to using the level system to help pick matches in a way that evens things out (lets keep the newbies with newbies here), you should have to unlock heroes as you go. More complex builds should only come in once you have demonstrated some level of competence with a core group of heroes. If you give me too many options, when one or five of them do not work out, I am going to get frustrated and stop playing.
To make these game even slightly accessible, there needs to be a much nicer low end for new players. Few heroes, less experienced players, some way to make me not feel like I am wasting my time looking into the game.
An Early Checkmate
The core problem for these games is simple. I have little to no interest in spending 30+ minutes fighting a battle that I already know I have lost. When we are 5 minutes in, and there is a hero who has leveled well above everyone else, I know that barring a significant mistake, we are in the first leg of a boat-race. Unless something happens to remove all of the momentum that one player has, he will be able to start roaming while I need to get those early levels. By the time my team is ready to start roaming, he has fed one or two teammates, and they are now launching into Team Fighting. All that is left is for us to lose. And that is what tends to happen. In exactly the same way as a chess match, the one or two early mistakes from the inexperienced players are so large that they make the outcome of the game clear. One player ends up causing the loss, and because quitting is not an option (without penalty), everyone must hang around until the fight ends. To actually make this game fun for new players, there are a few things that must happen.
- I need a way out! If I see the game is lost, I do not want to waste my gaming time waiting for that to happen. I only get so much time to play games in a given day, and waiting 30 minutes for the coming loss is not something I see as fun
- Speed up games for the newer players. When I am starting out, I do not want to spend so much time in a game with bad players, muddling through the whole process. Lower level competitive games should not take longer than 45 minutes at the MOST, with something like 15 or 30 being more common. Leave the long matches to the people who know what they are doing.
- Start me out with fewer choices. I am not flying a space shuttle here, so I do not want to spend a day reading up on the way different characters play. I want to get in and learn myself. Giving me more starting options for heroes than most FPS games have guns is insane. Sometimes I have trouble even finding the one I already used!
- Matchmaking is a Must. I am not letting any games here get away on this one. Even the DOTA beta should have some type of leveled matchmaking. Pitting a new player up with an experienced field is just like putting a random person off the street against a chess master. We know how it ends, and unless the master is a particular dick, the game is fun for nobody