Esports still on the rise

[Darkpriest]

i have to admit it was probably the best TI out of all, due to basically "no meta" team getting into finals. both teams had such a huge hero pool. I just wish that DC would try to throw a curve ball with a meepo pick in one of these games. Mirana pick got all to predictable by game 3

[Darkpriest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0oRbpITHcE

[Keyrock]

I just finished watching Elimination Mode 2.0 on Moonduck.  It's tournaments like this and Captain's Draft why I love Moonduck so much (and why I subscribe to them and throw them $5 a month).  99% of pro tournaments are Captain's Mode and I'm glad they are, because it's the mode most suited to finding out which pro team is the best.  With that said, I'm super happy to see Captain's Draft and Elimination Mode tourneys happen once in a blue moon, since they limit the hero pools for the teams to choose from and force them to play heroes out of the current meta.  Elimination Mode 2.0 was a particular treat since it came down to game #5 (in this mode more heroes get eliminated each game. By game 5 almost the bare number of heroes remain, mostly **** tier heroes).  It forces teams to play heroes they almost never currently play and makes for really weird and interesting games you would never see otherwise.  I mean, we got a w33 mid Lina, something that would be commonplace in 6.84, but is unheard of now.  Even more surprisingly, we got a carry Visage by Arteezy.  When is the last time you got to see Visage in a pro game?  Even LIL, widely considered the best Visage pro player ever, hasn't played Visage in ages because it's so weak right now.  Arteezy played carry Visage because there were no heroes left.  It was amazing.  I love tourneys like this that force players out of their comfort zones.

[Darkpriest]

yeah, those are fun. I do have one complaint though. US being almost as a **** tier as China to host a tournament.... the number of visa issues preventing quite a few talented players from competing and crippling their teams. Part of me wishes that all tourneys would get hosted in SEA, EU and CIS, as there was not a single visa issue or major screw up in any of these regions.

[Darkpriest]

One of the most entertaining games of DotA2 - also, hearing crowd going AAHWWOOO for the Greeks was some next level experience

 

and at the same time patch 7.00 getting released in 8h. Don;t know what to expect. going for 7.00 might be moving the game into DotA3 realms

 

http://www.dota2.com/700

Edited December 11, 2016 by Darkpriest

[Maedhros]

Been playing Dota since patch 6.30 or so. I truly believe it's the most beautiful teamgame there is. The possibilities to make great plays are endless, more so than in any sport maybe.

 

Can't wait for the new patch!

[Darkpriest]

Basically dota 3

[Keyrock]

Game 3 of the Boston Major grand final was pretty insane.  Not sure if I'd go so far as to call it the best game ever, like whoever put up the video on YouTube, but it was pretty spectacular.  Ad Finem, in their first Valve sponsored tournament, making it all the way to the grand final was also a really great story.

 

I haven't seen the new patch yet, but hopefully Icefrog nerfs the bejesus out of the SD/Luna combo.  As good a patch as 6.88 was, I'll be happy if I don't see SD/Luna again for a really long time.

[algroth]

I spent last Sunday with some LoL pro teams including Cloud9 and its sister Challenger team. Pretty swell dudes all in all, though the one that left the biggest impression on me was their Challenger toplaner, Licorice. He was a pretty top-notch and laid-back fellow, pretty humble and so on, and helped me a lot with the interview I had to do twice with him due to an audio error. The event I was at was the Logitech G Challenge, and also featured the CNB sister team (from Brazil), and two of the biggest LoL pro teams in the LAS region in Furious Gaming and Kaos Latin Gamers.

 

I'm doing a fair bit of work with a professional eSports organization here too, that being Isurus Gaming. Their LoL team is also right now bootcamping in Korea, making them the first team in LAS to do so. We'll see the fruits of that this next upcoming split.

[Blarghagh]

I will never understand how MOBAs became the posterboy for competitive gaming. Dota never stopped being WarCraft 3 for people who can't keep up with creeping their heroes and building a base at the same time. Which explains why it only took over that game's toxic cheese strat fanbase and also became the posterboy for awful nerd communities. :/

[algroth]

I will never understand how MOBAs became the posterboy for competitive gaming. Dota never stopped being WarCraft 3 for people who can't keep up with creeping their heroes and building a base at the same time. Which explains why it only took over that game's toxic cheese strat fanbase and also became the posterboy for awful nerd communities. :/

From what I've heard of pro players and other analysts and reporters, it's mostly because Blizzard never pushed the competitive scene to the extent the likes of Valve or Riot did with DotA and LoL. Or rather, they just didn't keep up with it. It seems like they're trying to promote this angle for Overwatch right now but even so their HotS competitive scene is in the dumpster, as is their StarCraft scene nowadays. Hearthstone is the strongest competitive scene they have, and even that seems to run mostly parallel to the company, from what I hear. I know for one that the owner of Isurus is opting not to make an Overwatch team based on his past experiences with Blizzard games. But I wouldn't know since I don't really follow WarCraft 3 myself.

