Why Dota Sucks

Why Dota Sucks — Prologue: Why Call the Genre “Dota”?
Posted on August 21, 2014 by Michael Lowell
There has been a lot of fighting over what to call the videogame genre conceptualized in the StarCraft third-party map Aeon of Strife and popularized in the Warcraft III third-party map Defense of the Ancients. Because some of the creators have settled on a name for the purpose of marketing their own game, fans not only feel compelled to defend their chosen game from outsiders, but the genre label that has been affixed to it. As a result, we need to settle the matter before we conduct the full order of business.

This book is intended to be a complete deconstruction of the “dota” genre, a book written for those who love videogames. This book will refer to individual titles as “dota games”, the genre as the “dota genre”, and will use a lower-case stylization in order to distinguish the term from Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2, the two games1 in the Dota series. Let’s explain why I have opted for “dota” in favor of the alternatives.


The most notorious term that has been proposed is the “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena”. Like most things on the internet, the origins are always up for debate. However, it appears the term was used as early as May of 2009, when Riot Games’ Tom Cadwell used the term to describe their upcoming game League of Legends.2 3 “MOBA” is notorious for a reason: It is a marketing term that Riot adopted in order to disassociate themselves from Defense of the Ancients. Quite simply, Riot didn’t want to call League a “dota game”. And unlike the other labels that were intended to market a game, MOBA may be the most nondescriptive term ever used to describe a game or genre. What is now applied to the top-down high-fantasy action in League of Legends could apply to “arena shooters” like Quake III and Unreal Tournament. It’s a label which was intended to distance League of Legends from the most relevant games, rather than to be compared with them, and can be entirely ignored.

The other popular contender is “Action Real-Time Strategy”, used by Valve Corporation in order to describe their 2013 game Dota 2.4 Since then, the term has been adopted by many fans of that game. For starters, “ARTS” does a disservice to fans of real-time strategy games, and it implies that RTS games like StarCraft, Supreme Commander, and Command and Conquer do not have action in them. But in addition, games which have received the ARTS label are commonly character-action games—games where you play from the perspective of a single character—which feature the base-building and unit construction found in RTS games. To call Dota 2 an ARTS is to associate it with a line of games—Herzog Zwei, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Guilty Gear 2: Overture, Brutal Legend, and many others—which do not have anything in common with Defense of the Ancients or Aeon of Strife.5 Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2 may feature elements commonly found in Warcraft III, but hardly the base construction and unit control that defined prior ARTS games, and the dota genre is best left to a separate distinction.6

The most compelling argument is actually one of the least common, and comes from those who believe the genre should be called, “Strife games”, “Strife-likes” or “AoS-likes”. It’s a direct nod to Aeon of Strife, which introduced many of the concepts that are now associated with the genre.7 But in the course of this book, we will explore in great detail how Aeon of Strife merely built the concept for a genre which is today defined by its “gameplay”,8 the interactive components that separate videogames from other media. Even if Aeon of Strife pioneered many of the concepts in the dota genre, developers are most commonly drawing their inspiration from the specific design, pacing, and style of play that was tweaked and refined for use in Defense of the Ancients.

For this reason, it’s simply the easiest and most effective to identify the genre with the game that brought it wide popularity and codified most everything commonly associated with the genre today.9 Much in the way that roguelikes are identified by their adherence to a game template codified in 1980’s Rogue, dota games are identified by their adherence to a game template codified in Defense of the Ancients. For this reason, the rest of this book will eschew all the other terms and go with “dota”. Perhaps one could wage an argument over the stylization of the term, and would prefer “DOTA”, “DotA”, or “Dota”. But “dota” simply takes the stylization currently applied to the Dota series and uses the precedent that was set by Rogue and the roguelike.10 And while the lower-case stylization may initially seem off-putting, I am comfortable that it is a good choice, and that it will become natural in the course of reading this book.

But enough about this. Let’s talk about dota.

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Why Dota Sucks — Introduction
Posted on August 21, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: Welcome to “Why Dota Sucks”. Contrary to the commercial, critical, and consumer success of the genre, it is the opinion of this author that dota is nothing less than a terrible example of videogame design. This introduction will explain how this book will be approaching the topic of the dota genre, to explain why the book is being written and to address some of the most common and immediate arguments which will be directed towards the material. The goal of the book is to provide the most comprehensive deconstruction of the genre that anyone will ever author and to provide the anchor for discussion of the genre that has been sorely missing.


——

If I had to describe the dota genre1 to someone who has never heard of it, I’d say it’s a little like taking the battles in The Lord of the Rings and turning them into a team sport. In this genre, participants take the role of powerful heroes and lead their disposable followers into battlefields more like a football pitch than the fields of war. If that seems a little odd to you, I suggest you get comfortable with it, because it’s getting attention that the old guard in game development would kill for.

Riot Games’ League of Legends is played by tens of millions of people every day2 and Valve Corporation’s Dota 2 is far and away the most popular game on Valve’s wildly popular Steam distribution service.3 Dota hasn’t merely positioned itself as an appeal to the masses, ala a Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. The genre has surpassed the StarCraft and Counter-Strike series as the figurehead in the growing circus of professional videogame tournaments and is getting high praise from some of the most capable videogame players. What was intended to be little more than a series of distractions in the Blizzard Entertainment real-time strategy ecosystem is now the hottest genre in videogames.

So that’s the question: How could the dota genre possibly “suck”?

Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you call dota games, it doesn’t matter who is developing them, and I don’t care what anyone else is saying about them. They suck. The genre is so fundamentally dysfunctional that it should have been laughed off the board the second it was considered anything more than a sideshow in the world of Blizzard RTS games. Dota is the Frankenstein of terrible game design concepts, the culmination of every damaging design trend in modern videogames. And yet, dota games—particularly Dota 24—are being held to the same regard as the most beautifully crafted videogames ever assembled. The ongoing narrative for Defense of the Ancients is that a series of amateur content creators with limited programming experience and few financial resources created a Warcraft III map that was not only better than Warcraft III, but surpassed the collective efforts of a billion-dollar videogame industry and its world-class game creators.5 A story that should set off red flags in the mind of any reasonable person has become a rallying cry for transformative change in the world of videogames.

So, here we go. The purpose of “Why Dota Sucks” is to fully deconstruct the history, circumstance, and design of Defense of the Ancients and the games inspired by it, and to show how flawed the genre really is. You may consider the title inflammatory, but quite frankly, it’s the most honest and accurate title that I could come up with. The deconstruction will focus on dota games in the direct lineage of Defense of the Ancients and Aeon of Strife, including League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth, Smite, Demigod, Awesomenauts, and Dead Island: Epidemic. The goal is to put forward the most complex and complete analysis of the dota genre that anyone will ever author and to provide the desperately-needed foundation for a discussion that has gone nowhere over the last decade.

Before we begin discussing the genre, we need to set some groundrules for how this book will approach the topic. And with that, you may have already figured out that this is not an academic piece. I do not intend to subdue my writing style in order to strive for a larger audience. I’ll laugh, I’ll cry, I’ll curse. And in the process, I’m going to take on a lot of targets, including the developers who make these games and the player bases who complete the consumer contract. While I will provide sources as necessary, this is an opinion piece through and through. Much of videogame history has been told through the internet, and the nature of the internet will make many things difficult to source. In many instances, the best that I can do is give you my word and honesty on the topic. I may have a strong opinion on dota, but my opinion is strong enough that I do not need to compromise the integrity of that opinion.

“But all opinions are subjective opinions, and opinions are like assholes! Everyone has one!” You’re absolutely correct. Opinions on game design are subjective. Opinions on television, books, and movies fall under the same brush. In order to understand and compare the concepts in certain videogames, you will have to make good use of math and logic. But at the end of the day, the conclusions drawn from “objective data”—and determining whether or not it makes for a better game—are subjective. And that’s perfectly fine! There is nothing wrong with being biased. We’re all biased towards certain points of view, as impacted by our own life experiences. If the critic is worth his weight, then his goal is to properly outline those biases and to leave as little as possible to interpretation. An opinion is not invalid simply because it is an opinion. If the argument is a bad one, then you should be able to explain why it is bad. Those subjective influences should be apparent in my writing and you can be the judge of them.

In approaching the topic, I’m going to provide a particularly valuable subjective perspective. As you may have figured out, the dota genre owes no small favor to the real-time strategy games created by Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and StarCraft developed a rather glowing reputation for their third-party content, and Blizzard’s games provided the backbone and foundation for the dota game model. In providing perspective on this matter, I will tell you that in a past life, I would have been described as a Blizzard fanboy.6 I have been playing Blizzard’s RTS games since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was released in 1994 and I am very familiar with the content and design in all of their real-time strategy games, leading up through 2010’s StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. I have been playing these games in an online environment since 1999, through services like Battle.net, ICCUP, and Garena.7

Thus, it should be no surprise when I say that this book is written from the perspective of a videogame enthusiast. I have played a ton of different games in many different genres, and played many games at a very competent and skilled level. I haven’t played everything, I haven’t been the best at anything, but I’ve played a lot and done it well. Drawing from this experience, I feel very passionate and certain about many of my opinions. And as a general rule, my writing rejects the popular narrative of videogame criticism. But if you’re aghast that someone could say bad things about dota, this shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Games like Mario and Zelda have had their moments, but they’re hardly the best thing going year-in and year-out. Sometimes, they’ve even been pretty damn bad. But it’s okay to say that you do not think a “classic game” is good! So don’t feel offended if I go after your favorite game of all-time.8 By the time this is done, I’ll be taking more than one genre to task.

“More than one genre?” Yes, you heard me. This book will not merely discuss dota. You will often see the argument that the dota genre is a hybrid of multiple game genres, meaning that it is not like any one genre, and that it cannot be compared to other genres. And yes, that’s as dumb as it sounds. Fans of dota want people to praise their genre, but they don’t want people to make the comparisons that should ideally lead to that praise. In taking the dota genre to task, I will draw from a body of knowledge that will include discussion of fighting games, brawlers, real-time strategy games, first-person shooters, and other genres as necessary. Cross-genre and cross-game comparisons are the heart of videogame criticism, and in order to understand the dota genre, you have to understand its position and relation in the cosmos.

As a result, this book will read like a general but comprehensive history of certain videogames, genres, and the economic and design models that got projects made. You may occasionally question the lack of focus on the topic of dota, but this is not just a book about dota; this is a book on videogames, and how the lessons of videogames apply to dota.9 These comparisons will be presented on the assumption that most of the people reading this book have experience with videogames and the genres that are being discussed. But I also understand there are long-time videogame players who have never touched the dota genre and may have only heard about it in passing. If you are not familiar with some of the games that will be discussed in this book, my simple recommendation is to try them out.

In taking this approach to the dota genre, I will provide thoughts on what I believe that dota games should do differently. These suggestions and criticisms do not exist in a self-contained bubble. Videogames are holistic. Every game system, art asset, and design choice must be carefully considered against the others. If your knowledge of the genre is centralized around the memorization of numbers, heroes, abilities, and other statistics, you will need to take a step back and grasp the bigger picture. This purpose of this book is to deconstruct the philosophy of dota. Not the “metagame”10 and not the tactics and strategies which are used to win in dota tournaments. The persistent nature of many dota games—in which they are constantly revised by their creators—makes it more crucial than ever to understand the fundamental concepts which define the genre.11

And in finalizing this introduction, I will state that I expect the entire internet to come crashing at my door. There will be a lot of misinformation in the discussion, where the opposition refuses to engage the content and still tries to debunk my point of view. I also expect a lot of people will simply make excuses so they do not have to engage the content. They won’t like the tone of the writing, or that I am not a “notable personality”, or whatever. This will come with a very delicious irony. The dota community often takes a point of view that you must play a dota game for hundreds of hours before commenting on it. It is also expected that new players will read documentation and strategy guides before engaging the game in a multiplayer setting with other human players. New Dota 2 players are commonly directed to Purge Gamers’ “Welcome to Dota, You Suck”, a ten-thousand-word introduction to the dota experience.12 The same community now will sit around claiming that this book is too long and it is not worth their time to read it. They will not do this because they feel the argument is bogus, but because what I have to say will act as a rejection of the time, money, and effort that those players have invested in Defense of the Ancients and its derivatives. It will be a rejection of their personal worldview.

I cannot stop all misinformation, because the internet is misinformation defined. But what I will say is this: I want this to be as controversial as a well-intentioned, well-written argument can be. I want to get this posted on every part of the internet where dota is being discussed. Not just because I love the attention. I want this book to spark a sorely needed debate. Quite honestly, I think that’s what needs to be done to make videogames better. And I don’t just want the typical dota player to read this. I want every notable dota player to emerge from their little bubble, the one where they spend most of their time with one videogame and only one videogame, to tell me how I am not a “videogame expert” or not an “expert on the topic of dota”. I want game developers and powerful people to read it. Or, at the bare minimum, to acknowledge the existence of the book.13 And I want them to do this, because if I have accomplished the things that I believe I have accomplished, I will have demonstrated that I am most certainly an expert. What they have to say will only attract attention to the truth.

I expect some will suggest that a scathing rebuttal of a genre which is being played at prize tournaments and by tens of millions of people means that I do not enjoy videogames. And I’ve heard this comment a lot, the idea that questioning the accepted truths—and championing the games that others aren’t familiar with—means that you hate videogames. When the reality is that I love them enough to take the knife to a popular and emerging game genre and provide a series of answers which demonstrate an incredible love of videogames. Even if dota may suck, this is my way of telling the world that “I love videogames and I want to make videogames better.”

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Why Dota Sucks — 1. Why I Am a Dota Expert
Posted on August 24, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: In spite of the time and energy that I have committed to researching and writing this book, many fans of dota will claim I am not qualified to present an argument. They will claim I am not good enough at dota and have not played enough dota. This is consistent with the philosophy of “e-Sports”, a movement that has hijacked the world of organized videogame tournaments for use as a marketing scheme. By positioning these games as sports, developers cast the idea that knowledge or expertise on a game can only be acquired by playing that one game. But videogame expertise has traditionally required a wide knowledge base that these insular communities now reject, and these communities fail to understand that extended expertise is only necessary for games which hold to the initial scrutiny. In the end, I will demonstrate that the failures of dota are systemic flaws. They can be observed by those who have never even played the genre, and they do not require hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime to be dissected. As a result, all that will be necessary to judge my expertise are the arguments in this book. And as you read this book, I will demonstrate that I am most certainly an expert on the topic of dota.


——

Before we can tear apart the dota genre, we need to address an issue important enough that it is worth giving its own chapter.

Instead of engaging the ideas which are being presented in this book, many critics and long-time fans of dota will simply choose to place my “qualifications” under the magnifying glass. Why? It’s easier than providing a proper rebuttal. They’ll ask: How many hours have I played dota? What skill level have I played dota at? Have I ever worked on a dota game? In spite of the fact that I have spent well over a thousand hours researching and writing this book, played the games which will be discussed, and given as much thought to the genre as anybody out there, many of my critics will claim that I am simply unqualified to present an argument. In a culture of competition where players invest thousands of hours into individual dota games—often because it is their job—they will claim I’m not good enough at dota and that I haven’t played enough dota. So, in order to provide a foundation for the thoughts in this book, we must deconstruct the culture of competition which has led to this nonsense and obliterate this approach to videogame “expertise”. In doing this, I will set the groundrules and explain why I am most certainly an expert on the topic of dota.

League of Legends and Dota 2 are the current figureheads for the growing world of “e-Sports”, a marketing buzzword for today’s organized and professional videogame tournaments.1 And let me begin by saying that I have no issue with videogame competitions as either a hobby or profession. The idea of playing excellent games in an organized or tournament format is a great way to gain even more enjoyment out of those excellent games, to raise the stakes and make the things happening in those virtual worlds more important. I also find that the peer review process created by these communities is very valuable in determining the merits of these games. While there is no substitute for merely playing a game and seeing how it holds up, the efforts of skilled players can help to confirm or deny how a game holds to scrutiny as human input scales upward. Unfortunately, e-Sports and the websites dedicated to these competitions have begun to have a nasty impact on game criticism.

While videogame competitions have been a mainstay of the medium since the early eighties, the limited success of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty as a spectator sport—a cannibalization of professional StarCraft: Brood War2—began a widespread commercial movement to use these tournaments as a form of advertising that runs concurrent with the game’s shelf life. Where videogame tournaments were once about pursuing the games that you enjoyed, e-Sports is little more than a marketing scheme,3 and companies have discovered that they can disguise this advertising and hype as community outreach and company goodwill.4 In many cases, the tournaments and cash prizes that were once a celebration of the achievement now appear well before the game has been released to the public, lest we forget that Dota 2 was revealed to the public in August of 2011 as part of a million-dollar tournament. Now, you can say what you want about the motives, but these tournaments have been a wild success. They’ve legitimized the subset of Western game culture that champions videogames as a vehicle for human competition and done it in a way that organizations like TwinGalaxies could have never dreamed of.

This marketing model has become a very successful one, but the endgoal is not to merely advertise the game and sell the software. As you may expect from a racket known as “e-Sports”, these games are analogous to sports, and the “experts” are those who put their knowledge and understanding of videogames into a march towards the top of one mountain. Using these tournaments, the goal is to create a culture of competition that hammers down on a game, providing the illusion5 of a game that holds to intense scrutiny as the best players in the world tear it apart. This apparatus turns talented players into celebrities, and since you could never beat them at their chosen game, who are you to tell them that the game sucks? In other words, these tournaments and the voracious competition surrounding these games are designed to be a buffer zone against criticism. And with the help of top players, game creators are casting the notion that your ability to play one game is equal to your understanding of what makes the game interesting and engaging.

Players have settled on two lines of thought. The first is that you must have played the game in question at a “high level”. Quite simply, if the player is not playing the game at an optimal or “intended” level, then he’s probably not playing the same game the experts are playing and should be ignored. The first argument is then closely tied to the second, the idea that you must meet a certain threshold for playtime. In a widely-disseminated piece of writing, an author for ESFI World made the assertion that you must have a minimum of 150 hours of playtime in order to provide criticism of Dota 2.6 This has been a defense mechanism used by MMORPG fans to defend the largely mediocre state of their genre, and prior to that, Japanese turn-based role-playing games.7 And I am sure there is an entire generation of arcade videogame players, an audience which had to make a flash judgment on whether any game was worth a second credit, that openly weeps at these assertions.

To compound the matter, the modern videogame business model accepts no finality in the development of a videogame. The goal is to continue supporting a game until it is no longer financially viable to do so, and this results in an endless stream of game updates which are designed to “fix the game”.8 Very often, this means that firm knowledge of game variables—how much health certain characters have, how hard certain characters hit, what strategies are popular—will have no relevance and no value in the months and years to come. Even new maps and game modes will come and go, requiring both supporters and critics to become familiar with them.9 And many of these persistently-developed games, including Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks, are now significantly different than the games which were originally released. Unless you have the desire and passion to continue playing, “expertise”—as defined by your knowledge of the game content—quickly becomes a lost title.

These players have taken the same approach as professional athletes, who will take opposition arguments to task by arguing the player (or coach, or commentator) making an assertion was never good at the sport.10 In the case of a StarCraft II or a League of Legends, the argument is that the voracious competition and persistent developer support offered to these games has resulted in something similar to a sports league. Just like those sports leagues, the rules of these videogames change on a regular basis, and the best strategies and tactics may very well change every couple of months. With it, the argument is that the games affiliated with the e-Sports culture are fundamentally different than those that preceded them. These games transcend the conventional rules of game criticism, and these games can only be judged by their most capable players. So whether I have been playing videogames for twenty-five years, playing the genre that birthed dota for twenty years, and demonstrated a high degree of comprehension for many genres is irrelevant, because I have not satisfied criteria for their game and their sport.

