Come on, the item system from DotA was pointlessly confusing. You get the same result with upgradeable items, just you don't need to have an item spreadsheet open.
Nah. How hard is it to understand that a Medallion of Courage is built from a Chainmail and a Sage's Mask? :P After a while playing, you get a sense of what items you need for various heroes and when you try a new one you can probably come up with a decent build idea quckly. The key though is time.
And with leveling up items, you remove a way to have variety. If you have, for instance, an item that does AoE damage on activation, that's all it really can do (without getting into a just as confusing "X item does Y at level 1, Z at level 2, and A at level 3, etc." system). You can't have a component item that grants you a bit of cleave plus a component that grants you some strength combining into an centered-around-self AoE active item, then that combining with another low-level recipe that grants a small chance to stun on attack to give a stronger AoE with ministun, then THAT combining with a few more components to become a targeted AoE damage active with ministun and silence.
When playing SotIS, I've never needed more math capability than what I can do in my head (and it's not like i can remember a ton of numbers or do calculus up there or anything). I HAVE been motivated to do in-depth analysis of a few heroes and the occasional item between games, but that's part of the fun to me.
I just noticed that people say the same thing about EVE online, but plenty of people have fun there. Moreover, I'm betting that the vast majority don't crack open excel to calculate ideal numbers for the latest ship they're gearing out or anything. I wonder if it's simply a different tolerance for dealing with numbers among people?
I think this single mechanic put me off the whole DotA series. People call it skillful, and they'd probably be right. I'd call it tedious for tedium's sake.
Lasthitting is definitely one of the more tedious of the mechanisms they removed. I personally like it because it adds an element of reflex and timing to DotA, though I can see why it was removed.
It's still there, and seemingly more important than other DotA games.
Jungling is there in DotA as an alternative to laning for one hero. In Blizzdota, it's a quick way to fight a few enemies (one time!) then get some boosts to your lane creeps. Not a sustainable way to level up like in DotA.
The method is interesting and I do like it, but why did they have to remove jungling entirely? The two could co-exist.
For me, every game needs it's 6-pool strategy. If you physically can't lose in 5 minutes no matter how bad you are, you're (as a designer) just delaying the action.
I said this on the stream, and some people made the jump between 6-pool and an "uncounterable tactic that everyone will use". 6-pool is risky for both the player and his opponent. It doesn't always work, and is pretty easily countered if you know it's coming, but as soon as you remove that risk, you actually dumb the game down. "Hey, I've got no risk of losing for the first 10m so I'll just do what I want with impunity".
And in bronze (and to an extent, silver), 6pooling is close to a free win. My problem is that 6pool like strategies vastly reduce the depth of the metagame by forcing the game to be over ending in victory for one side or the other very quickly. I mean, which would you rather watch: FruitDealer 6pooling his way through [insert tournament here] or some epic ZvZ/ZvT/ZvP with nice 30/40/50 minute games?
Uh huh, I thought it would be the latter =] That's no way to design a game.
DotA has a lot of pointless tedium and overly complicated mechanics. Sure, you can say that removing them simplifies the game, and you'd be right. A simple game isn't necessarily an easy game, though. There are also many ways to add skill to a game.
Well sure. Tetris or Bejeweled could be deep games (if they aren't already), but who would want to watch a Tetris tournament? Or a Bejeweled one? They may have some depth to their strategy, but the action is very very same-y. Half of the attraction of DotA is the mass variety in mechanics, action, heroes, and items that all combine together to create huge quantities of very unique games. Blizzdota is going a whole other direction than that.
By actually being a good player instead of staring at health bars, I guess.
How though? The item system was whacked in half, there's not much to do in lanes except pewpewpew, a bit of harass, and scrambling for those globes now and then, and you can't rely on anything to help defend you (except maybe allied heroes) anymore if you get team ganked or such.
Actually, thinking about it, that's gonna be really scary. Towers won't defend you for very long, so I suspect that a game will be made out of just running around in one big deathball picking off hero after hero. It happens in SotIS, and somehow Blizzard made towers that are actually worse than them, soo.....
..... said just like a typical DOTA player who doesn't know how to respond to change.
...Not so much. When the 4.0 Sotis update came, and everyone was whining "wa wa wa this game sucks if you dont put it back ecko im gonna ragequit!!!!1!111!!!!" I was all for it, loving the new mechanics and all the changes to gameplay. I'm fine with changes. But what Blizzdota is doing is by no means a traditional DotA, it's a whole different brand.
