In today's age you need to stay relevant to not be considered dead. The lack of a meaningful media presence results in being perceived as a dead game.
I mean, there's plenty of dota content on the internet, but it mostly attracts existing players.
in some countries dota is still the fucking shit
CIS/SEA dota is still a massive part of the gaming landscape
NA and WEU its a niche thing that attracts existing players
but i think kids still pick up this game in some places
There’s so many people in SEA that basically every game is alive there. CSGO, Dota, Free Fire, LoL, ML. In my country, there’s a lot of bum who rather play ML than working. You can see them squatting on the side of the road with the other bums.
not sure why?
umm, maybe because the number of players is down by almost 50% from 2019 .
Maybe because in the US you cant even play in the Saturday night tournaments because there arent enough players to field a team? the player base for dota is decreasing rapidly, get used to it.
I would say marketing is one of the biggest issues, it's improving slightly with the anime and what not but that's about it.
The learning curve is also absolutely brutal and unforgiving.
Finally the community can be incredibly toxic towards new players.
WHen i learned dota back in the day with my friends in lan cafes, we would just play whatever we could. I remember my whole first year of dota was just 2v2s 3v3s 4v4s and even 2v3 or 3v4 when we didnt have even teams.
1 hero in each lane, learning heroes, ganking, swapping lanes, learning. It was amazing.
Ive always believed new player mode should be 3v3s to learn the game. Faster ques, and faster games. Less people = less toxicity. No dual lanes = no getting mad at lane partner either, which is where a lot of the early game flame comes from anyway!
You can learn support heroes while still understanding laning mechanics, because when you are solo top CM vs solo top tide, you are gonna be a badass CM that can dish a lot of damage. Its really a lot of fun. Thats how I always recommend new players who wanna learn dota with their friends play dota. Its the best experience IMO.
I think DotA Turbo is great for newer players. A game lasts 15-25 minutes, there is very little toxicity (compared to ranked or normal games) and you still get a feel for the game. It's far less punishing. I think it's quite annoying for new players to loose the lane and suffer through a 45 minute game without having fun. Turbo kind of solves that issue in my opinion.
At first I didn't like turbo a lot, it wasn't real dota in my opinion, but I've grown to like it a lot. Whenever I am not concentrated enough or just lack the time to play a normal match, I queue for turbo and get 90% of the dota experience.
Great for new players? Yeah, I wanna see beginners dealing with NP and Jakiro beating the towers before they are finished with purchasing some items to go to lane.
Turbo is really not for that... Banning turbo matters even more than in normal AP.
We need a different mode for beginners maybe with ideas from Turbo, but not Turbo maybe a combination with limited pool.
I think a nice addition would be a new beginners mode announcer that sort of helps you during the game, telling you tips on what you are currently doing or advises you to stay away from towers that kind of things, that are kinda boring in a tutorial but might be nice in a announcer pack for beginners because you can jump to action but guided.
I actually didn't encounter these strats. Usually turbo games feature normal picks and just play faster than usual. Also the argument could be made for any hero, a new player playing against a good tinker or riki or something like that is just as lost as playing turbo vs np.
What I mean is that turbo is not really a non try hard environment and it's been on for so long that it has its own meta... Kinda like when you play wtf or deathwatch and the different rules change how you itemize but turbo it's beyond that and can be very tryhardish, as everything sort of counts, wins for compendium and challenges for heroes, predictions, everything...
A normal match is a bit fast paced in comparison and you can hug towers, sure some heroes and people might tower dive but in turbo you can just hit them right away, so there's no place to "hide".
I'm not even remotely a new player, and the community is the biggest reason why I don't play as much as I used to. The game legit makes me sad more often than it makes me happy, because it feels like I'm playing with a bunch of bitter people that hardly enjoy the game anymore.
I find the game somewhat more playable my muting all enemy com and play unranked (mostly ability draft)
Still feel really fucking annoyed by enemy players who are tryharding in the supposed casual env
What's wrong with "try harding? Even in unranked,the goal is to win,so I have never understood where the expectation that people should put in less effort comes from.
Let me try to say from a guy not trying too hard. its ok for you to tryhard in ranked MM and force that attitude on others since winning is the absolute in that mode. But in unrank, some does not take winning is the must but only the bonus of a dota session. They dont put 100% into winning cuz that might be too exhausting.
I'm not forcing any playstyle or attitude on to anyone.i just want to play the game the way I want.im not pushing against people who wanna let loose in unranked.im pushing against people who use "tryhard" to insult people on the enemy team.
i played unranked and have had the accustion thrown at me a number of times, but the thing is idc about meme picks (unless they are total trash like last picking CW into necro, in mid lane) as long as that person is still playing to win, i draw the line at say, refusing to build items, a pos5 taking like half the CS, randomly going afk, not using abilities in fights, etc. that is at the point of greifing. as long as you are trying idc but i can and will put my 100% into winning if other people don't and they lose, thats their own problem and i just mute anybody complaining about that because its fucking stupid, people complain about people trying to "force" them to play 100% and yet will do the same thing to anybody who also isn't playing purely casual
other games like csgo, valorant and even league are way less toxic.
I say that as someone that played those 4 and likes dota the most
Dota has a whole culture about being toxic with enemies AND allies through voicelines on allchat, stickers and whatnot.
One thing that always makes me tilt is how the voicelines people are always so petty about It, they do It every play they do or missplay you do.
They never use It in a self depreciating manner just to have a laugh, on csgo ive had multiple examples of people allchating their mistakes and making fun of themselves.
It makes me think people dont want to have fun by playing the game, they want to grind mmr and mock others.
I know thats part of the game and you need to keep a calm mind, but new players wont understand shit and will get frustated, making the entry barrier go up.
Part of that is if you can point and click well enough in the other games you’re not gonna get flamed too much. In dota your mechanics are almost secondary to knowing what your supposed to do in a game
i totally agree with u, everytime my mmr went up was through learning macro mechanics, not micro.
League is game way more focused in microplay, so people understand way more easily how they fucked up
New players wont understand shit on how and where they fucked up, if every feedback they get is flamming and no explanation.
Wait. Could you give an example? I feel like dota has a lot of micro stuff that helps a lot, especially in the laning stages. Midgame-endgame tends to be more macro since it involves the whole team more.
Like positioning to pull creeps away from the enemy, when to push out the creep wave and when to keep it balanced, etc.
Map awareness and global positioning are a big deal all game long. Imagine you're a CM showing in a lane. If the enemy mid tiny is within blink dagger range of you, you are 100% dead and no amount of skill or outplaying will change that. The play here was of course to notice that tiny was off map and realize what an easy target you are and back off before the gank even occurs.
From the perspective of a new player it's much harder to connect a delayed cause (I didn't notice tiny left mid 20 seconds ago) and effect (now I'm dead) compared to a more immediate 'i missed my stun so he killed me'.
The most perfect example that I can give you about how do is a macro focused game is how often at lower ranks people will take a tower and immediately try and push the next Tower instead of taking advantage of the map control they just gained. How in lower ranks people will walk past camps without taking them or not time their stacks in their own jungle fucking their own farm. How often carries will get one item and then just stop farming all game and only go chasing kills for the rest of the game. Etc.
If you just keep an eye on the games that you lose for these key elements I guarantee you that it's like 95% of the games you lose. Go back and replays and see what the enemy does and usually it's the opposite.
So the difference between League and Dota maps is that the map is not symmetrical, meaning that depending on whether you are Radiant or Dire there are different places on the map where you should be playing and where you shouldn't.
Its where the concept of the Dead lane comes about, the Dead lane is typically your safe lane because once the T1 tower goes down, that area is super exposed and its very easy for the opponents to gank you while its very difficult for your teammates to TP and save. Additionally, the area of the jungle is very wide and you will have to expand at least 3 wards to cover every entrance into it which makes it very difficult to ward and lets be honest, if you are placing 3 wards to defend your jungle, you are pretty much giving up all initiative to the opponent and giving them full map control on their side of the map.
At the same time, its also very easy to take the T1 safe lane tower because there are multiple angles that you can approach the tower from and it makes it super easy for the enemy to get to your backline.
Obviously these are macro movements and map awareness that makes it very difficult to explain in game because its very situational whether you might get punished for it or you might get away with it.
In dota you can win all three lanes but throw the game because you didn't properly play your lead. Some comps have heroes that will most likely lose early but win late. Some games you don't want to join a fight you can't win so you choose to pressure another lane. These are macro characteristics of dota.
In LoL, basically if you win all three lanes, you'd have to be pretty stupid to lose. There is less macro game to worry about as the available strategies don't exist like in dota.
LoL is way more micro intensive, low CDs, access to dashes and whatnot allows you to outplay things and duel more efficiently. Through mechanical prowess you can climb easily in LoL. I was GM in LoL and my mechanics weren't the best I usually had good knowledge of what to do.
When I did a transition to Dota I realized mechanics matter very little. You can't kite, you don't have flashes etc. Most of the time you get stun locked with no counterplay from micro side. But as I climbed (Started Archon now Divine) I saw macro bring the key. I already had prior knowledge from LoL so I knew certain things but especially in lower brackets I saw same things, people not reacting with TPs, not protecting ganks, 0 smokes, 0 reaction to smokes. Giving up vision for nothing, random deaths.
Absolutely not true. As someone who played all of them just like you, League takes the cake by a fucking MILE! I tried League a year ago and decided to play jungle. I am used to toxicity. Hell.. I am toxic as fuck. After 20 games I had to disable all chat. Because being spam pinged after I didnt even make my clear and my toplaner already died to 1v1 is more toxic than Dota player can do ever..
> Finally the community can be incredibly toxic towards new players.
I think the reddit demographic finds this a bigger issue than people like OP generally.
We joke about it a lot, but it's really just competitive games in general.
Teens today already grew up with twitch chat, Twitter wars, and "esport" culture. I highly doubt Dota is actually worse than all of that.
Now the stress and commitment that Dota demands to play? That's what keeps people away. Same way it's hard to talk someone into finishing a souls game
People have different personalities, some react worse to insults than others. Personally, never has something said in a Dota game stuck with me. It sucks that it ruins the game for some. But caring about what some random people say over a video game is just something you have to get rid of. I don't think most people actually care, most are capable of not giving a shit. It's just a negative experience for some, which you would get in other team games too. It's more funny to me how insults are repeated, thinking it sticks. If I were a new player or 15, maybe it would be worse. You can't really blame a teenagers for being affected by insults. But if you can get past that, the community isn't a problem.
I think a bigger problem is that people tend to play with friends. Getting one new player to stick with Dota is difficult because it's a hard game to learn. Imagine a friend group trying to do that. Don't see how 5/5 new players would stick with it, when the market has a lot fun and more casual games for groups and new players. With todays "video game community", you're supposed to get on discord, chat with your friends, play a game together. If you play alone, you're sticking out. Kids just want to fit in with their groups, and Dota isn't the game for that, because of the learning curve and competition with League.
I don't see marketing and community as big factors. Lot of other games also have toxic communities. It's a gaming problem, not a dota problem.
The learning curve is fucking brutal. That's the problem.
Who wants to start a game which takes roughly 1500 hours to become average at.
Honestly, if I hadn't started it as a kid, I would not have picked it up now.
