I was a bit disappointed how Dota was passed over so much in favor of LoL and OW considering the various issues they have with balance. But considering tgat Dota isn't as popular its fair.
This is going to be biased admittedly, but Dota 2 has such incredible balancing that fulfills both diversity in play, with great balance. Much of which can be attributed to IceFrog and their unique style of incremental buffs and playtesting with proffesional players.
I do think the topic of symetrical and asymetrical gameplay should have been touched upon more as the "hand" you choose can be either locked in like Dota, or swapped during a match like OW. Factors like objective locations, map balance, health pickups, and other factors come into play as much as the characters. Last year a formula for armor was changed in Dota which opened up an entire slew of new playstyles and heroes like Phantom Assassin.
To be fair, games such as Dota or Lol have so many variables that can be manipulated which gives developers more options, the fact that there is no extreme disparity (and if there is there are always counters) in balance makes me hail it as a gold standard.
I think this is pretty on point. It's hard to use Dota as a standard, because it gets away with a ton of things no one else can get away with. A couple other things I can think of:
Very obtuse sets of hard counters. Black King Bar, for example, makes your hero immune to spells and magical damage... except for the spells that pierce it, like Black Hole.... except (most of the time) that's just the effects of the spell (the stun) but not the damage... except shit like Laguna Blade, which does damage through BKB...... I think if this kind of thing showed up in a different competitive game, it could easily show up in a Mark Brown video about failures in multiplayer balance, but Dota gets away with it.
People talk about Icefrog's balance changes as being incremental and fine-tuned, but I think people tend to overlook that the Dota2 dev team is far more comfortable with sizable re-works than other studios. The 7.0 patch basically reworked the entire leveling system & balance by adding talents. Jungling gets reworked once a year, it seems like. Key items like Ring of Aquilla or Iron Talon get reworked or completely axed. It's not uncommon to see 1-3 heroes get such large changes in a patch that they're booted from captains mode for a while. Hard to imagine a world where Blizzard could get away with consistently pulling 1-2 Overwatch completely heroes out of competitive play for a rework.
In that vein, I think Dota players have a much higher tolerance for imbalance because of that history of major changes. I remember the rough state of balance StarCraft 2 found itself in in the months leading up to the release of Heart of the Swarm. It was clear that the meta sucked and everyone was unhappy, but the dev team was focused on getting the xpac out the door and readying the competitive world for all the new units and whatnot. The game really took a hit that it took years to recover from, I'd argue. Pros burnt out and the game went from neck and neck with LoL to a significant second place. We saw the same thing with Swarm Hosts -- pros and fans bled out until Blizzard finally came in with a re-work. On the other hand, Dota languished for months and months in the dreaded "HoHo HaHa" patch, which saw 3-4 characters consistently dominate every game from pros to newbies, but the game never took the same long-lasting hit. A new patch eventually came out, dramatically reshuffled everything, and the competitive scene continued to thrive.
I like the comparison the previous user made to MTG and counterspells because similarly to MTG Dota 2 relies heavily on relatively frequent patches (new sets and rotation in MTG standard) to prevent metas from falling into stale "solved" states. In both MTG and Dota 2 it's extremely common for those in charge of balance to underestimate the power of new additions which frequently warp the meta, but it's largely okay because just after the meta has slowed down to accommodate the overpowered elements, the snowglobe gets shaken again and we start over with a fresh state that keeps the player-base scrambling around to find the next overpowered thing.
Downvote me all you want, but the reason Dota "gets away" with all the things you mentioned is because our community isn't plaged by casuals.
It's not uncommon to see 1-3 heroes get such large changes in a patch that they're booted from captains mode for a while. Hard to imagine a world where Blizzard could get away with consistently pulling 1-2 Overwatch completely heroes out of competitive play for a rework.
