DOTA 2 - Or: Valve does Blizzard ripoffs now as well!

[Padre]

Watched another game. Ok maybe I'm a little biased because dota fanboys have been praising icefrog and valve for months on HoN forums but this game really looks weird. Heroes are outright bad when it comes to art direction.

I will take my Pharaoh, Rhapsody, even fucking Drunken Master any day. Oh and Stormspirt is now mexican. No shit.

Also another game where buybacks were dragging the game out for so long I almost felt asleep.

Also how much time did those pros got to practice before this tournament? Because some of the play were poor and resulted in a total stomp.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Tried watching last night but gave up and went to sleep after a particularly long break in the stream. Didn't really see enough to make a judgement on the characters; Spectre seemed well done but clockwerk's abilities all sort of blended into the background far too easily. And the commentators are way to spastic, though they usually are. People seem to think that shouting like a 4 year old throwing a tantrum is exciting, as opposed to actual insightful commentary.

Didn't get how the players were suffering from lag, weren't they all on a fucking lan, or at the very least sitting on top of the goddamned server they were required to be connected to? Disconnects shouldn't be a fucking isssue in a million dollar tourney. That aspect was highly dissapointing.

 

[Padre]

Waching another dota2 game. 52 minutes in. 27-15. Farming farming farming. And endless buybacks. I hope they somehow change the meta before shipping because this is just too slow and dull.

 

[ChristofferC]

Wtf 1 million dollars for the winner. That's just wasteful. Does anybody even really care about this tournament?

Watching a game now. The commentators are talking through a tin can?

 

[Padre]

Apparently valve spent 1 million dollars on the prizes and around 10 dollars to set up the tournament. First two days were pretty much unwatchable due to lag and referee had to pause the game constantly. And yeah, mics are shit too, Tobi sounds really really bad.

 

[Ulminati]

Is this thing still going? I watched it on day 1 and my interest pretty much evaporated.

The preseason LoL championship matches have been way more interesting. Heck, even their Dominion stream of the new map has been more interesting than watching 90-minute TF2 ricefests.

 

[MapMan]

I agree, the art direction on heroes is really bad, like what the fuck bad. What were they thinking?

 

[Reject_666_6]

It's Valve, so people will buy it anyway. /skyway

 

[Padre]

It's Valve, so people will buy it anyway. /skyway

Sadly, it's true. Dota will have a shitton of players probably. I will try it out, sure, but after after this tournament I don't expect anything spectacular. Art is hurting my eyes. Really compare Lion to Witch Slayer. Or Leshrac/Puck to Torturer/Bubbles. It's like they wanted to copy WC3 art but gave up halfway through.

Can't wait for Dota 2 to come out though. All the retards that fap to those streams and lie to themselves that it's so action packed and awesome will be gone from HoN.

 

[Grunker]

I'm pretty fucking satisfied with LoL, and I will try HoN soon with some of my friends. Even if HoN should win me over I doubt DotA2 will, based on what I've seen.

Also, their commentators are raving retards compared to LoL's.

 

[Terpsichore]

Dota was one of the worst WCIII AoS maps, full of retardation, devoid of any balance and revolving around overpowered items.

But since it was popular and widely played by pinoys, brs and other subraces everyone is trying to jump into the dickwagon for mad $$.

 

[Grunker]

Dota was one of the worst WCIII AoS maps [...] devoid of any balance

You liked some of the other AoS maps because DotA was devoid of balance?

They see him trollin', they don't care...

 

[Terpsichore]

There were a couple of really nice maps, both enjoyable and pretty balanced.

Unlike dota.

 

[Damned Registrations]

There were a couple of really nice maps, both enjoyable and pretty balanced.

Unlike dota.

This, pretty much. Even with how retardedly overpowered certain heroes were, AotZ was way ahead of DotA in balance and interesting gameplay. There was another one I can't recall the name of that allowed an extraordinary degree of custimization on heroes as well, that was also quite well balanced with many viable options. Well, during some versions. The designer would release versions with completely game breaking balance changes sometimes. Could have been avoided with a proper testing cycle, but that requires a player base.

 

[Grunker]

Not that I like DotA (I really don't), but all other AoS-maps were so broken they were unplayable for the most part. Sure, they had way more interesting and varied mechanics, but only because that was all they had. Content, content, content with no focus on balance at all.

 

[Terpsichore]

Aotz, doe, land of legends/legends of eternity.