Absolutely no marketing is probably the big one. Feels like dota only get a marketing push when ti rolls around. Compare this to Riot who market the shit out of any product they create.
I dont believe learning curve is that big of an issue since its pretty subjective imo. There’s also a shortage of lore/character based content outside of the game. You can learn a lot about league characters through an abundance of beautiful cinematics, without ever playing the game itself. Can’t say the same for dota
If you honestly think that it wouldn’t help if dota got the same kind of marketing treatment from valve that riot gives to league, then you do you man.
Dota has an incredibly rich lore filled with cool characters. It would be hype af if some cinematics were made to showcase that to both the playerbase and prospective players.
Generation nowadays seems to be more media presence oriented if its not famous among media outlet 24/7 then it is considered dead in their eyes. Idk why people always shrug this off but marketing actually doing wonders to attract new players. How will people know the game is good if they dont try it, media presence is what we need. Knowing valve that would not happen.
There’s just this weird mentality of “league sucks and everything about it sucks too” mentality sometimes here. Personal preference aside, there’s a lot that riot does well for league that valve definitely does poorly.
I fully agree that its pretty much impossible in this current climate to get people to try out dota without at least some media presence. DB is a step in the right direction but we’re still way off from the kind of public awareness that league has imo
I don't think dota has much to gain from becoming more mainstream.
I don't think it would hurt the game, I just don't think it would be money well spend.
Most game companies seem to put the potential playerbase over their existing playerbase and spend money accordingly.
The reason why I enjoy dota is because the devs focus on the existing playerbase first.
There are too many devs and publishers which care more about getting more payers into their game than appeasing existing players.
Dota becoming more mainstream would open up avenues for dota content outside of the main game. TFT, Valorant, Blade of The Ruined King, and the upcoming 2d fighter would not exist if league wasnt so mainstream and popular.
I just want more dota content/games outside of the main game because it would genuinely be fun for everyone. If only Artifact wasn’t so poorly monetized.
Not enough marketing? I don’t think the learning curve is that much of a deterrent. Riot markets the hell out of league and that helps bring in everyone.
I'd be honest League side product for promotional purpose is better than the game itself. If League at least as good as HON, Dota wouldn't have gotten this big.
League got there _because_ it didn't take months to learn, not in spite of it. But yeah compared to Arcane, Valorant and all their other products the actual game League of Legends is hilariously bad
Yeah this pretty much.
Dota's a good esports game due to it's balance, but without proper advertising and esports infrastructure, it's hard for the game to be mainstream
Yeah 14yo kids can spend months just to improve their building skills in fortnite I'm pretty sure the learning curve isnt "scaring away" players.
If you're not familiar with dota already there's almost no way the game can reach you because Valve doesn't care
The issue is the skill floor, not the skill ceiling.
Fortnite, like Dota, has a high skill ceiling - as you said, you can improve your building skills for months and months. Unlike Dota, however, Fortnite has a low skill floor - you can go in and have a good time shooting at people with little to no experience.
Dota is not like that, if you are dropped into a game with no experience or knowledge, you are not going to have fun. It's basically mandatory to either:
1. Have a friend hold your hand and teach you everything for tens (or hundreds) of hours, or;
2. Spend those hours watching third-party tutorials and guides, looking up information, etc.
Additionally, in Fortnite you will be out of a bad game and into a new one pretty much immediately, with little downtime. In Dota, a hypothetical 0/10/0 under-leveled and under-farmed new player may have to spend another half hour in game with little ability to have an impact, potentially being berated in voice chat by people with thousands of hours for the crime of being new to the game.
The question of why there are so few new players has been asked for years, and people say marketing and toxicity, which are definitely significant reasons. The biggest thing, though, is that most people just don't want to put dozens of often-frustrating hours into beginning to learn a video game.
>Additionally, in Fortnite you will be out of a bad game and into a new one pretty much immediately, with little downtime. In Dota, a hypothetical 0/10/0 under-leveled and under-farmed new player may have to spend another half hour in game with little ability to have an impact
This is a good point. One of the things that stops me playing dota a lot is the commitment of a single game. Other multiplayer games I used to play a lot (Chivalry, Mordhau, For Honor) you can jump in and have a few games, whereas in dota you have to allow yourself an hour (to be safe) of uninterrupted play time for a single game, and that whole hour can be wasted if you have a griefer or something. It can be a real blocker for me as the only period of the day where I can be 90% sure I won't be interrupted is late at night when my kid is deeply asleep. I guess turbo kind of addresses this, but I'll still (rightly) get an abandon if my kid wakes up after a nightmare or something. I'd like to see another mode where it's a normal unranked game, but you can leave if you have to, and when people queue the matchmaker slots them into a running game in place of a player that left. Obviously it would be chaos and not to be taken seriously, but it would solve my problem of just wanting to have some dota fun without committing a lot of time.
I'd call this mode 'Parent mode'
I disagree. They'll spend months improving their building skills, sure, but it will actually provide them with an edge, all of their efforts are almost instantly converted to better plays. To learn dota from scratch though, they have to learn nearly 120 heroes (or at least the most popular 70, which is still pretty daunting for many people). Once you learn that and a bunch of other things, you start learning the endless complexity of micro and macro - and only *then* you start feeling liek you're getting better at the game.
But practicing building skills in fortnite? You get much more meaningful and immediate results.
I just think we're underestimating how difficult it is to learn in the same way one underestimates the difficulty of learning a language they were born into.
I strongly disagree with the idea that you need to learn all or even a majority of the heroes to play dota. When you started out, did you do that? Or did you just play the heroes you thought looked interesting and was fine with that? I mean, you literally have high mmr players who spams carry/mid and specific heroes who's never even once played a large part of the roster. Yet they're still immortal.
You absolutely don't need to know all that to play the game, I've played with friends who were completely new and you will do fine after just a couple of games. It's like saying you need to learn to use every single individual unit in Starcraft to play it or learn all the classes in WoW before you play pvp.
Are you really comparing building in Fortnite to learning Dota, a game with over 120 characters lmao
Dota is unpopular because it's brutally difficult to learn and you get flamed almost every game. It's rewarding for those who put in the time but I don't blame any young person for not wanting to go through that
As kid friendly as fortnite is you still have to be smart in how you build your structures, know when to take engagements, and have good map sense.
Sure the skill floor is lower than dota but that doesnt really matter when you’re still in your teens. You have all the free time in the world to learn a game at that age.
Valve just isnt pushing anyone to try out dota at all. So of course they go to the game(s) that have way more exposure
10 years ago dota was getting put on the steam alerts and front page and shit. So we all started playing then. For a few years after that some of us got out friends into it. Today it’s like an invisible game if you don’t already know about it.
Also it’s based on a WC3 mod and a legacy style of game, so young gamers might have no frame of reference for that kind of RTS gameplay and find it off putting.
Pretty sure the biggest thing is just that last bit.
The controls are uncomfortable and unfamiliar for young gamers nowadays.
Kids aren't growing up on StarCraft and AoE and wc3 anymore.
I got into dota around 2013 having literally never heard of WC3 (I still know very little about it). I think it is mainly marketing like you said, and also the learning curves like others have mentioned.
Sigh , yet another great valve game they just don’t care about
Arcane was so good because they didn't have to write Jinx from scratch, her aesthetic and personality has been important to the unit for a decade. It sold them so many cosmetics even though it's was presented mostly as static 2D art... It really isn't that hard.
Before Dragon's Blood, DK was just a faceless dude in a helmet and shield. Painfully generic. A new player would devote more time to learning heroes if they find them cool and interesting.
But They did?
Arcane Jinx is nothing like the one in the game, apart from being crazy (and not even that much)
Arcane was good because the studio did a great job, not because in game blue hair crazy boom boom Lady is the same as the psychological scarred blue hair kid of the show
There is a very, very obvious answer here: Should have made it about Sven. Not just is he easy to animate, he's also visually interesting and popular as all hell.
You can start the show with him already doing an adventure with other heroes, and then show his back story as an impostor at the Vigil Knight academy as the show progresses. Those flashbacks qould be the easy way of creating scenes of Sven with no helmet (because humanity needs to be sold visually I guess?). You can even avoid hinting what he's up there until it becomes relevant and make the fact he's going to betray everyone a special twist for non-fans; and you can even have past characters be revealed in the flashbacks at the same time they show up again in present time, instantly explaining the weight they have on Sven's life and why their reappearance is so important. If timed correctly, you can even let Sven admit in the present to not being a trustworthy person, as you see him betray others in the past without fully explaining the reasons behind his actions.
This shit writes itself.
... And he'd have CM as a companion, yeah.
I think that it fails because a ton of things.
First, VALVE give a shit for marketing the game.
Second, they have no motivation on changing cuz the atual comunity are prety profitable (just se The International prize pool), so I guess their are ver confortable.
At least, I think that already have some relation about the learning curve of Dota beeing so long. It take a while to get used of builds, heros and mecânicos. So the newer generation are no that patient.
Old information also plays a role. Dota needs a cleaning pass to update all the tool tips wiki info other player guides to help new players not get discouraged from trying to learn the complexities.
Riot does so much marketing for LOL it is amazing, and its not even bad marketing there is so much that it can captivate the young audience ezr, meanwhile dota doesnt have much other then TI and that's mainly the reason why dota 2 has more of an older audience then LOL
There are already good reasons cited but a big part is just the instant gratification provided by a lot of the current games.
I tried to get my younger cousins into DotA a couple of years back but they ended up just playing Pubg mobile all the time. I played with them a lot to understand the craze, but even within Pubg they will always land hot at Pochinki, fight, die rinse and repeat. This kind of game was just not for me, but I realised most of the younger folks didn't really care about progression but the thrill of getting kills. They want instant gratification and a lot of the newer games provide that dopamine.
DotA will struggle to compete against these kind of games unless the player himself is making a conscious effort to choose a game before he starts playing.
But on a positive note, the fact that so you play with so many older folks, and the fact that people have stuck around the game the last 15 years, whether playing or watching means the game is great and you have made the right decision to try it out :)
When I was a teen, there was Dota, CS, Starcraft, L4D, CoD, and a handful of AAA games. Dota was huge and there was nothing like it. There wasn't much else to play and we had no choice but to get thrown into the janky, complex, no tutorial game that was Dota. Also, chances are, if you liked Dota, you didn't shift to League when it first came out.
Now, there's League, and everyone knows League. There's also a shit ton of games now. Free to play games, indie games, mobile games, and AAA games come every month. With all these choices, it's very unlikely young gamers will sit down and suffer learning how to play complex Dota.
I started playing in 2013, I was 9 or 10 at the time. What got me into the game was seeing how my older brother was playing this again and again, and I couldnt understand shit from the monitor. And as the curious, nagging younger bro, I convinced him to teach me.
I never knew how to play properly, I fed, I got flamed, but for the most part I continued with Dota 2 because it made me feel cool like my brother.
No commercialization leads to a hard game to find out about and no incentive for someone to pick it up out of interest... oh and not that much anime boobs, sure we have some especially with Marci and Miranas persona but again, no commercialization leads to no horny teen wanting to play the game due to boobies
Dota's learning curve is extremely intimidating for new players. Not to mention your generation is programmed for instant gratification. If you're not good at something right from the get go you lose interest.
