DotA vs LoL "FaceOff"

I was annoyed by this discussion and it's obnoxius "arguments"

I also want to state that I've played both games for a huge amount of time.

To summarise the whole "Face off" between LoL (Josh) and DotA2 (T.J.) the League of Legends "authority" raises up some questions about DotA2 in which he states that:



I Quote It's certainly not skillshots or mechanical complexity, like being able to respond to opponents' abilities. Mechanical complexity as Song of the Siren and Vacuum into Black Hole is certainly not a good argument.

I Quote I want some examples of counterplay that Dota 2 has that LoL doesn have. Other than denying (which, let's be honest, is kind of a stupid mechanic), LoL has all the counterplay Dota 2 has and then some.

Probably Josh needs an argument on why is denying stupid. Also T.J. says about the diffrence between maps, in which he doesn't bring up the treeline juking and teleporting out inside the treeline, not to mention Vacuum onto high/unpassable terrain. Able to manipulate terrain with Fissure, blocking choke points with Forge Spirit Summon Wolves. Also Josh says that it's not as intresting to juke inside unwardable areas, manipulate your path as juking in 4 max directions, against 5 players, in a high-chance-to-be-warded place.

Josh brings up another argument in which he doesn't even know what he's talking about. I quote LoL's balance and meta is constantly changing, so that a great team comp may be dominant for a few weeks, until someone figures out how to counter it, and then everyone's experimenting again.

Since when does meta-game(Web definitions
Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagame) mean picking the same certain 5 champions over and over again. And I don't remember EVER changing the Meta-Game with the whole competitive play twisting.

Josh says that I quote The Rune and Mastery system adds a ton of depth to stat tweaking and theorycrafting builds at high levels, and the matchmaking system keeps you playing with people around your same level. It is a minor penalty when trying to play with max-level friends as a brand new player, but I'll trade that for a massive boost to customization at high-level. Another win for LoL's depth.

Well, too bad that he didn't even play without his masteries or runes in a ranked game. I don't need to tell you how underpowered you are without your runes.

And THIS comes. Josh states that the stacking mechanic is a bug and should be fixed, telling that it's ridiculous to expect players to know that if they pull jungle camps far enough away from their spawn points, and the great effort you have to put to memorise the x:52/53 for stacking in any direction and x;16 for pulling the highly- godlike 6/9 creeps to the lane. This an utterly disgusting argument, and you know how to do that from EVERY SINGLE GUIDE FOR NEWCOMMERS.

Also he states that the more dynamic fights are a thing of taste. Wait, what ?! Since when does a more exiting battle, faster and more quick-thinking involved can ever be beaten.

Josh says that Riot's done a lot of help to improve the community beyond just the Tribunal (insert your own article written by them that they have actively been banning players without the help of the tribunal) in which the opposing side doesn't even REPLY, when I can think of beeing constant fixes, adding the quick-action wheel for calling misses, able to draw on the map, implementing voice chat (even tho russians are annoying) and having a mentoring system on the work-sheet.

Josh states that you have to buy tickets, in order to watch the games in dota, and in that there are free HD streams. Well wake up sunshine, dota has had that for ages. TobiWan, v1lat and many others have streams over tournaments. And the tickets are just a suppliment, where you can watch your own favourite player, not beeing necessary. And if I can remember corectly LoL doesn't even have a reply system of their own, approved and recieving bugfixes.




I just had to put it out there for how uninformed are game "debaters" and how much BS can they eat in order to get a good paycheck.

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And much more... I hate it when people try to compare these two games and end up bashing one or the other. Naturally, you will be biased to which you like more. These two communities just need to agree to disagree.

Instead of typing I quote,just use "Quote"

It's making things more dramatic xDDDD

Have to say, I don't think TJ did a great job debating. Then again, I've never played LoL so I'm not about to start slagging it off - the thing I will say is that I think denying and stacking ARE good things that add to the depth of the game. There are also a lot more skill shot based powers in DOTA that aren't really commented on - sure there's obvious ones like Meat Hook and Arrow, but a lot of unreliable stuns and other abilities take a lot of skill to use properly.

The whole debate is meh, some people like each game, people are different, etc.

League of Legends stole a lot of stuff from DotA, and all they do is rip off money from players. I don't see how that game is better. I've played it since beta and I can say it's not even 1/10 as good as DotA. People like it more because they can't handle DotA / they didn't get an invitation or they spent money in that 'game'.

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That arguement though.... it's like saying that "Halo ripped off Doom!" or "Sonic ripped off Mario!". It can be said... usually a great many times... about literally every single major genre of gaming that there is. Considering Dota's monstrous popularity, "clones" of it were INEVITABLE... just like with Mario or Doom or whatever. It's just the way the industry works. When something original like Dota comes along and is a big success, it has a high chance of being cloned.

I've never thought it to be a good arguement for, well, basically anything, and find it hilarious that it's usually only said about very specific games (Minecraft is another good example of one that gets this alot), despite OTHER games (damn near every FPS that ever was, for instance) NEVER get this arguement despite deserving it far, far more (though even in those cases, it'd STILL be a fairly dopey arguement).


That's not to "defend" LoL, mind you. I'd have jumped on that particular point regardless of what game (or even what genre) it was referring to, as that one tends to always bug me.


As for the topic at hand.... ye gods, am I ever tired of it. Listening to the two groups bicker back and forth and back and forth about which game is better and which game is horrible....sigh. I try to simply ignore it. I, personally, play BOTH of them. I like both of them pretty much equally, and which one I play on a given day entirely depends on my mood, or sometimes is just chosen at random. I enjoy both of them. Telling people this fact seems to often cause a sort of cosmic brainfart, as if they just cannot comprehend such a thing.

