"Why Dota Sucks" Lowell speaks out.

Coming up next on this guy's agenda!
"Why blue is clearly the worst colour, and should be banned."

I expect this to be basically a compilation of Dota flamers on YouTube comments and various forums, but slightly rewritten to sound more intelligent. And also extended.

So I bothered to read through some of his articles. Lowell references games like Doom, Descent 2, and Unreal Tournament quite a few times. He also brought up games being beaten in 30-minutes but how doing so was extremely difficult. So I have to assume Lowell is about my age (29) or older and grew up in the time when video games, both console and PC, really started to take off.

You can't really say Lowell is wrong because his basis for everything is on what HE thinks a good game should be. Of course this is all subjective, however the problem I have is that Lowell tries to present his views as facts based upon his own set of criteria.

He believes DOTA is a bad game because you can't get better just by playing and I have to agree on the latter part of that statement. To truly get better at DOTA/MOBA's you really need to watch some streams, videos, or at the very least use some guides on how to build. However the problem with Lowell's argument is that he believes it is a flaw in the games design. The need for these guides has little to do with the guides but more with your human opponents. Lowell's reference to games like Doom and UT work because those games are primarily single player games where your opponents reactions are relatively static they also have a very flat learning curve, so even when playing online adapting is simple. We as a player base have defined how the game should be played to win. If Lowell(or anyone for that matter) were to play against nothing but bots than you would be able to improve from just playing the game.

I haven't seen his other arguments but again these are the opinion of guy who believes games should be like Doom and Unreal Tournament and we should make games like we did back in the mid 90's.

Yeah it still doesn't stack up under those circumstances - he was saying about RTSs...and they've ALWAYS been subject to experimentation and learning from guides. I used to play Age of Empires (the original) and it was REALLY contentious when features like "command queuing" (i.e. being able to queue up multiple units to build) and "replays" were added...as they were "de-skilling the game".

People learned from guides, people learned from playing. People now started to learn by watching and copying. It didn't suddenly makes n00bs experts, or mean the top tier players couldn't have tricks or tactics everyone else didn't. Exactly the same applies to DOTA. Sure, it has a LOT of idiosyncracies and behind the scenes stuff that isn't obvious...yes it could be better...but a lot of that stuff is due to layers upon layers of new heroes being added, and trying to keep things balanced. Large, complex system is large and complex shocker. It's part of the attraction for many people. The fact that the game is as balanced as it is, is frankly astonishing.

Comes back to personal taste - Lowell may not like it, and that's up to him. Trying to come up with an intellectual argument why people shouldn't is fundamentally dumb. People play for fun, logic doesn't always come into it - hell people do all sorts of crazy stuff for fun. Each to their own. Whole thing smacks of attention-seeking and hits on his website to me. Maybe he's isn't as dumb as we think cos he's got us talking about him.

lets compare things like command queuing to something like digging a hole.
does having a shovel to dig the hole make it worse because it is easier? does using a machine to dig it make it even worse?
things like that dont make it easier, they just allow you to push the potential of what you can accomplish.

its the same is using tab to get to the next meepo to use a poof bomb, you are not going to do it by clicking on every unit really fast.

when you compare it like this you start to realize how ridiculous the guy sounds.

That kind of thinking is idiotic. The basic rules of chess and bridge are fairly simple. Try to play a serious player/s without doing some homework and you will get scalped over and over. Yeah, those games really are awful and will never have any sustained popularity. (eye roll)