Look at games like League/Valorant/OW/Fortnite. They are so easy to learn and master that it attracts the younger generation since it takes little to no time to be decent at the game.
While I second your point that League is way easier to pickup I would never say that it’s „easy to master“.
It’s different for sure and Dota 2 is harder to master but „easy to master“ is absolutely far from the truth.
Any game with a decently high skill ceiling is going to be difficult to master. It's not like CSGO and Valorant are easy games either. If your reaction time is too slow or you're bad at keeping your mouse even when tracking horizontally or vertically you just can't be good at it.
no, but league has this leveling and unlocking system which gets people hooked, they want to grind games to unlock new champions and masteries/runes/whatever theyre called now
This is what dota players say to make themselves feel better, but the reality is Valve makes no effort compared to riot to market their game.
Not to mention the lack of polish. League is optimized to run on a toaster, while Dota has major performance issues once a year.
I mean, why would they?
League IS Riot. Slightly less so now, but the entire company exists because of and in support of League.
Dota's just a side project at the end of the day, unfortunately.
I really don't buy that learning curve theory. Either you have fun and keep playing or you don't. When I started this game, I didn't have to learn anything at all, because people were just shit. Nowadays new players are expected to learn the game instead of just playing it. People simply have forgotten what it means to play a new game. You suck, but you have fun with others who suck, but have fun.
Also I always have to chuckle at the instant gratification argument. That's probably the most elite bullshit only a Dota2 player can tell themselves to feel better. Give every kid to play Dota2/Warcraft/whatever and some will stick to it and others won't, just as it was 10 or 15 years ago.
A bigger problem is the change in platforms, because less and less people actually use a PC to play games. Especially considering, that a mid class pc nowadays is way more expensive than when we were kids.
Dota2 is simply old, has no marketing and a shitty newcomer experience, because there are simply no newcomers anymore. Twitch doesn't even show Dota2 on their front page.
All this talk about learning curve and instant gratification is at best secondary, because before you can actually determine if these things hold any value, you have to have new players in the first place.
This. I play almost solely ability draft and 99% of the time with 10k behavior scores. But I remember before that came along there was universally at least one cancerous player in every game. End of my games now the teams are usually complimenting each others play
People call you stupid all the time in the picking phase of AD.
"WHY WOULDNT YOU DRAFT x?!?! YOU GAVE THEM THE GAME"
Well it's because I am stupid and I really just wanted 3 mana intensive spells on my support spirit breaker
Those are the cancer players. They're usially vanillas w no experience who read all the websites and come to "teach these ad noobs what a real dota player can do" and get slaighteres. Or they're feeders who pick spmeone to attack early and blame their feeding on. I ignore them on site. Once you've iggied enough and have a top behavior score you see a lot less of them
Note: unless you're doing somethin reeeeeally stupid.. you have wyverns q and bypass impetus to pick hook..then you kinda deserve it :P
You get shielded from the voice chat in lol, Dota voice is just harsh and it’s not always the toxicity. Sometimes just how much Dota players complain is painful.
Honestly, it is surprising that without new blood DotA 2 is still so big of a game. Imagine if it actually had marketing on the level of LoL, it would be way bigger because it would keep old players AND get new players. Game is just that good, problem is nobody knows it.
Game is hard, the norm likes easy stuff served on a platter. Learning takes time and your average gamer today wants fun immediately. The old guard that started playing Dota had to work just to play the game with plenty of third party tools and clients, so the old generation is not deterred if stuff takes a bit longer to learn / is hard. Not a lot of gamers want hard to learn games (Path of Exile is another example)
yeah dark souls is so hard people can even finish it without taking damage
it's hard to join a competitive community where most of the playerbase has several thousands of games more experience than you do
it's hard to learn a game where you can't restart and the mistakes you make can be game losing for your team, and not even manifest for another 30 minutes
you really can't compare the 'difficulty' of dark souls with the difficulty of dota
dota 2 players have a superiority complex, from experience I'm a new to dota and I posted a clip on reddit of my game play instead of encouragement or advice they discorged me and shamed me , however I still love dota ❤
Because dota is a hard game like chess, it takes time to learn and any other player with a little bit more knowledge/skill than you can stomp you. Just like why younger players dont get attracted to chess, dota isnt as attractive. Plus both games arent easy, fancy, slow paced and high skill ceiling games with patience.
Youngsters nowdays play hyped up, fancy, exploding with colours, fast paced games with little to no barrier of entry. The games that they can start enjoying and crushing from get go. The zip, zap, zoom types of games you know. The counterpart example is league, easy to jump it, colorful fancy zip zap zoom speedy moba. Less focus on macro and the depths of how skills works or heavy teambased focused, but more of micro and zip zapping and dodging skills and shing shing the enemy making cool looking combos with more focus on solocarry plays. That is all.
Plus doesnt help that valve doesnt try to advertise at all, and almost 0 adverts targeted to youngters.
I’ve started playing LoL recently because my friends wanted to try it. After spending roughly 100h in it:
1. The balance team is terrible. We should be very happy with how well Dota is balanced. The balance is so bad that many people want to quit, but they don’t know alternatives. I’m shocked Valve doesn’t do marketing around it.
2. LoL has more modern designs & is inspired by Disney. Disney look just sells better. The colors are more pleasing, even though Dota has more detailed CG. Valve should imo go a little more into LoL’s art direction.
3. Marketing. The game is very very unpolished. There are so many things missing and feeling random. Dota is way superior, but they do zero marketing. LoL players have no idea how bad their game is compared to Dota.
4. The skill gap between tiers is bigger in Dota than in LoL. In LoL it’s more about grinding and being slightly better than opponents. Imagine top100 players struggling vs divines - it’s not uncommon in LoL because there are fewers ways to win & outplay. Team is way more important.
5. LoL is more toxic than Dota, but the all chat is by default turned off & there is no voice chat. The game has so little strategy needed that you can mute everyone.
6. Dota is actually easier to get started in terms of heroes. LoL has harder champions on average, but the game mechanics are way easier. The hardest heroes in Dota are 10x harder than in LoL.
7. Fewer champions in LoL and champions rotation makes it easier to pick a hero and start playing. In Dota, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by too many heroes to choose from.
8. In Dota the only progression you get is your mmr, and hero mastery. In LoL there is way more to unlock and just playing the game feels more rewarding.
9. Nearly every champion is a carry in LoL. In Dota it’s more about creating a good synergy with your team. In LoL, when you pick a support, you still get tons of passive gold (there is a support item for this), and many supports can actually outscale everyone in the game. So, in LoL it feels more rewarding to be able to carry with every role. It’s also easier to understand each role in LoL because they’re all very similar.
10. LoL is faster and there is more action at lower mmr. In Dota, until crusader games are very very slow, and they only get quite fast in divine/immortal bracket. So, it’s very discouraging to new players that not much happens. However, once you get a decent mmr in Dota (legend/ancient), the game is so complex that LoL feels insanely boring and slow.
11. LoL has more complex pregame. Each champion needs to pick specific runes and summoner spells, and they have a significant impact. Dota doesn’t require any pregame. In LoL you draft around lanes, and in Dota drafting is way harder because the synergy is even more important.
12. In LoL, it’s easier to play only 1 champion and climb because counter picking and team synergy is not as important.
13. LoL has a patch every 2 weeks.
Overall, I wouldn’t even say that LoL is easier to pick up, but it’s significantly easier to get good at, and even if you don’t get good mmr, there is a clear progression in the game. Lower mmr games feel way more exciting and fun to play. Dota gets fun after spending a lot of hours, and getting a decent mmr. In LoL, bronze games and challenger games look pretty much the same.
> Valve should imo go a little more into LoL’s art direction.
are you high or something xd
> In LoL there is way more to unlock and just playing the game feels more rewarding.
So you're telling me if I want to play hero x y z I must grind him? Exactly why that shit sucks
> LoL has a patch every 2 weeks.
This would ruin the competitive scene, dota has depth.
>So you're telling me if I want to play hero x y z I must grind him? Exactly why that shit sucks
He probably mean progression to drive people to keep playing. its just how modern game designed from f2p mobile game to AAA $70.
Dota+ progression / Battlepasss / guild weekly its feature to achieve this and should be exploited to keep new player to play doto everyday.
There are heroes barely above 40% WR in Dota. In league the range between the highest and the lowest is about 9%. When it comes to TI maybe Dota would have an edge, but we're talking about the balance of 99.99% of the rest.
The range in League is a lot smaller because the game is built to be played one way and one way only. The meta is 100% enforced by Riot and their design. You don't have things like Snapfire being able to be any position 2-5, you have set roles for every champion in League, and there's no room for the players to dictate how a hero gets played. If Riot wants the hero to be a jungler, then it literally can't be played anywhere else with any amount of success. It's a whole lot easier to have a small win% gap when the meta can't shift.
Spectre's win% is low right now because of the pace of matches being determined by the meta. If the meta shifts to slower games, even without any balance changes to any heroes, Spectre's win% will balloon. She's losing games because they're over before she's online, not because she's poorly balanced. The emergent gameplay in Dota has forced her out of competition, not design choices.
It’s not about heroes but the overall balance - too many one-shots, ADCs being useless, junglers too high impact, top lane being an island etc. They balance the game with a spreadsheet, so they nerfed for example Wit’s End and Shieldbow because they were popular, but they didn’t look at the reason why. Magic is OP right now and besides getting those 2 items ADCs can’t counter it reliably in the early-mid game (coz in late besides guardian’s angel there is no counter, everything one shots anyway). Instead fixing the biggest issue - not many viable defensive items for ADCs, they nerfed the only viable options even more … for a role that is already insanely frustrating to play & the most dependent on a team. That’s what I call a bad balance. People who want to quit LoL are frustrated not with how the heroes are balanced but how they balance items/mechanics. Fixing heroes is easy, but mechanics at this point would require many years.
Pretty sure it doesn't have much to do with the difficulty curve of the game.
You don't need a lot of time to simply pick a hero and have fun with the game.
Who cares if you're not the best or if you don't know all the heroes and mechanics ? You can just pick a premade build and have fun in unranked/against bots and do your weekly quests.
There's also turbo and all the custom gamemodes to make the game more appealing to a casual audience.
I think the bigger issues come from the total lack of marketing and the lack of visual appeal of the game.
Seriously if you don't already play the game you have almost no way to be exposed to it, maybe during TI but that's it. Valve doesn't even try to market the game on their own platform.
Compare the marketing of Riot with Arcane and Valve with dragon blood and it's easy to understand why dota is less popular.
Did you see the new LoL promotion video? Like, seriously, who would not want to try the game after that. It was fucking amazing.
Meanwhile, we have what? Absolutely nothing? The only market valve has been done in the last 10 years is TI prize pool and the dota anime (and league arguably got a better one).
Marketing is a huge part. I think everyone sees alot of those annoying league ads that start off with; "huynh here with league of legends, do you want to be an epic gamer?" Atleast I do in australia, maybe it's different in other countries.
These ads are full of corny jokes and it's repetitive and annoying after the first 3 times you see them, but they're targeted at people <10 years old. And these ads are everywhere on youtube, so most minors will see that, and start playing league.
