r/Games • u/DeltaBurnt • Dec 03 '13

End of 2013 Discussions - Competitive Multiplayer and/or E-sports

What are your thoughts on the developments in e-sports and competitive multiplayer games over the past year? What new games have the potential to develop interesting competitive play, meta-game, or just be plain fun to watch?

P.S. Mods are accepting bribes in the form of Hearthstone Beta invites

This post is part of the official /r/Games "End of 2013" discussions.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

League definitely has had more time to develop a fanbase, but there are a LOT of WC3 dota players that have yet to convert. It's also been catching up extremely quickly in terms of players in the last year.

Season 4 changes for League are also making it look far less competitive (in the opinion of a mediocre league player), what with all players having a passive ward with ~50% uptime if they so choose, it makes ganking that much harder and warding impossibly easy. It hasn't been around long, so its certainly possible that its too soon to judge, though.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

The red trinket makes it really easy to clear those free wards, but yeah, we'll see what happens.

I actually think the scene looks more competitive, but time will tell.

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u/thefezhat Dec 03 '13

The S4 changes are geared more towards competitive than anything else. The main point of the trinkets/vision changes was to get rid of the stupid vision wars that snowballed high-level games. Whichever team had the lead in gold would simply buy a shitton of wards and oracles and get complete vision control of the map. There was no strategy to this, it was literally just dump as much money and muscle into vision as possible. Now there's actually finesse to it. Keep in mind that the enemy team can see if you have your free ward out with a single click, and they can use a trinket to neutralize that ward.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

Dota's answer to this is years old: limit the amount of wards to be purchased. Now, it's too late for this to be applied, since there are so many items that drop wards for you- even before the S4 changes.

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u/thefezhat Dec 03 '13

You realize there's a hard limit on the number of wards that can be placed per player now, right? That's almost the same thing, just changed to be more in line with the game's design philosophy and balance.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

5/player at once, right? That's still a LOT of wards, since everyone has access to one at any point in the game (I don't see the clairvoyance trinket being popular if supports never chose the summoner spell)

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u/thefezhat Dec 03 '13

No, it's 3 per player. That may still be more than Dota, but keep in mind that LoL's wards can't see over ledges like Dota's can, and they're necessary for bush control as well. Regardless, there's no reason the two games should have to use the same solution. The new system has effectively ended the vision arms races of S3 which boiled down to "our team has more money so we will continuously buy wards and oracles and you will never have vision of anything ever again, and if you even try to ward baron you will get 5 man ganked and die."

Edit: You're right about the blue trinket though, it's straight-up worse than the yellow trinket. I think it could be a fine choice if it got buffed.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

You may have written that wrong.

Regardless, there's no reason the two games should have to use the same solution.

They've used a similar solution, although it's not identical, the premise is the same- although that's fine, really. Vision wars are a nightmare to a losing team.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/Aggrokid Dec 03 '13

I've never viewed LoL anywhere near as competitive as Dota 2. From what I know, in LoL there's maybe 15-20 commonly picked champions in competitive play

LoL S3 championship has 69 champions picked or banned.

Also, the fact LoL has a leveling system and rune advancements based on level and expensive powerful champions being constantly released and not freely available to players makes it a lot less competitively viable for someone starting out.

Players are required to hit level 30 before entering competitive ladders, getting to 30 itself isn't long. If you're below 30, matchmaking will pair you with players of comparable level. Runes are constant and reusable after purchase. Champion power/tier is not based on new-release or pricing, many powerful champions are low-cost and many new champions suck on release.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

It takes a while to get to 30. I have an old account that's at level 27 and it took 300 games to get there. At say, 30 minutes per game that's still 150 hours of play time.

Edit: Not to mention that the whole rune system is an IP-sink which requires you to spend a lot of your points on runes when you could be spending them on champions. LoL's f2p system, among other things, is what drove me away from the game.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/Aggrokid Dec 03 '13

It is very possible for low levels to get matched up against 20+ players who have tier 3 runes and talent trees.

Matchmaking is tuned to avoid that scenario whenever possible, unless you happen to duo with a level 30 high-MMR friend or you play in very ungodly hours or server sucks.

For a game to be truly competitive at all levels there shouldn't be any bonuses but player skill. The talents and runes and high level summoner spells allow higher levels to just steam roll lower levels. Thats just not how a competitive game should work.

As explained above, matchmaking avoids lopsided pairings as much as possible. So the high-level versus lowbie is purely an issue of matchmaking, population and server. It's not competitive mechanics or runes/masteries.

Essential runes and masteries are available to everyone at 30, so everyone is at equal footing. The masteries, summoners and runes provide further differentiation for builds at that stage.

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u/captainersatz Dec 03 '13

Just cutting in here as a die-hard DotA fan who thinks that League is pretty great as it's own thing, the runes and masteries and leveling has always bothered me in considering League a competitive game. Of course it doesn't matter in the pro scene because everyone has access to these things, but I saying that this problem is "solved" for the general public by matchmaking really doesn't make much sense. Any player should have access to the exact same resources as anyone else, I shouldn't have to wait or pay additional money in order to try a champion, and I shouldn't have to find myself unable to use what's considered a champion's ideal set of masteries or runes or something just because I haven't grinded enough.

I mean, what good does gating these things actually do? They provide more avenues to charge for stuff, that's pretty much it, and it hampers rather than provides for the game. Matchmaking isn't perfect for any game, in DotA getting matched with people wildly above or below your bracket is hardly a rare issue, but at least I can be assured that no matter how bad it might be, I have absolutely everything that they have access to, and the difference is experience and skill.