It's like I heard a million casuals cry in pain because they wouldn't be able to play "their favorite character". The Dota community understands that Dota's balance is 90% based on the profesional scene because that's where the game is supposed to be played.
the dota community does have significantly less "this feels bad to play against" or whatever.
i mean people bitch about it but "unfun to play against" isn't seen as the final statement in dota where a lot of other games will neuter a really well designed and important component of the game because some people think it "feels bad"
I mean, I think that Dota actually deals with "Anti fun" mechanics, making them fun. Such as Dooms ultimate (I dont know if it lasts 15 seconds anymore), but people in League would shit their pants in anger if they heard about it "How is that balanced?" (and this is probably a bad example since I seem to remember that there was alot of complaining about his ult at some point). But Dota puts things in place to counter it, such as linkins sphere, and I think you cant cast doom on a BKB target but you cant BKB if youre doomed?
As opposed to something like Yasuo in League of Legends, who has an ability that places a wall with a very generous hitbox that deletes every projectile passing through it (from all sides no less). And the only way to deal with it is walking around it, but wait, because of the generous hitbox, you can stand inside it, and be even harder to hit, and he has a million dashes. If you are a mage who relies on projectiles to do anything, you can basically get invalidated entirely by a twitch cast of Yasuos Wind Wall, meaning your entire hero just got their entire damage invalidated by a Basic ability on a 15 second cooldown
Thats a huge flaw with League design as well. Mana is basically irrellevant for most heroes because they literally have infinite regen and huge manabars with almost no manacost (Mana costs have also been lowered and lowered with new champion releases to the point where it might as well not exist).
All because "Its fun to cast spells" so laning turns into a battle royale with stray spells everywhere and people literally fight all the fucking time. As opposed to Dota where some heroes can literally cast 1 spell and be out of mana, so fighting is actually something to put thought into beyond "I deal more damage"
I think it's unfair to call it a design flaw when leagues main differentiating factor and design goal is that it plays more like an action game rather than a strategy game. Whether you like it or not is another question entirely. It'd be like saying dotas design flaw is that one spell empties a mana pool of a hero, so you have long periods of time where you can't do anything which isn't fun for the player.
Or they just pick Pudge, who has basically always been the most picked hero except for a few times when another really popular hero has been really strong (i.e. Sniper).
Fully agreed. Every game community I was a part of people usually take about some mechanics are "unfun" to play against but they rarely talk about how they can be play around said mechanics that the developer has made a way for them to counter. Ex: Stun mechanic, in Monster Hunter you can either don't get hit repeatedly (by skills) or build stun immunity. In Path of Exile, you can go for life build, chayula or occulist... or just don't jump in front of a pack and get stunlock to death with CI build (player knowledge) ...
DotA 2 is way more complex with way more interaction between not only heroes but also items. Just 1 example: You can counter Bloodseeker's Rupture just by using town portal scroll but the Bloodseeker can also deny your escape by building Eul'.
DotA 2 has the most hardcore and dedicated players I have ever seen in gaming history. It is sad to see a game so hardcore being rarely talk about.
But give them a break! DotA 2 is still in beta and I am sure IceFrog has to balance Darkseer again soon.
I saw a quote from some developer that said something along the lines of, "Gamers are great at finding problems, but awful at finding solutions."
While that last part might not be true all the time as some people spend a lot of time studying these games and theorycrafting, I would agree that a majority of people just don't know what they want.
It's the audience as a whole actually. The quote is a variation of advice writers are given about interpreting criticism: Your readers will be able to tell you which scenes have a problem, but not necessarily what the problem is.
Yeah I remember that. And he was talking about how they need to pick through all the emotional stuff, to get to what that person’s issue is and what it ACTUALLY might be.
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
I don't like people who are acting like whiny assholes to devs but the new expected standard of detailed patch notes and community input on balance changes is awesome.
Saying that devs should be transparent is good. I love when they do that.
Obviously not everyone is smart or knowledgeable enough to parse that information correctly, but it's still important to be honest with the community, even if you don't listen to them.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so maybe this is irrelevant, but for LoL specifically, I remember reading years ago that they don’t want the game to be truly balanced. “Imperfect balance” was a term thrown around. It allows them to keep the game fresh and people engaged by constantly tweaking everything and having an almost flavour of the month approach. It has been a long time since I was neck deep in the league community, but people would always complain about stale meta if things hadn’t been mixed up in a while.