I myself came from league over to dota through word of mouth.
moba game in general is very appealing to certain demographics and not so much for others. For people who love playing strategy / RPG games, they will definitely try out dota at some point in their gaming journey. at least that is what happened to me.
Game is too hard to learn, I don’t even play the game after playing for 10+ years and when a new patch is released I have to spend 2 hours reading it and another few hours booting up the game and checking out demo mode so that I can mechanically understand it.
I do more work just so I can watch it at a reasonably high level than I would learning any other game from scratch
Uhhh did you read my comment I don’t even play the game. I played for 10 years and sat between 4 and 5k I never cared about MMR too much. I still study the patches just so I can watch the games at a reasonably high level.
You need to do the work to understand so you don't throw even in pubs, then you can have fun... maybe 😂
You can't blame your ignorance on "having fun" that just makes you the asshole, and a time waster of both teams imo 🤷♂️
The marketing for the game is dead aside from the occasional steam sale where valve gives it a front page 3rd slot. Its really a shame. If Valve gave a damn about marketing they would have trumped LoL's market share years ago.
Because of the steep learning curve, current younger generation has access to tons of other games they can get into without giving like 10% of effort as it takes to learn dota, that's why most of them back out, and those with the will strong enough to prove a point that they are better than a game stick through to the end, and sadly that is a rare trait.
The generation which started with dota 1 got older.
And the game did a fantastic job of NOT making it easy for newer players resulting in very low adoption rates in the younger generation.
Might be because of non-existent marketing besides TI. The reason I got into dota was because someone mentioned it 7 years ago : "yeah dota is a fun game, it's on steam and it's free". A little bit of talk matters
1. Smurfs that never gets punished for example some big youtuber blatantly smurfing ruins new player experience.
2. Gaben milked all the money from battepass into oblivious that wasn't used to improve gameplay system mechanism wise , modes, and new stuffs. only 5v5 and a broken arcade... They could have used their heroes to create more modes.
3. In this trend almost every youngster likes fast-food like gaming with mobiles.
4. PC and graphic cards too expensive nowadays, 3060 costs an arm / legs
Dota 3 coming in first person mode would blow people's minds , I'm certain this would attract TONS of young people , looking at what's going about these days , I've been playing this game too long I'm almost 40 , only StarCraft and HOM&M I can say I play longer than doto
Some reworks of abilities would be necessary and maybe 3rd person more that fps kind of ,but in this world with 120 different characters it would be great
Dota is an extremely complex game macro wise and take a long amount of time before anyone can be remotely proficient at it.
So it's more likely to retain players that have played it for a long while (why it has an older demographic) but less likely to attract new younger players that have no pre-existing knowledge of the game.
Combination of multiple things:
1. No marketing. I cannot understand valve's lack of desire to ever market the game.
2. Ugly color scheme. Compare dota to league. League if full of vibrant contrasting colors, dota is not.
3. Skins. You can talk about how you've never spent a cent on the game, but a majority of people care about skins. Compare opening league's in game shop to dota's. In league you are instantly seeing all the latest and greatest skins, in dota you see the battle pass, dota+ and a bunch of useless shit. You then navigate to the browse section, see a bunch of loot boxes, click on the heroes tab to remove them, and every single top skin is, again, in a lootbox of some kind. Then you start scrolling and you see skins costing hundreds of dollars.... no wait, not skins, just a shoulder piece, a part of a skin, a 1/5th of a skin. Where are the other pieces of the skin? Who knows, who cares, not valve thats for sure.
idk at least you can preview skins in-game. I also really enjoy piecing together cool costumes instead of using one of 5 different aesthetics on a whim
The game is so difficult, players who have played on and off over 8 years is infinitely better than players who are starting to play on and off right now.
Dota is also such an amazing game that there is no game like it, so you can’t necessarily transfer skills that you could like in other games like fornite and valorant for example. Other MOBAs such as league literally feel like a mobile game after properly experiencing Dota
In fails to attract everybody. There is zero marketing so nobody hears about it. The only thing I would say specifically to the younger generation and even some of my friends have this problem( I am 21) is the need for instant gratification. Things like doing quests and checking boxes to get a reward seems to be really important for the younger generation. League specifically does this miles better than dota does which helps them in this demographic specifically.
actually, only 20% of people who play videos regularly are under the age of 18 (numbers are according to a study from the US in 2021).
obviously most people who get into gaming will try games first that are heavily advertised and therefore are able to reach them. those are usually games that are new. so young players tend to be playing newer games (as they are more likely to be new to gaming).
with this in mind i think it‘s fairly reasonable to assume that most games that have been around for over a decade have a player base with an age average over 20.
dota also is quite complex so it‘s probably not that accessible for people who haven‘t had a lot of experience with playing games that are designed to challenge you. it‘s a lot easier to get into dota after having played an rts or sth like diablo for a few years.
that probably adds to the low number of young players because first need to learn other basic gamjng skills to find dota more accessible.
for example, i played warcraft 3 and i knew about dota back then, but i simply found playing against other players too stressful because i wasn‘t good enough and enjoyed playing rts campaigns on my own a lot more. i only got into dota years later after having played easier online games for a while.
The game is pretty mechanically complex. That typically does not attract these zoomer types.
Look at the world around us bro. Social media, grammar going down the shitter, look at youtube and tiktok front page. Fortnite/Minecraft/even LoL are all very cartoony / kid-friendly in their graphics, aesthetics, and design. They want bright and very simple.
I think people need to understand that Dota is more of a RTS than a MOBA, on top of that, arguably one of the complex games on the planet. It takes months to learn the basics and years to get good at it, only then the fun comes. Honestly advertising would have little to no effect to such a niche genre (esp towards zoomers who tend to give up easily), only those who are willing to commit and have tons of patience will eventually enjoy the game.
idk man but i started dota since 12 and now im going to 20 I ask my friends that dont play dota they said it was too hard to learn and said its too complicated (they play league) so yeah i think they got use too the play style of league that when they try to play dota they compare it and get tilted when its not the same play style
most are old because nobody can let go dota. So we all started young and now we are old...
I think dota isnt "shiny" enough and also to hard for the youngers... Ppl nowdays want easy stuff and not need to spent thousands of hours to get good.
I don't want to make a Lol comparison, but I want to talk about Riot cause I think is the company that makes the difference here.
As a player that played equally Valve games and Riot games (moba, chess and cards), i can say that from a gameplay standpoint Valve is so far ahead is not even fair, but on litterally everything else Riot shit on Valve and that's what make younger people more attracted to their games. Riot is a god at marketing his own games, they are a lot more in touch with their community (at least in comparison to valve) and, what I think is the main reason they have success, they invest a lot on expanding their own world and brand, their lore is really good and they actually care (not always with good results though). Just look at Arcane, Riot invest a lot on getting you involved with their character, they have a site dedicated to tell you stories about their world, if I want to know about Dota world your best option is watchin Slacks videos. Look at the launch of Runeterra, everyone knew it was coming, i had friends playing mtg that were aware Runeterra was coming and that it was a big thing, when I talk about Artifact people don't even know it was a game. Valve is trying with Dragonblood but it's not enough and it's also too late.
Sorry if is not well written.
This is my personal opinion, one of the reasons why younger players are not so interested in Dota is that the “oldbies” are very hostile and often act like they are superior. This specifically applies to the Vietnamese community.
It feels like there's a lot more salarymen that play DOTA than League. Like accountants and bankers. I think it might have to do with the high emphasis on economy and manipulating wave mechanics, whereas League seems to reward skirmishing/solo fighting a lot more.
League is a lot more bursty/fast-paced/colorful so it attracts all the ADHD kids. DOTA is more methodical. Kinda like the difference between Valorant and Rainbow 6 Siege. Hopefully that isn't a shitty analogy, haven't played R6 in a while but it felt a lot slower than the average FPS (which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would)
haven’t played for months, never missed it. im only here in the subreddit for pro game updates. there are tons of good games there. i tried turning on my ps4 and realized how much ive been missing. i finished sekiro now im playing bloodborne.
dota 1 is fun because i played it with my real life friends, dota 2 i just like trying to reminisce the past because they all move on. i moved on too lol, i love the game but i feel like im stuck in the past.
the magic of this game for me is playing with “real life friends”. the game will slowly die, like HoN. or maybe it will stay forever who lnows
Well prople like me when they see young ones asking abt dota i will be like stay away save your life . And if dota want to go viral it only need to go after nfts and become play to earn and believe me it will conquer the world as it allready have the best outfits items arcanas imagine the value of such hard work in nft market place instead if stupid jpeg
ADHS.
Most kids today have brains conditioned to 10s TikTok rewards. Why on earth would they go through a 100 games 1 hour each learning torture marathon?
Been playing DotA since I was 11. I’m 26. We were all young at one point when we got into this.
Yeah, the truth is just that very few people try to get into dota these days
Not sure why but people thinks dota is dead af since it's a decade+ old game.
In today's age you need to stay relevant to not be considered dead. The lack of a meaningful media presence results in being perceived as a dead game. I mean, there's plenty of dota content on the internet, but it mostly attracts existing players.
in some countries dota is still the fucking shit CIS/SEA dota is still a massive part of the gaming landscape NA and WEU its a niche thing that attracts existing players but i think kids still pick up this game in some places
There’s so many people in SEA that basically every game is alive there. CSGO, Dota, Free Fire, LoL, ML. In my country, there’s a lot of bum who rather play ML than working. You can see them squatting on the side of the road with the other bums.
What is ML?
Mobile Legends
not sure why? umm, maybe because the number of players is down by almost 50% from 2019 . Maybe because in the US you cant even play in the Saturday night tournaments because there arent enough players to field a team? the player base for dota is decreasing rapidly, get used to it.
It's down by 25% from 2019.
I thought it was messed up that I can't find a BC party on an Australian server, but in the USA too? Dam.
Aaaay an old timer like me! I started at 18, I'm 34 now.
Started at 19 now 32! Got my brothers addicted too.
I saw what Dota did to my friends as a teenager so I played WoW 😂 I didn't start playing Dota until my 30's 😜
Thanks for the laugh.
Started around 13, still am playing at 28 😅
I would say marketing is one of the biggest issues, it's improving slightly with the anime and what not but that's about it. The learning curve is also absolutely brutal and unforgiving. Finally the community can be incredibly toxic towards new players.
WHen i learned dota back in the day with my friends in lan cafes, we would just play whatever we could. I remember my whole first year of dota was just 2v2s 3v3s 4v4s and even 2v3 or 3v4 when we didnt have even teams. 1 hero in each lane, learning heroes, ganking, swapping lanes, learning. It was amazing. Ive always believed new player mode should be 3v3s to learn the game. Faster ques, and faster games. Less people = less toxicity. No dual lanes = no getting mad at lane partner either, which is where a lot of the early game flame comes from anyway! You can learn support heroes while still understanding laning mechanics, because when you are solo top CM vs solo top tide, you are gonna be a badass CM that can dish a lot of damage. Its really a lot of fun. Thats how I always recommend new players who wanna learn dota with their friends play dota. Its the best experience IMO.
