Caltrops - Defense of the Ancients - Re: The current state of MOBAs

Forum Overview :: Defense of the Ancients

by Daniel Berkhart 06/19/2016, 11:29am PDT

fabio wrote:

Awesomenauts

This was the saddest decline of the bunch. Started out an absolute blast. Simple, colorful, easy to pick up, fun, action reflex based, best community, short matches to minimize frustration.

Holy shit did they fuck it up. Starting with the expansion, it all started going to shit. Massively overpowered DLC heroes, tweaking the absolute worst map to make it even worse (AI Station should have just been flat out removed from the game), and features to make the games shorter for the sake of more watchable E-SPORTS matches. All this did was exasperate the genre's snowballing problem. Matches were pretty much decided by first blood. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say 9 out of 10 games were steamrolled by whichever team got the first kill.

Another favorite ruined as soon as the developer tried to legitimize it as a competitive e-sport.

I agree about the snowballing, but they've been changing things around lately. They assigned a dude to actually respond to people's criticism of the balance in the official forums now, whereas they always used to just pretend obliviousness despite the endless stream of complaints about the ill-conceived XP system, and said dude has been talking about toning down the snowballing. In the latest patch he actually seems to have made a start at it. It's a bit better now, I think. You can have a few unlucky deaths right away and not even feel like you're losing yet, unless your ENTIRE team dies and the enemies wreck a turret or something.

The developers do have a really weird dedication to the idea that matches must be short and that play must not be "passive". Obviously pushing, killing, and defending are all fundamental parts of the game, but these guys seem to consider most ways of defending to be bad, whereas pushing and killing are good. They use the pejorative term "stalling" to describe these bad ways of defending. Personally I find it effective and fun to defend for a few minutes (so that I will be able to turn to aggression once I've built up some strength). Ronimo often seems to think that the game should be primarily about getting kills, though--even though this is obviously at odds with the genre. The obvious way to achieve what they've been pushing for for so long would be to remove all structures and just let the game be a Smash Bros. variant, or replace them with flags and allow only capture-the-flag matches, or replace them with capture points and turn the game into some kind of king-of-the-hill variant, etc. If "passive" play and "stalling" are bad then defensive turrets are also bad, so they should be removed. But they'll almost certainly never be removed, of course. Given that, then, "stalling" needs to be accepted, embraced, and made as fun as possible.

Regardless, I think it's still a fun game. But it's definitely been ailing for a while.