The item system in Allstars isn't interesting. It's a fuck-ton of standalone variables thrown together on a platter for players to memorize. New players don't want that. Blizzard isn't aiming this game at the "young whippersnapper" OR the opposite end of the spectrum, the "geek heads". They're aiming this at players who want to have fun. New players have a madly hard fucking time getting into Allstars from the start. With this setup, newer players don't have to spend hours memorizing item builds. It's not a question of casual vs. hardcore, it's a question of smart vs. stupid, and Blizzard realized that.
I'm a player who wants to have fun. I'm also a player who happens to want something I can really sink my teeth into learning and practicing, something between a game and a hobby and a sport. If that's not what they're making, fine, then I'm not the audience. I'm just saying, from my perspective, these are my concerns.
And items. So you get 4 slots to dump what looks like one of 20 or so items (maybe 30?) into and upgrade. That's boring to me. No strategy, no "oh that hero is X, so instead of Y i need to buy Z and do A differently", just "uhhh this item looks good ill buy that" and i win anyway.
I do like the boots removal though. It never made much sense to me to have to buy a boots item, why not just remove the boots part and develop the special abilities (if any) into actual full-fledged items.
I saw a new player in SotIS the other day. He stayed back, farmed, played cautiously, and helped where he could. He found the shop right away, easily grasped the concept of recipes, and bought a few decent items (IIRC). He proved to me that people can learn to play DotA quite quickly, if they're actually willing to put the effort into it. But most people seem to just want a "herp derp chaaaarge leeeeroy jenkins!!!!!" type game where what your strategy is and what you buy doesn't matter.
Yes, that was kind of ranty. I don't mean to offend anyone though :P I'm also not going to pretend that the entire dota genre is ruined forever!!! because of this, or any such sort of thing.
As for jungling, Blizzard answered your concerns in their panel. There is space in between lanes. It has to be filled with something. They would rather fill that space with direct points of interest (in this case capture-able mercenary camps) than WC3-style creep camps. Yeah, jungling is gone, but its replacement will provide a greater teamplay aspect. Blizzard stated that one of their primary goals was to remove the individuality and make a more teamplay oriented map. This fits with that. If you want individuality, play Allstars.
The thing is though, DotA is already plenty teamplay oriented. And that brings me to my next point, which is...
Weaker towers is the same idea. They want to reward you for grouping up as a team. Also, the weaker tower dynamic is also going to affect how players play their lane. No more is the dynamic of not trying to actually kill the other teams creeps and not push the lane. It's all just much simpler and more straightforward and that's good. Weaker towers also balances the idea of having Siege heroes (which is reminiscent of DOTA in its original form on Wc3:ROC): if players group up as a team of 5 and attempt to push, an unaccounted-for siege hero could wreck their base by himself.
I already play something like that. And let me tell you right now: for the most part, it sucks. Oh, did you land in a group of bad players while the enemy team is a premade? Sucks to be you, good luck having fun when the enemies skip the laning phase, start running around in a deathball, chaingank the heck out of each hero on your team, and hurl insults about your skill because they don't even realize why they're winning. Or in reverse, you start the game, get a good group, and proceed to curbstomp the enemies without any real effort involved.
And with weak towers, yeah that's horribly boring. You have nowhere to run or hide when the enemy team wants you, they just ignor towers, stretch past enemy heroes, and slam you down. The tower is either ignoring your plight in favor of the shiny creeps next to it (and in this case, now it's wasting ammo doing so), or it's being pitfully weak at hurting the enemies.
The difference is, when you can get a pair of relatively evenly matched teams, it's a 5v5 heaven for the duration of the game. This will be, what, a bit of laning, 2 teamfights, and a couple of pushes into victory (or loss)? Bleh. I'm not looking for fast food or candy in my games, I'm looking for solid meat and potatoes.
all that said, I'm still going to try it when it comes out. These are my concerns just from hearing about this, not a tantrum thrown because everything isn't going my way.
My first reaction was "it's being dumbed down!". My second reaction was "But dumbed down is such an inflammatory term" >.>
I'm definitely going to try what i've tongue-in-cheek named as "DotA for Dummies", and i may even like it, but the way I see it is DotA is supposed to be for the geekheads. Its the sort of game you would learn about and play to both hone your reflexes, and figure out the mechanics plus the quirks thereof. Something one would want to study.