Now, let’s be clear: I do not think it is a bad idea to find lessons in an excellent game or series, nor would I dismiss the opinion of a top StarCraft or Dota player because that is the game he pours most of his time and energy into. But what people need to understand is that the traditional role of the “videogame expert” was a jack-of-all-trades. The expert played and beat lots of games, and by doing this, became knowledgeable across a number of genres. Anyone who read Nintendo Power in its heyday knows about Howard Phillips, the company-appointed “Game Master” who played nearly every game for Nintendo hardware and conquered a great percentage of the Nintendo software lineup before his 1991 departure from the company.11 When Nintendo Power gave praise to “Power Players”, the magazine recognized skill across multiple games and genres. And when Nintendo held their World Championships, it was a contest which required players to compete in multiple games. While it was wise for Nintendo to recognize these accolades across their entire software library, television shows that doubled as videogame competitions—Starcade, Video Power, Nick Arcade—also asked players to demonstrate their talents across the spectrum.

But over the last three decades, the complexity of videogames has expanded by significant orders of magnitude. The games are bigger, there’s more of them, they demand much more of your time, and completely new genres have emerged in order to take advantage of the new technology. Versus multiplayer games now go beyond the novelty of a Pong or a Karate Champ, and players can network and compete against each other from across the planet, gaining insight into how one game operates. Much as medical specialists become more important in a world of exponentially-increasing medical knowledge, it can be more appealing to become familiar with certain games and pool that expertise into a larger discussion. While a varied perspective remains valuable, becoming familiar with a game or genre means doing it at the expense of other games.12

Today’s e-Sports are the extreme end of that model, and fall much in line with the “gated community” nature of today’s internet, where people forge togetherness from a single interest. And what tends to happen in these communities is that everyone genuinely begins to believe that Game X or Series X is the greatest thing ever. There’s no debate to be had on whether a game is “good” or “bad” because everyone already thinks the game is great. That’s why they showed up for the discussion in the first place. As a result, these communities are exploring these games with a manner and methodology where they have begun to forget what made the game so appealing (relative to other games) in the first place. And because players are pouring so much time and energy into their current passion, this perspective will become even more narrow, as they miss out on new games and their new approaches to that genre.

So, where StarCraft may be one of many excellent real-time strategy games, you would not know this by reading a web site like TeamLiquid.net, the Western figurehead for coverage of professional and organized StarCraft. The web site doesn’t merely give extended airtime to the StarCraft series, nearly all discussion of RTS theory is centered around StarCraft. Discussion threads for fantastic RTS games such as Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and the Wargame series are largely ignored.13 The web site now propagandizes the myth that StarCraft: Brood War is the best game in its genre and the myth that StarCraft II is a top-notch RTS. If competing design theory is drawn from elsewhere, it is drawn from League of Legends and Dota 2, the rival e-Sports that draw money and attention away from professional StarCraft II.14 And, much as in other message boards and communities, the echo chamber grows louder as the minority gives up hope and seeks shelter elsewhere.

In providing incentive and acclaim to those who pour their time and efforts into one game, the e-Sports marketing machine has embraced their insular knowledge of the topic, and it has made these communities very dangerous to the pursuit of game criticism. In order for these players to invoke authority on the topic when they are playing such a limited range of games, they are attempting to redefine the qualifications for game criticism to suit their own purposes. In order to hold ground against videogame players who have played and hold perspective on hundreds and even thousands of games, they have to. Fans of e-Sports will claim this criteria is about objectivity, to make sure the games are being approached by those who have the knowledge base to discuss them. It is not. It is meant to wall the community against criticism of their chosen game from qualified outsiders. It facilitates a body of criticism in which only those who like the game are “qualified” to comment on it, and is meant to delegitimize those who can stand against the machine.15

What these players have failed to understand is that “good” and “bad” are not declarations which exist independently of themselves. To say something is “good” is to say that it is better than the “bad” stuff. What is the good and the bad stuff? In this case, it’s the other videogames out there. If you do not have a solid perspective for the body of videogame history, then it will be difficult to say whether a game belongs near the bottom or the top, or whether it is worth playing at all. Fans of Dota 2 and League of Legends may fancy their games as sports, but in a lot of ways, game criticism is the process of comparing different sports, to understand what makes those games appealing and what certain sports do better than others. You just need to develop the worldview—and greater understanding of games—in order to explore these concepts.

But on top of this, we should point out that playing games, understanding games, and writing about games requires three connected but distinct skill sets. Being good at a game does not mean you understand the theory behind the concepts or have the skills to communicate your knowledge of the concepts. And no, I am not claiming that the game critic should be an everyman. But if you are genuinely knowledgeable about a game or genre, you need to demonstrate that you understand theory and concepts, and not just strategies and numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that many skilled players understand the theory of the games they pour their time and energy into. However, it is a whole different story to explain how that theory works, use it to make relevant comparisons, and then place those comparisons in a format that will provide benefit to others.

And to follow on that, the amount of time you have spent with one game has nothing to do with how well you can play the game or how well you understand it. Hell, “time spent” does not even determine whether you would recommend a game to someone else. I spent hundreds of hours with both Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Rock Band, in part because they filled a niche for rhythm gaming in a multiplayer environment. But I would never recommend either of those games over Vanquish, where my twenty hours with the game amounted to the most fun that I ever had with a third-person shooter. Sometimes, I feel comfortable casting judgment on a game after an hour or two, typically because it does something which is a fundamental no-no.16 Other times, a game will demand much more of my time. However, that usually comes down to whether the game has earned my attention in the first place.

Once you have spent enough time trying to understand videogames, what you will find is that the success and failure of a videogame is typically settled in the higher levels of game design, the design choices which provide the foundation for a game. Is the game built on an interesting concept? Does the game world provide a convincing atmosphere? Do those mechanics provide satisfying audio and visual feedback? Is the game inherently liberating and exciting? Does the game present a solid grasp of the design theory that made the genre so interesting in the first place? A game must succeed at these tenets of design before things like the metagame begin to remotely matter. You will hear people praise dota games for their “polish”, the process of tweaking and refining a game’s systems until they are as close to “perfect” as one can ideally hope for. Well, polish can make a good foundation great, but it can’t make a bad foundation good.

And very often, you will hear high praise for the “depth” of the dota genre. But I don’t think people understand that if you have enough players trying to be the best at one game, you will find pedantic subtleties and depth in any game. Angry Birds and Bejeweled have enough random chance in their outcomes that there is no satisfaction in playing either of these games. In spite of this, these games have significant depth curves between their best and worst players.17 “Speedruns” of older videogames demonstrate a level of comprehension and understanding that most players will never even see or consider, leading to fierce competition in games which were never intended for such scrutiny.18 If you have enough people hammering away at one game, and you set up criteria that measures a full range of skill levels, then any game can be “skilled” or “deep”. The goal in game design is to make sure that the skillful elements lead to more engaging outcomes than those in competing games.19

In arguing my case, I will make it very clear that I do not think it is the design of the subtle low-level interactions that hold back the dota genre. The problem lay in the higher-level designs which provide the foundation for tactics, strategy, the control scheme, the targeting interface, the camera, and the aesthetic design choices. As I said at the beginning of this book: I think that the philosophy of the dota genre is the problem. I am not attacking the concepts that are only available to those who have attained mastery of dota, and I am not attacking concepts that require hundreds of hours of play in order to approach or consider. I will be making breakdowns and comparisons of concepts that can be observed and understood by those who have never even touched the genre. This is not a series of nitpicks. These issues are a long line of fundamental flaws.

So you see, I do not have to “master” dota or meet some sort of make-believe qualification in order to demonstrate that the genre is dysfunctional. In the course of videogame discussion and criticism, it doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve played, it doesn’t matter how high your score is, and it doesn’t matter whether you can beat the best player in the world. Skilled play is simply one means to exploring and understanding the games in question. What matters is whether or not you know what the hell you’re talking about. In order to demonstrate that I do, I am presenting this book as a cogent, complex argument outlining my grievances with the genre. From here, the only thing that will determine whether I am an expert is the arguments presented in this book. And by the time you have finished reading it, I will have most certainly demonstrated that expertise. Not just on dota, but on the entire world of videogames that surround that one genre.

I believe that I have been diligent in researching this topic, in playing the games which I will discuss in this writing, and in drawing strong, relevant conclusions from these games. If my arguments don’t hold water, then you should be able to explain why, drawing from the skills and knowledge that you have developed as both a videogame player and a human being. Now, through the coming series of chapters, I will allow you to decide whether I have done this topic justice.

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Why Dota Sucks — 2. The Crude Birth of a Genre
Posted on August 30, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: In order to understand dota, you must first look at the circumstance of dota. You must look at the evolution of the genre within the Blizzard Entertainment real-time strategy ecosystem, through the third-party content creation for Warcraft II, StarCraft, and Warcraft III. In giving this matter extended scrutiny, you will find that the dota genre was not the matter of design genius, but of circumstance and impediment. Unlike the commercial game designers who have the talent and resources to shape the game experience, every Blizzard game offered a new set of restrictions for amateur content creators. Bound by these limitations, content creators used RTS game engines and RTS map editors to build a character-action game. You will find that these limitations—and the flaws that came with those limitations—have shaped the mechanical, aesthetic, philosophical, and economic conventions of its genre. This book will highlight those limitations as it is necessary to do so.


——

We should now discuss the rise of Defense of the Ancients as it emerged from the Blizzard Entertainment real-time strategy ecosystem. Now, why is that? While videogames are collaborative works that showcase the creativity of highly talented individuals, I believe that the history of videogames has been largely written by economics and circumstance. Videogames are art, but it’s a business of art. The great videogame designers have found the means to mold the business of videogames to their own interests and talents, whether they’re catering to the demands of the corporate board, working with others at an independent game developer, or creating free content for a commercial game engine in their spare time. This does not mean you cannot learn games through the simple act of playing them, but circumstance is a valuable tool for confirming your instincts, and the circumstance of dota is no exception.

A couple of unrelated events would usher in the popularity of third-party content for use with Blizzard software. Many games featuring elements we associate with RTS would find reverence and acclaim from their contemporary audiences.1 But with 1992’s Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, Westwood Studios would codify the archetype for the RTS genre—build a base, build an army, destroy the other base—that is now commonly thought of as RTS.2 The following year, id Software would release Doom, and with help from the continuing and emerging adoption of the internet, the game would launch a voracious consumer appetite for player-created content. People wanted to make their own maps, and by using the internet, they could get complete strangers to play and enjoy them. In November of 1994, Blizzard Entertainment would launch their own RTS flavor with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, setting the stage for what was to come.

While turn-based strategy games had already allowed players to customize, randomize, and create their own battlefields, it seemed fairly inevitable that RTS would use “Create your own maps!” as a selling point. And when Blizzard released their 1995 RTS classic Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, they would provide players a functional, intuitive map editor. The nicest thing to be said about the editor is that it provided the user-friendly approach that would come to define the later editors for Blizzard RTS games. But when we compare it with the tools used to create content for today’s games, it was largely deficient. Players were given no access to the mission briefing system, the maps could not be linked together as part of a campaign, and those maps could not feature victory conditions beyond “kill everything”. In-effect, maps existed as individual entities within their own contained ecosystem and had little flavor beyond the arrangement of the units and terrain.

Third-party programs such as War2xEd and PUDDraft would give players more control over the design of their maps—allowing players to make rudimentary customizations for units and AI—and Wardraft would even allow players to customize and modify the game files. (In spite of this, “total conversions” would never catch on.3) Warcraft II ultimately lacked support for the scripting or programming that would allow units and buildings to act outside of their parameters.4 For example, a scenario where friendly knights run towards your base to “warn you of the impending danger” was simply impossible.5 These limitations would stifle the growth of what we now think of as “custom maps”, the maps which attempted to take Blizzard RTS games in unconventional directions.6 Puzzle maps and so-called “Olympic” maps usually asked the player to take a small number of units and get them to a destination on the map. But for the most part, these maps were simply exaggerations of the Warcraft II mechanics, instead of anything that players would consider its own “game”. Skirmish and singleplayer maps would dominate the landscape for content creation in Warcraft II, and the custom map would remain an unknown quantity.

Blizzard would provide the leap forward when they released their Campaign Editor alongside StarCraft in 1998. The new scripting techniques were demonstrated in the famous StarCraft singleplayer campaign, which featured a greater focus on narrative and character development than the genre had previously shown. The Campaign Editor gave players access to the scripting system that built the campaign, and with it, a flexible entry gate for anyone who wanted to scratch the game development itch. From there, the integration of StarCraft into Blizzard’s Battle.net online service—launched for use with 1996’s Diablo—assured mapmakers a larger audience than the trove of third-party tools and web sites.7 It is during this time that content creation would formally split into two separate affairs, with skirmish and custom maps being thought of as separate entities.

From this circumstance, the dota genre would make its entrance in the StarCraft custom map Aeon of Strife, as created by the mapmaker Aeon64.8 The map allowed players to select a powerful character—one individual in a team of players—to compete against an onslaught of computer-controlled enemies. While Aeon of Strife was conceived in an RTS map editor, its emphasis on powerful protagonists, large waves of fodder enemies, and straight-forward level design was less like StarCraft and more like the “lawnmower”9 hack-and-slash games (Dynasty Warriors, OneeChanbara, Ninety-Nine Nights) that would appear in the following decade.

As one small part of the StarCraft custom game scene, Aeon of Strife was a change of pace from the conventional game modes. StarCraft may be a classic within its genre, but like most early RTS games, it has lacked a genuine sense of scope and scale in war. As it has been described in third-party accounts, the gigantic wars on display in Aeon of Strife provided this sense of war for StarCraft players.10 Because of this, it would become a regular part of the custom game scene. Countless versions and variants of the map would appear as created by various mapmakers, even as Aeon64 was nowhere to be seen.11 And many of the concepts that define Defense of the Ancients would emerge in this era, including defensive control points and the sprawling, winding map layouts associated with the genre. Most crucially, some mapmakers would turn Aeon of Strife into a versus multiplayer game, with players attempting to drive their computer-controlled fodder against a competing army and their leaders.12

But even if the StarCraft custom game scene was thriving and popular, the maps remained incredibly basic. They co-opted the StarCraft art assets, game template, and user interface because they had to. The selectable characters in Aeon of Strife were simply powerful versions of the units that could already be used in the skirmish game modes.13 If you were a mapmaker and you wanted to make a new character, you gave an existing unit a cool name, increased their health, upped their damage output, and that was that. Those characters were simply more powerful clones of an existing unit.14 Meanwhile, total conversions of StarCraft faced the same issues as the ones built for Warcraft II.15 And when compared to the content creation for other games—including Doom, Total Annihilation, Quake, and Half-Life—StarCraft custom maps were limited in both scope and quality.

In spite of this, StarCraft custom maps became an incredibly valuable commodity. You see, the videogame publishing model was built on the same contract as the movie industry. Basically, you use the trash to fund the good stuff. Discerning videogame players may despise the “brodude” who buys FIFA every year, but the money he spends on Electronic Arts‘ sports games can be used to finance a Mass Effect, a Dead Space, or a Titanfall. However, such a contract can even exist within a single game, where you offer a wide range of game modes for a a wide range of players. The players who enjoyed StarCraft custom maps could act as a social and economic backbone for the smaller percentage of users who pursued the game as a top-notch RTS experience. As RTS games like Warcraft II, Total Annihilation, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings were quickly left to their die-hards, StarCraft maintained incredible longevity with the help of the third-party content.16 In the long run, it was worth every dime of Blizzard’s attention to encourage the creation of the custom maps.

The wild success of StarCraft (and 2000’s Diablo II) paid off handsomely for Blizzard. By the time Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was marked for its July of 2002 release date, it was the most anticipated videogame in the history of the computer market. In spite of this, the end result was not a revolution. The game would be centered around small-scale tactics and it would share much in common with 1997’s Myth: The Fallen Lords and 2000’s Sacrifice. Warcraft III‘s defining concept was the powerful heroes that could level up, acquire items, and unlock powerful abilities over the course of a match. But unlike the previous Blizzard RTS games, the emphasis on base-building and fast economic management was brought to a minimum. Fans of Warcraft II and the other RTS games based on the Warcraft model had come to expect fast action and an emphasis on economic supremacy. And the focus on slower, more localized combat—with game-changing heroes at the center of the battle—would make Warcraft III one of the most polarizing games ever made.

On the other end, custom map creators fell in love with everything that the Warcraft III World Editor had to offer. They took advantage of the new maximum player limit, which bumped StarCraft‘s eight-player limit up to twelve. Since computer-controlled players are often used to fulfill essential map functions, the custom maps for Warcraft III were commonly contested on a five-on-five basis, providing the team sizes typically associated with the dota genre.17 On top of this, the editor allowed native access to “Just Another Scripting Syntax”, the scripting language that provides the backbone for Warcraft III maps. Players now had the power to program their game map, so long as the code functioned within the parameters outlined by Blizzard.

The most significant leap would come in the amount of content was now available to mapmakers. When Warcraft III was originally announced, Blizzard marketed the game under the moniker of “role-playing strategy”.18 And whether a narrative-driven singleplayer map or a versus multiplayer match, the player could slaughter “neutral” foes in order to gain resources (gold, items, experience) for their war effort. In the pursuit of this, Blizzard added hundreds of units and buildings that comprised every primary and secondary faction within the world of Azeroth. Where Blizzard custom map creators were once confined to the small range of units that were needed to flesh out the game’s playable factions, they could now choose from an entire world of creatures and characters. All of the available unit models, down to the most pathetic slime or troll, were given as much detail and attention as a Thrall or a Jaina Proudmoore.19 These creatures and buildings could be thoroughly customized for use in the new maps.

With little hesitation, players imported their favorite StarCraft custom maps into the new game engine. The premise of Warcraft III would prove a perfect match for Aeon of Strife, the story of powerful badasses going to battle with a sea of mooks, and the map was quickly ported over. However, the introduction of the hero model and the lower unit counts altered the appeal of the map.20 Much like the “Hero Arena” maps that dominated the early custom game scene in Warcraft III, Aeon of Strife was taking the Warcraft III hero model—a small portion of that game’s construct—and turning it into its own game. Aeon of Strife was giving players a single character that could learn spells, gain items, and level up, all performed through a point-and-click user interface. Very often, these maps thrived on a novelty appeal, with heroes and characters that could grow to comical levels of strength. And if this all sounds like it has some crossover appeal with the Diablo series, that’s because it absolutely does.

However, most of these maps would remain a novelty experience because the vaunted World Editor was limited in places that it needed to be flexible. The editor allowed mapmakers to customize nearly every aspect of a unit, but in a game where units are commonly defined by their range of spells and abilities, you could not customize the individual spells and abilities that were being used by those units. They were exact copies of the ones available for use in the skirmish and campaign modes.

Third-party programs were once again created in order to overcome these limitations, and it was a battle waged with limited success. During this period, the first Warcraft III maps with custom spells and abilities would emerge, and they were prominently featured in maps like Valley of Dissent and Keys of Sealing. In the midst of this development, a player by the name Eul created something called Defense of the Ancients. The early versions of DotA were grossly limited in quality, even in regard to basics like terrain design and unit placement. However, the map featured all the trappings we associate with today’s dota games: A large roster of playable characters, two bases connected by a three-lane map design, neutral monsters strewn about the map, and “hidden” merchants who sold players the most powerful items. But Battle.net content creation was a largely collaborative effort, with players borrowing and often stealing from each other. The lack of standardization for the third-party programs limited their reach and limited the progress of the dota model.

