The premise is simple: you and nine other players are sorted into two teams of five. Each player chooses their own character to play from a pool. To win the game, your team must destroy a specific structure in the other team's base before they do the same to you. Gameplay gets complicated when you consider how to effectively combine the unique skills of each character, how to match those heroes against the enemies' choices, how to deny the other team resources while maximizing your own, how to counter the enemies' strategies, and so on. Matches take on average 30-45 minutes, and each match starts from zero - a fresh map, new teammates, and new enemies.
Having sunk 1000+ hours into DotA2 (no shame) and several thousand more into its predecessor, the DotA Allstars custom map for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, (okay, a little shame,) I have had plenty of experience with the MOBA scene. I've had flawless games that made me feel like the king of the online world and I've had awful games that made me uninstall and re-think my identity as a gamer. But, through thick and thin, I remained with DotA2 because games, like people, are not perfect. Even though DotA2 can be enraging at times, there is a lot of good things going for it.
Alas,
There's no excuse for poor game design that leads to unnecessary complications and dreadful playing experiences. Little to nothing can be done about the obnoxious community - this much I will forgive. As much as I hate being harassed by monosyllabic kunckle-draggers who are too obsessed with the current meta to give anything else a second look, I recognize that this is something that game developers can't control. Sure, you can implement mute options, reporting systems, punitive measures, and everything else, but you simply can't make people stop being a**holes online.
This is why engineers need to work on sending punches through the Internet...
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| "No! YOU buy wards f**kface!" |
But there are plenty of things that Riot, Valve, and S2 could be doing to deal with other very pervasive problems with these games.
I'll start with one of DotA2's most notorious mistakes: No forfeit option.
Seriously?
As I said above, a typical match of DotA takes about 40 minutes. Usually by the 20 minute mark, if the teams have been working hard, there's a definitive lead for one or the other. Now, it is possible to turn a game around when your team is behind. It is incredibly important to not lose faith just because you're down 10 kills and 3 towers. I played a game once where our team had lost all of our rax, our T4 towers were under attack, and we still managed to pull out a win. I don't mean to say it's common - it isn't. But it is possible to have an upset victory.
Now let's leave the land of hypothetical and come back to reality.
Some games don't have an "edge" after 20 minutes. Some games are all but over by that time. It's possible to come back from being 10 kills and 3 towers behind, but what about 20+ kills and 5 towers? And, while it would be great for the other team to march into your base and end it, they don't have to; they can sit outside in the jungle and wait it out. Now the game, which is essentially over due to the massive gold imbalance, is dragging on because the other team is in no rush to win.
And I can't blame them. Winning feels satisfying, and wanting to savor that feeling is natural. But while they're grinding neutrals and Roshan for half an hour in order to complete their next expensive item, 5 players are sitting around base with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for the match to end. This time could be spent playing a different match where they have a chance of winning and having fun. Oh, and should you try to leave early and spare yourself the pain of watching the match drag on? Enjoy the punitive measures - several matches in Low Priority Queue, filled with sub-par, rage-aholic players.
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| The hero I miss most from Allstars (aside from Techies) |
And the worst part? The DotA Allstars custom map HAD a forfeit feature back when I played it in high school. LoL and HoN also have forfeit features. Valve seems to be the only developer who doesn't feel it necessary to give its players the mercy of conceding matches.
However, that's just a DotA problem. There's one issue that is uniform across all MOBAs. A problem so pervasive and infuriating that it has been the cause of thrown headsets, smashed keyboards, and punched monitors.
I'm speaking, of course, about foreign language barriers.
I've lost count of the number of times I've entered a game of DotA, after queueing only for US East and US West servers, to be hailed by players in Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. For the record, I've played with plenty of non-English speakers who were stellar players and kind to boot. The problem I have with these players in general isn't that they're from outside the USA, it's that they don't speak English.
Same difference? No. Let me explain.
I queue for US East and US West not because I believe in Freedom, Justice, The American Way, and other 'Murican tenants, but because I only speak one language - English. And since I'm supposed to be playing cooperatively with 4 other players, I figure I should queue for servers where the primary language of the server location is English. After all, how can we coordinate attacks, talk strategy, or even set up our team if we can't communicate?
I'm not naive. I recognize that not everyone in the United States speaks English. And I'd be tolerant if this language barrier only popped up once in a blue moon. But for every other game to have me hitting my head against my desk because I can't communicate with my team is not a sign of diversity in America; It's a sign of a serious design flaw on the part of the developer.
Nothing like trying to go for rune and having 3 different people on my team typing things like "cyka," "nob," and "jejeje" at me.
The fix could be simple: the game server could issue a ping for each player, see where the player's country of origin is, and re-queue them for an appropriate server. Since players can already check their ping with the server, I know the capability is there. The programming wouldn't be too difficult. Hell, DotA Allstars had a third-party program, Banlist, that allowed for independent hosts to check countries of origin and latency of the connecting players. If some independent developer can work up the protocol in his spare time, certainly Valve could devote some man hours to getting players into their local servers. This would lead to better chances at communicating with our teams, and therefore, better chances of actually enjoying the playing experience.
It'd also stop me from feeling so horribly, horribly racist.
Got any gripes about MOBAs that you'd like to share? Leave them in the comments. Maybe I'll pick them up in a later blog.
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