Hugbees

WARNING: A large, opinionated rant coming through. Also, most of what I say applies to HoN and DoTA(2) more so than LoL.

I don't know what baffles me more, that DoTA, a piece of shit game became popular, or that every MOBA game that comes out follows the same terrible design principles without ever once questioning the formula (League of Legends tries, and while it's the best of the MOBAs in my opinion, it's not really saying much. That's like saying my poop today doesn't smell as bad as my poop from yesterday, in the end it's still shit).

So what makes MOBAs so bad? A lot. In essence, the objective of the game is solid, and the idea of these characters you level up sounds good, but it falls flat on it's face in oh so many ways.

The first thing is how long a single match takes to play. Matches in these games typically take between 30 minutes to an hour. That is way too long considering how brief moments of being AFK can screw you over, especially in DoTA 2 and HoN. So you need to A) Play a game for an hour and B) not go AFK during that time. It's clear the original designer of DoTA has no real life obligations to design a game around two obviously clashing principles like this. Imagine having to beat the entirety of Super Mario Bros without pausing, you had to do it all in one go. Yes the older games didn't let you save, but you could still pause. You can't pause in MOBAs. In MOBAs where there is a pause feature, no one will let you use it if you have to take the dog out or use the bathroom. They only do it when someone disconnects and are waiting for a reconnect, so pausing isn't viable in MOBAs.

Second is how many flaws get ported over to other mobas (I'm done with capitalizing moba, I don't respect the genre enough to care). Some of these include:

Last Hitting - This is something they decided to take all the way to the bank with, and it's stupid. The way it worked in Warcraft 3 is that the player who got the last hit on an enemy creep got the gold for it. It made very little difference in the actual game where the gold drops were minimal. I would say this is a flaw with the engine rather than the game, but they could have done shared income now that I think about it. They also didn't need to take it to the extreme and have you last hit everything possible. Creeps, heroes, buildings, you name it, you have to last hit it to get the most money out of it, but just you, not the rest of your team. I'll get into that later though.

It also doesn't help that last hitting just isn't fun to do. in league it's not so bad, but in dota and hon (fuck capitalization on these names) it's a tedious task that isn't fun to do at all. Nothing is fun about watching the monster's health bar until just the right moment, then right click on it to try to kill it. Repeat that 100 times and you have a one way ticket to the loony bin.

Denying - This just doesn't make sense at all no matter how you look at it. You can kill your own creeps to prevent the enemy from getting experience or gold from it. Imagine if I'm fighting in Iraq and the soldier next to me is about to get shot. Let me shoot him in the head and DENY the enemy the opportunity to kill him. See why this is stupid? This is the shit Dick Chaney got blasted for, so let's put it in our game! It is dota we're talking about after all, so why not make it complete shit, that was the aim here, right?

Losing gold on death - Rofl. All I have to say about this one. In a game where you can't surrender, quit without penalty (yeah you can get banned in these games if you leave matches. It makes sense but still a bit of a deterrent if you ask me), and it's easy enough to get behind on levels, let's make it so you also lose gold when you die. Nothing like punishing poor play with not being able to do anything until the match ends. When this happens, I want to leave, because I pretty much am wasting my time trying to compete with people with way better items than me because I died one too many times. Another hint that the creator of dota lives in his mother's basement, you have to spend your life playing the game to be able to avoid this from happening. You also risk getting flamed by your team, but I'll get to that later.

Hero Balance - None of these game creators know what balance is. You can't tell me Pudge is not overpowered. He has a grab that can go halfway across the map, and if you're grabbed you die. His Rot spell plus his ultimate will kill anyone, because hey, balance. Tiny is another. I can be at full health and get killed in 1 combo by him. Bullshit there's nothing I can do to avoid it. Even riot does it in league. Lee Sin is overpowered as fuck, and there are too many shitty heroes like Renekton who needs to be fed to stand a chance, or Eve who riot admitted was purposely made to be the weakest, probably to have a cover up for how incompetent they are. Of course, if you say that character is OP the person playing them will say "no he's not". I actually admit when characters are overpowered because I've done my fair share of things that I know are just so unfair. But I've never seen one other player admit it, but I'll get to that... right now actually.

Community - The worst thing about these games. Even if the game is perfect, the player base is enough to drive me away. In fact, it's why I'm completely done with mobas. I've uninstalled league, hon, and dota 2 and will not go back to them. I'm tired of doing poorly in a game and having some dumb fuck no lifer asshole yell at me for it. Fuck you buddy, that's when I either quit, rage back, or troll the game to ruin it for that asshole. The best thing to do in league when my team rages at me is to steal red/blue, go to an enemy and die and say in all chat "HEY! FREE RED/BLUE BUFF!" and watch my team's reaction. It's totally justified. If someone is going to tell me to uninstall and kill myself in real life, I have no issue trolling the fuck out the game. I don't believe in just ignoring them and moving on, the damage has been done and for me to just walk away silently is the same as letting them get away with it. It's for those reasons that I can't play these toxic ass games, and it's why I hope they friggin go extinct.


Want to play a good pvp game? Play Guild Wars 2. Battles don't take hours on end, you can't get screwed over by levels or gear because like smart people, ANet made the game based on pure skill and not how well you can last hit things.

The thing that bothers me about these games the most is how little the developers try to change the game. They don't try to fix flaws like long game times, last hitting, they just leave in all of the same Warcraft 3 engine limitations because they fail. dota2 does nothing different, it's the same exact game and that's sad. Hell, I've even heard discussions about not adding or changing certain things like aimplates for abilities because "Dota 1 didn't have it." DOTA 1 COULDN'T HAVE HAD IT! These are the same players that yell at new players for mistakes. They are the same idiots that are why shitty games like this are allowed to exist. dota was a fluke, something that should have never been and I wish wasn't.