The community would get a big surprise when the Warcraft III expansion pack The Frozen Throne arrived in July of 2003. The upgraded World Editor offered access to every aspect of the Warcraft III game model, allowing players to create their own spells and even modify the base game rules. Nearly all of the third-party programs that had been created during the Reign of Chaos days were now obsolete. With this powerful editor, players could now do anything they wanted, so long as it functioned within the Warcraft III game engine, its interface, and its scripting system. With these powerful tools now standard across the entire user base, content creators had ease of ability to create and disseminate the concepts that we now see as synonymous with Defense of the Ancients. And just like Aeon of Strife, Defense of the Ancients had become a concept and a brand, and numerous players would create their own versions of Defense of the Ancients.

Early in the life of The Frozen Throne, a pair of content creators by the name of Meian and Ragn0r would create their own variant of DotA. They decided to take interesting and well-designed heroes in other versions of the map and place them under a single banner.21 Much as the best professional athletes compete in All-Star games, the map would be known as DotA All-Stars. However, the pair gave up on the project shortly after its launch and left it to the dustbin. Another mapmaker by the name of Steve “Guinsoo” Feak saw potential in the map and took over the project. His chief contribution was to facilitate interaction between the human participants, distinguishing it from versions of Defense of the Ancients which emphasized the destruction of the disposable soldiers.22 And through a long line of revisions, DotA All-Stars would acquire a reputation for its quality. Fans were now eager to contribute, and a team of mapmakers would work with Guinsoo in order to update the map.23

By 2004, serious multiplayer competition began to emerge around DotA All-Stars. To help organize the competition, Guinsoo’s compatriots in Clan TDA created a system of bots that was used to enforce conduct in DotA All-Stars matches played throughout Battle.net.24 TDA member Steve “Pendragon” Mescon would also create a community portal for DotA All-Stars and it would quickly grow in popularity. (At its high point, dota-allstars.com would have over a million registered users.25) By 2005, there was hardly a Warcraft III player on Battle.net who had not heard of the map, and many players did not take kindly to its existence. It was during this time that Guinsoo would hand off DotA All-Stars to fellow creators Neichus and IceFrog, a duo that possessed the programming skills necessary to continue increasing the complexity of the map.26

If the story had ended there, people wouldn’t be writing books about the topic. But at this point, even Blizzard had taken notice of the map, and the company organized a DotA All-Stars tournament for their first BlizzCon convention in October of 2005. (Blizzard’s support for the map would otherwise remain limited.) By 2006, other large tournaments were being organized and the best dota players were participating in them. DotA All-Stars had even begun to earn the ire of other custom game creators and players, because All-Stars was making it difficult for competing maps to get any exposure.27 And as the Warcraft III skirmish modes were being left to their most committed players, it finally dawned that DotA All-Stars was generating more interest—and acclaim—than Warcraft III itself. DotA All-Stars was becoming ubiquitous with Warcraft III in the way that Counter-Strike would become ubiquitous with Half-Life. This version of Defense of the Ancients would become such a success that competing versions of the map would be left to history, and the lineage of maps directly leading into DotA All-Stars is now singularly identified as “Defense of the Ancients“.

The map would have a profound impact on nearly every party associated with it. In 2006, a Singapore software company would launch “GGClient”—later renamed to Garena—and the program would be used throughout Southeast Asia to play Defense of the Ancients en masse with unauthorized copies of Warcraft III.28 The threat of piracy would become a major factor in Blizzard’s decision to launch 2010’s StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty without any formal support for offline play,29 and the new version of Battle.net allowed the company to remove a map from the service if it did not meet certain criteria for ethics and copyrighted material.30 31 Along with a less intuitive map editor, the StarCraft II custom scene would never enjoy the popularity and success of its predecessors. Interest in the game quickly waned without a robust custom scene to act as a backbone for the die-hards.

In response to this reality, Blizzard unveiled “Blizzard DOTA” at BlizzCon in October of 2010. But at this point, Guinsoo and Pendragon had taken up residence at Riot Games. Meanwhile, IceFrog was allegedly32 working with S2 Games on Heroes of Newerth and then later with Valve on Dota 2. In August of 2011, Valve would officially unveil that sequel, and both Eul and IceFrog were present on the development team. Later on, Blizzard would scuffle with Valve over the “DOTA” trademark, and Blizzard would rename their map to Blizzard All-Stars. After years of what an outsider would see as “development hell”, the map is now a commercial project known as Heroes of the Storm, which has an expected 2015 release date. League of Legends and Dota 2 have become two of the most popular games in the world, dota is now the hottest genre in videogame development, the market for RTS games has come to a crawl, and Blizzard is now looking from the outside-in on the commercially-lucrative genre that was created with their own editing tools.

Defense of the Ancients became so popular that it would not only come to dominate the game it was created in, but have a profound impact on the companies and individuals involved in its success. And yet, for all of this success, we need to maintain some perspective. Just as the puzzle maps were an alteration of the concepts in Warcraft II, and just as the early tower defense maps were an alteration of the concepts in StarCraft, Defense of the Ancients was an alteration of the concepts in Warcraft III. The Frozen Throne‘s World Editor may have been powerful, but it was not a programming language and it was not a videogame creation tool. It was a mapmaking tool, designed to make maps with the content and game rules outlined by Blizzard. It is crucial to understand this. When players manipulated the Warcraft III game engine towards more powerful ends, problems began to show.33

As we have already mentioned, modifications of the game and the game engine could not be disseminated on Battle.net. This meant that most custom maps used the same interface, control scheme, and game concepts in Warcraft III. Most damningly, the Warcraft III game engine does not provide native access for the “mouselook”34 mechanics now synonymous with first- and third-person action games on personal computers.35 But in addition, the peer-to-peer networking technology used for online play in most RTS games is designed for a game model with a large number of moving parts. Action games with fewer moving parts use a client-side prediction model to minimize the effects of networking latency, and not only could Battle.net not provide this benefit, the service (as designed for Warcraft III) uses a quarter-second hard-coded internet delay. This was intended to prevent players from gaining a substantial advantage with a better internet connection, but it discouraged the adoption of the concepts that are a mainstay in other excellent action games. And while the Warcraft III game engine has hosted concepts ranging from first-person shooters to Diablo-style action games, custom keyboard layouts (and the maps that used them) never caught on because they generate substantial input latency.36

So hopefully, you understand where I am going with this. It didn’t matter which game it was: Warcraft II, StarCraft, Warcraft III. Blizzard mapmakers were influenced by incredible restrictions at every step of the way, and not the kind we typically associate with the design of videogames, where designers attempted to overcome the technical limitations presented by limited hardware. Things that were common in other genres were impossible to distribute through Battle.net and impossible to perform in the various Blizzard RTS game engines. The result is that dota is a rarity and oddball within videogames. It is one of only two genres whose rules were foremost defined by software limitations—the limitations of Blizzard game engines and their content creation tools—instead of hardware limitations.37 Every time that Blizzard custom maps made their grand leap, there was simply another set of barriers that got in the way of “building the best game possible”.

What this should demonstrate is that dota was not a matter of genius and great design, but of circumstance and impediment. When developers were creating the blueprints for their genres—id Software and the FPS, Capcom and the fighting game, Westwood and the RTS—those companies had minimal notion of how these genres should play and what they should look like. But more importantly, they had the freedom, creative talent, and resources to define the experience. This is not to claim that all great videogames, whether amateur or commercial, are built on a clean canvas. But the games that thrived on borrowed assets were created by one of two groups: One, the designers whose vision was not compromised by the software limitations, where amateur projects like Team Fortress were built into a game engine specifically tailored to their genre. Or two, the companies with the resources to make those borrowed assets work. For instance, taking the Unreal 3 game engine—designed for use with FPS games and long the enemy of colorful art design—and turning it into a visually-stunning platforming game like Mirror’s Edge.

After spending a pathetic amount of time trying to understand videogames, there is one thing I can say with certainty: Great videogames are no fluke. You don’t just fuck around in a game editor for a couple thousand hours and end up with something worth playing. As manifested today and through significant revision, the history of the dota genre is the history of amateur game designers using their limited resources to manipulate a game engine which was never designed for formal modification, never designed for traditional action games, and was demonstrably terrible at doing many of the things that were commonplace in videogames. Or, in other words, the creators of dota used an RTS game engine, the RTS concepts laid out in Warcraft III, and the Warcraft III World Editor to create a character-action game. The same game model used to create Warcraft, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Total Annihilation was used to create something that shares more in common with the Diablo and Dynasty Warriors series. And in order to distribute this new genre, the creators were bound to the limitations of Battle.net distribution.

These limitations have now defined the mechanical, aesthetic, economic, and philosophical conventions of the dota genre. Dota was an underground genre in the truest sense, operating entirely outside of commercial videogame development. The creators of Defense of the Ancients were given over half-a-decade of unopposed airtime to mold the expectations of the “hardcore dota player” and to mold their expectation of what a “great dota game” should look like. When commercial videogame companies finally decided to examine this genre, to take their resources and build a better game, they simply chose to whore the genre out. Both League of Legends and Dota 2 do little to deviate from Defense of the Ancients, and the other games which have attempted to capitalize on their popularity make the occasional step sideways instead of trying to bring the genre forward. Just as the Japanese role-playing game was largely the matter of sticking with what works when Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest made “press A to win” a commercial juggernaut, there has been little economic or critical impetus to reconsider the design of dota games.

So, here we are. There is no question in my mind that the people who turned these custom maps into their own genre were absolutely passionate about their work. These content creators spent countless hours trying to improve their formula simply because they thought it was a goal worth pursuing. But passion is not cause for celebration in itself. Throughout the rest of this book, I will point to this circumstance whenever it is necessary to explain the lessons of the genre. In spite of the commercial and critical praise that has been extended to dota, it is my opinion that the genre can be summed up in three words: “Eh, close enough.”

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Why Dota Sucks — 3. The Camera
Posted on September 2, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: Much like the RTS games that inspired it, the dota genre is most commonly played with a top-down “free roaming” camera that can be moved around the map independently of the participants. The genre features many mechanics that take advantage of the free camera and most dota players favor the free camera. However, the RTS genre was designed for a world in which you are playing the role of an overhead commander, whereas dota asks you to play the role of an individual. The use of a free camera to control an individual breaks the player’s connection to the action on the screen and does it to a substantial detriment. This faulty design choice is countered by an excellent body of game design that shows it is possible to manage RTS elements from a fixed camera perspective. But ultimately, the resistance of the dota community to fixed camera elements has nothing to do with an argument of superiority. Quite simply, it is a fear of change, a fear that a fixed camera would “dumb down” the genre. It is a fear generated by a lack of familiarity with the games that have featured the fixed camera elements and done them well.


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The two most fundamental design choices you will make in the creation of your game are input and output. How will players control the events in the world and how will they view them? If your game is worth a damn, then these decisions will profoundly govern its design. Throughout videogame history, game developers have had significant agency to shape these choices. Very often, the people creating the games were also creating the hardware.1 But it’s not just hardware that can dictate input and output. This can also happen at the software level, where an existing game engine or game creation software dictates the range of design choices. These lessons are most obvious in any discussion of the dota genre’s approach to output.

Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients employ the common real-time strategy camera system, a top-down “free-roaming” camera conceived in the strategy games prior to StarCraft and Warcraft III. In these games, the camera has a limited field of view and does not follow any one target. Instead, the player manages the location of the camera just as they would manage the location of their character or their soldiers. While games such as Awesomenauts, Smite, Dead Island: Epidemic, and console dota games are designed for a fixed camera—where the camera locks directly to the character you have chosen for battle—this is not the standard option. The most popular philosophy sticks with the roots, and games such as League of Legends, Dota 2, Dawngate, Demigod, Heroes of the Storm, and a rash of Chinese dota knockoffs favor the free camera. These games typically offer a toggle between the free and fixed methods, but the fixed camera is typically a concession to beginners who are uncomfortable with managing the camera as a separate entity. This is because Defense of the Ancients and subsequent dota games feature game systems and game mechanics which have been designed for use with the free camera.

Dota is a genre where it is crucial for teammates to hit lanes and angles simultaneously in order to synchronize skills into a well-coordinated path of destruction. In the pursuit of proper timing, players expect a grasp of the battlefield that cannot always be conveyed through an on-screen minimap or player communication. It’s easier for those players to move the camera around the battlefield and see where teammates and enemies are coming from. But in addition, many dota games feature elements familiar to RTS games, and the free camera is designed to take advantage of them. In many dota games, the player can acquire a courier, which will allow players to purchase items from the shopkeepers in their base and transport the items to their character while they are in the battlefield. Management of the vulnerable courier as it moves through the winding battlefield is very often a must. On top of this, many characters can either create clones of themselves or summon supporting units. Since they can be managed as individual entities, they can be used to attack and defend multiple fronts.

Because dota has been designed for the free camera, comprehension and mastery of the camera are mandatory for “skilled play” in the games which provide it. And when confronted with the option of designing a dota game for a free camera or a fixed camera, the free camera is usually the one that wins out. However, it will be a common theme in this book that simply polishing, tailoring, or adapting your game systems for an idea does not act as good game design unto itself. If you have a good eye for movies or television, you know that merely tying together the loose ends does not make a conclusion fulfilling. An ending can still be a bad one even if “It makes sense, given the options they had to work with.” It is about deriving an interesting end result from the sum of all parts.

So, we need to understand two things: Why did the dota genre adopt the free camera and what is the actual purpose of a free camera? The first question is pretty easy to answer. The dota genre uses the free camera because Warcraft III did. (That will also be a common theme in this book.) But if you are familiar with Warcraft III mapmaking, then you are aware the camera is one of the few things that mapmakers actually had full control of. You can zoom, rotate, and position the camera in any way that you want. You can even build your game map for fixed camera support, locking the camera to a character from a third-person or first-person viewpoint. Map creators had a fairly wide range of choices to work with, so what happened here?

Well, Battle.net custom maps were foremost a social affair, and the maps were usually designed for the highest player counts possible. Much in the way that today’s big-budget videogames are often homogenized so that they will be agreeable to large audiences, the high player counts effectively democratized the decision to continue playing a map. If ten players get together to play a map and only one of them does not like the concept, the control scheme, or even a specific aspect of the map, then that’s ten people who may move on to a different map.

If your goal was to make a popular Warcraft III custom map, you didn’t risk the trend that an unconventional concept would take some time to become comfortable with, even if it’s an interesting one. The creators that took the Warcraft III game engine in unconventional directions watched their projects become niche affairs, closer to proof-of-concept than a mainstay in the Warcraft III custom game listings. And within the context of an RTS game with a free camera, and in a game where the company’s art assets and game mechanics were tailored towards a very specific field of view, a camera that locks to a character amounts to a gimmick.2 This is where the problem lies. The Warcraft III game engine has so thoroughly dictated output in the dota genre that the field of view in the games that use the free camera is almost entirely identical. And, in using this free camera, the dota genre has entirely compromised the way that you view and connect with that virtual universe.

In using a free camera as the backbone for the dota genre, designers and developers have completely missed the point as to why RTS games use a free camera. It has nothing to do with “giving players the tools they need to win”. When you play a videogame, ask yourself a simple question: Who are you playing as? That is the most fundamental means by which you connect with the action on the screen, by inserting yourself in the role of some participant in that world.3 There is no mincing words when we describe this as fundamental to the character of a videogame. Whether maze games, platformers, shoot ’em ups, side-scrolling action games, fighting games, 2D and 3D brawlers, adventure games, stealth games, or even work and flight simulators, all of these games use some variant of a fixed camera.4 Even games which employ multiple characters—particularly team-based fighting games—make sure to keep your current character in the field of play or quickly shift the camera to the next participant in order to maintain the player’s connection to the action.

The RTS camera was designed for a world in which you are playing as a commander, and you are looking down on the universe you are helping to shape.5 The genre and its pioneers had already figured this out in their early years, where Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty placed you directly in a generic leading role and Populous asserted that you were a god looking down on your followers. Even in the RTS games which do not provide a direct narrative context for your role in the game, the game model conveys the commander role. So even if Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation thrust “you” directly onto the battlefield as a king-style chess piece,6 and The Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle-Earth places you in the unspoken role of the narrator, the focus is on managing the simulation of war and making sure your soldiers go where they need to go. It’s not only empowering to scan the battlefield and give orders, but it feels comfortable and natural.

The dota genre has adopted the RTS commander role for use in a game where you are centrally playing as one character. You are not playing as the courier, you are not playing as your summoned creatures, you are not playing as your supporting soldiers, and you are not playing as the collective of those moving parts. You are playing the character you have chosen for battle, so it is natural that the action is always focused on “you” or from “your perspective”.7 Through the use of the free camera, you are constantly detaching yourself from the character that is supposed to be your connection to the action on the screen. Immersion is the popular buzzword these days, and let’s be very clear: This breaks immersion and does it to a substantial detriment.

Perhaps this would not be an issue if the dota genre used strong narrative, visual, and mechanical backing for the decision. The goal is that you must explain “Why?” Why do you see the world from the perspective that you do? Many aspects of the dota camera—the degree of omnipotence available to the player, the top-down perspective—could be validated with the proper design choices.8 After all, recent games like The Last of Us, Dishonored, 2012’s Syndicate, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution feature skills and tools for seeing through walls and the environment, and provide good reasons for why you can.

But proper craft requires proper execution, and the creators of dota games have half-assed the process. League of Legends asserts that you are a summoner who is in-fact controlling the action from a distance. The summoner role is the means by which you can view other parts of the battlefield and the means by which you control characters beyond the one you have chosen to play as. These games are simply borrowing the existing feedback mechanisms found in the RTS genre, where the characters you are bossing around acknowledge your existence and comment on your decisions. In other words, you’re still playing the role of the commander, but with possession and control of an individual.

But if you are familiar with games such as Lifeline, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Critical Path, Wirehead, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, a maligned game like Night Trap, or even the voice in the head of the main character in Deadly Premonition, then you know that you must take significant strides to convince players that it is worth playing a supporting role at the expense of the leading role. In order to do this, the supporting role must come to entirely dominate the mechanical and aesthetic conventions of your game. And very often, it must provide a distinctly different experience. Instead, the retroactive justification of the player’s role in the dota games which use the free camera was simply to make the most of a bad situation, and it is disinteresting and nonsensical when compared to the strides taken by developers in other games and genres.

If you know your videogame history, you will know that it is only the dota genre which has struggled with the camera. The other half of the Warcraft III custom game scene that received the commercial treatment—the tower defense genre—has not. Many TD games maintain the same top-down perspective found in the maps built for Warcraft III and StarCraft. And that is perfectly fine, because traditional TD games are little more than simplified RTS games to begin with. But many developers correctly understood that TD games were simplified RTS games, and found that if they wanted to make their TD game anything less than a waste of time, then they had to attach the concept to another genre. In adopting the first-person shooter model, the Sanctum series plays from the first-person perspective. The Orcs Must Die! series has adopted the camera, interface, and control scheme more commonly found in MMORPGs. Those games used strong mechanical, visual, and narrative backing in order to explain why the game is being played from their new perspective, and since they did it well enough, nobody gave it a second thought.

Well beyond the walls of the dota genre, there have been countless videogames for both computers and consoles where the player manages elements typical to RTS and does it with a fixed camera. Games such as Herzog Zwei, Overlord, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, the Kingdom Under Fire series, AirMech, Brutal Legend, Guilty Gear 2: Overture, Ninety-Nine Nights, Mount and Blade, Battlezone, and even the Call of Duty series9 have demonstrated that it is possible to use a fixed camera to manage RTS elements. All of these games came from countless separate developers who were pursuing different styles of play, but all came to the same conclusion: RTS elements can be played from the ground level and they can be done very well.