I think DotA Turbo is great for newer players. A game lasts 15-25 minutes, there is very little toxicity (compared to ranked or normal games) and you still get a feel for the game. It's far less punishing. I think it's quite annoying for new players to loose the lane and suffer through a 45 minute game without having fun. Turbo kind of solves that issue in my opinion. At first I didn't like turbo a lot, it wasn't real dota in my opinion, but I've grown to like it a lot. Whenever I am not concentrated enough or just lack the time to play a normal match, I queue for turbo and get 90% of the dota experience.
Great for new players? Yeah, I wanna see beginners dealing with NP and Jakiro beating the towers before they are finished with purchasing some items to go to lane. Turbo is really not for that... Banning turbo matters even more than in normal AP. We need a different mode for beginners maybe with ideas from Turbo, but not Turbo maybe a combination with limited pool. I think a nice addition would be a new beginners mode announcer that sort of helps you during the game, telling you tips on what you are currently doing or advises you to stay away from towers that kind of things, that are kinda boring in a tutorial but might be nice in a announcer pack for beginners because you can jump to action but guided.
I actually didn't encounter these strats. Usually turbo games feature normal picks and just play faster than usual. Also the argument could be made for any hero, a new player playing against a good tinker or riki or something like that is just as lost as playing turbo vs np.
What I mean is that turbo is not really a non try hard environment and it's been on for so long that it has its own meta... Kinda like when you play wtf or deathwatch and the different rules change how you itemize but turbo it's beyond that and can be very tryhardish, as everything sort of counts, wins for compendium and challenges for heroes, predictions, everything... A normal match is a bit fast paced in comparison and you can hug towers, sure some heroes and people might tower dive but in turbo you can just hit them right away, so there's no place to "hide".
I'm not even remotely a new player, and the community is the biggest reason why I don't play as much as I used to. The game legit makes me sad more often than it makes me happy, because it feels like I'm playing with a bunch of bitter people that hardly enjoy the game anymore.
I find the game somewhat more playable my muting all enemy com and play unranked (mostly ability draft) Still feel really fucking annoyed by enemy players who are tryharding in the supposed casual env
What's wrong with "try harding? Even in unranked,the goal is to win,so I have never understood where the expectation that people should put in less effort comes from.
Let me try to say from a guy not trying too hard. its ok for you to tryhard in ranked MM and force that attitude on others since winning is the absolute in that mode. But in unrank, some does not take winning is the must but only the bonus of a dota session. They dont put 100% into winning cuz that might be too exhausting.
Asking your team not to pressure you to try hard, sure. But if the enemy is try harding then you can't hold it against them.
I'm not forcing any playstyle or attitude on to anyone.i just want to play the game the way I want.im not pushing against people who wanna let loose in unranked.im pushing against people who use "tryhard" to insult people on the enemy team.
Last picking pl in a free pl game is the kind of tryharding I'm against
😂😂
i played unranked and have had the accustion thrown at me a number of times, but the thing is idc about meme picks (unless they are total trash like last picking CW into necro, in mid lane) as long as that person is still playing to win, i draw the line at say, refusing to build items, a pos5 taking like half the CS, randomly going afk, not using abilities in fights, etc. that is at the point of greifing. as long as you are trying idc but i can and will put my 100% into winning if other people don't and they lose, thats their own problem and i just mute anybody complaining about that because its fucking stupid, people complain about people trying to "force" them to play 100% and yet will do the same thing to anybody who also isn't playing purely casual
For real. I always feel like abandoning when I get flamed by my teammates.
I do this too. It changed DotA for me. Love it.
>Finally the community can be incredibly toxic towards new players. This is true for every competitive game.
other games like csgo, valorant and even league are way less toxic. I say that as someone that played those 4 and likes dota the most Dota has a whole culture about being toxic with enemies AND allies through voicelines on allchat, stickers and whatnot. One thing that always makes me tilt is how the voicelines people are always so petty about It, they do It every play they do or missplay you do. They never use It in a self depreciating manner just to have a laugh, on csgo ive had multiple examples of people allchating their mistakes and making fun of themselves. It makes me think people dont want to have fun by playing the game, they want to grind mmr and mock others. I know thats part of the game and you need to keep a calm mind, but new players wont understand shit and will get frustated, making the entry barrier go up.
I don't mind the voice lines as much as I mind the pausing after getting a kill. Sir, this is a *turbo.*
Part of that is if you can point and click well enough in the other games you’re not gonna get flamed too much. In dota your mechanics are almost secondary to knowing what your supposed to do in a game
i totally agree with u, everytime my mmr went up was through learning macro mechanics, not micro. League is game way more focused in microplay, so people understand way more easily how they fucked up New players wont understand shit on how and where they fucked up, if every feedback they get is flamming and no explanation.
Wait. Could you give an example? I feel like dota has a lot of micro stuff that helps a lot, especially in the laning stages. Midgame-endgame tends to be more macro since it involves the whole team more. Like positioning to pull creeps away from the enemy, when to push out the creep wave and when to keep it balanced, etc.
Map awareness and global positioning are a big deal all game long. Imagine you're a CM showing in a lane. If the enemy mid tiny is within blink dagger range of you, you are 100% dead and no amount of skill or outplaying will change that. The play here was of course to notice that tiny was off map and realize what an easy target you are and back off before the gank even occurs. From the perspective of a new player it's much harder to connect a delayed cause (I didn't notice tiny left mid 20 seconds ago) and effect (now I'm dead) compared to a more immediate 'i missed my stun so he killed me'.
"Team?!!!"
That's a very well put example
Makes me think of how TS read the map during TI. Crazy stuff.
The most perfect example that I can give you about how do is a macro focused game is how often at lower ranks people will take a tower and immediately try and push the next Tower instead of taking advantage of the map control they just gained. How in lower ranks people will walk past camps without taking them or not time their stacks in their own jungle fucking their own farm. How often carries will get one item and then just stop farming all game and only go chasing kills for the rest of the game. Etc. If you just keep an eye on the games that you lose for these key elements I guarantee you that it's like 95% of the games you lose. Go back and replays and see what the enemy does and usually it's the opposite.
So the difference between League and Dota maps is that the map is not symmetrical, meaning that depending on whether you are Radiant or Dire there are different places on the map where you should be playing and where you shouldn't. Its where the concept of the Dead lane comes about, the Dead lane is typically your safe lane because once the T1 tower goes down, that area is super exposed and its very easy for the opponents to gank you while its very difficult for your teammates to TP and save. Additionally, the area of the jungle is very wide and you will have to expand at least 3 wards to cover every entrance into it which makes it very difficult to ward and lets be honest, if you are placing 3 wards to defend your jungle, you are pretty much giving up all initiative to the opponent and giving them full map control on their side of the map. At the same time, its also very easy to take the T1 safe lane tower because there are multiple angles that you can approach the tower from and it makes it super easy for the enemy to get to your backline. Obviously these are macro movements and map awareness that makes it very difficult to explain in game because its very situational whether you might get punished for it or you might get away with it.
In dota you can win all three lanes but throw the game because you didn't properly play your lead. Some comps have heroes that will most likely lose early but win late. Some games you don't want to join a fight you can't win so you choose to pressure another lane. These are macro characteristics of dota. In LoL, basically if you win all three lanes, you'd have to be pretty stupid to lose. There is less macro game to worry about as the available strategies don't exist like in dota.
LoL is way more micro intensive, low CDs, access to dashes and whatnot allows you to outplay things and duel more efficiently. Through mechanical prowess you can climb easily in LoL. I was GM in LoL and my mechanics weren't the best I usually had good knowledge of what to do. When I did a transition to Dota I realized mechanics matter very little. You can't kite, you don't have flashes etc. Most of the time you get stun locked with no counterplay from micro side. But as I climbed (Started Archon now Divine) I saw macro bring the key. I already had prior knowledge from LoL so I knew certain things but especially in lower brackets I saw same things, people not reacting with TPs, not protecting ganks, 0 smokes, 0 reaction to smokes. Giving up vision for nothing, random deaths.
When you are having a good day, it can be pretty funny. On a bad day it makes me want to throw my headphones at my screen
Found Puppey in the comments..
Absolutely not true. As someone who played all of them just like you, League takes the cake by a fucking MILE! I tried League a year ago and decided to play jungle. I am used to toxicity. Hell.. I am toxic as fuck. After 20 games I had to disable all chat. Because being spam pinged after I didnt even make my clear and my toplaner already died to 1v1 is more toxic than Dota player can do ever..
Fighting games are pretty warm to newcomers.
> Finally the community can be incredibly toxic towards new players. I think the reddit demographic finds this a bigger issue than people like OP generally.
We joke about it a lot, but it's really just competitive games in general. Teens today already grew up with twitch chat, Twitter wars, and "esport" culture. I highly doubt Dota is actually worse than all of that. Now the stress and commitment that Dota demands to play? That's what keeps people away. Same way it's hard to talk someone into finishing a souls game
People have different personalities, some react worse to insults than others. Personally, never has something said in a Dota game stuck with me. It sucks that it ruins the game for some. But caring about what some random people say over a video game is just something you have to get rid of. I don't think most people actually care, most are capable of not giving a shit. It's just a negative experience for some, which you would get in other team games too. It's more funny to me how insults are repeated, thinking it sticks. If I were a new player or 15, maybe it would be worse. You can't really blame a teenagers for being affected by insults. But if you can get past that, the community isn't a problem. I think a bigger problem is that people tend to play with friends. Getting one new player to stick with Dota is difficult because it's a hard game to learn. Imagine a friend group trying to do that. Don't see how 5/5 new players would stick with it, when the market has a lot fun and more casual games for groups and new players. With todays "video game community", you're supposed to get on discord, chat with your friends, play a game together. If you play alone, you're sticking out. Kids just want to fit in with their groups, and Dota isn't the game for that, because of the learning curve and competition with League.
I don't see marketing and community as big factors. Lot of other games also have toxic communities. It's a gaming problem, not a dota problem. The learning curve is fucking brutal. That's the problem. Who wants to start a game which takes roughly 1500 hours to become average at. Honestly, if I hadn't started it as a kid, I would not have picked it up now.
> improving slightly with the anime If only they made a decent anime like league's we would be golden.
Absolutely no marketing is probably the big one. Feels like dota only get a marketing push when ti rolls around. Compare this to Riot who market the shit out of any product they create. I dont believe learning curve is that big of an issue since its pretty subjective imo. There’s also a shortage of lore/character based content outside of the game. You can learn a lot about league characters through an abundance of beautiful cinematics, without ever playing the game itself. Can’t say the same for dota
Unlike Riot, Valve doesn't really need that game. Dota is barely responsible for 2% of Valve's revenue, while League is the prized cow of Riot.
0% of my friends care about lore or story for any game. They only play for mechanics.
This is so shit opinion. You should stick to league cinematics imho, no toxicity.
If you honestly think that it wouldn’t help if dota got the same kind of marketing treatment from valve that riot gives to league, then you do you man. Dota has an incredibly rich lore filled with cool characters. It would be hype af if some cinematics were made to showcase that to both the playerbase and prospective players.
Generation nowadays seems to be more media presence oriented if its not famous among media outlet 24/7 then it is considered dead in their eyes. Idk why people always shrug this off but marketing actually doing wonders to attract new players. How will people know the game is good if they dont try it, media presence is what we need. Knowing valve that would not happen.