And then they go and remove:
An interesting item system
Last-hitting
Jungling
strong towers
which is quite a bit of what makes DotA interesting to us geek heads. Towers, for instance, prevent it from being just a "hurr durr push push push tower dive for killz" game. Jungling adds an alternative to just laning, and is IMO more interesting than just lanes. Etc.
Young whippersnappers, they want their games to be handed to em on a silver platter. Then they want the games to be forced down their throats and digested for em.... :P /oldfart
To me, that's not skill, that's rote memorization. It's also very boring (again, to me), because there's no actual strategy or thinking involved, just "how well can you execute this predefined series of actions"....
I'd like to see one on terms (the ones that attach to actor messages): things like what the At term does, when you'd want to put terms on a Create message, stuff like that.
Hmm. Well, the model I use uses the LazerBolt1_Blue_Lines1.dds for both diffuse and emissive textures. Will that cause a problem? (Also, what difference are you referring to between a "substring" and "slot with subname")
So i'm trying to recolor some projectiles (using PhoenixOverloadMissile model). I set it up like the tutorial said, trying both LazerBolt1 and LazerBolt1_ prefixes. Neither worked. I'm trying slot main, and 3 trigger on substrings of diffuse, alphamask, and emissive.
Seconding the request to have a typed out version. I don't particularly want to spend an hour wading through a livestream to figure out what the next editor features are gonna be >.>
Edit: The biggest thing that concerns me is that Blizzdota might be a little too much like "DotA for Dummies" for me... :/
Is nothing but bad acting, cliches, and general poorly written bits
Horribly racist, sexist, and any other ists you can think of
But then you can find reviews like that for ANYTHING, so take it with a block grain of salt. :P
Not true! I was able to hack SotIS by manually modifying the bank files then opening the appropriate screen, which somehow triggered a bank reload and my new data to show up. (The bug that let me hack it was quickly fixed, needless to say :P) But it is doable. Maybe you have to explicitly tell starcraft to reload the banks? In any case, it should be possible to set up a fake server side system like that. Only downside is that it needs quite a bit of extra fiddling to get to work on each user's part.
First, it isn't vjeux's... It's eckolnovkol and brax making/publishing it (did vjeux publish for ecko at first? or was he the original creator or something?). And yes, it's not all that balanced, but why is it that when anyone mentions ANY first-page map, it's only to say how much it sucks? :P I suspect it's because most of y'all never managed to get a map there? Not that I like the popularity system, but it's a little like hating Apple because they "have junk products and are only supported by the fanboiz". At least maverck had the courtesy to say:
Well, the "Duplicate [data element]" command is really confusing for everything but the simplest stuff (like site operations). My favorite tactic is to just cannibalize/imitate various structures and units to do what i want. :)
I'm toying with adding some model additions to the Rory hero unit, and when I attach a Baneling model addition (for testing purposes) via SOpAttachWeaponRight, it just floats in the air somewhere around the location of where the rocket is usually launched instead of actually being attached to the gun barrel. But if I use SOpAttachHead the baneling model animates properly (and looks funny :P). Is this an artifact of certain attachment points being static and is there a way to work around it?
(starting to wish Blizz would let us work directly with model bones :/)
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Nah. How hard is it to understand that a Medallion of Courage is built from a Chainmail and a Sage's Mask? :P After a while playing, you get a sense of what items you need for various heroes and when you try a new one you can probably come up with a decent build idea quckly. The key though is time.
And with leveling up items, you remove a way to have variety. If you have, for instance, an item that does AoE damage on activation, that's all it really can do (without getting into a just as confusing "X item does Y at level 1, Z at level 2, and A at level 3, etc." system). You can't have a component item that grants you a bit of cleave plus a component that grants you some strength combining into an centered-around-self AoE active item, then that combining with another low-level recipe that grants a small chance to stun on attack to give a stronger AoE with ministun, then THAT combining with a few more components to become a targeted AoE damage active with ministun and silence.
When playing SotIS, I've never needed more math capability than what I can do in my head (and it's not like i can remember a ton of numbers or do calculus up there or anything). I HAVE been motivated to do in-depth analysis of a few heroes and the occasional item between games, but that's part of the fun to me.
I just noticed that people say the same thing about EVE online, but plenty of people have fun there. Moreover, I'm betting that the vast majority don't crack open excel to calculate ideal numbers for the latest ship they're gearing out or anything. I wonder if it's simply a different tolerance for dealing with numbers among people?
