Match Length

That makes sense. After all, balancing tends to be small scale (on a few heroes, abilities, or items), which is not enough to change something like the length of a game. I did notice something (although I'm not sure if this is how it's always been) but even BOT GAMES are short. I usually have the difficulty on Hard, and the game lasts 35 minutes at most. Maybe the bots have some kind of algorithm that makes them as similar as possible to the current real players, I don't know.



While it is possible to intentionally lengthen the game, it's not really quite the same. Not to say that your strategy is bad; it's actually very effective at countering teams that don't have a real hard carry, or are bad at farming. However, when you play a match where both sides are playing for the late game, you get plenty of interaction, and it helps make the game able to turn around 180 degrees in a few seconds. I really miss those close games...


That is very effective, but it's rare where you will get a coordinated team with good supports and good wards and split push etc. People always want to play those "overpowered" heroes because they're too lazy to learn the more difficult (but more effective) heroes like Morphling or Invoker or Meepo and so on.


So true! You get people who decide to just skip farming and push at level 4. With pubs, players usually don't play for the team. This leads to making terrible decisions. People don't take risks where they would be able to turn the game around, or do stupid things like going Roshan while the rax are under attack.


Exactly

For me there is no such thing as "the meta", the meta is just about how people choose to play not about the game balance itself.

You *can* play a full turtle strategy with a Medusa and spend the 40 first minutes of the game just warding your jungle while Dusa goes Midas HOTD into Linkens and does nothing but stack ancients and split push. There's no reason why playing like this will work less now than it did 5 years ago : the game hasn't been rebalanced at all in this sense. I've actually had a lot of pubs with friends where we played like this (well maybe not to THAT point but still), and it worked perfectly well. I've seen a lot of lineups with a Tinker or Keeper of the Light to counterpush + any hard carry work extremely well. Turtle strategies still work in pubs but they require coordination : good warding to avoid ganks, decent counterpush, and good aplit push. If you have that then it's pretty easy to beat these mid-game ganking/pushing lineups and these Mirana pickers.
I don't know about competitive, but in pubs the only reason why games don't go late is because people have no notion of "we have better late game so let's not force fights for now, instead let's just ward and farm our BKBs before we teamfight". Because pubs don't know basic stuff like that they just get wrecked by deathball teamfight lineups with Sand King, Earthshaker, Tidehunter and whatnot, and game ends at 28 minutes.

TLDR : for me the reason why pubs don't go late is because pubs have no concept of playing defensively, they want to force fights all the time even if they have no chance of winning them.

If this isn't meant as a rhetorical question, what you are saying is possible. I'm not sure if it's just pubs or the entire trend that's changed.

That's actually a strong possibility, now that you mention it. I (personally) don't enjoy these shorter games because one team usually CRUSHES the other. It's rare nowadays to have those close games where one decisive fight/push/tactic wins or loses the game.

I think it's that TI4 has affected people's picks so they pick heroes like Shadow Shaman and Razor and Brewmaster. The trend seems to be mid game pushing and teamfight heroes like Tidehunter and Faceless Void.

The meta moved to the early game? Like more early-game influence instead of late-game hard carries?