Aotz was both interesting and pretty balanced in the end because the gameplay wasn't item/hero based, it mainly revolved around working with your troops.

All the heroes played VERY differently, for example Greel was a spellcaster without normal attack, required being in melee range in order to unlock his full potential and had a low cooldown/high damage melee hp draining attack. He was both very frail and stupidly hard to kill, depending on how you played your cards.

Scamp was easily oneshoted by everything, but you had tools to avoid damage, hide inside minions, jump from corpse to corpse and cause massive burst damage, amazing in hands of a skilled player.

The map featured fun, variety, innovation, "uniqueness" and balance.


Doe was pretty much the same thing but focused on short games, with an entirely new array of uniques heroes.


Lol/loe was more dota-like, but without entirely useless heroes, without overpowered items and with plenty of balance as well as actually fun gameplay (items added a lot of variety while never being mandatory and deciding the game). 6v6 games with premade teams were GREAT, no cheesing, no blaming each other, no running into situations where you can't win just because the other team picked x heroes and z items.



These maps had no real playerbase yet they were leagues ahead.

 

[Icewater]

Anyone remember Eve of the Apocalypse? It had some really damn cool mechanics for instance in addition to gold there was a second resource, crystal, that could be used to purchase cool little upgrades for your hero's abilities. Hero abilities also scaled off their stats instead of just being fixed amounts. It had multiple submaps built in that you would vote on at the beginning, unlike DotA that only has the one.

Rather than getting skill points every level you'd only get them every few levels, and as I recall every skill had something like five or six levels so realistically you couldn't max every skill, you had to choose between them.

There was even an AI that would take over and play if someone left the game and it was surprisingly good. It'd chase you if you were low health, retreat if it was in danger, give its gold to other players, make full use of all of its abilities, etc.

This map wasn't just technically superior to DotA, it was also really fucking fun, but people worshiped and cloned the shit out of DotA instead of maps that were actually good, hence a large part of my intense hatred for these shits.

 

[Grunker]

Hero abilities also scaled off their stats instead of just being fixed amounts.

Oh you mean like in LoL

 

[Icewater]

Hero abilities also scaled off their stats instead of just being fixed amounts.

Oh you mean like in LoL

I don't play this dogshit, so I have no clue. They didn't scale in DotA, but that doesn't seem to stop retards from revering it.

Edit: Besides, have you ever made a WC3 map? Having abilities actually scale like that is somewhat difficult to do, so I have more respect for people who figured out how to make it work so well in the WC3 engine than I do for people who had their own engine to work with.

 

[DakaSha]

lol?

 

[Rogue]

What a foul and putrid game. Of course Valve got involved. They will smear Steam all over it for the extra flavour.

 

[sea]

It's Valve, so people will buy it anyway. /skyway

It's got Steam achievements and TF2 hats, of course people will buy it. They'll buy it for the goddamn hats and then never touch the game again.

 

[Ulminati]

It's Valve, so people will buy it anyway. /skyway

It's got Steam achievements and TF2 hats, of course people will buy it. They'll buy it for the goddamn hats and then never touch the game again.

It's supposed to be f2p though, so they cna get the hats without buying it.

It's not like a non-free DotA clone is going to have a shot with LoL having its big, fat arse planted squarely on the entire market atm.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Eve of the Apocalypse was interesting in concept, but I recall they added a particular hero that was absurdly broken to the point that it ruined the game for me. His 'drawback' was that every time you used an ability, your skillset cycled to a different set of skills. However, any moron could simply chain 3 or 4 skills into a perma stunning death combo and rape anyone they wanted at will. Given that the game placed a HUGE emphasis on killing heroes as opposed to dealing with towers or troops, having someone pick said hero and use him properly was basically a free win.

I actually miss the original AoS, it wasn't even PvP; it was 4 allied players picking hero units and fighting against a powerful enemy army with events scripted to provide enemy reinforcements at certain times and when your troops entered certain areas. Frantically rushing to defend an area where your troops were losing ground or to pick up the slack left by a dead ally (No revives, you die, you're gone) was very fun, as was doing things like rushing past enemy front lines to take out tanks or buildings for extra gold, or diving into the middle of a heavily defended nest of towers to break just one and then barely escape. I often wondered why none of the WC3 maps ever copied that style of gameplay instead. (Arguably they did with some of the hero defense maps, but those were always pretty shitty and didn't involves any cool static defenses or scripted events, or allied NPC troops.)