Lasthitting is definitely one of the more tedious of the mechanisms they removed. I personally like it because it adds an element of reflex and timing to DotA, though I can see why it was removed.
Jungling is there in DotA as an alternative to laning for one hero. In Blizzdota, it's a quick way to fight a few enemies (one time!) then get some boosts to your lane creeps. Not a sustainable way to level up like in DotA.
The method is interesting and I do like it, but why did they have to remove jungling entirely? The two could co-exist.
And in bronze (and to an extent, silver), 6pooling is close to a free win. My problem is that 6pool like strategies vastly reduce the depth of the metagame by forcing the game to be over ending in victory for one side or the other very quickly. I mean, which would you rather watch: FruitDealer 6pooling his way through [insert tournament here] or some epic ZvZ/ZvT/ZvP with nice 30/40/50 minute games?
Uh huh, I thought it would be the latter =] That's no way to design a game.
Well sure. Tetris or Bejeweled could be deep games (if they aren't already), but who would want to watch a Tetris tournament? Or a Bejeweled one? They may have some depth to their strategy, but the action is very very same-y. Half of the attraction of DotA is the mass variety in mechanics, action, heroes, and items that all combine together to create huge quantities of very unique games. Blizzdota is going a whole other direction than that.
How though? The item system was whacked in half, there's not much to do in lanes except pewpewpew, a bit of harass, and scrambling for those globes now and then, and you can't rely on anything to help defend you (except maybe allied heroes) anymore if you get team ganked or such.
Actually, thinking about it, that's gonna be really scary. Towers won't defend you for very long, so I suspect that a game will be made out of just running around in one big deathball picking off hero after hero. It happens in SotIS, and somehow Blizzard made towers that are actually worse than them, soo.....
...Not so much. When the 4.0 Sotis update came, and everyone was whining "wa wa wa this game sucks if you dont put it back ecko im gonna ragequit!!!!1!111!!!!" I was all for it, loving the new mechanics and all the changes to gameplay. I'm fine with changes. But what Blizzdota is doing is by no means a traditional DotA, it's a whole different brand.
I'm a player who wants to have fun. I'm also a player who happens to want something I can really sink my teeth into learning and practicing, something between a game and a hobby and a sport. If that's not what they're making, fine, then I'm not the audience. I'm just saying, from my perspective, these are my concerns.
And items. So you get 4 slots to dump what looks like one of 20 or so items (maybe 30?) into and upgrade. That's boring to me. No strategy, no "oh that hero is X, so instead of Y i need to buy Z and do A differently", just "uhhh this item looks good ill buy that" and i win anyway.
I do like the boots removal though. It never made much sense to me to have to buy a boots item, why not just remove the boots part and develop the special abilities (if any) into actual full-fledged items.
I saw a new player in SotIS the other day. He stayed back, farmed, played cautiously, and helped where he could. He found the shop right away, easily grasped the concept of recipes, and bought a few decent items (IIRC). He proved to me that people can learn to play DotA quite quickly, if they're actually willing to put the effort into it. But most people seem to just want a "herp derp chaaaarge leeeeroy jenkins!!!!!" type game where what your strategy is and what you buy doesn't matter.
Yes, that was kind of ranty. I don't mean to offend anyone though :P I'm also not going to pretend that the entire dota genre is ruined forever!!! because of this, or any such sort of thing.
The thing is though, DotA is already plenty teamplay oriented. And that brings me to my next point, which is...
I already play something like that. And let me tell you right now: for the most part, it sucks. Oh, did you land in a group of bad players while the enemy team is a premade? Sucks to be you, good luck having fun when the enemies skip the laning phase, start running around in a deathball, chaingank the heck out of each hero on your team, and hurl insults about your skill because they don't even realize why they're winning. Or in reverse, you start the game, get a good group, and proceed to curbstomp the enemies without any real effort involved.
And with weak towers, yeah that's horribly boring. You have nowhere to run or hide when the enemy team wants you, they just ignor towers, stretch past enemy heroes, and slam you down. The tower is either ignoring your plight in favor of the shiny creeps next to it (and in this case, now it's wasting ammo doing so), or it's being pitfully weak at hurting the enemies.