“But Dota 2 and League of Legends require the precision of a point-and-click RTS game. How am I supposed to do this with a fixed camera?” Then I implore that you play Shiny Entertainment’s Sacrifice, an action-strategy hybrid which has demonstrated with almost flawless fidelity that it is possible to manage RTS elements with a fixed camera. You can zoom and rotate the camera, but it is always locked to your summoner. The interface allows the player to control dozens of units at any time, and to control those units with the same flexibility found in other RTS games. Want to create formations? Want to send a unit halfway across the battlefield to defend a structure? Go for it. And yes, these concepts have been held to a high standard through the game’s multiplayer modes, and are not just a cheap gimmick for use in a singleplayer setting. It’s a third-person action game featuring all of the elements which are otherwise familiar to the Blizzard RTS games that birthed the dota genre. So before you say the concept can’t work, go play Sacrifice and get back to me.10

What this should demonstrate is that the removal of a free camera is not about “dumbing down” the genre. The goal in game design is to make sure your best moments and your most interesting ideas are better than the ones in competing games.11 To argue that the dota genre needs a free camera is to argue that the genre is doing things which are fundamentally more interesting with the free camera. But games like Sacrifice allow you to comfortably manage and control your troops from the third-person. Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Brutal Legend provide interesting narrative context for their RTS elements. And in the pursuit of this camera, the dota genre is losing support for the great ideas that would be more effective with a fixed camera, particularly the control schemes used by the classic action games for console and arcade hardware. To argue that the free camera is absolutely essential to the character of the genre—when there is no one thing that dota can do better with it—is to argue the genre isn’t that interesting to begin with.

Then again, an “argument of merit” is secondary to the reason that a fixed camera meets incredible resistance. Does anyone believe that if the dota genre had been built for a fixed camera, players would be screaming that it is holding the genre back, and that developers should let everyone play dota like an RTS? Of course not. And if fans of dota are completely unconcerned with “immersion”, and it is control of the battlefield that they desire, then how come they have not asked more powerful and more flexible cameras? Why haven’t they demanded that the camera in 2009’s Demigod become a universal standard for the genre, when Gas Powered Games adopted their Supreme Commander “strategic zoom” feature for use in a dota game?12 If we are to accept dota’s narrative device at face value, and you are playing the role of an omnipotent wizard, it only makes sense that the user interface streamlines that omnipotence.

The simple answer is that dota players don’t want any of these things, and the resistance to change is a common part of the hardcore videogame experience. To use a relevant example, take a look at when StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was announced and revealed back in 2007. There was significant concern over the game’s upgraded user interface, because it would allow players to select more than twelve units and select more than one building at any time. Much of the raw input required to play and master StarCraft is derived from the demands of its interface, and long-time fans argued the new interface would lead to reduced depth and a less enjoyable game.13 The choice to pursue the interface upgrades commonplace in RTS games made after 1998—most already present in 1997’s Total Annihilation, 1997’s Dark Reign, and the early Command and Conquer games—had become a heated point of contention across the StarCraft community.14 This is because the change was only being considered in relation to the original StarCraft. These players were willing to settle for an inferior, more restrictive interface because they were not familiar with the RTS games that had demonstrated superior concepts using their superior interfaces.

Much the same applies here. The insistence on the dota genre’s current camera is about protecting a very specific game model that relies on the free camera as a means to skillful player input. If you allow players to manage the strategic picture from a bird’s eye perspective, it will reduce the importance of player input and spatial awareness in the course of skilled play. In the face of top-down point-and-click action games which demand a much higher “Actions Per Minute”15, and in the face of games with far more moving parts, the genre desperately needs this mechanical interaction in order to remain interesting. The removal of the free camera and its limited field of view would lower the barrier even further. And instead of embracing the superior concepts that could be implemented with a superior camera, those players will reject it, for the fear and risk that comes with an “unknown quantity”.

In the end, the defense of the camera amounts to “Don’t change it, because you may break something.”16 And in a medium which has been defined by a terrifyingly rapid evolution, that is never ever an excuse. Warcraft III map designers only pursued the free camera because the Warcraft III game engine made it the comfortable, easy choice. And today, players only accept the free camera because it is the comfortable, known commodity which the genre was built on.

So what I will tell you is this: If you think the free camera is the correct design choice, you are arguing that a series of map creators who lacked the creative resources and talent got it right. You are arguing that an amateur mapmaking community all made the same, “correct” decision in the pursuit of fundamentally different projects—dota games, tower defense, dungeon crawlers, or elsewise—which have traditionally demanded different interfaces and cameras. And you are arguing that the commercial game designers who had the creative and financial freedom to design their illusions from scratch got it wrong. Quite simply, the free-roaming camera was an overreach that was chosen because it had to be chosen, and was never complemented with the proper visual, narrative, and mechanical design decisions. The free camera is not essential to the experience, and countless excellent games have shown that in the context of a character-action game, it is the inferior option.

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Why Dota Sucks — 4. Scope, Scale, and War
Posted on September 7, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: While there is some limited but consistent praise for the visual direction of the dota genre, one merely has to look at the development history of 3D RTS games to understand why Defense of the Ancients could not provide the feel of an epic war at the ground level. And as developers take full advantage of technological improvements, the dota genre has remained stubbornly committed to the scope and scale of a third-party map in a 2002 videogame. Much of this stems from the lack of narrative cohesion that defined Warcraft III third-party maps, where “excuse plots” and “excuse graphics” were the norm. But in addition, the genre has been held back by a commitment to dota as virtual sport. By using “our game is a sport” to validate the genre, you have restrained the scope of your genre to a single “playing field” in a world where companies are building massive virtual universes. Combine this with the economics of modern game development, and it is easier to build a game about “The League of Legends” than the universe of war surrounding it. In the interim, the dota genre will compare unfavorably with the games which seek to push visual and technical boundaries.


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As much airtime as we may give to the mechanics and systems in videogames, what people have to understand is that games are simply not about “gameplay”. There’s a common adage that “graphics do not make a game”, but videogames are a hell of a lot more fun when the action on the screen looks awesome. Part of doing badass things is looking like a badass, and clever use of art and narrative can transform good or even average game systems into something worth taking a look at.1

So far as I have been able to gather, there is scattered praise for visuals and sound in the dota genre. Yes, there is no doubt in my mind that League of Legends is one of the most hideous videogames to ever hit it big.2 But Dota 2 is merely building on the stylized visuals in Warcraft III and enhancing their character with a laborious range of art assets and voice acting efforts. And then there’s Demigod, where massive underground caverns and ancient temples provide a wonderful take on the dota template. But you see, these developers are only exploring the visual concepts that were laid out in Defense of the Ancients. And in a fantasy medium where anything is up for the imagination, are the concepts really that interesting to begin with?

Answering that question requires us to once again fall back on Warcraft III, and to understand a little about offering the consumer a game worth checking out. As we mentioned in the last chapter, your game needs to demonstrate things that cannot be achieved on other platforms and in other genres. Consequently, the real-time strategy genre is a simulation of war, whether traditional military, science fiction, high fantasy, or elsewise. In the early history of the RTS genre, games achieved this sense of war by using 2D renders of 3D game models. This was a way to showcase “3D graphics” without the technological demands of the 3D rendering process.3 But by the end of the nineties, the consumer interest in true 3D worlds was being sated by other genres and platforms, and RTS developers felt the pressure to play catchup.

Predictably, emulating the scale of 2D RTS games in a 3D format would place a considerable strain on the computer technology of the time.4 In order to get 3D RTS games working on the typical home computer, developers held back the scope and scale of their established formulas, thus holding back the scope and scale of war. Warcraft III would be one of many games in a trend highlighted by Homeworld, Warzone 2100, Command and Conquer: Generals, Age of Mythology, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. In doing this, Blizzard maintained many of the concepts associated with traditional RTS games, but in order to get the game working in a true 3D engine, they did it in a game model with fewer participants and fewer moving parts.5 6

Because of this, there is a criticism of Warcraft III which is often overlooked. As a tradeoff for the adoption of 3D technology and the smaller armies, Warcraft III has a relatively insubstantial notion of the words “chaos” and “destruction”. As a simulation of war, the game can feel very lacking. Nobody is going to confuse it with Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Cossacks: European Wars, Rise of Nations, or the Wargame series. Sure, Warcraft III has some cool moments, great use of color, and some powerful-looking abilities. But unlike the devastating wizardry found in a Sacrifice, the destruction tends to be very localized and is typically unbefitting of an “epic conflict”. The Warcraft III visual design was at its best when playing to its “role-playing strategy” moniker, alternating the smaller, simpler battles with moments of discovery in the course of exploring the unknown portions of Azeroth7 and Kalimdor. Predictably, the Warcraft III visuals were at their best when they were playing to the strengths of the Warcraft III game systems. And this is the art direction which Defense of the Ancients standardized for use in the dota genre.

But what makes dota compelling escapism in the first place? Fans of dota may argue the appeal of their genre is in working together with a team of human beings to achieve victory, but that is not a theme unto itself.8 The inherent appeal of the dota genre is much the one found in the lawnmower brawler, the world of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. It is about becoming a powerful champion, directing your forces into the heat of battle, and letting the world know that you mean business. And we know this, because that was the appeal of Aeon of Strife! But when Defense of the Ancients codified the dota genre, it standardized the genre around visual concepts that were not intended to provide the feel of an epic war as witnessed at the ground level. Even as game developers create their own dota games using their own game engines and their own programming tools, and even as technology surpasses the Warcraft III game engine, its limitations continue to define the visual direction of the dota genre.

Perhaps this did not stick out when Defense of the Ancients was launched in 2002, during a time of relative infancy for the 3D videogame. While the lawnmower games were already building a reputation (and notoriety) for their on-screen enemy counts, they were only getting a couple dozen enemies on the screen and doing it at the expense of all other visual fidelity. But this is a medium which is defined by technological progress. Even late-generation PlayStation 2 games like Demon Chaos, which used some clever programming to get thousands of enemies on the screen, were beginning to up the ante. Shadow of the Colossus was presenting players with gigantic bosses that had to be scaled, solved, and conquered like any other environment. And if you compare the sixth generation of videogames (PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox) to what has followed, the most immediate improvement is the scope and scale of the concepts. Larger battlefields, more monsters, bigger monsters, and more satisfying visual feedback, all in the pursuit of more complex games with more moving parts.

With game developers taking predictable advantage of boosts in the hardware, the medium has entirely upped the bar for visual presentation. The Ninety-Nine Nights and Dynasty Warriors series are getting hundreds of enemies onto the battlefield and pairing the carnage with visually-detailed backdrops. The Hitman and Dead Rising series are managing huge, detailed crowds for use in their own genres. The Grand Theft Auto and Crysis series are taking breathtaking leaps in the complexity and fidelity of both organic and man-made environments. The Total War series features detailed skirmishes with thousands of individual participants. Which is nary to speak of the gains made in the RTS genre, with Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars, Supreme Commander, and Planetary Annihilation demonstrating massive armies in both 2D and 3D formats. The Wargame and Men of War series are hosting detailed, fully-destructible environments that wilt under the ground and air assault. And today, first-person shooters like Massive Action Game, Planetside 2, and ArmA III are getting hundreds of human participants into multiplayer settings without a hassle.

Here we have games throwing incredible simulations of war and civilization at the player, delighting their audiences and pushing consumer technology to its limits. So, the question is: Why, exactly, would I give a shit if a dota game is throwing a few dozen soldiers and five-man teams down a corridor of small, static environments? Then again, I suppose this was expected from an action genre which is so committed to its RTS roots. Why provide players with an incredible sense of space if your camera is confined to a small, fixed view with no outward orientation? Why provide players with sprawling, open environments when your character’s field of vision is often determined by the “fog of war” mechanics present in RTS games?9 Why provide players with detailed interactions and high-quality art assets—the kind that can only be appreciated in close-up camera angles—when the dota genre is being played from a fixed distance above the ground? But even if these limitations were not present, it is clear that the genre has favored a low-poly “stylized” art approach with a smaller number of on-field participants. As it currently stands, the dota genre lacks the detail and technical muscle of competing games and competing genres.

I think there are three games in the dota genre that can demonstrate the lack of visual panache. The first is Smite. The premise is that you’re not merely playing as a powerful champion, you’re going a step above mortals. You’re playing as the gods. Sound cool? Well, the game does nothing to actually justify the premise, and looks like most of the MMORPGs that you’ve played in the last decade. Smite amounts to little more than a conventional dota game that uses a fixed camera perspective. When I think of gods going to war with each other, it’s difficult to argue that there is a more underwhelming means to this presentation. As games like Populous, Black and White 2, and the God of War series have shown us, gods don’t poke and prod their way around battlefields, they destroy them.10

The second game is The Lord of the Rings: Guardians of Middle-Earth, and memory yields us a number of games that conveyed the events of Middle-Earth with more intrigue. While The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is an otherwise unplayable mess, its sense of scale is at least comparable to other lawnmower brawlers. The Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth II significantly builds upon the moving parts in its middling predecessor, providing an impressive sense of scale that compares well with many high-fantasy RTS games. Even a brawler like The Lord of the Rings: War in the North provides some marginally compelling ground-level action. Certainly, the scope and scale of these games will merit unfavorable comparisons to the cinematography in the trilogy of movies that are based on the books.11 However, the war and chaos to be found in these games—games that occupy the dreaded “licensed videogame” territory—are far ahead of anything found in Guardians of Middle-Earth. And with it, the other dota games that Guardians is based upon.

The last game is DC: Infinite Crisis. Just like Guardians of Middle-Earth, Infinite Crisis compares unfavorably with the similar games which bear its motif. Even if many superhero games also fall victim to the malaise of licensed videogame development, many of them have at least tried to inject the most appealing moments of these characters into a game worth playing. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the various Spider-Man games, and the well-reputed Batman Arkham series are at least trying to provide videogame players the things those superheroes are are synonymous with. Whereas injecting these characters to a dota game—the genre of rigid movement systems, low on-screen enemy counts, and restrictive map design—feels criminal.12 Why would I ever want to be Batman or Superman in Infinite Crisis when I could be Batman in the Arkham games or Superman in Superman Returns? The action to be found in those games is way cooler than a dota game which uses a comic book license as a visual placeholder.

Fans of dota may argue that Smite, Guardians, and Infinite Crisis are hardly the face of the genre. However, these games help to confirm its restrictive nature. It is not merely that the visual design is restrictive, but that the visual direction leads to restrictive mechanical concepts. The worlds of comic book heroes and high fantasy are being retrofitted for the mechanical trappings of the genre.13 So, the creators of dota games claim that their characters are “heroes” or “champions” or even “gods”, but when it comes time to present these actions on a screen, there has been very little to back this up. Where other developers pushing the visual and technical boundaries of the medium, the creators of dota are entirely content with what its game model represents, how it functions, and what it looks like.

But hey, what was to be expected when nobody was even thinking about what their new genre was? Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients emerged from a culture of map development where creators had little control over visual direction. While support for imported game models existed in Warcraft III—and most were of very poor quality—the common practice was to rearrange the Blizzard art assets. Where some games merely have “excuse plots”, Blizzard third-party maps had “excuse graphics”. A Pokémon Tower Defense or a Battle For Helms Deep did the same thing as Defense of the Ancients, matching the Warcraft III art assets against narrative concepts in public domain and copyrighted works. The goal of these creators was to turn the existing Warcraft III models into something playable, and very often, it was done at the expense of whether it made sense. On the way there, Defense of the Ancients borrowed its backstory from unrelated media, whether the public domain, Japanese animation, other videogames, or Warcraft III itself.14 Like many Warcraft III maps, Defense of the Ancients was just bad fanfiction, and it damn sure shows.

Since then, the job of justifying dota—explaining what dota actually is—has been left to commercial game developers.15 Riot Games went with the explanation that “The League of Legends” was set up in response to the endless wars on the continent of Valoran. The League acted as a simplification of war within a carefully controlled arena that acts as a way to settle political disputes.16 Demigod chronicles the gods’ attempts to find a half-mortal champion worthy of joining their ranks, and is performed through a process akin to a game or sport. And unsurprisingly, Valve purged the Defense of the Ancients universe of the copyrighted names and backstory when they created Dota 2.17 Valve settled on the story that the “Mad Moon” which held the forces of good and evil in balance was destroyed. Which, for some reason, leads to a “war” where waves of “creeps” head down “lanes” in order to fight each other.

But that’s not how narrative works in videogames. Even if your narrative amounts to an excuse plot, your excuse plot can’t be retroactively enacted, because that narrative arc is the means to cohesion for all the visual and mechanical elements in your game. And just as designing your game for a free camera does not make the free camera inherently interesting, merely providing a narrative does not make it the best possible narrative. Quite simply, some concepts and ideas are going to be cooler than others, and they’re going to lead to cooler moments in the course of playing a game. Now, we can always debate what the coolest concepts will be, but let’s be honest: The world of endless conflict surrounding The League of Legends sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than The League of Legends. The world of Demigod sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than the god-sport. The chaos of these worlds—which exists entirely outside of what is being presented in these games—sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than the stability and order that has become the foundation for the genre.

Much of the confusion stems from that unhealthy obsession with e-Sports, and it is a culture of competition that doesn’t really care about graphics. That may seem like a broad brush, but this is very often the case. In these circles, the thrill of videogames is the thrill of competition, to compete with others and to see where you rank within that universe. Discussions of visual design usually boil down to transparency: Do the graphics quickly and effectively convey critical game variables? If flashy graphics become an obstacle to that goal, then very often, they must be marginalized or eliminated. This means playing on less detailed graphics settings in order to more easily isolate those game variables, and this is well-documented in the Quake III Arena and StarCraft II communities.18 The lack of concern for the visual elements in the dota genre is no different, and is something which spills over in the genre’s approach to map design.

For those who are familiar with Counter-Strike, another game series with a robust tournament scene, it may seem at times that “Dust2” (de_dust2) was the only map ever made for the game. Much in the way that Dust2 is almost entirely synonymous with Counter-Strike, games like Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth, and League of Legends are defined by their use of the three-lane layout popularized in Defense of the Ancients.19 However, most players are content with playing this one map over and over.20 The reason is simple: Where I view the genre as having more in common with Diablo and Dynasty Warriors, the competing train of thought views the dota genre as team sports, and many players view the battlefields in their games as little different than a chess board or a football field. If you view your universe like it’s a sport, why would you need more than one battleground to go to war in?

Well, first of all, computer code can codify game rules with fine detail and then disseminate those rules as though they are any other form of mass media. The word-of-mouth and governing bodies that allowed sports to flourish during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were far more primitive in their distribution.21 Sports confined themselves to a neutral layout as a means to accessibility and standardization. Even if many famous playing fields were defined by their inconsistencies—where basketball’s Boston Celtics would try to trap and funnel opponents towards the “dead spots” on the floor of the Boston Garden—they were closer to a necessary evil than an intended outcome.22 Whereas the “playing field” in most dota games is not neutral by design, and is a world of winding backwood layouts less like a basketball court and more like the jungle gym at a Chuck E. Cheese.

What has been lost in the confusion is that videogames can do things sports cannot. Games can do certain things better than sports, and this is why designing your videogame to be a sport tends to be a complete disaster. By the nature of their distribution model, videogames can feature dozens and even hundreds of playing fields, and talented designers can use those playing fields to build a universe quite unlike our own.23 And if you look at the games which have used “sport of the future” as a premise—including but not limited to Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Deathrow, and Monday Night Combat—the creators of those games never once said “Our game is premised on a sport or a competition, so let’s restrict our game world to a single playing field!” These games used a wide range of venues to provide narrative and visual character for that universe. Developers attempted to explain why the player was fighting in a spaceship, a stadium, or an abandoned parking garage, all as part of an initiative to create a world worth exploring. In the end, these games used “our game is a sport” as narrative backdrop for the goal of building an awesome videogame universe.

