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Star posted:Who’s the best tank and why is it stitches Johanna
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Jan 7, 2024 13:57
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 19:26 |
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Mind over Matter posted:Valla IS both strong and popular.
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Jan 21, 2024 19:20
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After playing this, Dota2, and SF6 quite a bit recently, i'm honestly stunned how bad the ranked online experience in HOTS is. I love HOTS, it can be so much fun, but man with some perspective I can finally see how shockingly bad the online experience is. It's grueling, slow, frustrating, forces you to play unwinnable matches, and feels way too obsessed with assigning people a correct rank than with having fun. SF6 is an example of fantastic near-perfect online play. Ignoring if lag is good or not, the flow is incredible: You start any single player mode, training arcade storymode whatever you want to do, and turn on matchmaking. Then you just play or practice while the game matchmakes in the background. After around 30 seconds, you'll have a match. A match is 2-3 minutes, and you can rematch until someone has won a best of three matches. And done, and you're right back where you're left off. On top of that, the rank system is A M A Z I N G. There is an MMR based system - but only once you've reached Master rank. Before that, there is a much simple easy-to-understand ranking system. You gain rank every around 1000 points, you gain 50 points per win, and lose 40 points per loss. Also winstreaks grant bonuses. This means people on average are climbing until they lose 60% of matches, climbing goes really really fast if you win, etc. The only improvements I can point out are the menus can be a bit more fiddly than i'd like and the custom room UI is overcomplex, but they still only take 30-60secs of your time. So I am always having fun, always doing something, and always feel like me climbing is due to me training harder and winning more matches, and bad laggy trolly etc matches are rare and just 2mins long and then I can quit. My fate is always 100% in my hands, it feels like. But sure, it's not a team game. Right? Aaaaand now let's get back into HOTS. I lost my three ranking matches this season due to trolls and leavers and the game catapulted me from Silver 5 to Bronze 4. Due to some hidden MMR value being low, I am currently gaining 25 points per win, and losing 250 points per loss. This means i'm stuck in Bronze 5 trying to boost some hidden loving value until the game is allowing me to climb ranks again. Do I need to win 1 match? 10? 100? 1000? I have no loving clue! Once I get a match after 3-5 mins of waiting staring at menus and the shop because thats all I am allowed to do while queueing, we get into draft which takes forever. In DOTA2, everyone bans at the same time and it takes 10 secs. In HOTS there are 6 ban rounds in total where each can take up to 30s, meaning 3mins sitting around waiting for people to pick a ban. Each hero pick is also alternating turns, which also takes forever, while in Dota2 hero picks are simultaneous and you just get to redo it if two teams pick the same char. Ok so now we in match and someone is raging and decides to rage quit and troll. Because the game hard punishes leaving, many people stay in match and just gently caress around instead, wasting everyones time. But if they decide to leave, well, my next 30 mins of my lives are in the trash bin! Because there is no system that allows anyone to leave the match! What?? In DOTA2 5mins of a player disconnect makes the match safe to leave. While here, i'm just stuck! If I don't stay around clicking around to move my character, I get disconnected and punished! This means 30% of matches are a complete loving waste of my time! Which brings me to the XP system and gameplay in general. In Dota 2, the above match would actually be at least winnable! Because one lane would allow one hero to get twice the XP with your ally gone, you could at least hope for that hero to get fed and start ganking and winning the game. It's happened a few times! So there is no reason for me to give up. Also, Dota2 premieres individual player decisions and skill much more than 5v5 team glomps, meaning even as a bad player I can win a game with a few good decisions and not loving up. In HOTS though, XP is shared, so a member leaving means we're just hosed. We're getting a harder time picking XP balls, they contribute to team XP so we are not gaining a level advantage anywhere. Also, the game is designed to force team fights early and often, and solo ganking is a lot harder for a multitude of reasons including the lower damage and abundance of heals all throughout the game including a full heal every 90s that is just a 8 seconds walk away. This means my individual decisions matter a lot less, and my ability to turn around a losing game boils down to almost nothing other than landing a perfectly executed big ult combo or hoping the opposing team has dumb players that expose themselves one at a time. While a skilled player can easier turn around a losing game, your ability to do so is an order of magnitude smaller than DOTA2. All this means, in Dota2 I feel like I am always having fun and fighting for a win, and even in 4v5 near unwinnable matches than can stretch to 45+ mins I can still always identify "man if I had just did that or that instead I could have actually won" while in HOTS I feel like I repeatedly get stuck in games I can't win or games I literally can't lose, leaving about 1/3rd of games boiling down to games where my skill matters and the rest to just letting the numbers machine torment the 10 (or 9) of us until it decides we can move on with our lives. It suddenly feels a lot easier to understand why this game died and I am a lot more content with it. Bisse fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 10:06
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I mean TF2/Diablo/WoW has little ESports to speak of and still have like a neverending fanbase of a bazillion players, and there are more MOBAs out there other than just DOTA2 enjoying decent lives without insane ESPORTZ funding, so I feel like if the game was genuinely good it would not have suffered that massive drop after the artificial billionaire injections ended. EDIT: Or to put it like this, if the entire Dota2 pro scene died today, Dota2 would still have a significant playerbase for years to come just due to it being a Fun Game in its own right. Bisse fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 10:14
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Star posted:I have no issues with the rest of the points you bring up (although I don’t agree with all of them), but this sounds a bit strange. Placement matches almost never make any real difference to your rank. You might go up or down one rank (e.g. 4 to 3 or 5) but moving from S5 to B4 shouldn’t happen, even with three losses. Was the S5 rank from way back? I was around plat 1/diamond 5 back in late 2019 and when I jumped into SL again this spring I got placed around S5. I had spent most of last season hovering around B1 and finally ended on S5. Had about a 2 week gap in between.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:52
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Chakan posted:The funny thing is that Dota2 has been adding some of that stuff & moving (vaguely) towards a closer experience. There’s a system that gives you bonuses to choose from as you level, sometimes it’s stat increases but other times it changes an aspect of a talent. They’ve added runes that give gold and XP & an item that gives XP to the user (and the team member with the lowest XP?) and there’s a couple objectives that move/give non-xp rewards, incentivizing people to leave lane and do big team fights. This is true but they have also made the map bigger. So there are more things to do that are clearly good but also you need to decide which is worth it when and who does it. And one player making good calls help turn a game. Conversely being caught out of position is even more bad than before because of the increased distance to safety. You rarely see 5v5s until the late game. However in HOTS, the map routinely asks the entire team to 5v5 over an objective. Sometimes it makes sense to ignore objective and go back to lane, but the game is often about whole teams moving to one or more pings on the map. Things like small map sizes, mounts, nearby forts, and support that poo poo heals out like diarrhea help discourage other styles of play. There are macro decisions like what is more important early game, a fort a camp or a kill etc, but the game just really wants you to 5v5 basically all the time. In Dota there are often multiple possible decisions with clear pros n cons and either is fine, but in TotSQ when spiders drop you are either there defending against the spiders or you are losing your team the game. Bisse fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 13:24
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 19:26 |
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ARAM is fun
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Apr 14, 2024 13:44
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