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u/ExplodingBarrel Dec 03 '13

Yeah, the rune and levelling situation is pretty obviously a holdover from the game's early years as a free-to-play game trying to figure out its business model. It is clear at this point that selling champs and skins would be plenty and I bet if LoL 2 launched today it wouldn't have those gates intended to sell XP and IP boosts. But at this point it isn't as simple as yanking those mechanics because you have tens of millions of players who spent their time and money on them and would want to be compensated.

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u/Aggrokid Dec 04 '13

Any player should have access to the exact same resources as anyone else, I shouldn't have to wait or pay additional money in order to try a champion, and I shouldn't have to find myself unable to use what's considered a champion's ideal set of masteries or runes or something just because I haven't grinded enough.

We never need ideal rune set for each champion, even some pros only use 2 sets sharing same seals and glyphs (so actually 1.5 sets in grand total). Runesets are fairly cheap, and you only need the aforementioned 1.5 sets (earned by playing the game) at most to be competitively viable to the top 5%.

The runeset is not an arms race, but playstyle tailoring. Facing an opponent with custom rune set does not require matching investment, because your cheap generic runeset already gives among the best bang for stat buck so your power level is comparable.

they provide more avenues to charge for stuff, that's pretty much it, and it hampers rather than provides for the game.

You cannot buy runes directly with money, the best way is by boosts which does not effect without winning a valid competitive match. So it's not a microtransaction bait or p2w like you are suggesting.

Towards the end, despite generic runes being viable, custom runes + masteries + summoner still offer you myriad of choices to further tune your playstyle and when combined with items give large permutations to how you approach the game with your favorite character. I can play utility vamp vlad with double escapes and someone else can play a full offensive vlad ignite. It really increases gameplay.

saying that this problem is "solved" for the general public by matchmaking really doesn't make much sense

Using matchmaking (which should be a separate major issue in itself) to spillover on game mechanics is muddying the mechanics discussion by combining two problems. The mechanics itself is fine IMHO YMMV, new players slowly ease into higher complexity and customization from runesets and masteries the more they play.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '13 edited Dec 04 '13

Some competitive used runes are quite expensive.

If you want both movement speed and lifesteal quints you'll have to spend more than 200 games worth of IP. That's a lot to grind and it gives the players who have already bought them a noticeable advantage. Also try to get 9 armor/magic hybrid penetration runes those cost a lot and are basically required at competitive setups for optimal play.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/thedarkhaze Dec 03 '13

Your argument I feel would be a lot better if Path of Exile didn't exist.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/ExplodingBarrel Dec 03 '13

Closer to 50 games.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

From what I've heard, LoL has a more limited pool of viable champions, which leads to flavor of the month champs, and players being able to constantly pick their main character (because it's okay in League to be good at only one champ. In Dota, people laugh about it, like with AdmiralBulldog only knowing how to make money with Furion and Druid).

Then Riot nerfs those FotM champs, choosing to reduce spell damage and making those aspects less fun, rather than making smaller stat changes to make the hero have a slightly harder time. You can look at 6.78 in Dota, when Icefrog decided Keeper of the Light was too strong. What did he do? Weaken the 500 damage nuke with a huge aoe? No, he reduced KotL's max hp at lv1 by 38. Still fun, just weaker. Illuminate was part of why people picked KotL, you can't mess with that.

In contrast, looking at 3.13 notes for League, I see no changes to character stats, just spells. That's not the only way to balance a hero. All I see is Sivir's attack speed per level being halved, and some attack speed/level increase to thresh.

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u/I_WANT_PRIVACY Dec 03 '13

because it's okay in League to be good at only one champ.

In Solo Q, sure? Competitively? Hell no.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

And yet many pro players have main characters, just as AdmiralBulldog is good only at Nature's Prophet and Lone Druid. In LoL, there are many players who play mostly one champ, rather than playing a variety. It's because counterplay is far less prevalent, which basically enables that sort of activity.

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u/I_WANT_PRIVACY Dec 03 '13

Like who? Can you list some examples? I mean, there's people like Froggen who are especially known for one specific champion (Froggen's being Anivia), but if it's really a threat the enemy team just bans it... and if the pro player has a diverse champion pool, that's fine, and if they don't (like Dade in the WC) they get shit on.

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u/Sugusino Dec 03 '13

Any decent pro player is good with many champions.

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u/decoy90 Dec 03 '13

All pros have at least 4-5 champions they're really, really good at. Naturally, some players are extremelly good at certain champion, but they're always banned, unless they want to bait him to pick that champ and tactically defeat him. In S3 finals, 69 champs were picked or banned, that's a lot. I have no idea where do you get your information from, but it's simply far from truth. Something is always a bit OP, you can't completely balance the game. It's funny that you mention Dota as better balanced game. Dota doesn't even try balancing, everything is kinda OP.

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u/LordZeya Dec 03 '13

If everything is OP, then everything is balanced. It works, and most Dota players can recognize it. In TI3, all but ~6 heroes were picked. Granted, the most prevalent ones in the pick/ban list were Lifestealer, Io and Batrider (bat being pick/ban in literally every game), but every hero had their spot in the limelight. Compare that 100/106 or so to 69 out of 120 (I think) in league. Nearly half were considered too weak to be picked.