So, within the context of sports, “one map” may be a standardization. Within the context of videogames, “one map” is an unquestionable and thorough regression. By arguing that your game is a spectator sport, and by arguing that the maps are “playing fields” similar to the ones found in real sports, you are arguing that the scope of the game—your universe—is so limited, that it can be contained and walled off by a single set of screaming, cheering fans. And if you would argue that dota is appealing precisely because it is a team sport, then what I would tell you is that a game that looks and plays like N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights or Supreme Commander can be that sport. But on the other end, the dota genre has not provided players with a sprawling, compelling universe.

But other than the molded and defined expectations of its audience, what is stopping the creators of dota games from taking the leap forward? Well, again, the purpose of commercial dota games that followed Defense of the Ancients was to make money. And yes, all commercial games exist to do this. However, the last half-decade has seen a consumer exodus from the games which intend to push technical and visual boundaries in favor of cheaper, simpler projects that are less likely to destroy a developer or require the backing of a large publisher. With competition from free videogames and the internet, people are giving second thoughts to the routes that allowed companies to pour tens of millions of dollars into a game. Right now, it’s a hell of a lot easier to win people over with the next Minecraft than a game which pushes technical boundaries but limits its audience in the process…even moreso, if your genre has its roots in a “free game” like Defense of the Ancients.

As a result, it’s a lot easier to build a game about “The League of Legends” than the universe of war surrounding it. Why would a publisher take a financial risk on a dota game that pushes boundaries when it will not look like other dota games and will not appeal to the sensibilities of the typical dota player? Why would Electronic Arts throw down a “Triple A” dota game when they can create a comfortable offering like Dawngate and throw the E.A. marketing machine behind it? Why would companies look to create massive, open battlefields when that scope could potentially compromise the game as a real-world spectator sport? And with the dota genre finding a huge audience outside of the industrialized world, why take a risk that your visual powerhouse will not run on the computers at a Vietnamese PC bang? Certainly, that is a difficult economic reality for the dota genre, but at the end of the day, your game can only be judged by the game.

The end result is a genre which is bound to a dysfunctional narrative and visual mediocrity. It is now competing against the grand leaps that are being made every single year. And again, this does not mean that all visually groundbreaking games are great or even good.24 But with each passing year, videogames will continue to up the ante for art design, using better hardware to more fully realize the creative vision, and showcasing a range of visual concepts that will allow for the more complex game mechanics that players desire. It’s a range of concepts—scope, scale, and war—that dota has a long way to match up to.

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Why Dota Sucks — 5. Auto-Attacking
Posted on September 14, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: Defense of the Ancients and most of the games in the dota genre use the auto-attack mechanisms common to real-time strategy games, and the concept has wide crossover appeal with the fans of many computer game genres. To understand its role in the genre, you must understand that most dota games line the battlefield with powerful defensive towers, and the goal of the early-game is to control the pace of action in the “farming” phase. Quite simply, the purpose of auto-attacking is to provide an element of skill in this phase. However, much like the free-roaming camera, the auto-attack mechanisms were intended for an RTS genre where you are playing a commander who has indirect control over the action. The end result, once again, is that the player is disconnected from the action because the dota genre should be providing direct control of your character. It is a system where the character initiates attacks, rather than the player. The body of game history and even certain dota games will demonstrate that, within the context of a character-action game, auto-attacking is the inferior opinion.


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Note (12/14/14) – Edits have been made addressing the argument that dota games feature a toggle for auto-attacking.

With discussion of the core visual choices out of the way, we can now commit our time and energy to the game mechanics. In beginning this discussion, we should once again point out that most of the design decisions in the dota genre boil down to the following: “Warcraft III and Defense of the Ancients did it, so we’re doing it.” However, the matter of auto-attacking—and the entire circus of design choices surrounding it—goes the furthest in demonstrating how ubiquitous this really is.

Because custom maps played on Battle.net were inextricably bound to network and input latency, Warcraft III offered its mapmakers minimal support for more conventional controls and combat schemes. Most games in the dota genre now follow that precedent and use the auto-attack mechanisms found in real-time strategy games. Instead of using a series of inputs to initiate and perform your range of basic attacks, dota games allow the character to automatically attack a target so long as the target is visible and it is in their attack range. You can interrupt and stall the automation by using other commands: Movement, casting spells, and even repeatedly issuing the “Stop” command. But generally speaking, if your character can attack something, they will attack it. To govern how fast a character or unit can attack, the process is tied to their “attack speed”, which can be increased by gaining levels, buying items, or being the target of enchantments. While some dota games feature a toggle for auto-attacking, the toggle was conceived well after the genre’s conception, and auto-attacking is intended to be a central concept.1

Auto-attacking provides two core appeals to fans of the dota genre. The first is that the system poses as a marginal or superficial improvement on the combat systems in a number of different games.2 The fans of dota games are very often coming from other computer games—StarCraft II, Warcraft III, Diablo II, World of Warcraft—which lack support for the complex input strings found in more conventional action games, whether the combos in fighting games or the multiple-button inputs in brawlers.3 For fans of RTS games, auto-attacking will feel comfortable and natural. For fans of Diablo games for the personal computer, auto-attacking “streamlines” much of the clicking that defines those dungeon crawlers. And for fans of the MMORPG, dota can present similar concepts in a fast-paced action game that is not bound to the significant server latency that comes with those MMORPGs.4 Even if the combat in dota is limited, it’s appealing to audiences who don’t think it is.

But in addition, auto-attacking presents an interesting psychology of design. Very commonly, you will hear that fighting games are “button-mashers” and real-time strategy games are about “who clicks faster”. Basically, the argument is that good players are only beating bad players because they can perform more commands, instead of performing those commands efficiently. Auto-attacking ensures weaker players won’t be “out-clicked” or “button-mashed” by those better players. And in order to increase your damage—to put yourself in a position to “out-click” those players—you must outplay opponents when everybody starts the match on a level playing field. Proper management of your limited attack power will create separation between stronger and weaker players, and will do it in a very overt and obvious way.

But if you’re wondering how auto-attacking creates depth, we need to understand that it is not the only piece of the puzzle. And try to bear with me on this one, because this is a bizarre circle of interconnected design decisions. Traditionally, versus multiplayer games use some sort of mechanic or concept which forces players to engage their opponents aggressively or cede all initiative and get slaughtered.5 Your game has to do this. If it doesn’t, the game will become slow and defensive and it will compare unfavorably to games that are fast and aggressive. The simple rule in these games is that if you’re not attacking, you’re probably losing, and it works.

Everything in the dota genre suggests this “initiative” should come from the weave of “towers” or “turrets” that litter the battlefield. Anyone who has played Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Team Fortress 2, the Call of Duty series, or even Unreal Tournament 2004‘s Onslaught mode should be familiar with the concept of node control, where players contest control points and try to capture them. However, both StarCraft and Warcraft III offered limited support for the concept or idea of capture points, because these games were using their resource nodes (gold, minerals, gas) as the control points.6 Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients are simply treating the control points like all of the other structures in a conventional RTS: They cannot be captured and they can only be destroyed.

While there are ways to quickly wipe out the towers—commonly known as “push” strategies—they are foremost an anti-rushing mechanic, a way to give weaker players breathing room as they need it.7 Players usually need to gain several levels in order to sustain any assault on a tower, and as a result, the most common early-game goal is to manage the pace and flow of combat. This circus is known as the “farming” phase. As the computer-controlled soldiers head down their lanes and into battle, players want to strike as many “last-hits”8 as possible, to control the gold and experience that comes with making the fatal blow.9 As characters grow strong enough, the spoils of last-hitting become the backbone of the mid- and late-game situations where players are more likely to engage in large team battles and coordinate attacks on enemy structures.10

This is where auto-attacking comes in. The dota genre has had many issues providing players with the fast-paced input that defines many point-and-click action games, because in using the RTS genre its base, it is reducing the scale of RTS down to a small handful of units. In order to maintain skillful player input, the auto-attack function exists to perpetuate an element of skill in last-hitting and the farming phase. Early on, timing your automated attacks in order to score the killing blow may seem difficult enough. But as the level of play improves, you will then have to measure all the other variables in play—where enemies are located, what your teammates are doing, the health totals of soldiers—against the last-hitting process.11 The process of competing for last-hits will eventually become its own game and skillset.12 Thus, the simple reasoning is that when you combine auto-attacking with last-hitting, it makes for a deeper game with a more defined separation of skill between weaker players and stronger players. If you can’t last-hit, then you aren’t going to beat the people who can.

Auto-attacking exists to validate a circle of ridiculous design choices, and it’s all for nothing. One fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of auto-attacking when you transplant it from an RTS game into a character-action game. Because again, in RTS games, you are playing the role of a commander. And even if you are playing as a participant on the field, you are controlling most of the soldiers on the field through indirect means. You are not that soldier. You have no direct connection to the soldier on the screen. You’re superior to that soldier, and he is to follow your orders as you issue them. But at the same time, it wouldn’t make sense for your soldiers to stare down the enemy and fail to take initiative. Unless you’ve told the soldier to stand their ground, they don’t need orders to fire on the target that’s moving towards them.13

As the large collection of individuals in your command apply their marginal intelligence and capabilities to the situation, this helps to make the game world feel like a real place. That was precisely the appeal of Populous and SimCity from the moment those games went to market at the end of the eighties. Auto-attacking makes sense in a strategy game where the player is providing indirect control for most actions: Telling others where to go, what to kill, what tactics to use, and then allowing those participants to apply their own intelligence to those goals.14 But you know what happens when you apply it to action games which rely on immediate, forceful, and direct control of one participant on the screen? You have compromised the repetitive elements in your game.

This is a failure that runs two layers deep, a pair of mechanisms that must be understood in tandem. That first is that the dota genre is co-opting that indirect control from RTS games, whereas character-action games demand the most direct and complete form of control possible. One day, we’ll probably be using neural or full-body controls to fulfill that direct control. But right now, since we’re still using mechanical input devices (controllers, keyboards) to interact with game worlds, we have to improvise. That means when a character swings a sword, it is most commonly mapped out to one button press. One button press, one swing.15 That’s how you create the illusion that you are swinging the sword. But in dota, you are simply automating the attack process and continuing the frenzy until the target is dead, you are dead, or you acquire a different target.

One can merely look at the similar games which also use a high-fantasy motif— the Fable series, Dragon’s Dogma, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the Souls series—and you will find a list of games which never considered the concept of an auto-attack feature and would feel mushy and inconsequential with one. But if none of those games are convincing, then look no further than 2011’s The Last Story. The role-playing brawler allows the player to make their own decision on the matter of auto-attacking, providing those players with a toggle for the “Attack Type”, and the Automatic Attack Type allows the character to initiate their melee attacks by simply running into the target. What was likely a concession to the fans of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s previous games, a “Who’s Who?” of Japanese turn-based role-playing games, will compromise the experience if you do not realize the option for a Manual Attack Type is burrowed in the options menu.

“But what about games like World of Warcraft and Diablo? Both of those games feature elements of automation, and people seem to like those.” And with it, we get our second layer, the one where dota becomes significantly and demonstrably worse than those games. As substandard as the approach to combat in MMORPGs and isometric brawlers may be, those games still require players to initiate combat. They require you to press the button on your mouse, keyboard, or controller, and it effectively forces you to acknowledge the combat state. But in co-opting the RTS mechanisms, the characters in Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth, and Dawngate initiate combat simply if they are within range of a target, no matter how much attention that the player is otherwise giving to their character. The character is initiating the combat, rather than the player. And even if you disable auto-attacking in Dota 2 or League of Legends, concepts such as “attack-move”16 still exist and still use the automation.

Quite remarkably, the inferiority of the auto-attack concepts can even be demonstrated within the dota genre! In playing Awesomenauts and Dead Island: Epidemic—both games which use more familiar approaches to character-action combat—you will find that the combat is superior for the simple fact that these games do not use the concepts laid out in Defense of the Ancients.17 These games may feature elements of automation, but they require players to initiate combat and are handled in a way which does not break the character’s connection to the action. The more conventional, tried-and-true combat systems in these games merely compare unfavorably to the better character-action games which came before them, whether 3D brawlers like Devil May Cry or (in the case of Awesomenauts) 2D action games like Metal Slug. But even in this losing situation, those dota games—and the action games they fall short of—demonstrate there is more potential for a great experience as you move away from the automation.

And you have preserved auto-attacking for what, because it “adds depth”? Unlike the free camera, which at least provides players with greater spatial awareness, auto-attacking is nothing more than a mechanical barrier which bears no relation to the aesthetic presentation. It exists for no other purpose than to be restrictive, and to demand more from the player in the absence of more complex concepts. If auto-attacking is “good” because it “adds depth”, and you can’t explain how it makes the feedback loop more immersive, engaging, or elsewise, then it isn’t that good of a concept to begin with. Again: The ideal goal in game design is to come up with skillful elements that are liberating and visually interesting, and the dota approach to auto-attacking is simply not one of those things.

What may seem like streamlining or convenience for the fans of Blizzard RTS games, the Diablo series, or the MMORPG—and an element of skillful input for veteran dota players—only dumbs down the combat for those who are familiar with the action games popularized on consoles and in the arcades. And if you would argue that dota actually improves itself by automating the repetition, you are arguing the repetitive elements in these games are so awful that it is better to forego them entirely.18 When, as countless action games in a wide variety of genres have demonstrated, the goal should not be to simplify or remove the repetitive elements, but to improve them.

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Why Dota Sucks — 6. The Chess Pieces
Posted on September 22, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: The characters in the dota genre have been hailed for their complexity and diversity. In order to debunk this, we should explain how the framework for the “chess pieces” came into place. The hero system is a direct transplant from Warcraft III, and technical limitations prevented content creators from making this system more complex. Commercial game developers have since adopted that framework. But in stripping the RTS concepts from Warcraft III and centering the action on the hero system, dota not only compares unfavorably to the RTS games where you control far more moving parts, but to comparable character-action games with more complex control schemes and skillsets. Ironically, it is the simplicity of the characters that provides the illusion of diversity, where the marginal differences become more important when the tools for victory are so similar. In the end, the simplicity is intended to create accessibility, where the range of simple characters assures you will not have to make grand leaps in order to learn them. Where other developers have looked to up to the complexity of a genre, the creators of the dota genre looked at one of the simpler RTS games and chose to make it simpler.


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We should now focus our time and energy on the genre’s defining concept. Whether you think of them as heroes, champions, gods, or elsewise, every player selects a character for the battle, and they are designed to “support”, to “carry”, to “jungle”, or fulfill some aspect of a team’s overall strategy.1 While there are different selection formats that span a range of game modes, they follow the same ideal: Players want to choose characters that complement individual and team skill sets while creating difficult matchups for the opposing team. Many dota games—Defense of the Ancients, Dota 2, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth—are defined by their massive character rosters, all featuring over one-hundred participants. And because the genre has been standardized around a small number of maps and game modes, the presence of these characters as interchangeable but interesting “chess pieces” is crucial.

The creators of the various dota games have a number of considerations to make in the character construction process.2 From this range of choices, the dota genre has been hailed for the diversity and complexity of its character designs. Well, for starters, the chess pieces in the dota genre can only be as complex as the game systems that provide their foundation. In addition, diversity is a natural outgrowth of complexity. The more possible ways the complexity can be arranged, the more possible ways you can make things different from each other. So, in order to debunk the chess pieces, all we have to do is demonstrate that the framework for the characters is busted. We don’t have to debunk every single character when we can demonstrate the flaws in the production line. Let’s do this by diving back into the origins of the genre.

When Blizzard Entertainment released Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002, it marked the most complete exploration of “micromanagement”3 in Blizzard RTS games, with powerful hero units at the center of the battle. Each hero would pair their standard physical attack alongside four “hero abilities”. Unlike the single-click abilities commonly associated with RTS games, hero abilities could grow significantly more powerful over the course of a match. From here, most heroes were given two castable “active” spells, a “passive” ability that is permanently enabled for no mana cost, and an “ultimate” ability that is typically acquired in later parts of a match. To prevent the overuse and abuse of these spells, the castable abilities don’t merely cost mana, but are governed by a cooldown timer, and you must wait X number of seconds before casting a spell again. To round out this skillset, these heroes possess six item slots, and items can be acquired, purchased, and used over the course of the match.

It is important to understand that Blizzard designed this system with only their concepts in mind. The Warcraft III user interface is built for the maximum number of commands—Move, Stop, Attack, and so forth—that any one Warcraft III unit will acquire. As a result, the game’s “command grid” leaves no redundant space. Building more complex soldiers for an interface that won’t support them is a burden unto itself. But most critically, Blizzard coded their game around the limitations. The maximum number of hero abilities that can be used by any one hero is five.4 Likewise, a hero’s backpack can never hold more than six items. These are hard-capped limits and they cannot be changed. The workarounds for this system were flimsy and hardly anything that could be standardized across a wide range of maps. But most importantly, the fixes emerged well after Defense of the Ancients became a centerpiece of the Warcraft III custom game scene.5

If your goal was to create a more advanced template for heroes, you were shit out of luck. Your map was to be an advertisement and supplement for Warcraft III, and it was not to outdo Warcraft III.6 We can conclude that this system created considerable limitation for the custom game community. Mapmakers could not expand the framework for heroes or make it more complex. So, just as dota games borrowed their camera, their visual concepts, auto-attacking, and last-hitting from the Blizzard RTS, the defining concept in the dota genre is also a direct transplant from Warcraft III. Nearly every dota game uses a similar character template, ranging all the way from Defense of the Ancients to games (AirMech, Bloodline Champions, Monday Night Combat) which merely feature elements of dota.

But the Warcraft III hero system was intended for a game in which heroes are just one part of the machine. It was one concept to go alongside base construction, unit production, squad-based tactics, and economic supremacy. As part of a larger system, as one means to complexity, the hero system is adequate. But on its lonesome, it is not. The heroes in Warcraft III are not complex. Even Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, which introduced many of the genre’s conventions and has been outclassed by the body of games which followed it, features spellcasters with five different abilities. Today, games like the Men of War series feature individual soldiers who are significantly more complex—and have significantly greater access to skills—than any one hero in Warcraft III. It is simply a mistake to hold the hero system as a high point for complexity, because it has been outclassed even within its own genre.

As a result, the heroes in the dota genre are complex and diverse…when compared with the heroes in Warcraft III, which were not only intended to be straightforward, but to complement a standing army. But once the genre became a subset of an existing game, and you were removing all of the other things that define the RTS, content creators needed to build new game systems, ones that would lead to more complex characters than the Warcraft III framework could ever consider. This would have required systems that allow for characters with more spells, more attacks, more options for mobility, a more complex range of user input, and possibly a more complex item system. This is precisely what did not happen because Warcraft III made sure that it could not happen. And once commercial game designers got a hold of the genre, there was no critical or consumer impetus to make it happen. Dota creators and dota fans were already happy with their “complex” and “diverse” heroes.