 

As for LoL, which is what I play the most regarding competitive multiplayer games, I find that not only is it a very fun, skill-intensive and diverse game, but that it also seems to be still growing and improving at a crazy rate, to the point the game as it exists now is entirely different to how it was a year ago, and not merely in terms of balancing either. It manages to keep itself fresh and new with every patch, and that helps a lot with regards to extending the playerbase and audience's interest in the game. I'm not sure how much attention Blizzard still puts into updating WarCraft 3 and adding new content to it, if at all.

[Darkpriest]

I will never understand how MOBAs became the posterboy for competitive gaming. Dota never stopped being WarCraft 3 for people who can't keep up with creeping their heroes and building a base at the same time. Which explains why it only took over that game's toxic cheese strat fanbase and also became the posterboy for awful nerd communities. :/

 

It's a fast paced team game, and the macro skill changed from economy to map control and ability to maximize your farming rate. The amount of various skills and strategies being available in a fairly well balanced game with over 100 heroes is something that none other esport game can mimic - that also makes every game basically unique. There are literally no two same games of DotA, at worst, you will have same drafts, same people and same approach to strategy, at best, each game is unique. I am a bit sad seeing DotA 2 basically moving to DotA 3 as I feel it was in a very good spot, some minor tweaks to balance always are welcomed, but it was a well balanced game in the last patch. team based shooters are also in there although to less extent.

 

RTS games arefairly stagnant in regards of match ups and build orders. Player skill on micro is more visible though, same goes for his map awareness and general APM. RTS are top 1v1 games, shame Blizzard screwed up in this regard.

 

Team games are always more popular than solo competitions.

[Blarghagh]

This was a reply to Algroth. Typing on the phone takes too long.

 

Warcraft 3 hasn't been a thing in years, but that doesn't take away that most Mobas are still the same gameplay, graphics and even characters as WarCraft 3 hero arenas. It boggles my mind. They haven't moved since 2003 and I was bored of them then. I think it's because they're non-game easy to watch. Watching one member of a team die is as obvious as ball-in-goal. I grew up watching Brood War. I know killing five workers in an RTS is a huge play. Moba fans need people to die with their only characters to even comprehend something important happened.

 

Anyway, you're probably incorrect since everything Blizzard pushes as an eSport dies. Pushing it doesn't really make a scene. Blizz killed SC and ruined HotS by pushing it while Hearthstone was never intended as an eSport is flourishing. DotA was an eSport before Valve took it. They just advertise stuff, the community pushes it. Blizz learned from this, Overwatch launched without competitive modes and ladders, you can't push a competitive scene. CS:Go nearly died when they pushed it but they let it go and now it's huge.

 

The only Moba I play occassionally now is HotS precisely because it's not competitive as an eSport anymore, so Blizz can just add bat**** crazy stuff like that two-headed ogre and the Firelord that becomes a raid boss. Dota and Lol haven't changed in 10 years? Why not watch Fifa instead?

[algroth]

This was a reply to Algroth. Typing on the phone takes too long.

 

Warcraft 3 hasn't been a thing in years, but that doesn't take away that most Mobas are still the same gameplay, graphics and even characters as WarCraft 3 hero arenas. It boggles my mind. They haven't moved since 2003 and I was bored of them then. I think it's because they're non-game easy to watch. Watching one member of a team die is as obvious as ball-in-goal. I grew up watching Brood War. I know killing five workers in an RTS is a huge play. Moba fans need people to die with their only characters to even comprehend something important happened.

 

Anyway, you're probably incorrect since everything Blizzard pushes as an eSport dies. Pushing it doesn't really make a scene. Blizz killed SC and ruined HotS by pushing it while Hearthstone was never intended as an eSport is flourishing. DotA was an eSport before Valve took it. They just advertise stuff, the community pushes it. Blizz learned from this, Overwatch launched without competitive modes and ladders, you can't push a competitive scene. CS:Go nearly died when they pushed it but they let it go and now it's huge.

 

The only Moba I play occassionally now is HotS precisely because it's not competitive as an eSport anymore, so Blizz can just add bat**** crazy stuff like that two-headed ogre and the Firelord that becomes a raid boss. Dota and Lol haven't changed in 10 years? Why not watch Fifa instead?