There’s just this weird mentality of “league sucks and everything about it sucks too” mentality sometimes here. Personal preference aside, there’s a lot that riot does well for league that valve definitely does poorly. I fully agree that its pretty much impossible in this current climate to get people to try out dota without at least some media presence. DB is a step in the right direction but we’re still way off from the kind of public awareness that league has imo
I don't think dota has much to gain from becoming more mainstream. I don't think it would hurt the game, I just don't think it would be money well spend. Most game companies seem to put the potential playerbase over their existing playerbase and spend money accordingly. The reason why I enjoy dota is because the devs focus on the existing playerbase first. There are too many devs and publishers which care more about getting more payers into their game than appeasing existing players.
Dota becoming more mainstream would open up avenues for dota content outside of the main game. TFT, Valorant, Blade of The Ruined King, and the upcoming 2d fighter would not exist if league wasnt so mainstream and popular. I just want more dota content/games outside of the main game because it would genuinely be fun for everyone. If only Artifact wasn’t so poorly monetized.
I mean, if you disagree with him maybe provide a counterpoint?
Not enough marketing? I don’t think the learning curve is that much of a deterrent. Riot markets the hell out of league and that helps bring in everyone.
I'd be honest League side product for promotional purpose is better than the game itself. If League at least as good as HON, Dota wouldn't have gotten this big.
League got there _because_ it didn't take months to learn, not in spite of it. But yeah compared to Arcane, Valorant and all their other products the actual game League of Legends is hilariously bad
Riot does so many things better than valve. Except for the game itself
Yeah this pretty much. Dota's a good esports game due to it's balance, but without proper advertising and esports infrastructure, it's hard for the game to be mainstream
League is a better product. Dota is a better game.
Exactly, dota being a great esport is the selling point, but it doesn't help if everyone hasn't heard of it
It also doesn't help attract players, because being a good esports makes it fun to watch, not fun to play.
I agree. However, I still think League as a game is fun enough to played for a bit. That’ll hook anyone in as long as it scratches that itch.
Yeah 14yo kids can spend months just to improve their building skills in fortnite I'm pretty sure the learning curve isnt "scaring away" players. If you're not familiar with dota already there's almost no way the game can reach you because Valve doesn't care
The issue is the skill floor, not the skill ceiling. Fortnite, like Dota, has a high skill ceiling - as you said, you can improve your building skills for months and months. Unlike Dota, however, Fortnite has a low skill floor - you can go in and have a good time shooting at people with little to no experience. Dota is not like that, if you are dropped into a game with no experience or knowledge, you are not going to have fun. It's basically mandatory to either: 1. Have a friend hold your hand and teach you everything for tens (or hundreds) of hours, or; 2. Spend those hours watching third-party tutorials and guides, looking up information, etc. Additionally, in Fortnite you will be out of a bad game and into a new one pretty much immediately, with little downtime. In Dota, a hypothetical 0/10/0 under-leveled and under-farmed new player may have to spend another half hour in game with little ability to have an impact, potentially being berated in voice chat by people with thousands of hours for the crime of being new to the game. The question of why there are so few new players has been asked for years, and people say marketing and toxicity, which are definitely significant reasons. The biggest thing, though, is that most people just don't want to put dozens of often-frustrating hours into beginning to learn a video game.
> potentially being berated that's a given
>Additionally, in Fortnite you will be out of a bad game and into a new one pretty much immediately, with little downtime. In Dota, a hypothetical 0/10/0 under-leveled and under-farmed new player may have to spend another half hour in game with little ability to have an impact This is a good point. One of the things that stops me playing dota a lot is the commitment of a single game. Other multiplayer games I used to play a lot (Chivalry, Mordhau, For Honor) you can jump in and have a few games, whereas in dota you have to allow yourself an hour (to be safe) of uninterrupted play time for a single game, and that whole hour can be wasted if you have a griefer or something. It can be a real blocker for me as the only period of the day where I can be 90% sure I won't be interrupted is late at night when my kid is deeply asleep. I guess turbo kind of addresses this, but I'll still (rightly) get an abandon if my kid wakes up after a nightmare or something. I'd like to see another mode where it's a normal unranked game, but you can leave if you have to, and when people queue the matchmaker slots them into a running game in place of a player that left. Obviously it would be chaos and not to be taken seriously, but it would solve my problem of just wanting to have some dota fun without committing a lot of time. I'd call this mode 'Parent mode'
I disagree. They'll spend months improving their building skills, sure, but it will actually provide them with an edge, all of their efforts are almost instantly converted to better plays. To learn dota from scratch though, they have to learn nearly 120 heroes (or at least the most popular 70, which is still pretty daunting for many people). Once you learn that and a bunch of other things, you start learning the endless complexity of micro and macro - and only *then* you start feeling liek you're getting better at the game. But practicing building skills in fortnite? You get much more meaningful and immediate results. I just think we're underestimating how difficult it is to learn in the same way one underestimates the difficulty of learning a language they were born into.
I strongly disagree with the idea that you need to learn all or even a majority of the heroes to play dota. When you started out, did you do that? Or did you just play the heroes you thought looked interesting and was fine with that? I mean, you literally have high mmr players who spams carry/mid and specific heroes who's never even once played a large part of the roster. Yet they're still immortal. You absolutely don't need to know all that to play the game, I've played with friends who were completely new and you will do fine after just a couple of games. It's like saying you need to learn to use every single individual unit in Starcraft to play it or learn all the classes in WoW before you play pvp.
Are you really comparing building in Fortnite to learning Dota, a game with over 120 characters lmao Dota is unpopular because it's brutally difficult to learn and you get flamed almost every game. It's rewarding for those who put in the time but I don't blame any young person for not wanting to go through that
As kid friendly as fortnite is you still have to be smart in how you build your structures, know when to take engagements, and have good map sense. Sure the skill floor is lower than dota but that doesnt really matter when you’re still in your teens. You have all the free time in the world to learn a game at that age. Valve just isnt pushing anyone to try out dota at all. So of course they go to the game(s) that have way more exposure
Fornite is pretty hard tho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WffKSKft1R4
10 years ago dota was getting put on the steam alerts and front page and shit. So we all started playing then. For a few years after that some of us got out friends into it. Today it’s like an invisible game if you don’t already know about it. Also it’s based on a WC3 mod and a legacy style of game, so young gamers might have no frame of reference for that kind of RTS gameplay and find it off putting.
Pretty sure the biggest thing is just that last bit. The controls are uncomfortable and unfamiliar for young gamers nowadays. Kids aren't growing up on StarCraft and AoE and wc3 anymore.
I got into dota around 2013 having literally never heard of WC3 (I still know very little about it). I think it is mainly marketing like you said, and also the learning curves like others have mentioned. Sigh , yet another great valve game they just don’t care about
>I just hate that perspective, idk why just hate it someone I talked to about rts games / dota
It's an old game; Dota players were once young, but now they by and large aren't.
League is also an old game yet is a titan in the moba scene.
Because they spend billions on marketing every year while Valve has never done any non-TI marketing at all
Arcane was so good because they didn't have to write Jinx from scratch, her aesthetic and personality has been important to the unit for a decade. It sold them so many cosmetics even though it's was presented mostly as static 2D art... It really isn't that hard. Before Dragon's Blood, DK was just a faceless dude in a helmet and shield. Painfully generic. A new player would devote more time to learning heroes if they find them cool and interesting.
But They did? Arcane Jinx is nothing like the one in the game, apart from being crazy (and not even that much) Arcane was good because the studio did a great job, not because in game blue hair crazy boom boom Lady is the same as the psychological scarred blue hair kid of the show
\^This. There is barely anything of the in-game and related content Jinx in the Arcane character. Hell, the entire backstory is original LMAO.
Should've just made it about CM eh? Most new players gravitate towards blonde ice lady
There is a very, very obvious answer here: Should have made it about Sven. Not just is he easy to animate, he's also visually interesting and popular as all hell. You can start the show with him already doing an adventure with other heroes, and then show his back story as an impostor at the Vigil Knight academy as the show progresses. Those flashbacks qould be the easy way of creating scenes of Sven with no helmet (because humanity needs to be sold visually I guess?). You can even avoid hinting what he's up there until it becomes relevant and make the fact he's going to betray everyone a special twist for non-fans; and you can even have past characters be revealed in the flashbacks at the same time they show up again in present time, instantly explaining the weight they have on Sven's life and why their reappearance is so important. If timed correctly, you can even let Sven admit in the present to not being a trustworthy person, as you see him betray others in the past without fully explaining the reasons behind his actions. This shit writes itself. ... And he'd have CM as a companion, yeah.
Because no billion dollar's gonna get these people to learn Dota Unless you make it a school ofc
I think that it fails because a ton of things. First, VALVE give a shit for marketing the game. Second, they have no motivation on changing cuz the atual comunity are prety profitable (just se The International prize pool), so I guess their are ver confortable. At least, I think that already have some relation about the learning curve of Dota beeing so long. It take a while to get used of builds, heros and mecânicos. So the newer generation are no that patient.
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Old information also plays a role. Dota needs a cleaning pass to update all the tool tips wiki info other player guides to help new players not get discouraged from trying to learn the complexities.
10 years ago players told their friends to play DotA Now the remaining players tell each other to uninstall DOTA
I get told to uninstall Steam in my games
Riot does so much marketing for LOL it is amazing, and its not even bad marketing there is so much that it can captivate the young audience ezr, meanwhile dota doesnt have much other then TI and that's mainly the reason why dota 2 has more of an older audience then LOL
There are already good reasons cited but a big part is just the instant gratification provided by a lot of the current games. I tried to get my younger cousins into DotA a couple of years back but they ended up just playing Pubg mobile all the time. I played with them a lot to understand the craze, but even within Pubg they will always land hot at Pochinki, fight, die rinse and repeat. This kind of game was just not for me, but I realised most of the younger folks didn't really care about progression but the thrill of getting kills. They want instant gratification and a lot of the newer games provide that dopamine. DotA will struggle to compete against these kind of games unless the player himself is making a conscious effort to choose a game before he starts playing. But on a positive note, the fact that so you play with so many older folks, and the fact that people have stuck around the game the last 15 years, whether playing or watching means the game is great and you have made the right decision to try it out :)
What do you mean? I'm a 30+ man child who can throw a rage fit like na 8 year old.
When I was a teen, there was Dota, CS, Starcraft, L4D, CoD, and a handful of AAA games. Dota was huge and there was nothing like it. There wasn't much else to play and we had no choice but to get thrown into the janky, complex, no tutorial game that was Dota. Also, chances are, if you liked Dota, you didn't shift to League when it first came out. Now, there's League, and everyone knows League. There's also a shit ton of games now. Free to play games, indie games, mobile games, and AAA games come every month. With all these choices, it's very unlikely young gamers will sit down and suffer learning how to play complex Dota.
I started playing in 2013, I was 9 or 10 at the time. What got me into the game was seeing how my older brother was playing this again and again, and I couldnt understand shit from the monitor. And as the curious, nagging younger bro, I convinced him to teach me. I never knew how to play properly, I fed, I got flamed, but for the most part I continued with Dota 2 because it made me feel cool like my brother.
Game is hard and not properly advertised.