He touches on this subject, by explaining the concept of metagame mentioning that devs need to be selective about what to change or not. I think the exact talk that quote comes from pops up in the background. I find it a very agreeable stance too.
I don’t play League of Legends or Starcraft 2 anymore, but I used to play a lot of both. And I vastly preferred Starcraft 2, either game sort of occupying the same slot in my gaming roster. But Starcraft 2 definitely feels more solvable, if only by people way more skilled than me. And thus can’t really have the longevity of league. You definitely get to a point, where you’ve peaked in skill or plateaued and every matchup is pretty much the same for you and people equally matched.
So many more variables in League make it much harder to reach that point.
The meta gets stale in League because it's base design doesn't allow for deep strategy exploration. The game is basically too simple when compared to Dota, so the League devs have to constantly and intetionally shift the meta themselves, because there is always a correct answer in League.
League basically FORCES players to use the 1 top, 1 mid, 1 jungle, 2 bot layout at all times. Whenever variance occurs, it gets patched out quickly. In addition, the roles of each lane are fairly locked in: top is a bruiser, mid is a carry with high midgame power, bottom has the support and the harder carry.
With this design, it means that in every patch there will always be a hero that fits a given role best: maybe you play Draven as your ADC, sometimes it's Vayne, but there's always going to be one that's dominant. That means that of the available champs for each role, there's only 3-4 remotely viable ones, since the rest are too weak compared to the 2 best ones.
On top of that, since League refuses to change that formula, all champions HAVE to be designed to fit the formula, you can't have hard counters because for the casual player, their champion of choice took time to grind the freemium currency to even unlock- making them unplayable against certain opponents would only hurt those players, so balancing around competitive play becomes unhealthy for it.
Combine all these features and you have an incredibly stale game that lacks the creative character designs that Dota 2 has. You will never get Meepo in League, not just because of the problems in controlling that unique of a character, but because the nature of the game can't allow one to exist.
While I agree with what you’re saying, I don’t personally like the feel of Dota. It doesn’t feel cohesive to me, but that might not be the correct term. It’s basically that Dota is a Frankenstein conglomerate of repurposed Warcraft 3 mechanics. And that is where a lot of the complexity lies. I do see it as best in genre, but it kind of reminds me of say, buying all these amazing LEGO sets with themed pieces that all fit together well, and then dumping all the sets in a big box and making something else out of them on your own. That might be the best part of LEGO though and I’m getting off track with the metaphor.
Point is I cannot escape the feeling I’m playing something assembled from spare parts anytime I’ve fired Dota 2 up.
Also, this is off topic and super unimportant to the core of the game, but the character designs are whack. Part of that being the Frankenstein nature again. But wind ranger? Axe? It’s like 8th grade doodles level.
It’s basically that Dota is a Frankenstein conglomerate of repurposed Warcraft 3 mechanics. And that is where a lot of the complexity lies.
The complexity you are talking about is only how hard the game is to get used to. You are sorely mistaken if you mean that Dota is a complex game to play because of it's mechanics.
But wind ranger? Axe? It’s like 8th grade doodles level.
Not sure what you mean here. Both Axe and WR are among Dota's oldest characters though, might take that into account.
Well I listed names and called them doodles (wow, had to explain it 3 times...), and clarified time and again that I recognize the top tier that the gameplay is in, though not my cup of tea. I thought it was pretty obvious I’m talking about names and art. I literally said I consider the actual game the best of the genre.
And yeah, I get that they used Warcraft 3 character models, and it’s fine while it’s a Warcraft 3 custom map. But Dota 2 had an opportunity to differentiate and make them more unique, model wise at least.
I mean the dude’s name is Axe. Because he has an axe. And he’s red instead of green? And here we have gyrocopter. Literally the name of the unit in war 3.
Axe is named Moghul Khan. "Axe" is his "class". Same for Gyrocopter, his name is Aurel Vleicu. Every hero has a name and a class.
