I never played any of those fancy "Lord management" game before. No LoL, no HoN, no original Dota. I still have no interest for Blizz's All-Star or Smite and S MNC didn't really catch my eye until they added TF2 hats (I might be hat-oholic). But this one. This one. The UI, the graphical style, the cosmetic items. Everything to hook me, and hook me it did, like a Pudge with his ult ready. Anyone here has a beta key? Anyone annoyed by Razor as much as I am? Anyone hates those games with a passion and want to burn me for bringing it up?
I'm in the beta, never really been into this type of game before but The same things that drew you drew me. I've only played a few games but Razor really irritated me in one.
I played the orgiinal DotA game for several years (from 6.10 until 6.6ish), but I quit after I got sick of the community...there was too much negativity for me. I was also frustrated that the devs refused to add in basic (i'd argue essential) features that other similar games already had, such as votekicking, surrender votes, etc. Apparently they do have that in now, but it's still too many trolls and annoying people for me to care. DotA 2 is pretty similar to that, except now there's the added annoyance of a very dead color palette, which makes it hard on my eyes, and extremely tiny interfaces and fonts. There's lots of other minor annoyances like that. And they also do not have a basic surrender vote which is ridiculous to me. After playing LoL for two years, testing DotA 2 feels like I've traveled back in time-- and not in a good way.
Like I've mentioned before, I spent a lot (i.e, far too much) time playing Heroes of Newerth. It's essentially the same game, so I was excited when I got my DotA 2 key. After 35 hours and a string of encounters with extremely immature/negative people, I decided it wasn't for me. It's a wonderful game with friends, the community is terrible though. In saying that though, I'd be happy to start playing again if there was enough interest on these forums to form a regular steam group or something
I played a lot of League of Legends, and spent over $100 on it, too. In the end, fuck that game. Fuck it with Count Tilly's Long-range Pike! I quit cold turkey. It was kinda fun sometimes. I played with friends. Sometimes all 5 of us on voice chat. I had a lot of good times, I'm sure, but all I can remember are the bad times. What a binary game. Either you do really well, kick the other team's ass, or nothing goes your way and it's 45 minutes of continuous frustration. Most often this is because of the rock-paper-scissors way the heroes work out when fighting in lane. Maybe 5% of games were ever actually close and interesting where one team or the other made a comeback or there were some epic battles, or something interesting happened. The other 19 games out of 20 were just tedious creep farming, and lane harassment/attrition battles, where one team eventually wins the attrition fight and start pushing towers. For a while I really wanted a Dota 2 key, I was even a mod in the Dota 2 Beta Key subreddit trying to organize ways for keys to be distributed to the people who wanted them the most. I didn't even have a key myself. Then one day I got my own invite from Valve. I never even installed it. At that point I had fallen out so out of favor with the whole genre that I'd have rather gouged my eyes out with a spoon than spend another minute with these ridiculous game mechanics. Ugh... I'm making myself sick. The game was the worst sort of competitive, adrenaline junky game possible. I either wanted to high five myself after playing, or murder someone. Very little in between. You know what I started playing after I quit playing LoL? Dungeons of freaking Dredmor! 300+ hours later and I still love the game. I don't think intense competitive multiplayer games are for me. No, that's not true. I've played a lot of competitive L4D2 and it's a lot of fun. It's just something about the MOBA genre. So, N490, I sorta want to burn you, now, for bringing it up. No, not really. I'm glad you brought it up. If my experience can save even one person from the tortures of these games, then I'm glad.
(Entirely off topic. Please ignore this entire post.) I love you Glazed! You describe the experience of many multiplayer games well there. They can be fun, but why must multiplayer be a winner and a loser? Why can there never be a reasonable winner and runner-up? Why must you dedicate your life to completing a stupid match that may be against ten different kids taking turns at the controls to win, or risk losing if you get up to grab a Coffee every once in a while? DoD is fair and reasonable in 99% of cases. It can be very hard with certain builds, but it is always possible even if you are an insomniac fetching Coffee every few minutes to stay awake and finish your run without that curse known as sleep. But DoD is single player only.