The difference is, when you can get a pair of relatively evenly matched teams, it's a 5v5 heaven for the duration of the game. This will be, what, a bit of laning, 2 teamfights, and a couple of pushes into victory (or loss)? Bleh. I'm not looking for fast food or candy in my games, I'm looking for solid meat and potatoes.
all that said, I'm still going to try it when it comes out. These are my concerns just from hearing about this, not a tantrum thrown because everything isn't going my way.
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My first reaction was "it's being dumbed down!". My second reaction was "But dumbed down is such an inflammatory term" >.>
I'm definitely going to try what i've tongue-in-cheek named as "DotA for Dummies", and i may even like it, but the way I see it is DotA is supposed to be for the geekheads. Its the sort of game you would learn about and play to both hone your reflexes, and figure out the mechanics plus the quirks thereof. Something one would want to study.
And then they go and remove:
which is quite a bit of what makes DotA interesting to us geek heads. Towers, for instance, prevent it from being just a "hurr durr push push push tower dive for killz" game. Jungling adds an alternative to just laning, and is IMO more interesting than just lanes. Etc.
Young whippersnappers, they want their games to be handed to em on a silver platter. Then they want the games to be forced down their throats and digested for em.... :P /oldfart
0
@caparosmith: Go
To me, that's not skill, that's rote memorization. It's also very boring (again, to me), because there's no actual strategy or thinking involved, just "how well can you execute this predefined series of actions"....
0
I'd like to see one on terms (the ones that attach to actor messages): things like what the At term does, when you'd want to put terms on a Create message, stuff like that.
0
Hmm. Well, the model I use uses the LazerBolt1_Blue_Lines1.dds for both diffuse and emissive textures. Will that cause a problem? (Also, what difference are you referring to between a "substring" and "slot with subname")
0
So i'm trying to recolor some projectiles (using PhoenixOverloadMissile model). I set it up like the tutorial said, trying both LazerBolt1 and LazerBolt1_ prefixes. Neither worked. I'm trying slot main, and 3 trigger on substrings of diffuse, alphamask, and emissive.
0
The best way to do the animation is via Movers probably (see http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/maps-and-mods/tutorials/missile-movers/ for a thorough covering of what and how they're used). Splitting i think can be done via data, though I myself haven't tried it.
0
Seconding the request to have a typed out version. I don't particularly want to spend an hour wading through a livestream to figure out what the next editor features are gonna be >.>
Edit: The biggest thing that concerns me is that Blizzdota might be a little too much like "DotA for Dummies" for me... :/
0
@Enexy: Go
Don't, according to the storyline buffs it was:
But then you can find reviews like that for ANYTHING, so take it with a
blockgrain of salt. :P0
@Dustin374: Go
Not true! I was able to hack SotIS by manually modifying the bank files then opening the appropriate screen, which somehow triggered a bank reload and my new data to show up. (The bug that let me hack it was quickly fixed, needless to say :P) But it is doable. Maybe you have to explicitly tell starcraft to reload the banks? In any case, it should be possible to set up a fake server side system like that. Only downside is that it needs quite a bit of extra fiddling to get to work on each user's part.
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@Eimtr: Go
First, it isn't vjeux's... It's eckolnovkol and brax making/publishing it (did vjeux publish for ecko at first? or was he the original creator or something?). And yes, it's not all that balanced, but why is it that when anyone mentions ANY first-page map, it's only to say how much it sucks? :P I suspect it's because most of y'all never managed to get a map there? Not that I like the popularity system, but it's a little like hating Apple because they "have junk products and are only supported by the fanboiz". At least maverck had the courtesy to say:
instead of more pointless flames...
OT: Very excited for HotS, mainly for the new content it will bring for the custom map community :)
0
Well, the "Duplicate [data element]" command is really confusing for everything but the simplest stuff (like site operations). My favorite tactic is to just cannibalize/imitate various structures and units to do what i want. :)
0
@grenegg: Go
I want my units to carry out existing orders, will units still do that? >.>
And ok, makes what I was planning not quite as good i suppose, but i'll work with it :P
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I have 2 questions:
0
I'm toying with adding some model additions to the Rory hero unit, and when I attach a Baneling model addition (for testing purposes) via SOpAttachWeaponRight, it just floats in the air somewhere around the location of where the rocket is usually launched instead of actually being attached to the gun barrel. But if I use SOpAttachHead the baneling model animates properly (and looks funny :P). Is this an artifact of certain attachment points being static and is there a way to work around it?
(starting to wish Blizz would let us work directly with model bones :/)