When it comes time to sing praises of character design, the most common namedrops are Meepo and the Invoker,7 two mainstays of the Dota series and two of the most difficult characters to play successfully. In reality, these characters demonstrate how limited the hero system actually is. Meepo’s defining trait is the ability to create clones of himself and use the clones to attack different parts of the battlefield. But this is a concept which compares unfavorably to, I don’t know, every RTS game which requires players to manage more than one front.8 The Invoker makes a more compelling case, because his four basic spells can be used to “Invoke” ten different advanced spells, making fast reflexes and proper spellcasting a must. But this shows that in order to achieve anything that would appeal to the veterans of more complex action games—or even veterans of the dota genre—its creators must entirely subvert the existing game rules. They must introduce additional complexity in the form of a bizarre and cumbersome gimmick, one that actually limits complexity because 1) “Invoke” is bound to a cooldown timer, and 2) you can only “invoke” (store) two of those ten spells at any time.9

“But the complexity of these characters is not just in their movesets! It’s the items! It’s about being able to choose your playstyle through the things that you purchase over the course of a match!” And what a mess this is. Even role-playing games figured out that items which give you functional complexity are far more interesting than items which give you numerical complexity. Most of dota’s early-game consumables are healing items that cannot be used in combat, and equipment with castable abilities is typically acquired late in the game. It is unlikely that a game will last long enough for players to create an entirely new skill set out of those purchasable items. In addition, the items in dota games are “character neutral”, meaning that any character can equip or use any item and gain benefit from it. The diversity that could be provided by a class-based equipment system has gone untouched.10

But even if dota presented players with better items, other games let you show off the loot. You wear it, you shoot it, you swing it. That’s right: Most items in the dota genre do not come with in-game graphics. To provide these graphics would expose how ridiculous it is that a floating ball of gas like Io can equip boots and swords like any human. This lack of visual intrigue may not stand out in Warcraft III, where items are a tiny portion of the game model, but it sticks out in a item-driven action game like Dota 2.11 A Divine Rapier may add several hundred attack points to the character’s statline, but you will never see a character wield it. So, it wouldn’t matter whether this system has “depth” or whether it is a means to more diverse and complex characters. Interesting mechanics should be backed with interesting visual outcomes, and the items in dota games aren’t even providing the outcomes that were present in the role-playing games of the nineties.

So, it’s quite simple: The unit properties associated with RTS games—movement speed, turn speed, collision size, spellcasting, all built for an RTS interface—were designed for a game in which you control dozens and even hundreds of soldiers at any time. These systems were designed to make armies feel distinct.12 This can be seen on full display in RTS games with asymmetrical factions—particularly StarCraft and Armies of Exigo—where armies feel bulky, or mobile, or fast, or offensive, or defensive, depending on the size and composition of that army. As a result, dota doesn’t just compare unfavorably to those RTS games, which feature a greater range and number of moving parts. They don’t even compare favorably to role-playing games like Planescape: Torment and Dragon Age, which require the player to control multiple “heroes”. By reducing Warcraft III to a game centrally played around one character, you are inviting comparisons to the countless character-action genres which were built to satisfy their most capable and enthusiastic players.

Even in the most immediate comparison to dota, we will find that the characters in an isometric brawler like Diablo II can draw from their own list of thirty different spells and abilities.13 Yes, thirty different choices. Place this alongside the robust Diablo equipment and loot generation system—where items provide a wide variety of interesting ideas—and it’s not even a contest. Whether or not this works in application—where players will upgrade and mercilessly abuse a small percentage of those skills—we can easily find that the chess pieces in Diablo are more complex than what you will find in any dota game.14

But when we begin to up the ante, dota looks worse and worse. Even the most basic 2D “belt-scroll” brawlers allow players to string together elaborate attack sequences, whereas “combos”15 have no place in dota because auto-attacking and the spellcasting system prohibit their existence. But when you work your way into 3D brawlers, you will find that fans of Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, and Bayonetta are still finding new and novel approaches to the ridiculous range of weapons and moves available to them. The range of skills is best exemplifed by the so-called “combo videos” that demonstrate the most flashy and intricate knowledge of the movesets found in these games. I would argue that dota doesn’t compare well to a genre where the characters can carry more weapons—which often have their own movelists and can be freely switched during combat—than the number of spells and abilities that dota characters have.

And in many of these brawlers, complexity is not merely about what the player can do. In the Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry series, enemies are often as capable as the player himself. A wide range of dangerous enemies acts as a means to complexity, because new enemies will demand different tactics that will require a variety of skills and tools. But in the dota genre, computer-controlled opponents—whether the enemy army or the neutral enemies which dot the map—have one purpose: They are pinatas. They will never outwit the player and they will never beat the player to the punch. You whack them over the head and gold comes out. This could work in Warcraft III, a game with enough player interaction to make the computer-controlled participants a secondary attraction.16 It cannot work in the dota genre, where the farming phase is a primary attraction and players must fight the computer.

Then you can compare dota to the fighting game genre, a gold standard for fast action in videogames. In 1991’s Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, the player gets access to a six-button layout, providing six basic attacks with variations for standing, crouching, air, and close-up attacks. In addition, the player gets two or three special moves, each of which has three variations in strength.17 And that is the game which kicked off the genre proper! Fighting games such as Tekken feature gargantuan movelists and some of those moves—particularly “chain throws”—may require over a dozen inputs in order to perform successfully. In games such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Skullgirls, long strings of combination attacks are the backbone of anything vaguely considered “standard play”. The demands of input are complex enough that even the best players will screw up from time to time. Whereas the input in the dota genre—select a spell and then click where you want to cast it—is so basic that it is almost entirely impossible to fail an input. You can merely misuse it.18

Perhaps most importantly, fighting games use the synchronous nature of movement and combat to make similar moves feel different.19 Take a look at the fireballs and projectiles that define the genre. Peacock’s Screwball Cannonball (Skullgirls) becomes a standard single-button move. Ryu’s Hadouken requires a “quarter-circle” input. Guile’s Sonic Boom uses a press-and-hold “charge” input. Ness’s PK Thunder (Super Smash Bros.)20 uses a two-button input and the projectile can be controlled after it is launched. Akuma’s Zankuu Hadouken and Morrigan’s Soul Fist (Darkstalkers) can be fired while in the air. Urien’s Metallic Sphere (Street Fighter III: Third Strike) combines a rotation input with a “release to fire” method. The result is that moves can feel wildly different in spite of their similar utility, and characters can feel innately offensive or defensive beyond their base skills and movement. Whereas characters in the dota genre feel the same because players are using single-press inputs in order to perform similar spells, abilities, and movement.

But it is not just that dota games have simplified input to the point of banality—failing to take advantage of the range of input provided by a keyboard—the entire genre swears by this simplification. Where RTS hotkeys were once about word association—mapping “Train Grunt” to the “G” key—Defense of the Ancients players took advantage of the hotkey customization in The Frozen Throne and moved all of the hotkeys to one end of the keyboard. Dota games now build on this trend, and the games played with the mouse and keyboard now standardize hero abilities to a row of keys. In Dota 2 and League of Legends, it’s the Q through R keys. In Demigod, it’s the 1 through 4 keys. The layout is so synonymous with the genre that players will often identify spells with the key that it is affixed to. For instance, noting that a character can be easily countered by another character’s “Q” or “W”.

This has created a unified theory of design when nearly every other genre features a diverse range of ideas and control schemes. This is how you end up a genre of brawlers where developers take wildly different approaches to things as simple as blocking, where the counter-attacks in the Arkham games, block button in the Ninja Gaiden series, dodge mechanics in the Devil May Cry series, and parrying in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance lead to entirely different challenges and designs. This is how you end up with countless action game genres which all pursue different control schemes in order to make the happenings of their world work. The dota genre has standardized itself around the simplified character skillset, and sees similar concepts used in largely the same way with the same boring control scheme.

Ironically, it is this simplicity which provides the illusion that the characters are complex and diverse. In discussing the sense of sameness that can be found in the Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat games of the nineties, world champion Street Fighter player Seth Killian argued that the best characters in those fighting games simply have better versions of the moves that everyone else is using. This forces players to extract victory from the marginal differences between these characters. As Killian notes, this is not unlike the actual game of chess, where in a game of symmetrical sides, white gains a huge advantage by making the first move.21 In a game where the differences between the tools are less significant, any deviation becomes more impactful and important.22 And in a game where players are using a wildly limited moveset, in a game where characters can be slaughtered in seconds, the minor differences between characters add up very quickly.

So you see, dota players have sold themselves a myth that their games feature some of the most complex and diverse character rosters in videogames…but are bound to one of the simplest control schemes in the entire medium, and are built around a character template that was merely a subset of an RTS game. This is not complex, and by extension, it cannot be diverse. Every faction in a decent RTS game is Meepo. Every character in a decent dungeon crawler is the Invoker. And because competing genres could be iterated and expanded through the punctuated leaps provided by sequels, they got more and more complex with every go.

And if you would argue that the complexity in many of the above games is not being used to compete against the adaptable intelligence of a human player: There is absolutely no reason that the systems in games like Ninja Gaiden or Diablo II could not be adapted to a versus multiplayer environment, just as the systems in Doom gave way to Quake and Unreal Tournament, and just as the systems in God Hand gave way to Anarchy Reigns. But do not sacrifice the quality of the game in the chase for competition. If it is purely human competition that you desire, then a friendly life lesson: There are better things to compete in than videogames. It does not matter whether primitive things like “skillshots” are being commandeered by players who play the game for no reason other than that it is their job. The complexity of the competition in the dota genre cannot hide the utter lack of complexity in its game systems, and to pursue that competition at the expense of the game is to end up with a significantly worse videogame experience.

Ultimately, the character designs in the genre are not about complexity or diversity. They are about simplification and accessibility. When you combine this simple control scheme with a massive roster of largely similar combatants, you are assuring that your player base does not have to make huge leaps in order to learn new concepts, or to even learn a new character. You don’t even have to learn a new set of controls. This system will allow beginners to choose what they are comfortable with, instead of having to learn uncomfortable concepts and master unfamiliar game systems.23 Or, as the creators of Dawngate have suggested, these systems will allow the player to “personalize your playstyle”. There are enough deviations (characters) within each “role” (support, carry, jungle, etc.) that you will eventually find something which you are comfortable with and enjoy playing. Or, to bring things full circle, you will not have to explore a wide range of diversity in order to play the game.

And let’s be clear: I am not arguing that if the characters in your game have more weapons and tools, it makes for a better game on principle. After all, execution of the concepts is paramount, and the counter-examples I have provided in this chapter have largely succeeded on this front.24 And you know why? Because these games use the right cameras. They provide the proper complexity in visual design. They demonstrate a competency in their repetitive elements. They provide the players with proper feedback mechanisms. And most importantly, their complexity is the result of game developers attempting to cater to their most enthusiastic players, and making the framework more and more complex with every go. But when it came time to build the dota genre, amateur mapmakers looked at Warcraft III and asked: “How can we take one of the simpler games in its genre and make it simpler?” And simpler they made it, turning one small part of that game into its own genre.

There’s only one question left to ask: If dota is using such a simple and basic character template, how did we end up with a perception that these simple characters lead to greater depth? Let’s answer that in the next chapter.

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Why Dota Sucks — 7. Complexity Through Choice
Posted on September 30, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: In order to explain how the dota genre provides the illusion of character complexity, we must briefly discuss the shift in the consumer perception of what depth entails. With the help of large companies that can pour significant resources into disposable choices, most of the game industry now champions a model of “complexity through choice”, where depth is presented to the player through the number of choices, rather than the interactions created by the choices. The dota genre is born to this philosophy, offering the player an unprecedented level of choice, particularly in the number of heroes available to players. With the help of an excruciatingly slow learning process, it will take you hundreds of hours to simply interact with all of the individual characters in meaningful situations, and they can be arranged in so many ways that you will never have to revisit a familiar situation. But in the end, not a single individual—or even the confluence of five individuals on two sides—can hide that the millions of possible combinations are less complex than the outcomes and frameworks in competing genres.


—–

What we need to ask is: If the characters in the dota genre are so simple, and they compare unfavorably with the chess pieces in other genres, then how do they provide the illusion of depth? The common argument is that Defense of the Ancients stripped away the tenets of RTS—base construction, unit construction, node-based resource gathering, and a significant range of tactical interaction—to focus on Warcraft III-style hero management. By removing these things and exploring a greater range of concepts within the remaining game systems, the creators of Defense of the Ancients were supposedly able to create a deeper game.1

Of course, this is something that videogame players and journalists have struggled with ad infinitum. This is a culture of media which hails and extols some of our simplest videogames—Pong, Super Mario Bros., Nintendo versions of Tetris, Wii Sports, Journey—as some of the best videogames ever created.2 Well, this laugher is little different: Defense of the Ancients pioneered a deeper, more complex genre by removing game systems. How the hell does that work? The short story is that in the last twenty or so years, there has been a fundamental transition in the consumer perception of depth. The slightly longer story is how this came into being and how the dota genre uses this to its benefit.

In the medium’s early years, designers worked around incredible technological restrictions that encouraged an emphasis on elegance in videogame design, a high degree of depth created through a smaller ruleset. While games such as Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger were heavily marketed on the size of the offering, the general rule was that your limited content needed to play better than everyone else’s. But during the mid nineties, the optical disc became the dominant media format for videogames. There would be a number of changes in the philosophy of commercial game design, but the most notable would be the impact of optical media on elegance. The developers who were once designing games for multi-megabyte cartridges and low-capacity arcade kits were now working with seven-hundred-megabyte optical media. And while Sega’s Saturn and Dreamcast consoles would become the home of countless cutting-edge arcade games, it otherwise became open season for developers to add and retain any content they damn well pleased.

During this same time period, the difficulty level in popular videogames declined by a significant order of magnitude. Easier games were only a commercial detriment in the arcades, where the easy games were quickly mastered and left to the wayside. But in the new world of the PlayStation, where arcades were a declining commercial force and consoles were the king of the market, “easier games” meant “more customers buying more software”. Using the increased storage space offered by the new media, developers began to use additional content as a buffer zone for the playtime that would normally be generated through failure. The one-hour game that could take dozens of tries to beat could now be replaced with an easier game that was ten times longer. Where the technological limitations once acted as a check and balance on the designer’s exuberance, games could now be defined by the breadth and the scope of their content, even if it didn’t lead to greater depth.

Although the best game developers have taken this technology and used it to build more complex, more elegant, and more compelling games,3 most of the industry now champions a model of “complexity through choice”. Where the first-person shooters of the nineties allowed players to carry as many as ten weapons, Call of Duty offers thirty largely similar guns as part of a two-weapon “loadout”.4 Pokémon X and Pokémon Y allow you to plug over 700 different critters into one of the simplest turn-based battle systems in its genre. Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV are almost entirely dedicated to introducing a new toy or game mode in every mission, and do not try to make those toys interesting or cohesive as a whole.5 Borderlands offers billions of possible weapon combinations in order to sidestep its hideous combat and visual design. Basically, the complexity in the core functions—whether running and gunning in a first-person shooter, managing the battlefield in a strategy game, or controlling space in a brawler—are being simplified. You’re being given more choices but asked to use, understand, and master a smaller range of them at any time.

It is the perfect model for the large companies that can throw manpower and resources at a single game, creating disposable choices that can be substituted in and out of the system at the player’s leisure. (Or, as it is commonly known, “downloadable content”.) And in the process, their games have completely transformed the consumer perception of depth. See, understanding and mastery of a well-designed game requires you to understand how all those moving parts interact as a whole. But the “depth” provided a range of choice can fool less experienced players by virtue of how many choices are being provided. So long as these choices are balanced and no weapon dominates, the ruse works well enough. It’s easier to convince the consumer that the number of weapons, skills, and upgrades—rather than the interactions created by those weapons, skills, and upgrades—is what makes a game deep.6

And no genre on the planet sells this ruse better than the dota genre. Defense of the Ancients and the subsequent dota games have become today’s endgame for complexity through choice. Because, once again, that was the option that was available to Warcraft III map creators. When the creators of Defense of the Ancients stripped down the Warcraft III game template to build a game around its hero system, there was no way they could compete with the dungeon crawlers, brawlers, fighting games, and other action titles that feature more complex chess pieces. When confronted with this reality, those creators scaled the number of choices as far as the eye could see. More items, more heroes, more matchups. The more, the better.

Today, the games most synonymous with the dota genre are also the most synonymous with complexity through choice. Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of Newerth each feature over 100 characters and over 100 items. League of Legends is well-known for its “Mastery” system—a transplant of the World of Warcraft “Talent” system—that allows players to pour skill points into nearly sixty passive skills as they play matches and level-up their game account. Players can also purchase Runes, which provide incremental stat bonuses for various skills. Dawngate features similar systems, but also allows players to choose a “role” before a match, to take on significant stat bonuses in the pursuit of a specific playstyle. While many dota purists despise talent systems, the goal is much the same as a varied character roster or a wide range of items: Give the player more levers to pull, even if the levers lead to incremental and mundane outcomes.

So, just compare the dota genre with the RTS games where you get a handful of factions to choose from. Compare the dota genre with the 30 to 50 characters that comprise some of the most complex fighting games.7 Now, you may argue that this doesn’t stop designers from creating a dota game with a smaller number of characters. But if you are part of a game industry which has hammered home the idea that “choice is depth”, it absolutely does. A dota game with fewer characters and fewer choices—whether Awesomenauts, Demigod, Dead Island: Epidemic, or Heroes of the Storm—will be seen as simpler than its peers, even if the interactions between the characters may be more interesting. And the business model for the dota genre—where the developer gives away the game for free and slowly releases paid content—will encourage developers to add more choices. If you’re not adding new characters and new choices, then you don’t have a business model.

In doing this, the dota genre has done something fairly clever. The player is engaging this range of choice at their own pace, and the average match length in a game like Dota 2 usually runs from 20 minutes to an hour, a very long match length for a versus multiplayer genre. As a result, it may take 100 hours to play all of the characters once. This may seem like a long period of time, but many fans of dota are coming from games and genres where a significant time investment is not seen as a negative. In its heyday, the most committed World of Warcraft players were expected to build their week around the guild’s raiding schedule.8 The genre also appeals to the fans of e-Sports, who accept the time investment as a necessary evil for becoming the best.

But in addition, the dota learning curve is an anomaly. In most videogames, the learning curve is a matter of player input. What weapons can I use? What skills does my character have? What tools are in my toolbox? The learning process remains interesting because the player can engage these concepts at their pace. But in the dota genre, your limited skill set dries up very quickly. You quickly learn what spells the character can use, and you need to wait until the next match to try out a new “build order”. So what happens in a genre where a team of players can significantly stack the odds against the individual? A genre where a couple tenths of a second can mean the difference between success and failure? A genre where there are as often as many as nine other players in the battlefield, each with their own individual roster of skills? The process of learning the game is based predominantly on output. In other words, what can others do to you? What can your teammates do to others?

Instead of having systems in place where players can quickly cycle through the available characters and learn what they are capable of, this range of player output can only be engaged in a team setting, where the value and aims of individuals are going to vary on a match-to-match basis, and where different teams are going to demand different combinations of spells and items. These concepts can only be engaged at the rate which other players are presenting those concepts. As a result, there is not only a ton of content and a ton of different ways it can be arranged, but the meaningful lessons of said content are presented to the player at an extremely slow rate. I may think of this as a poorly-designed learning process, but for everyone else, this provides the slowest of slow burns present in any genre. It can take longer to test drive a dota game than it takes to play and master many of our best videogames. From this web of design choices, we get the perception that if it takes longer to engage dota than other games, then it must be deeper than other games.

There are so many options—and so many ways for them to be arranged—that it may take the player hundreds of hours to simply engage a familiar situation. And with it, you’ll be asked to perform different duties and different roles as you pair with and against different characters. In a League of Legends or Dota 2, the number of possible team combinations and matchups are so vast that no community—let alone any individual—will ever see all of them.9 Throw in all of the items and runes, and you will always see new team combinations, new matchups, and new build orders, because it is simply impossible to engage them all. When you compare the dota genre with the popular videogames of past and present, this range of choices is simply unprecedented.