Yeah, I can relate to that. Personally I only tried once, and the community is, generally speaking, so immature that it's not even funny. And it doesn't help that I once met someone who played DotA seriously in person (as a co-student, when I was getting started in the university), and not only was he an all-around idiot (suffice to say the guy was thrown out for not having sufficient points to pass after just one semester), but he was just incapable of shutting up about the whole thing; whenever he could (read: whenever he was near someone who hadn't smacked him for that already), he was constantly talking about the stupid game, over and over and etc., and if someone is rambling on about a game in the middle of a calculus lecture, that alone is enough to get the image. But then again, maybe I'm just getting too old for that...
I think the main reason competitive L4D2 is so fun is because it's specifically designed with the knowledge that 90% of everyone who plays it is going to be a griefer, and the intent to make things remain fun for the remaining 10%.
I don't think that's why. I never had too much griefing in League or in L4D2. Griefing in L4D2 can suck just as much. Ever play Scavenge and had your own teammate shoot your cans? The one benefit in L4D2 is you can kick them and a new player can join. In League, that wasn't possible and it did suck, but I don't think that's the major reason why the game was bad. I think it's because L4D2 doesn't reward winning by making you win more. In games like League of Legends, if one team gets ahead in XP then they will outclass you in lane and in team fights. And the extra kills they get send you back to base making you lose even more XP. It ends up being a landslide. Eventually you will catch up in XP because they will hit level 18 and stop leveling, but by then they already have a huge gold advantage and tower advantage. Combined with the rock-paper-scissors hero matchup (assuming you chose heroes using blind picking) some games are just unwinnable. L4D2 is nothing like this. I used to play Scavenge a lot, and regularly had close and interesting games. Sometimes your team was just outclasses by the other team in terms of skill and teamwork, and you lose. But when your opponents gets 16 cans in round 1 and your team gets 2, that has no bearing at all on round 2. Each round you start fresh, and if you get your act together you can still win the match. Comebacks in MOBA games are much rarer and the games take 45 minutes! Who wants to sit through a losing game that long? Even having to wait 20 minutes to surrender often was too much. In the end the average game experience was too stressful and just not fun.
I often have awesome comebacks and fallbacks in LoL - it's just that when you have an awesome comeback, you're like "I finally managed to carry these goddamn nooblords", but if you fallback, its "goddamn nooblords, can't carry them." You need to walk in with the attitude that you want to try something different and slam some mad bballs.
That's why I do mostly Dominion-- it's only 15-20 minutes, so there's less of that annoying wait for it to just be over if the game has been decided pretty early. Or I do AI games and just have fun slaughtering bots >_> but yeah, it does swing between extremes a lot. edit: just saw your post on L4D2. I rarely get pissed off playing it, because it's sort of like...everyone knows that fuckups happen, especially in longer campaigns. So it's more like you just laugh it off and have fun.
This is true. Survivor deaths outside of PvP are due either to bot stupidity or the Director being a prick.
To clarify my position, I walk in with something I want to do (dunk some mad bballs as Yi, or get 1k AP as Heimer, or whatever) and try to do that. If my team is crap, then I might do something funky like tank Heimer - and we've pulled back when other team messed up when I did that once, lol.
I always wanted to know if I was fireproof. Was I just lucky to be paired with people who could understand that someone was new then? Actually, from the reputation of those games, I suppose the answer is yes. I also get that the matches often (in my experience) become one-sided, and that the mechanics are arbitrary (last hits sticking out as the first example I really got stuck on). I don't know why I'm still stuck on it. Is it because it's my first contact with the genre? When it comes to being dated, it is, after all, Dota in Source, with minor adjustments and a way to make money out of it. I actually like the aesthethic of it all, but then again, I might not have spent enough time with WC3's vibrant colors to have strong memories of'em. Also, hats. I suppose we could lay Dota 2 to rest then.
Also: Going from 1-30 is the worst part by a mile. Once you get people who've been 30 for a while, you lose a lot of ragers and people who spam "faggit" in chat.