 

Can't speak for most MOBAs, only those I know, but... In all honesty I'm not seeing how you're reaching the conclusion that they haven't changed in ten years. If nothing else I mentioned earlied how much progress and change there's been in LoL through the last year/year and a half. It may have started off as a WarCraft 3/DotA knockoff but it has since revamped its aesthetic, gameplay and characters and made its own thing out of it. Even now as new characters are being introduced several older ones are being reworked and given new, more diverse and unique functions within team compositions, not to mention being reimplemented into the game's lore (which, fair enough, is not what the eSports scene cares about, not I for that matter). On top of these I can't say the likes of Smite or Paragon to name some others are the same gameplay, graphics and characters than Warcraft 3, and HotS, while sharing some of the characters, is pretty clearly its own thing as well.

 

With regards to pushing a game as an eSport, I can't say for certain what it is that Blizzard is doing that is killing the competitive scene for their games because I don't follow them as closely. Based on a few interviews I did with pro Overwatch players I know they were pretty critical of the way the national rosters for the World Cup were formed, with them being a blend of pro players and streamers. This aside I'm pretty much repeating what I've heard of people I've spoken to in the business, but even so, when you look at the likes of LoL and how Riot has been pushing and supporting the competitive scene since its release, they've done a fantastic job in making it thrive, and even nowadays it still continues to grow.

 

Also the "readability" of the spectator client in top-down MOBAs certainly does help in making the game accessible to a viewing audience. Overwatch for one looks like absolute chaos when spectated, or so it seems to me. Even as someone who doesn't play Smite or DotA I still felt I had a decent idea of what was happening in the game. Of course, multiple kills on the enemy team are crowd-pleasers but they are not the important aspects of the game and the audience by now understands that. Acquiring objectives is more important and are usually as cheered, if never quite as satisfying in terms of entertainment value as seeing a full 5v5 teamfight, and the audience likewise understands this.

[Maedhros]

The only Moba I play occassionally now is HotS precisely because it's not competitive as an eSport anymore, so Blizz can just add bat**** crazy stuff like that two-headed ogre and the Firelord that becomes a raid boss. Dota and Lol haven't changed in 10 years? Why not watch Fifa instead?

 

Dota hasn't changed a lot because it's a very good game. Why change something that works?

 

They add new heroes, modes and items every now and then though. The update yesterday was HUGE. If you play HotS because of bat**** heroes, well Dota has its fair share of those. Meepo, Techies, Invoker, Rubick, Tinker, Timbersaw to name a few - all with very unique abilities.

 

There are millions of hero/item/lane setup combinations/strategies that makes the game never feel outdated or boring. There is no skill-ceiling, and pro gamers keep getting better at it. There is so much room for personal improvement, innovation and strategy, more so than in actual RTS games (and I say this as a WC3/BW veteran).

 

I know I sound like a fanboy (I guess I am), but I truly believe Icefrog is the greatest "competetive gaming" developer there is.

Edited December 12, 2016 by Thingolfin

[Keyrock]

I agree with Thingolfin, I personally think DotA is the most complicated, highest skill ceiling, most strategic game ever made.  There are so many layers of strategy in the game that it boggles the mind, from trying to outsmart the other team during the draft, masking your own strategy as long as you can while trying to predict the opponents' and blocking and counterpicking, to laning setups, knowing when to give up a lane and jungle, itemization and knowing the hundreds of interactions between item abilities and skills, skill builds, understanding probable power peaks so you know when your team should back off and avoid fights, potentially sacrificing your offlaner or a support to split push and keep the other team occupied while your carry farms up their next item.  Then there are all the split second decisions and actions you have to make in the midst of a chaotic team fight.  Proper positioning, force staffing a disabled ally to safety, manta dodging disabling abilities, blink initiating, covering your retreat, smoke ganks, using a scan to try to confirm the enemy smoke ganking, it goes on and on.  All of this constantly changes a bit with new patches that tweak abilities, add heroes, and add items, plus the meta shifts even during a patch as different heroes become popular and strategies shift to counter them.  One of the main reasons LoL became so popular is because DotA is so dauntingly difficult that there was a definite market for a similar game that was significantly less complicated and more accessible (though still fairly deep in its own right). 

[Bartimaeus]

I know I sound like a fanboy (I guess I am), but I truly believe Icefrog is the greatest "competetive gaming" developer there is.

Yeah, IceFrog...the guy who didn't even start DotA. Alright.

Edited December 13, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[Chilloutman]

 

I know I sound like a fanboy (I guess I am), but I truly believe Icefrog is the greatest "competetive gaming" developer there is.

Yeah, IceFrog...the guy who didn't even start DotA. Alright.