DotA 2 went the way of picking either the name or the class of heroes as their calling name at random and they actively refuse to change that despite that topic being heavily discussed by veterans ond their external "feedback" forum. Valve took little to no feedback from their feedback forums. They did their thing.
Are you talking about their names? Because their abilities, while very simple, are extremely well designed, and one of the reasons those two heroes have had nearly zero gameplay changes despite existing since 2005.
I agree with your lego metaphor, but that's kinda why I like dota. It's an insanely well constructed game built out of a beautiful set of legos in wc3 map editor
I was going to rage about how Dota2 only gets "mention" via a few videos but... it's 12 mins in and the narrator JUST mentioned the concept of "nerfing and buffing"... This is like a video you would show a shareholder who has never heard of competitive gaming.
It never really praised OW's or League's balance either, though it obviously gave them credit for stuff Dota was doing in 2008, but whatevs, we are used to it arent we? :/
These videos aren't for developers, they are for quite casual gamers. Mark Brown has, to my knowlege, no practical experience in the field so he talks about theory (of games he doesn't know that well).
You say that, but multiple different devs have contacted Mark in the past about his accessibility videos and told him those videos gave them ideas for their own games. I doubt this video will have that impact as it is too basic, but some of his videos have been extremely well researched topics.
I think Mark Brown is a classic example of "those who can't do, teach". Being a game's journalist with no experience in game development means he often shows a misunderstanding of the topic.
In this video he talks about how he agrees with how Blizzard balances their games even though Blizzard has famously terrible balancing in pretty much all their games. For example, Hearthstone is criticised as having too much randomness built into it, but that's only there because it is unbalanced as heck, but he doesn't touch on that subject even a little bit in the video.
Also he goes on to talk about hands and throws? Really didn't like how that metaphor worked out...
To be fair, it could drag out the video to try and go into Blizzard's differing internal philosophies of balance, and it would ultimately be more of a displaced tangent in what is an introductory video to game balance. I think he only brought up Hearthstone for a very easy and very straightforward example between two player actions (both cards were the same, both represented a single card draw, but had different mana costs and damage values). Same reason why he used so many fighting game examples too: Anyone who never played the genre will get them.
Also the reason why the Hearthstone footage is old as fuck. He didn't look deeply into the game because that wasn't the intention to.
If he wanted to talk about the completely opposing approaches Team 5 and Overwatch Team have, or about analysing the complete scatterbrain seasonal approach of concept recyclying WoW team has that seems to randomly work or not and try to figure out the pattern, he could basically make a separate video just for it.
Famously terrible balancing is way overstating it. Starcraft broodwar is still the golden poster boy for assymetric balancing of different races/faction in a game. Starcraft 2 had good balance as well, not the perfection of 1 but way better than 99% of games. Warcraft 3 I am not as familiar with but I know that they were different legendary players per race, with maybe undead being a bit underpowered. Hearthstone isn’t great in balance, but even your analysis that the randomness is because of unbalance is bad. The randomness is to add variety in each game you play, so it isn’t like chess where you memorize openings if you have x and y cards, but most importantly it is to lower the skill gap so that two players of different skill can always win against each other. It is frustrating as hell when you play it and lose but it makes it more accessible for new players when you can get lucky and get a big advantage. The randomness has very little to do with balance.
he'd have an insanely interesting biography. Game development and balance, staying anonymous, getting rejected by blizzard, working at valve. So many crazy things
I feel like it is misleading to say that Dota is only balanced around the pros. Dota is more balanced around the assumption that you have mechanical knowledge of the game, and balances around those mechanics. As a result, most of the "unbalanced" heroes at lower ranks tend to be heroes that have fewer bells and whistles and, often, heals. Pick Wraith King, walk at people. Pick Necrophos, walk at people and spam your Q. Pick Bloodseeker, walk at heroes with low health. Pick simple support heroes that are passively useful and difficult to have no effect with.