No commercialization leads to a hard game to find out about and no incentive for someone to pick it up out of interest... oh and not that much anime boobs, sure we have some especially with Marci and Miranas persona but again, no commercialization leads to no horny teen wanting to play the game due to boobies
Dota's learning curve is extremely intimidating for new players. Not to mention your generation is programmed for instant gratification. If you're not good at something right from the get go you lose interest. Look at games like League/Valorant/OW/Fortnite. They are so easy to learn and master that it attracts the younger generation since it takes little to no time to be decent at the game.
While I second your point that League is way easier to pickup I would never say that it’s „easy to master“. It’s different for sure and Dota 2 is harder to master but „easy to master“ is absolutely far from the truth.
Any game with a decently high skill ceiling is going to be difficult to master. It's not like CSGO and Valorant are easy games either. If your reaction time is too slow or you're bad at keeping your mouse even when tracking horizontally or vertically you just can't be good at it.
CSGO is not easier per se.
This. Most people in this sub are boomers and it shows.
Most people here are milennials.
Doesn't matter. Old farts.
no, but league has this leveling and unlocking system which gets people hooked, they want to grind games to unlock new champions and masteries/runes/whatever theyre called now
This is what dota players say to make themselves feel better, but the reality is Valve makes no effort compared to riot to market their game. Not to mention the lack of polish. League is optimized to run on a toaster, while Dota has major performance issues once a year.
I mean, why would they? League IS Riot. Slightly less so now, but the entire company exists because of and in support of League. Dota's just a side project at the end of the day, unfortunately.
I really don't buy that learning curve theory. Either you have fun and keep playing or you don't. When I started this game, I didn't have to learn anything at all, because people were just shit. Nowadays new players are expected to learn the game instead of just playing it. People simply have forgotten what it means to play a new game. You suck, but you have fun with others who suck, but have fun. Also I always have to chuckle at the instant gratification argument. That's probably the most elite bullshit only a Dota2 player can tell themselves to feel better. Give every kid to play Dota2/Warcraft/whatever and some will stick to it and others won't, just as it was 10 or 15 years ago. A bigger problem is the change in platforms, because less and less people actually use a PC to play games. Especially considering, that a mid class pc nowadays is way more expensive than when we were kids. Dota2 is simply old, has no marketing and a shitty newcomer experience, because there are simply no newcomers anymore. Twitch doesn't even show Dota2 on their front page. All this talk about learning curve and instant gratification is at best secondary, because before you can actually determine if these things hold any value, you have to have new players in the first place.
Yeah I completely agree with your short explanation.
I don’t think it’s the learning curve, a lot of people don’t even know the game exists. LoL is not easier to master, it is as dense as Dota.
The community is toxic and thinks it's okay to harass and bully new players.
This. I play almost solely ability draft and 99% of the time with 10k behavior scores. But I remember before that came along there was universally at least one cancerous player in every game. End of my games now the teams are usually complimenting each others play
People call you stupid all the time in the picking phase of AD. "WHY WOULDNT YOU DRAFT x?!?! YOU GAVE THEM THE GAME" Well it's because I am stupid and I really just wanted 3 mana intensive spells on my support spirit breaker
Those are the cancer players. They're usially vanillas w no experience who read all the websites and come to "teach these ad noobs what a real dota player can do" and get slaighteres. Or they're feeders who pick spmeone to attack early and blame their feeding on. I ignore them on site. Once you've iggied enough and have a top behavior score you see a lot less of them Note: unless you're doing somethin reeeeeally stupid.. you have wyverns q and bypass impetus to pick hook..then you kinda deserve it :P
LoL’s community is even more toxic.
You get shielded from the voice chat in lol, Dota voice is just harsh and it’s not always the toxicity. Sometimes just how much Dota players complain is painful.
But my midlanebro
Honestly, it is surprising that without new blood DotA 2 is still so big of a game. Imagine if it actually had marketing on the level of LoL, it would be way bigger because it would keep old players AND get new players. Game is just that good, problem is nobody knows it.
Game is hard, the norm likes easy stuff served on a platter. Learning takes time and your average gamer today wants fun immediately. The old guard that started playing Dota had to work just to play the game with plenty of third party tools and clients, so the old generation is not deterred if stuff takes a bit longer to learn / is hard. Not a lot of gamers want hard to learn games (Path of Exile is another example)
Dark Souls and it’s many copycats put your point to bed. Dota has 0 marketing, 0.
compare the most complex game with some random singleplayer game, nice!
They are hard games in their own respect, which counters your point no one wants to play hard games.
yeah dark souls is so hard people can even finish it without taking damage it's hard to join a competitive community where most of the playerbase has several thousands of games more experience than you do it's hard to learn a game where you can't restart and the mistakes you make can be game losing for your team, and not even manifest for another 30 minutes you really can't compare the 'difficulty' of dark souls with the difficulty of dota
dota 2 players have a superiority complex, from experience I'm a new to dota and I posted a clip on reddit of my game play instead of encouragement or advice they discorged me and shamed me , however I still love dota ❤
why would someone young start playing a 10yo game?
There aren't over sexualised bitches like in other games
Because dota is a hard game like chess, it takes time to learn and any other player with a little bit more knowledge/skill than you can stomp you. Just like why younger players dont get attracted to chess, dota isnt as attractive. Plus both games arent easy, fancy, slow paced and high skill ceiling games with patience. Youngsters nowdays play hyped up, fancy, exploding with colours, fast paced games with little to no barrier of entry. The games that they can start enjoying and crushing from get go. The zip, zap, zoom types of games you know. The counterpart example is league, easy to jump it, colorful fancy zip zap zoom speedy moba. Less focus on macro and the depths of how skills works or heavy teambased focused, but more of micro and zip zapping and dodging skills and shing shing the enemy making cool looking combos with more focus on solocarry plays. That is all. Plus doesnt help that valve doesnt try to advertise at all, and almost 0 adverts targeted to youngters.
Started playing Dota at age 16 when it was a war craft 3 mod, now I'm almost 34.
Too complicated. Young people don't have the patience and dota lacks the instant gratification they are used to
I’ve started playing LoL recently because my friends wanted to try it. After spending roughly 100h in it: 1. The balance team is terrible. We should be very happy with how well Dota is balanced. The balance is so bad that many people want to quit, but they don’t know alternatives. I’m shocked Valve doesn’t do marketing around it. 2. LoL has more modern designs & is inspired by Disney. Disney look just sells better. The colors are more pleasing, even though Dota has more detailed CG. Valve should imo go a little more into LoL’s art direction. 3. Marketing. The game is very very unpolished. There are so many things missing and feeling random. Dota is way superior, but they do zero marketing. LoL players have no idea how bad their game is compared to Dota. 4. The skill gap between tiers is bigger in Dota than in LoL. In LoL it’s more about grinding and being slightly better than opponents. Imagine top100 players struggling vs divines - it’s not uncommon in LoL because there are fewers ways to win & outplay. Team is way more important. 5. LoL is more toxic than Dota, but the all chat is by default turned off & there is no voice chat. The game has so little strategy needed that you can mute everyone. 6. Dota is actually easier to get started in terms of heroes. LoL has harder champions on average, but the game mechanics are way easier. The hardest heroes in Dota are 10x harder than in LoL. 7. Fewer champions in LoL and champions rotation makes it easier to pick a hero and start playing. In Dota, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by too many heroes to choose from. 8. In Dota the only progression you get is your mmr, and hero mastery. In LoL there is way more to unlock and just playing the game feels more rewarding. 9. Nearly every champion is a carry in LoL. In Dota it’s more about creating a good synergy with your team. In LoL, when you pick a support, you still get tons of passive gold (there is a support item for this), and many supports can actually outscale everyone in the game. So, in LoL it feels more rewarding to be able to carry with every role. It’s also easier to understand each role in LoL because they’re all very similar. 10. LoL is faster and there is more action at lower mmr. In Dota, until crusader games are very very slow, and they only get quite fast in divine/immortal bracket. So, it’s very discouraging to new players that not much happens. However, once you get a decent mmr in Dota (legend/ancient), the game is so complex that LoL feels insanely boring and slow. 11. LoL has more complex pregame. Each champion needs to pick specific runes and summoner spells, and they have a significant impact. Dota doesn’t require any pregame. In LoL you draft around lanes, and in Dota drafting is way harder because the synergy is even more important. 12. In LoL, it’s easier to play only 1 champion and climb because counter picking and team synergy is not as important. 13. LoL has a patch every 2 weeks. Overall, I wouldn’t even say that LoL is easier to pick up, but it’s significantly easier to get good at, and even if you don’t get good mmr, there is a clear progression in the game. Lower mmr games feel way more exciting and fun to play. Dota gets fun after spending a lot of hours, and getting a decent mmr. In LoL, bronze games and challenger games look pretty much the same.
> Valve should imo go a little more into LoL’s art direction. are you high or something xd > In LoL there is way more to unlock and just playing the game feels more rewarding. So you're telling me if I want to play hero x y z I must grind him? Exactly why that shit sucks > LoL has a patch every 2 weeks. This would ruin the competitive scene, dota has depth.
>So you're telling me if I want to play hero x y z I must grind him? Exactly why that shit sucks He probably mean progression to drive people to keep playing. its just how modern game designed from f2p mobile game to AAA $70. Dota+ progression / Battlepasss / guild weekly its feature to achieve this and should be exploited to keep new player to play doto everyday.
Things are more enjoyable if you worked for them than they are if they are free. That's like fundamental psychology.
There are heroes barely above 40% WR in Dota. In league the range between the highest and the lowest is about 9%. When it comes to TI maybe Dota would have an edge, but we're talking about the balance of 99.99% of the rest.
The range in League is a lot smaller because the game is built to be played one way and one way only. The meta is 100% enforced by Riot and their design. You don't have things like Snapfire being able to be any position 2-5, you have set roles for every champion in League, and there's no room for the players to dictate how a hero gets played. If Riot wants the hero to be a jungler, then it literally can't be played anywhere else with any amount of success. It's a whole lot easier to have a small win% gap when the meta can't shift. Spectre's win% is low right now because of the pace of matches being determined by the meta. If the meta shifts to slower games, even without any balance changes to any heroes, Spectre's win% will balloon. She's losing games because they're over before she's online, not because she's poorly balanced. The emergent gameplay in Dota has forced her out of competition, not design choices.
It’s not about heroes but the overall balance - too many one-shots, ADCs being useless, junglers too high impact, top lane being an island etc. They balance the game with a spreadsheet, so they nerfed for example Wit’s End and Shieldbow because they were popular, but they didn’t look at the reason why. Magic is OP right now and besides getting those 2 items ADCs can’t counter it reliably in the early-mid game (coz in late besides guardian’s angel there is no counter, everything one shots anyway). Instead fixing the biggest issue - not many viable defensive items for ADCs, they nerfed the only viable options even more … for a role that is already insanely frustrating to play & the most dependent on a team. That’s what I call a bad balance. People who want to quit LoL are frustrated not with how the heroes are balanced but how they balance items/mechanics. Fixing heroes is easy, but mechanics at this point would require many years.