To this, I simply say: Who cares? Who cares if your dota game has a thousand or a million characters when every one of those individuals is less complex than what can be found in a competing game or genre?10 And who cares if your game has a hundred items, sixty talents, and countless runes when they don’t provide meaningful visual feedback? The interactions created by those parts—where teams of five lead a small number of computer-controlled allies down lanes on a single base map—are less complex than what you can find in competing genres. No matter the billions or trillions of combinations available to the player, dota can never be arranged in a way which will compete with the complexity in those rival action games.

We now have a generation of videogame players running around claiming that bicycles are more complex than cars because they walked into a bicycle shop and saw all the different ways they can customize their bike. But any group of idiots with enough time and resources can build a videogame with hundreds of characters, items, monsters, weapons, whatever. After all, that’s why it’s such an appealing business model for the companies with the resources to create them! I want games that are tanks. I want games that are rocketships. I want complex, intricate machines where every part has to be carefully considered in relation to the others, for the simple fact that they will lead to more complex outcomes than the ones in simpler games. Can they have customizable parts? Sure. But you should only do this once you have built a machine that will be more complex than its competition, regardless of what parts the player is placing into it.

Whether your game is a single-screen Pac-Man clone or takes place in a vast, sprawling metropolis, the goal is to make sure that all of the choices available to the player are interesting. Your game should be defined by the height of its creative powers, rather than the range and scope. And if that means you must create a smaller number of choices so that your time and energy can be allocated to making them good ones, then so be it. That’s the reason that the side-scrolling fighting game, in its best moments, can be as compelling as an open-world game that spans for miles.11 And it’s why games like StarCraft: Brood War and Street Fighter II Super Turbo can remain compelling in the face of the evolution that has shaped their genres. These games may lack the number of matchups and choices found in other games, but people keep coming back to them because they remain interesting.

In building those awesome choices and matchups, the game needs to be built on an series of awesome core concepts. At the end of the day, a game with a proper foundation will allow you to build those complex, well-designed, visually satisfying interactions. But here we are, discussing the genre of shoddy cameras, second-rate aesthetics, poor feedback mechanisms, and lousy character frameworks. Just as polish can’t make a bad game good, a boring framework is always going to yield boring characters, no matter how many tries you have to get it right. And it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me whether the free market is voting for the widest range of choices possible. In the meantime, I’ll take a handful of interesting characters over a cast of clowns that do little more than waste my time.

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Why Dota Sucks — 8. Balance
Posted on October 6, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: The dota genre is commonly praised for “balance”, where the choices and characters available to players remain on even footing as the level of play improves. While the dota game systems force balance through artificial means—where the selection of the dominant choices is turned into a minigame—the more crucial issue is created by the genre’s reliance on the balance update. Because Defense of the Ancients was a “free game” for a platform that encouraged the polish and perfection of a single map layout, the genre uses the balance update in lieu of the other, more interesting options for balance that come with sequels and new content. Not only does the overuse of the balance update compromise the aesthetic integrity of the game world, but it hits the reset button and prevents players from exploring a game to its roots. And the inevitable result of a “balanced” game is one where players have to separate themselves using less interesting and diverse tools, something entirely consistent with the nature of dota.


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One of the most common praises of the dota genre is that the games tend to be “balanced”, that most abilities and skills are viable for use and remain effective as the level of play improves.1 So, even if people agree that the characters and concepts in the dota genre are simpler than those in rival genres, this lack of complexity can appear to be more elegant and interesting because there are fewer redundant or bad choices. In a game like Diablo II, the thirty skills and abilities available to the character can boil down into a small handful of build orders, with some skills being clearly superior to others. On the other hand, the typical character in the dota genre may only have four abilities, but they’ll be useful in a wide range of matchups, and you’ll be using them regularly. Most commonly, fans of Dota 2 will hold high praise for the range of characters selected and used at major tournaments.2 For this audience, it demonstrates that the game is not only being designed by capable individuals who could come up with the concepts and theory, but understand how to make that theory work in application.

Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the entire design of the dota game model is a series of checks and balances designed to mitigate poor balance. The core concepts in the genre make it easier to balance a dota game than other games. Let’s not forget that characters are bound to a leveling system, and those characters will grow more powerful over the course of a match. You can cut the head off of an unfavorable or poorly-designed matchup by simply being a higher level than your opponent. “But wouldn’t such a system benefit ‘imbalanced’ heroes? The powerful heroes will gain levels faster and then become even more powerful.” Not all characters exist on an equal curve. Some characters are stronger later in the game, and some characters are at their most effective early on. Even if one character is clearly better than the others, the player still needs to work hard in order to gain levels, to kill towers, to wipe out the opponent, and to win the game. Very often, this chain of events requires cooperation and hard work from your teammates. And even if that character is imbalanced, the opposing team can still band together in order to take down that individual.

In addition, the commonly-accepted “competitive” formats for League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of Newerth are defined by a back-and-forth drafting process, where teams take turns selecting their characters, and where a character can only be picked by one player. While other versus multiplayer genres occasionally dabble in this concept—the first-person shooter where only one player can wield the powerful gun, the strategy game where players cannot pick the same leader—this design runs contrary to many games. This system allows the creators of dota games to turn those dominant options into its own game. Instead of watching teams pick optimal choices, players can contest the imbalanced character, and will have to make unconventional character choices during the chaotic draft phase.3

But if something is too powerful, certain draft formats feature a “ban phase”. If you think a character is too strong, the game will let you remove it from the character pool. And to this, I laugh out loud. Yes, players have adopted “house rules” for use with select games, where players overwhelmingly agree that a game is better in the absence of a certain character or tactic, and refrain from using it.4 But these decisions were usually made when the developer was unable to update the game or simply chose not to. And very often, the house rules were only agreed upon after years of play and rigorous debate. Yet here we are with a ban button for characters that one thinks are too powerful, integrated into the genre by its creators and used on a match-to-match basis. Sadly, this scrub du jour of game systems is now considered a crucial element of professionally-played League of Legends and Dota 2 matches. It’s a disaster of an idea, but it’s a means to game balance nonetheless, and should be mentioned here.

The endgoal of these systems is to force variety through artificial means. They help to mitigate the chief drawback of poor game balance, the sense of familiarity that comes with seeing players repeatedly pick the same characters. If the dota genre allowed players to abuse the optimal choices, it is more than likely that most dota games would see very little variety. And the results of the 2013 and 2014 Dota The International most certainly confirm this, with each of the top five most “contested” characters—that is to say, the characters selected or banned the most times—featured at respective rates of ninety-three and eight-six percent.5 That’s correct: The top five heroes were chosen or banned in roughly nine out of every ten games. Much in the way that top RTS players tend to stick with one faction, dota players would be more likely to choose the roles and characters they are the best with. But by creating a system that turns the selection of optimal choices into its own game, you can sell this lazy form of game balance as an element of strategy.

However, understanding these systems only scratches the surface of this topic. Defense of the Ancients was one of the early forerunners to the world of “digital distribution”, in which a game is distributed and updated almost entirely through the internet. The map was originally disseminated through Battle.net, where players join a match and download the map from the host. However, the size of the Defense of the Ancients map file crawled into the megabytes and was significantly larger than competing Warcraft III custom maps at a time when dialup internet was still a thing.6 Later on, players would settle on a second choice. Instead of allowing new players to download Defense of the Ancients through Warcraft III—and stall the start of any match for several minutes—players were kicked out of the match and directed to the Get DotA website, where they could download the map. From this central staging ground, new versions of the map could be quickly disseminated.

Where videogame developers often have to place patches through an extensive testing phase, Defense of the Ancients existed on top of the Warcraft III game engine, and “updating the game” simply meant “updating a map”. This distribution process allowed for rapid development of what players commonly think of as the balance update, where the designers tweak and modify the underlying mechanics that provide the foundation for the simulation. While these balance updates occasionally revise core systems, they more typically alter the individual tools that the player already has available to them. It’s simple, it’s fairly easy to do, and the commercial game industry has widely adopted the process for use on the computer and mobile formats. And within the world of online multiplayer, players now almost entirely expect these updates. 7

But even in a world of constant game updates, Defense of the Ancients and subsequent dota games are now well-known and stand out for their persistent support. The limited documentation makes it difficult to know how many times Defense of the Ancients has been updated, but the number likely runs well north of one-hundred updates. Dota 2 has mirrored the Defense of the Ancients development process. League of Legends received over 75 updates in the first four years of its release. Smite and Heroes of Newerth follow a similar development process. A dota developer who does not provide regular updates might as well consider his game done and dead.8 While not all of these updates are intended to tweak or improve game balance—some being designed to scrape out mundane bugs—they demonstrate the route that is being taken to balance dota games.

So, everything checks out, right? Well, it is crucial to understand why the dota genre adopted this approach to game balance. The answer is simple: Battle.net was a distribution system for maps. It was not a rule distribution system. The rules for the StarCraft and Warcraft III skirmish modes can be used with any map. The rules for Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, and Brutal Doom could be used to modify a commercial engine and become the ruleset. But in the case of a Warcraft III custom map, the rules are contained in the map file. If you wanted to play Defense of the Ancients on five different battlegrounds, you needed to make five different versions of the map.9 But what if the ruleset in one version has a serious design flaw? What if these “competing” maps cannibalize each other in the Battle.net custom game listings? The result is that the Battle.net distribution model favored the idea of updating one map until it was “polished” or “perfect”. And because Defense of the Ancients developed a culture of organized competition, having only one “playing field” became easy to digest.

What the creators of dota games failed to understand is that the balance update is just one means to balance. It is not the only option. Remember: Patches only became a regular part of videogames during the mid-nineties, when the internet—and more importantly, first-party online gaming services—could be used to distribute them. Prior to online updates, game developers had one of two options for “balancing” their games. The first was to create a revision point that improves on the original game, whether an expansion pack or a sequel. Some of the most celebrated videogames ever made—Doom II, Descent II, Unreal Tournament 2004, Super Street Fighter II Turbo—were akin to standalone expansion packs, taking existing concepts and content and using them to entirely outclass their predecessors. And in creating a sequel, they could use the pre-release phase to give careful consideration in making the returning characters or weapons more competitive.10

In addition, you could design new levels and environments. It’s an extension of the game design process. Developers have created concepts that they thought would be fun to use in a videogame and they “balanced” those options against challenging and interesting level designs. They would “balance” a Mega Man, a Simon Belmont, a Ryu Hayabusa, or a Ladd Spencer by creating obstacles best suited to their wildly different skill sets. The same rules apply to multiplayer games, where the options only need to be balanced well enough that they can be used in a wide range of interesting and visually engaging environments.11 Developers have often given their player base the tools to create this content, and while I know that I have taken players to task throughout the course of this book, the die-hards tend to be very good at creating this content and will do it for free in their spare time.12

So here’s what happened: Defense of the Ancients was a “free game” that was regularly updated at no cost. Because of this, commercial game designers have struggled with how to build a business model for the genre, and appear to have settled on “create one game, update the hell out of it, and sell the player base downloadable content”. This has eliminated “sequels or expansion packs as a means to balance”. And because Battle.net made the single-map model ideal, and has institutionalized smaller map counts across the commercial dota games, this limited “new maps as a means to balance”.13 In the end, this design process encourages developers to continue tweaking the existing content, and encourages the “balance update” at the expense of everything else. In lieu of superior options, the dota genre has focused on the least compelling means to game balance.

The balance updates presented through new game content—whether presented in the form of sequels, expansion packs, or content updates—feels natural and interesting because it is aesthetically significant. Real life doesn’t come with balance patches. Change in the real world is synonymous with a change in scenery, and games should ideally follow suit. In addition, sequels and new maps act as an addition and addendum to that videogame universe, rather than a substitute or replacement.14 But when you constantly update the mechanical foundation of your game with no corresponding change in visual content, you are compromising the integrity of your game world.15 Instead of providing the illusion of a real world on the other side of the screen, you are saying that your art assets are just a series of placeholders for the mechanical interactions, and that this number crunching is the real star of the show.16

But you may argue that balance updates change mechanics, and since games are defined by their interactive nature, balance updates make for more engaging interaction and a better game. Well, I will admit that in my younger, more formative years, I would have certainly endorsed this balance process as a never-ending process for precisely this reason. I would have told you that as players become more familiar with what remains, it makes sense for the developer to make the final adjustments, resulting in a “finely balanced” game. But if it is the most engaging interaction that you desire, why would you want to play a game where nothing about the rule set is certain? Where a world of new maps is to apply the existing theory and knowledge to new environments, balance patches often hit a reset button on everything that you have previously known about a game, and it will prevent players from exploring a game to its roots. How can one argue that a game is deep when the developers are trying to stop you from seeing how far down the ocean floor really is?

Unfortunately, this is the development process that the business of videogames now encourages. In a world where you bought a boxed retail game, and “the developer got your money and has no reason to care what you think”, it protected the integrity of the finished work. But today, companies have built their business models on a steady stream of downloadable content, and they must maintain the size and morale of their player base in order to maintain the business model. The balance update is the easiest way to maintain this morale, and it becomes a matter of democracy run awry. Not only does the developer need to please the casual player who thinks the new flavor of the month is unbeatable, but also the skilled players whose opinion carries significant weight in a world of videogame celebrity.17 Very often, this means making the balance changes for the sole purpose of balancing a matchup across a wide range of skill levels, and not the changes that make for the best game.

So what happens in a world of endless balance updates? Our natural inclination is not to make weaker things more powerful, but to make powerful things weaker. After all, people only care about “imbalance” if it’s keeping them from winning. That’s why the draft systems in dota games exist in the first place: To ban and limit what’s powerful. So, every time an interesting tool has a chance to shine, it will be yanked away from its players like a child having their hand swatted by a parent. As Seth Killian has argued, the inevitable outcome is that in abiding to the wishes of the players who scream and whine about balance, you will end up with a less interesting game where stronger and weaker players have to separate themselves from each other using less diverse and interesting tools.18 And it is no surprise that dota fits this to a tee, a genre where character skillsets are so restrictive that they can appear to be diverse. You can’t have interesting but superficially dominant options when the profitability of your business model hinges on keeping a wide audience of players happy.

But many games in the dota genre take this a step further because they are being balanced around that single map. It is not just that you have to make the characters equal. You have to make those characters equal relative to the layout of the one map that everybody plays on. In a genre where minor changes to a character’s skillset can have a profound impact, mundane things like the spacing and layout of trees now become important factors that must be considered.19 And in the process, it becomes a cycle which perpetuates itself. You are not only balancing the characters to work on the map, but you are balancing the map to work with the characters. As players are forced to achieve more with less, and as the minutiae becomes more important, game balance will swing in wilder directions as players find the new optimal tactics.20

Now, many players view these constant updates as proof that the developers care about their fans and are doing what needs to be done to make a great game. In reality, it shows something much, much different. Quite simply, a game which has to be repeatedly balanced is not balanced. How can the Dota series be balanced if we are now nearly a dozen years past its conception, and yet, it always seems like someone has to go back and make a correction? And how can dota games be balanced if nobody seems confident enough to stake their reputation on a current version of the game?

You see, a balanced game does not need to be constantly corrected, and the simple fact is that there is nothing wrong with having powerful characters. A well-designed game should be able to persevere in the presence of a dominant strategy because the interactions that lead to the dominant strategy will remain interesting. The goal, as Seth Killian has argued, is to make sure that the weaker choices do not lose to the powerful choices in boring ways. But then again, we’re deconstructing a visually-stunted genre built around a simple, basic control scheme and some of the simplest characters in videogames. When “losing to a dominant choice” is not accompanied with well-designed game systems, quality visuals, or a general sense of immersion, then “making sure the choices are equal”—to create pleasure from human competition as played through an even playing field—is the only thing you have left to fall back on.

But if the creators of dota games do not provide this constant support, and they do not snuff out “imbalanced” tactics and strategies as they appear, then their games will become irrelevant, as players drop that “dead game” and its “stagnant metagame” due to a “lack of support”. In this day and age of game development, the makers of dota games are most certainly not the only people who must give in to this reality. People are whining about game balance in pretty much every genre. However, the developers and creators of other games still have the previous commercial and distribution routes available to them. They can release sequels. They can introduce new maps. Their players can create maps. The dota genre does not provide these options.21 The end result is that the dota genre is tethered to the balance update in a way that rival games and genres are not. So, quite simply, the creators of dota games must strive for a game where everything is balanced. And as a result, a game where nothing is interesting.

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Why Dota Sucks — 9. Dota Obscura
Posted on October 16, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: Videogames typically allow players to learn a theory of design, where you are gaining an understanding of a virtual world and how it operates. The Dota series is a disastrous exception to this rule. Because Warcraft III provided no formal support for many of the concepts that were programmed into Defense of the Ancients, the map has been hounded by glitches and interactions that have compromised the theory. And not only is the theory inconsistent, it is regularly modified in the pursuit of game balance. What could have been an aberration in the history of the dota genre has now become the foundation and backbone for Dota 2, which maintains the broken theory. Why keep it? Not only is the broken theory a means to game balance, it is also a means to depth, where knowledge of the obscure interactions can be used against other players. But this compromises the learning process, where you are learning the game by memorizing small, discrete facts which operate independently of each other. The process of learning the theory is heavily predicated on rote memorization, and it runs counter to the interactivity that makes games so much fun.


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But the rabbit hole for proper design goes deeper than game balance. At the end of the day, you must present these rulesets in a way that makes them interesting to explore. For this reason, we must wage war on Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2. Even though we are only holding this criticism against the Dota series, it is the figurehead for the genre. And because its lessons provide developers with an enticing but dangerous precedent, it’s worth cutting the head off of the snake.

Traditionally, games of all kinds allow players to learn a theory of design. From a simple puzzle game like Tetris to a virtual world like Grand Theft Auto V, the idea is that you are not learning a series of interconnected rules, but an understanding of a world and how it operates. Anyone who has played a Japanese role-playing game knows that monsters are vulnerable to certain damage types, where fire monsters fall victim to water, air monsters are weak to lightning, and if the game feels remotely clever, the living dead can be crushed with healing magic. These concepts also require a rigorous cohesion between mechanics and art direction, where fans of the Mario and Sonic series immediately understand not to jump on the pointed objects. But if you have designed strong theory—and with it, a high degree of integrity—it creates an enjoyable learning process where deeper levels of understanding are derived from the broad design choices that provide their foundation.

Developers settled on these ideas without much of a thought because it is a design process that feels natural. They were simply transplanting their understanding of the real world into digital theory. The commercial design process has also encouraged this, because developers have a financial impetus to make sure their rulesets can be easily engaged and understood. But with more games emerging from outside of the publishing model and the commercial spectrum, more creators are neglecting these lessons. I don’t think it’s surprising that one of the most acclaimed amateur videogames of the last decade, Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress, is notoriously difficult to learn through the act of play. This is because Adams is focused on making the game he wants to make, instead of making sure that new players can approach it.1 This is also a development process that has also defined the Dota series, and the design of its ruleset is a disaster.

Remember what we said earlier: Defense of the Ancients was not software as we commonly think of software. It was not even a mod, where players are given significant freedom to alter the game concepts. It was a game map, whose rules existed directly on top of an existing game and game engine, programmed with the scripting language that Blizzard gave its players access to. It is crucial to understand that Just Another Scripting Syntax, the foundation for Defense of the Ancients, is a high-level programming language. In layman’s terms, this means that the language makes the process of creating the software easier by automating or simplifying certain aspects of the programming process, but at the cost of how much control you have over the hardware’s finer, lower-level operations.