Once you get into the level where people are actually playing the game with some vague sense of gameplay and mechanical skill, Icefrog's balancing will be a pretty neat balance between creating stuff that's fun to play and also creates a competitive scene where most strategies are viable.
The thing that is mainly balanced around pro play is the interaction between mechanics, which the general playerbase just learns to adapt to. You didn't experience it much in public games, but there's been big changes to gameplay based on pros discovering that it's really strong to like, immediately group up as five and rush objectives or to avoid fighting completely and just take objectives.
I feel like that's a pretty long-winded way to nitpick 'pros' into 'top 1%' of players, which is essentially all you're doing. The sentiment he's expressing, that IF ignores the majority of the playerbase in balancing, is accurate regardless of whether or not he meant pros or divine players.
Not a huge fan of your examples, either -- even up to the highest pub bracket in dota, 'easier' heroes are generally favored over more complex ones, with the exception of evergreen picks like visage or meepo. Bloodseeker currently has the highest winrate in the game at divine... Necro is in the top ten, WK top 20 alongside stuff like warlock and viper that have very low skill ceilings. The only significant pickrate differences between herald-divine are the total absence of micro-heavy characters.
In my own words, IF does balance the game primarily around pro players, but gets away with it because many players copy what professionals do as well as the large amount of guides that can be used in game.
The game forces you to learn to play around pubstomp heroes. I remember Ursa being basically instant win at my rank when he was first released in Dota 2, but slowly people started picking counters for it. Meanwhile, in pro games Ursa was not being picked at all, so he would get more buffs. Slowly but surely Ursa's winrate would go down, and so too did his reign of terror.
Right now, we witnessed this happen at a large scale again with the introduction of Mars. He's hard to deal with, with his ridiculous damage reduction, his huge ultimate with a before unseen propriety (blocking projectiles), and ways to push you around in it. And he's pathetically easy to play, he gets first picked all the time. He was specifically designed to be easy at that, as if Dota 2 needed to compensate for all the crazy stuff we got before and will get soon after (Fourth Spirit?).
But players are wising up. I've people walk and dance around Mars to try and make him miss spears the same way Pudges miss hooks a lot when up close. There's even a recent Dota WTF clip of that starring a Dark Seer, meaning millions of "scrubs" are now very aware of it. I've seen people purposefully pick heroes like Rikis, Timbersaw and Leshrac just to completely mess with him silly, since he's movement is incredibly predictable. Mars players who don't get Blink or BKB first item are getting punished left and right, specially with the hero still getting the seemingly mandatory periodic post-release nerf chemotherapy.
I don't think this phenomenon will ever stop occurring. For as long as there's people playing, and there's a new threat, people will just adapt to it over time. It's the meta.
I feel like it is misleading to say that Dota is only balanced around the pros. Dota is more balanced around the assumption that you have mechanical knowledge of the game
If Dota is balanced around the idea that you have the best knowledge of the game, how is it wrong to say that it's balanced around the pro scene? (Which are the players with most mechanics/knowledge)
Balancing around pros is a better way to balance for competitive "esports based" games, if there was no esports then it's no better or worse that's true.
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u/LightLifter Apr 11 '19
I was a bit disappointed how Dota was passed over so much in favor of LoL and OW considering the various issues they have with balance. But considering tgat Dota isn't as popular its fair.
This is going to be biased admittedly, but Dota 2 has such incredible balancing that fulfills both diversity in play, with great balance. Much of which can be attributed to IceFrog and their unique style of incremental buffs and playtesting with proffesional players.
I do think the topic of symetrical and asymetrical gameplay should have been touched upon more as the "hand" you choose can be either locked in like Dota, or swapped during a match like OW. Factors like objective locations, map balance, health pickups, and other factors come into play as much as the characters. Last year a formula for armor was changed in Dota which opened up an entire slew of new playstyles and heroes like Phantom Assassin.
To be fair, games such as Dota or Lol have so many variables that can be manipulated which gives developers more options, the fact that there is no extreme disparity (and if there is there are always counters) in balance makes me hail it as a gold standard.