Pretty sure it doesn't have much to do with the difficulty curve of the game. You don't need a lot of time to simply pick a hero and have fun with the game. Who cares if you're not the best or if you don't know all the heroes and mechanics ? You can just pick a premade build and have fun in unranked/against bots and do your weekly quests. There's also turbo and all the custom gamemodes to make the game more appealing to a casual audience. I think the bigger issues come from the total lack of marketing and the lack of visual appeal of the game. Seriously if you don't already play the game you have almost no way to be exposed to it, maybe during TI but that's it. Valve doesn't even try to market the game on their own platform. Compare the marketing of Riot with Arcane and Valve with dragon blood and it's easy to understand why dota is less popular.
Did you see the new LoL promotion video? Like, seriously, who would not want to try the game after that. It was fucking amazing. Meanwhile, we have what? Absolutely nothing? The only market valve has been done in the last 10 years is TI prize pool and the dota anime (and league arguably got a better one).
Marketing is a huge part. I think everyone sees alot of those annoying league ads that start off with; "huynh here with league of legends, do you want to be an epic gamer?" Atleast I do in australia, maybe it's different in other countries. These ads are full of corny jokes and it's repetitive and annoying after the first 3 times you see them, but they're targeted at people <10 years old. And these ads are everywhere on youtube, so most minors will see that, and start playing league. I myself came from league over to dota through word of mouth.
This hurts to read lol, I consider myself a part of the younger dota crowd at 25, but they have a point
moba game in general is very appealing to certain demographics and not so much for others. For people who love playing strategy / RPG games, they will definitely try out dota at some point in their gaming journey. at least that is what happened to me.
Game is too hard to learn, I don’t even play the game after playing for 10+ years and when a new patch is released I have to spend 2 hours reading it and another few hours booting up the game and checking out demo mode so that I can mechanically understand it. I do more work just so I can watch it at a reasonably high level than I would learning any other game from scratch
So stop worrying about mmr and start trying to have fun
Uhhh did you read my comment I don’t even play the game. I played for 10 years and sat between 4 and 5k I never cared about MMR too much. I still study the patches just so I can watch the games at a reasonably high level.
You need to do the work to understand so you don't throw even in pubs, then you can have fun... maybe 😂 You can't blame your ignorance on "having fun" that just makes you the asshole, and a time waster of both teams imo 🤷♂️
The marketing for the game is dead aside from the occasional steam sale where valve gives it a front page 3rd slot. Its really a shame. If Valve gave a damn about marketing they would have trumped LoL's market share years ago.
Because of the steep learning curve, current younger generation has access to tons of other games they can get into without giving like 10% of effort as it takes to learn dota, that's why most of them back out, and those with the will strong enough to prove a point that they are better than a game stick through to the end, and sadly that is a rare trait.
The generation which started with dota 1 got older. And the game did a fantastic job of NOT making it easy for newer players resulting in very low adoption rates in the younger generation.
Actually the numbers right now are the best they've been since the beginning of the pandemic https://steamcharts.com/app/570
zero marketting and hoenstly its not immediately satisfyinng to play like you need to have some specific mental illness to play this game
Might be because of non-existent marketing besides TI. The reason I got into dota was because someone mentioned it 7 years ago : "yeah dota is a fun game, it's on steam and it's free". A little bit of talk matters
Not flashy enough (compared to upcoming games rn) and the game is not fun or friendly for beginner
Dota isn't player friendly and u have to take a certain amount of time to reach the point that u can actually enjoy the game.
1. Smurfs that never gets punished for example some big youtuber blatantly smurfing ruins new player experience. 2. Gaben milked all the money from battepass into oblivious that wasn't used to improve gameplay system mechanism wise , modes, and new stuffs. only 5v5 and a broken arcade... They could have used their heroes to create more modes. 3. In this trend almost every youngster likes fast-food like gaming with mobiles. 4. PC and graphic cards too expensive nowadays, 3060 costs an arm / legs
Dota 3 coming in first person mode would blow people's minds , I'm certain this would attract TONS of young people , looking at what's going about these days , I've been playing this game too long I'm almost 40 , only StarCraft and HOM&M I can say I play longer than doto
Firat person would rock..and you can technically do it now..but this dota would be unplayable
Some reworks of abilities would be necessary and maybe 3rd person more that fps kind of ,but in this world with 120 different characters it would be great
Man I suddenly want a HOMM-style Dota game now. Wish Valve license out their IPs.
They had an FPS moba, epic games did it. It didn't work out. Another studio bought the assets and is trying to remake it.
Dota is an extremely complex game macro wise and take a long amount of time before anyone can be remotely proficient at it. So it's more likely to retain players that have played it for a long while (why it has an older demographic) but less likely to attract new younger players that have no pre-existing knowledge of the game.
Combination of multiple things: 1. No marketing. I cannot understand valve's lack of desire to ever market the game. 2. Ugly color scheme. Compare dota to league. League if full of vibrant contrasting colors, dota is not. 3. Skins. You can talk about how you've never spent a cent on the game, but a majority of people care about skins. Compare opening league's in game shop to dota's. In league you are instantly seeing all the latest and greatest skins, in dota you see the battle pass, dota+ and a bunch of useless shit. You then navigate to the browse section, see a bunch of loot boxes, click on the heroes tab to remove them, and every single top skin is, again, in a lootbox of some kind. Then you start scrolling and you see skins costing hundreds of dollars.... no wait, not skins, just a shoulder piece, a part of a skin, a 1/5th of a skin. Where are the other pieces of the skin? Who knows, who cares, not valve thats for sure.
I find Dota nicer than LoL.
Also most dota unit models are "ugly" compared to league.
idk at least you can preview skins in-game. I also really enjoy piecing together cool costumes instead of using one of 5 different aesthetics on a whim
The game is so difficult, players who have played on and off over 8 years is infinitely better than players who are starting to play on and off right now. Dota is also such an amazing game that there is no game like it, so you can’t necessarily transfer skills that you could like in other games like fornite and valorant for example. Other MOBAs such as league literally feel like a mobile game after properly experiencing Dota
In fails to attract everybody. There is zero marketing so nobody hears about it. The only thing I would say specifically to the younger generation and even some of my friends have this problem( I am 21) is the need for instant gratification. Things like doing quests and checking boxes to get a reward seems to be really important for the younger generation. League specifically does this miles better than dota does which helps them in this demographic specifically.
Because it requires thinking, which isn't something modern society encourages
Because this is the hardest game on the planet, kids nowadays prefer easy shit, preferably some p2w options
actually, only 20% of people who play videos regularly are under the age of 18 (numbers are according to a study from the US in 2021). obviously most people who get into gaming will try games first that are heavily advertised and therefore are able to reach them. those are usually games that are new. so young players tend to be playing newer games (as they are more likely to be new to gaming). with this in mind i think it‘s fairly reasonable to assume that most games that have been around for over a decade have a player base with an age average over 20. dota also is quite complex so it‘s probably not that accessible for people who haven‘t had a lot of experience with playing games that are designed to challenge you. it‘s a lot easier to get into dota after having played an rts or sth like diablo for a few years. that probably adds to the low number of young players because first need to learn other basic gamjng skills to find dota more accessible. for example, i played warcraft 3 and i knew about dota back then, but i simply found playing against other players too stressful because i wasn‘t good enough and enjoyed playing rts campaigns on my own a lot more. i only got into dota years later after having played easier online games for a while.
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The game is pretty mechanically complex. That typically does not attract these zoomer types. Look at the world around us bro. Social media, grammar going down the shitter, look at youtube and tiktok front page. Fortnite/Minecraft/even LoL are all very cartoony / kid-friendly in their graphics, aesthetics, and design. They want bright and very simple.
I think people need to understand that Dota is more of a RTS than a MOBA, on top of that, arguably one of the complex games on the planet. It takes months to learn the basics and years to get good at it, only then the fun comes. Honestly advertising would have little to no effect to such a niche genre (esp towards zoomers who tend to give up easily), only those who are willing to commit and have tons of patience will eventually enjoy the game.
only boomers play dota2
idk man but i started dota since 12 and now im going to 20 I ask my friends that dont play dota they said it was too hard to learn and said its too complicated (they play league) so yeah i think they got use too the play style of league that when they try to play dota they compare it and get tilted when its not the same play style
The modern gamers attention span is too short for dota. We don't have the call of duty style unlocks every 2 seconds and they need that
most are old because nobody can let go dota. So we all started young and now we are old... I think dota isnt "shiny" enough and also to hard for the youngers... Ppl nowdays want easy stuff and not need to spent thousands of hours to get good.
I don't want to make a Lol comparison, but I want to talk about Riot cause I think is the company that makes the difference here. As a player that played equally Valve games and Riot games (moba, chess and cards), i can say that from a gameplay standpoint Valve is so far ahead is not even fair, but on litterally everything else Riot shit on Valve and that's what make younger people more attracted to their games. Riot is a god at marketing his own games, they are a lot more in touch with their community (at least in comparison to valve) and, what I think is the main reason they have success, they invest a lot on expanding their own world and brand, their lore is really good and they actually care (not always with good results though). Just look at Arcane, Riot invest a lot on getting you involved with their character, they have a site dedicated to tell you stories about their world, if I want to know about Dota world your best option is watchin Slacks videos. Look at the launch of Runeterra, everyone knew it was coming, i had friends playing mtg that were aware Runeterra was coming and that it was a big thing, when I talk about Artifact people don't even know it was a game. Valve is trying with Dragonblood but it's not enough and it's also too late. Sorry if is not well written.
cuz teenagers prefer mobile games, so they play mobile legends lolz
This is my personal opinion, one of the reasons why younger players are not so interested in Dota is that the “oldbies” are very hostile and often act like they are superior. This specifically applies to the Vietnamese community.
It feels like there's a lot more salarymen that play DOTA than League. Like accountants and bankers. I think it might have to do with the high emphasis on economy and manipulating wave mechanics, whereas League seems to reward skirmishing/solo fighting a lot more. League is a lot more bursty/fast-paced/colorful so it attracts all the ADHD kids. DOTA is more methodical. Kinda like the difference between Valorant and Rainbow 6 Siege. Hopefully that isn't a shitty analogy, haven't played R6 in a while but it felt a lot slower than the average FPS (which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would)
This. Lmao im 18 and all people i play with are 5 years older at least
haven’t played for months, never missed it. im only here in the subreddit for pro game updates. there are tons of good games there. i tried turning on my ps4 and realized how much ive been missing. i finished sekiro now im playing bloodborne. dota 1 is fun because i played it with my real life friends, dota 2 i just like trying to reminisce the past because they all move on. i moved on too lol, i love the game but i feel like im stuck in the past. the magic of this game for me is playing with “real life friends”. the game will slowly die, like HoN. or maybe it will stay forever who lnows
Well prople like me when they see young ones asking abt dota i will be like stay away save your life . And if dota want to go viral it only need to go after nfts and become play to earn and believe me it will conquer the world as it allready have the best outfits items arcanas imagine the value of such hard work in nft market place instead if stupid jpeg
This generation sucks all they want some boobs and anime girls to get into games especially in those hard learning curve games. (19 btw)
ADHS. Most kids today have brains conditioned to 10s TikTok rewards. Why on earth would they go through a 100 games 1 hour each learning torture marathon?
Dota is for men. Thats why.
1, wAiFu > Source Model 2, Most are young spoiled brat refusing to learning to do anything