I dont know why people cant just live and let live, so to speak. If someone likes one game, and haaaaaaaates the other.... hey, that's fine. That's super. But there's no need to jump up and down and SCREAM about it like so many do, or just sit around bashing the other (accomplishing exactly nothing except irritating people).

Not that the bloody arguements will ever STOP though, of course. Expecting gamers not to shriek angrily at each other about stupid **** is like expecting rocks to ignore gravity. Aint gonna happen.

Well here is my 2 cents. I started playing dota back in 2004 which makes it roughly just over 9 years I have been playing the game, so yes I am going to clearly favor dota over League or any other of it's many knock off's.

That being said however a little over a year ago some friends convinced me after many months of harassing me to play League with them and finally I gave in and played it for several months with them.

Within a week I managed to hit level 30 (we're talking like 4 or 5 days of playing) and was a all around better player then the 8 or so friends I had at the time playing League most of whom had been playing since beta.

My very 2 first League games and I am not exaggerating at all I went 12, 3 and something like 16 with Ziggs and 24, 4, 11 with Volibear.

League and this is purely in my own personal opinion takes no skill to play well. You have indicators for every ability making it nearly impossible to miss unless you suffer from parkisons, you have no death penalty by way of gold loss, and don't have to worry about denying creeps.

League players hate on Dota simply because it is to hard for them and they lack the ability to get over the learning curve

That really doesnt mean as much, though. If you've played this type of game before.... and particularly played one of them alot.... and particularly played DOTA alot.... then yes, you're GOING to have a major advantage when you jump into another. To expect otherwise is.... kinda silly.

For me, fighting games are my main genre. For the ones I like, I play at a very high level. I've had an absurd amount of practice, and the entire genre goes along with my particular set of skills in general. When it comes time to learn a new one, I have a *much* easier time of it than the vast majority of players do. Many other players can take months to "properly" learn one of those... it takes me all of a couple of weeks, if that, and not a whole lot of effort, to reach a quite high level of play. Bloody braggy as that sounds, it illustrates my point: Simply because *I* find most of that genre to be super-easy, doesnt mean plenty of others wont have major trouble with it. There are many that find it incredibly difficult, even the supposed easier-to-learn fighting games. And of course, there are genres that can do that to me as well; many gamers consider certain FPS games to be very easy to learn and not hard in general, but if *I* play the FPS in question, likely the most I'll accomplish is getting exploded really often, or accidentally taking out half of my own team. To me, they're nigh-impossible. But to a ton of others, that's very much not the case.

And I have honestly wondered about Dota's difficulty... frankly, I'm not finding it hard to learn. Oh, there is ALOT to learn, and much practicing involved, and some mechanics are downright screwy, but no individual bit is rocket science. I have nothing but time on my hands, so I can afford to spend time reading guides and whatnot to learn what I need to know, and on top of that I'm used to games that are dramatically more difficult than what I'm finding this one to be (danmaku shmups, roguelikes, and insanely hard games in general are my mainstays, since I need a high challenge to hold my very limited attention, so I'm used to difficulty being very.... high).

I *very* strongly suspect that one of the central reasons that Dota is so hard to learn for most players is the very simple fact that there's very little in the way of things like tutorials and whatnot. And no, guides dont entirely count here: Many gamers are used to the GAME teaching them how to play (regardless of which game it is), but Dota has exactly squat in the way of tutorials or good teaching tools beyond "get someone else to explain or use a guide outside the game". When a game comes along that LACKS proper tutorials (or just has really badly-made ones, which is much more frequent), things can get pretty loopy for new players, particularly as the complexity of the game increases. It is good though to see that the devs are *finally* starting to add tutorials and such to the game; I've actually held off on recommending the game to many friends, simply because it'd be very frustrating to them to learn right now, and because I hate having to try to teach people stuff, which I'd pretty much HAVE to do. Once there are full tutorials in place, I can recommend it finally.

Beyond that, Dota isnt always logical about how it handles things. Look at the deny mechanic, for instance. As much as I love the game, and as much as I try to use the mechanic myself, I consider it *really* bloody stupid. That a way to hurt my enemy is to.... flatten my own troops. Yeah. Makes PERFECT sense, except for the part where NO. When I've had to explain the mechanic to friends, I usually get a blank stare, followed by a line like "that's really stupid, why is that in there?". Dota has many obtuse and archaic things about it, and it doesnt help new players learn. Hell, the deny mechanic itself is actually pretty EASY to learn. The concepts behind it and the way it's executed are simple, generally a matter of timing and paying attention and such. But the CONCEPT is so nonsensical that it actually gets in the way.

Dont get me wrong here: I sure as hell dont think the deny mechanic is a downright BAD thing ("stupid" does not always equal "bad"), and of course there are plenty of other games out there that are very hard to learn, and it doesnt make them bad either. I think it's a bloody wonderful game. I'm enjoying the whole "genre" that it's spawned, for that matter. My points though, still stand.



Aaaaaaanyway, that's enough rambling from me, heh. Just sharing thoughts on the matter, is all. I find it an interesting topic. I am pleased to see at least that there's very little arguing about this topic on this specific site/forum.... a very good thing. Talking sensibly about it seems a foreign concept in most other places.

story time

the creator of dota 1 when on the make league the person who make dota 1 balance and a competitive scene made dota 2.

Both fun game, I follow the competitive scene of dota 2 only, but that is my personally choice.

I think its good to have similar games, it gives gamers more variety to choose from.