 

Yeah he didn't started it, but he done most of the work to push it to progaming for sure

[Keyrock]

 

I know I sound like a fanboy (I guess I am), but I truly believe Icefrog is the greatest "competetive gaming" developer there is.

Yeah, IceFrog...the guy who didn't even start DotA. Alright.

 

Icefrog may not have started DotA, but he's been the main driving force behind it for the vast majority of its history.

[Bartimaeus]

Hmph. Were either of you around when DotA (the WC3 map) was actually being developed? I was. Most of the changes IceFrog did over the years - especially the later years (think 2008, maybe 2009 and beyond) - were just little balance tweaks every few weeks to every few months (and usually only a handful of them at a time) that were so basic that *I* could've implemented them myself - literally* - and most of them were suggestions of the players. IceFrog did remarkably little DotA for a *really* long time for how much fame for it he has - one only has to look at the changelogs for the original map to see how much of a "driving force" he was. The community behind the map was a much stronger and lasting driving force than he ever was.

 

*I'm not kidding: I really could've done at least most of them myself, and I wasn't ever even that much of a mapmaker.

Edited December 14, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

You're dismissing balance tweaks like they are trivial.  Even tiny changes can have massive effects on a game with 130+ heroes, dozens of items, and hundreds of interactions between all the different abilities.  It's pretty daunting work trying to keep things at a point where a wide pool of heroes are viable at all levels of play and, while not all patches have been winners, Icefrog has done a pretty remarkable job of maintaining a wide pool of viable heroes while changing the game just enough to keep the meta from getting stale.  

[Bartimaeus]

Yes...nevertheless, I would struggle to call him the "main driving force" (I think that has to go to the community, who played it endlessly for a decade-plus, so much so that Valve eventually decided to develop it into its own game...even compared to other fantastic games, DotA is very unique for having retained such a massive playerbase...and even growing to ever larger proportions with the release of DotA 2 which is basically just a straight-up continuation of DotA anyways), and as for the "greatest competitive gaming developer" label...he didn't even develop the gameplay type (in fact, not even the original DotA developer did - these types of games were originally called Aeon of Strife clones for a reason, before they rebranded it to "MOBA" many, many years down the line). I'm not sure what it would take to get called the "best" in this area (especially since it's clearly so subjective), but I have to think these caveats make it a little bit of a stretch here: DotA (and MOBAs in general) still exist and are being developed and played for reasons beyond IceFrog's involvement in them. I'm sure he helped by making new versions for so long (even if a lot of them were only small changes), but...

Edited December 14, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[Darkpriest]

you can;t have one without the other. Icefrog proved himself during DotA days, as he build the game and listened to the feedback.. Sure as hell he had less tools to do so back then, than he has now when working with Valve.

 

To be honest, I;d call this game DotA 3 now, (i guess Valve cannot as they can only use DotA 2 term legally), with such huge changes. the game will be more focused on roaming and taking objectives. Sounds interesting with the new map.

 

The strong interaction between the community and devs of DotA is still seen. Look how much money they get from community for their "International". Sure, some patches take longer than others, and sometimes some broken things occur, but devs are usually fast to response by either hotfixing in minor balance patches or if more work is required they put certain heroes in the freezer and not allow them in tournament play, and only leave them playable in casual modes.

 

Valve even listened to the community when they eventually release custom map dev tools, etc. The success is a result of both, great dev and responsive, if not somewhat toxic at times, community.

 

I've been with the game from the start, a still remember a chore of downloading updates via a website, sometimes being kicked for no reason other than actually downloading a change in the WC3 client etc. It's been a long ride, and the game had its ups and downs (quite a few of those too) but overall I'd not change my MP fix for anything else now.

 

I've tried some other MP genres like MMOs or shooters, etc. but shooters got a bit boring - they were too one dimensional, while MMOs are pure stink as they promote grinding over skill. You don;t get much better by playing PvP in MMOs, you get vastly better by killing some random pixels that happen to drop a good loot once in a blue moon.

[Keyrock]

To be honest, I;d call this game DotA 3 now, (i guess Valve cannot as they can only use DotA 2 term legally), with such huge changes. the game will be more focused on roaming and taking objectives. Sounds interesting with the new map.

Also, we all know Valve can't count to 3. 

[Maedhros]

Before Icefrog Dota was fun, but also a mess riddled with bugs and imbalanced heroes. There was no metagame to speak of. He made Dota into a competetive masterpiece. Balance tweaking a game with that many unique heroes/spells/items is way harder than Bartimaeus makes it sound. It's pretty ridiculous to suggest that you could've done the same job.

Edited December 14, 2016 by Thingolfin