This significantly limited what could be done with the Warcraft III game engine and game assets. And relative to the efforts of commercial programmers who have significant experience and the deep pockets of a developer or publisher, the range of what Warcraft III mapmakers could accomplish was minimal.2 Without any formal support for modification, the creators of Defense of the Ancients used JASS to “hack” their concepts into the game map, including enhanced spellcasting features and movement tricks like leaping and “knockback”. In using this higher-level language to modify concepts that Warcraft III provides no native support for, Defense of the Ancients has been hounded by bugs and glitches. They became a necessary evil in the pursuit of a complex game map built on top of the Warcraft III game engine.

As a result, the confusing nature of the Defense of the Ancients ruleset is a two-step process. The first issue is that, quite simply, various glitches and interactions compromise the theory outright. The most obvious example is magic immunity. The Warcraft III rules for magic immunity were simple: Units are immune to all abilities that cost mana, so long as it is not a healing spell or the well-defined ultimate abilities.3 The rules are easy to learn, they’re presented in a very obvious manner, use strong mechanical logic, and can be quickly learned in the course of play. And perhaps most importantly, they make sense. But in Defense of the Ancients, the sloppy use of JASS means that spells can have wildly different effects on magic immune units. Some spells will have their damage blocked, but not the stun effect. Some spells will have their stun effect blocked, but not the damage. Some spells will even have different effects depending on when you activate a skill that provides immunity.4 These outcomes come with no strong logic, and have no reason for their existence other than “that’s how they were programmed”.

In addition, Defense of the Ancients muddles the existing Warcraft III damage types, complicating the matter as players scramble to figure out which spells and attacks deal what kind of damage.5 In Warcraft III, any ability that cost mana was a magical ability, any ability that did not cost mana was a physical ability. From there, those separate ability types acted accordingly. But in Defense of the Ancients, some magic abilities are classified as physical and some are classified as magical. You heard that right: These spells all cost mana, but not all of them are magical abilities. The Dwarven Sniper, a character whose attacks are all performed with a rifle, alternate between Magical and Physical damage. The Juggernaut, who performs all of his attacks with a sword, features the same dichotomy. There are no consistent design or aesthetic principles for these choices, and these are merely two of the countless heroes which demonstrate this sort of erratic spell classification.

These systems are just a small sampling of what has been torn asunder by the Defense of the Ancients design philosophy. These confusing interactions also apply to “debuffs”, to “disjointing”, to “bash”, to nearly every core system which was adapted to Defense of the Ancients from Warcraft III.6 Normally, unintended and surprising outcomes could showcase a game with enough depth in its systems that these unexpected outcomes still surprise veteran players. But as we said earlier, these unexpected outcomes are ideally the result of higher-level interactions, where the core rules build complex but logical outcomes. In this case, the interactions are the result of the lower-level programming choices—the way that the design of an individual spell interacts with the Warcraft III game engine—and hardly anything that can be understood in advance.7 Where the fans of other genres would normally view these things as “bugs” or “glitches”, they are an intended aspect of the Defense of the Ancients experience.

From there, we reach the heart of the matter. At some point in the development process, IceFrog decided that these rules could be indiscriminately changed as a means to game balance. Though many of these changes are characterized as bug fixes, a number are explicitly outlined in the Defense of the Ancients changelogs as balance tweaks.8 These changes go a long way in explaining the inconsistent nature of the Defense of the Ancients ruleset: IceFrog doesn’t view his game world as a universe, but a series of interconnected placeholders that can be changed to suit the culture of competition which surrounds his games.9 10 This means that all of these confusing and poorly-designed rulesets—the collection of inconsistent rules associated with magic immunity, debuffs, disjointing, and other systems—can now be changed on a regular basis. An esoteric game system becomes even more esoteric as players have to scramble to memorize the new interactions.

Now, if Defense of the Ancients had merely become the father of the genre and the commercial game industry had left its lessons to the dustbin, we wouldn’t have needed an entire chapter on this topic.11 But when Valve continued their tradition of taking amateur projects and turning them into commercial games, they would go against the lessons of videogame history. While we’ll probably never know the terms of the agreement between Valve, IceFrog, Eul, and all the people who came together to build Dota 2, the finished project was less of a sequel and more an enhanced remake, a game which bundles nearly identical mechanical concepts with improved graphics and various features for ease of use.

In creating this enhanced remake, Valve took the bugs, glitches, and esoteric intricacies that were the result of the Warcraft III game engine and recreated them in their own Source engine. The goal of a one-to-one recreation is so important that the Dota 2 Dev message board lists anything that is not an “Intended Change” as a “Known Bug”.12 Once an unintended but necessary evil for Defense of the Ancients to exist on top of the Warcraft III game engine, the broken design theory was given a vote of confidence by one of the most reputable game developers on the planet. While improvements to the Dota 2 user interface have attempted to reduce some of this confusion,13 concepts such as Immunity and Bash maintain the same broken theory found in the predecessor.

But other than a stubborn insistence that Dota 2 be little more than an upgraded version of Defense of the Ancients, why would anyone carry on this approach to game design? Well, the integrity of the simulation is irrelevant to those who are most concerned with using the inconsistent theory to assert dominance over other players. Not only are these inconsistencies a means to game balance, but they are also seen as a means to depth. By allowing players to hoard knowledge of the obscure interactions, you create greater separation between stronger and weaker players.14 In a series where the player skillset is so limited and restricted, these inconsistencies become important and must be accounted for. The result is that competing games such as Demigod and Heroes of the Storm—which should otherwise earn minimum praise for their consistent game systems—will actually be considered inferior games. This is because they are not using poor design practice as a buffer zone for the general lack of complexity in the dota model.

None of this is to argue that other games do not have glitches, that glitches are not the realm of the elite in other communities, and that these glitches will always break the aesthetic presentation in a game. It is not even to argue that glitches cannot enhance the experience.15 But the developer must maintain the integrity of their game, and there must be a consistency in the choices that create the world you’re peering into. Just as the overuse of the balance update is a means to cheapening your game world, an inconsistent ruleset will achieve the same result. Once your game calls one rule into question—a world where everything is consistent, except for this one time, and another time—players will begin to question every rule. They will become more disconnected from the experience because there are more inconsistent actions revealing the weakness of the simulation. And where a strong theory of design will create elegance, a weak theory of design will encourage bloat in your mechanics. Creating an exception to the rule is to create another rule.

And let’s be clear: When we use the words “logical” and “consistent”, we are not arguing that there is random chance in how these skills interact with each other. The game is simply running computer code and the code works the same way every time. What we are arguing is that the mechanical outcomes are inconsistent with the visual and narrative presentation, thus rendering an illogical game world.16 In the case of Defense of the Ancients, an entire game has been built around these illogical and inconsistent outcomes, and then rendered more inconsistent in the desperate march to keep the game from disintegrating under the weight of its poor ruleset.

But perhaps you’re not convinced. Maybe you enjoy these “unpredictable outcomes”, where you can organize a mental catalog of loosely-connected facts and use them to gain an edge against other players. Maybe you like the idea that you can cut down an enemy team by knowing that a certain spell will respond in a certain way in a certain situation. Well, just as auto-attacking and the free camera are a boring means to depth, the design of this ruleset is a boring means to depth. In-fact, it is probably the worst means to depth that you can come up with in a videogame! You may say, “That’s subjective!” Oh, but it isn’t! If you understand media, you understand that the best media builds on the strengths of its format. Books are defined by the written word, so the best books are defined by the quality of their writing. Movies are defined by moving pictures, so the best movies are defined by their use of moving pictures.17 Consequently, the thing which defines videogames are their interactive nature, and the best videogames are the ones that play to the strengths of that interactivity.

By creating a world in which no consistent logic exists, theory can be breached at the creator’s discretion, and every rule can be called into question, the defining skill in the learning process is rote memorization. The lessons of these inconsistent rules are self-contained and have no relation to each other, resulting in a learning process that is less about interaction and more like memorizing facts out of a book.18 It is the skill which is the most at-odds with the strengths of an interactive medium, and as a result, the least interesting. Defense of the Ancients is the perfect game for a generation raised by an educational system that values the memorization of concepts over the understanding and application of theory. It is the perfect game for a generation told by public schools that history is about the memorization of facts, dates, and events, instead of drawing intelligent conclusions and concepts from the arrangement of the facts and dates. But it is also a horrible way to design your ruleset, and it runs counter to everything that makes the ideal game an awesome one.

Many players will assert that this ruleset shows how deep and complex the Dota series is. In a learning process where everything can be called into question, there will always be something new to learn. And yes, most critics of my argument will believe I am opposing Defense of the Ancients because the game is too complex, that I have a pea-sized brain, and that my pea-sized brain cannot handle the game. But where game journalists and other players often attack the complexity of a ruleset—because they simply don’t understand it—I am attacking the means by which the complexity is organized and then presented to the player. I do not want a game of weak logic where the theory changes because its creator wants to balance a matchup, and I do not want a game where it is more convenient to learn things by reading a guide than it is to play it. I want games which are worlds, and have rulesets which are confident and strong enough to convince me that is absolutely what they are.

So certainly, the learning process created by this shoddy theory may facilitate “depth”, in that stronger players can overcome weaker players through brute knowledge of the game rules. But as we said earlier, any game can be deep and profound if you have enough people trying to hammer away at it. That is why it is crucial to make sure the depth is presented in the most satisfying manner possible. The learning process in the Dota series relies on the least interesting approach to videogame interactivity, and the outcomes of these obscure rules are so pedantic that there is no visual or mechanical satisfaction to be gained from them. So if it is rote memorization that you desire in your learning process, then I suggest picking up one of the numerous academic disciplines. The thoughts presented in those disciplines are going to be far more deep, complex, and competitive than whatever you can find in any videogame, let alone a dota game.

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Why Dota Sucks — 10. Dota and Teamwork
Posted on October 24, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: One of the common narratives for dota is “teamwork”, the idea that the genre presents greater complexity through its team format. But many games that focus on the might of the individual feature excellent team modes. What happened? When Defense of the Ancients adapted the Warcraft III game systems to its own ends, it reduced the number of moving parts and the amount of time you have to make them count, reducing the depth in a prior game model and making it more important to play off your teammates’ actions. Dota has simply dumbed down the lessons of a prior game, and in order to regain that complexity, it must standardize the experience around teams of human players. It is entirely consistent with a videogame market where players view the dominating individual as a design flaw, and consistent with a genre where players feel burdened by their teammates. Dota is defined by teamwork because it fails to provide anything but teamwork.


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We should probably mention that even in its own circles, dota is not always seen as an infallible behemoth. Awesome? Sure. Perfect? No. As a point of contention, dota games are often placed in the same breath as the StarCraft series, the current figurehead for real-time strategy games and a mainstay in the world of videogame tournaments.1 The series follows in the stead of many early RTS games and is known for its rather insane emphasis on Actions Per Minute, and merely developing the mouse speed to keep up with the best players can take years of practice. Even in a culture of videogames that has an unhealthy obsession with the matter of “skill”—where ego demands you are playing the “most demanding and skilled game”—many dota players will admit that the StarCraft series demands more from the individual than a League of Legends or a Dota 2.

However, the totem pole in the StarCraft series is settled through the one-on-one format, and the games can be taken to task for their mediocre team formats.2 And with the philosophy of the modern StarCraft map intended for battles between two individuals, it has resigned team matches to a relaxed state of play. In response, dota players have created a narrative that their genre is defined by “teamwork”. Where RTS games, arena shooters, and fighting games commonly focus on the might of the individual, the argument is that dota is fundamentally different than other multiplayer games because it presents greater complexity and depth through a team format, and demands players work with each other in order to achieve success. And to this, I laugh out loud. When someone tells you their game is about “teamwork”, it should set off the reddest of all red flags. Let’s tear this one apart.

You see, the “teamwork” argument is nothing new, becoming popular when 2000’s Counter-Strike and 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved redefined the wider conventions for the first-person shooter. These games were praised for their focus on teamwork, even though the genre had already seen team-based shooters like Team Fortress and Starsiege: Tribes. Consequently, we now have people arguing that the difference between dota and StarCraft is teamwork, and it is to announce “I have never played any RTS other than StarCraft or StarCraft II and I do not know what I am talking about.” Shocking as it may be for an audience which invests most of their time and energy into a small handful of a games, StarCraft is not the only RTS ever made, and there are countless RTS games with excellent team game modes.3 So let’s just explain how the creators of Defense of the Ancients transformed Warcraft III into a “genre of teamwork”. And from there, we can explain what “teamwork” actually means.

While many RTS games share Warcraft III‘s focus on small-scale tactics, they do not share the same approach to “lethality”. Because the nature of war entails powerful tools that can cut through armor and flesh, the lethality in most RTS games is very high, and most soldiers can be cut down in seconds. But the men and women who fight the battles of Warcraft III can take exceptional amounts of punishment before dropping dead. Even workers, long the punching bag of the RTS genre, can stand up to a surprising amount of punishment. While the game was ostensibly a Blizzard response to concerns that the genre had become too fast and too complex for wider audiences, Warcraft III allows players to explore concepts and tactics that cannot be engaged or considered in faster, more brutal RTS games, and players are given a comical level of agency to shape outcomes in their favor.

When Defense of the Ancients adapted the Warcraft III game model to its own ends, it made two significant changes. We’ve already talked about the first one. Interesting depth in Blizzard-style RTS games stems from the effort required to manage tactics, resource gathering, supply lines, and unit production on multiple fronts in real time. Compare this with the dota genre, where the model is defined by the management of one unit on one front. Because there was no real effort to make the individual chess pieces more interesting, the number of possible skillful permutations has been significantly reduced. Quite simply, there is going to be more room for the expert to separate himself in the game that features dozens or hundreds of moving parts than the one that is defined by the management of one unit on one front.4

This played into the second change, where Defense of the Ancients increased the lethality of the Warcraft III game model. Now, most of the battlefield participants in the dota genre hit harder than their Warcraft III counterparts. But because of the reduced complexity, there are fewer options for the player to defend themselves from coordinated and surprise attacks. On top of this, most of the options for in-combat healing that were present in Warcraft III have been eliminated.5 So, much as Halo and Counter-Strike did away with most of the defensive options in first-person shooters—where you dodge the rockets and move in a way that makes it difficult for opponents to hit you—Defense of the Ancients has done away with most of the defensive options in Warcraft III.6 Under the correct circumstances, a battle in Warcraft III could take minutes. But through proper and expected use of special abilities, fights in the dota genre can be decisive in seconds.

The dota genre has been categorized as “hardcore” due in-part to how immediate and unforgiving engagements can feel, and in many cases, players can be wiped off the battlefield before they’ve even had a chance to reasonably evaluate the situation.7 But this is a total misunderstanding of difficulty, and it assumes that anything which slaps you on the hand harder is somehow more compelling. By this logic, the unbreakable infinite combos in fighting games and the one-shot “Instagib” modes in shooters are the high mark for their respective genres. In reality, these things merely dumb down their respective games, because you are reducing the amount of time that you have to create favorable outcomes.8 Much the same applies to dota. In scaling damage upward, reducing the number of pieces you have to work with, and reducing the time you have to make them count, they have significantly reduced the depth in a prior game. This is not theory, this is not speculation. This is a cold, hard fact.9

This reduction in depth has significantly lowered the barrier for optimal or “perfect” play. As a result, it becomes more important for players to wring every last drop of blood out of the store, to find improvement in other places. With “perfect play” being much easier to attain, and with players unable to separate themselves through individual ability, that “thing” ends up becoming your teammates. This is the reason that dota games are placed in the same breath as team sports. But there’s a difference: Team sports have incalculable skill curves at the individual level. The “skill cap” in athletics is so high that two-hundred years of organized sports leagues, advances in training techniques, and breakthroughs in science have not come close to conquering them, because we have not conquered our physical limitations as human beings. In these sports, there are still significant individual boundaries to be conquered, let alone the machinations which lead to “perfect team play”. And even if teamwork is an important part of many sports, individuals can continue to personally better themselves in order to overcome the limitations of the other participants.

On the contrary, the complexity of the interactions in videogames are trivial and basic, for the simple reason that the human body is a far more complex input scheme than a game controller, and the physical demands of the real world are far more complex than any videogame. Even in the “most competitive” videogames, top players are usually scraping razor-thin margins, where Counter-Strike players spend significant time optimizing their mouse and monitor settings, where StarCraft players are mapping out build orders so they can shave seconds off of a timing push.10 But in a game where you must rely on your teammates, the optimal becomes much easier to attain. If you lower the “skill ceiling” even further, a weaker player (or a boneheaded mistake) now becomes a significantly greater liability because the stronger player’s consistently excellent play now reaps smaller dividends.

So, do you get where I’m going with this? “Teamwork”, as it has been popularly manifested, was never about building more complex games. Today’s team games are merely dumbing down the lessons of prior games, and in order to regain that complexity, they must standardize the experience around large teams of human participants. The older games with excellent team modes were providing enough complexity and depth to individuals that they could be identified by the one-on-one modes. Whereas games like Halo, Team Fortress 2, Defense of the Ancients, and League of Legends have to be identified by their team formats, because if you play them in smaller formats with fewer participants, then they are a complete waste of time. None of this means that the games which emphasize or showcase teamwork cannot be interesting.11 But much as complexity in choice is intended to provide the illusion of depth in the absence of well-designed game systems, “teamwork” is intended to provide the illusion of complexity in the absence of a deep skillset for the individual.

What makes it appealing to players? A game of teamwork decreases your own stake in a match, marginalizing the impact of your meager contribution to the outcome and allowing you to participate in favorable outcomes that far, far outstrip your actual ability to perform. This makes these team modes ideal to new players, weaker players, and players who have no interest in getting better, because they can coattail the efforts of stronger players in the pursuit of winning. But at the same time, that marginalization can become an excuse. While the skilled player will recognize that the management of his teammates is a skill like any other, the popular perception is that the actions of those teammates are “outside of your control”. The player who thinks he’s god’s gift to man—but plays team modes precisely because he is not—can now use the poor play of his teammates as a crutch for his own failed efforts.12

Today’s videogame player views the dominating individual as a design flaw, and players can vote with enough financial force that developers will hear them out.13 Modern multiplayer games have become the manifestation of 1975’s Rollerball, the movie about a team sport which is manufactured to demonstrate the futility of individual achievement, and dota is the genre which most takes this lesson to heart.14 It’s a genre where tenths of a second can be the difference between success and failure, where tenths of a second can cause your entire team to die and become the thing that ruins a sixty-minute match. In this model, where success depends on the razor-thin margins of other players, it is inevitable that your teammates will make more mistakes than you could ever hope to make on your own.15 And it’s no surprise that lower levels of play in Dota 2 are known as “the trench”. As the level of play gets worse, your teammates will make so many mistakes that your ability to shape the match becomes marginal, as though they’re stuck in a trench.16

To make the matter of shared accountability even worse, dota compounds these issues by punishing players with its ruleset. Many games in the dota genre provide the player with a significant bonus for killing enemy heroes, an extension of the last-hitting mechanics. The bonus is usually a chunk of experience and resources, and on rare occasions, select items that will be dropped by a player if they die. So death not only wipes out your own team’s initiative and spacing, but it hands resources over to the enemy team, forcing teammates to work harder in order to cover for the mistakes of a “feeder” who gets killed over and over. Making excuses and handing out blame simply becomes too easy.

“But that’s what score is for. Score can measure who contributed the most to the fight!” Well, back in the day, at least. The team games of yesteryear usually left no ambiguity as to who contributed the most in the team effort. The general idea was that you were given equal skillsets, and you had to adapt your robust skillset for the situation.17 But as games more specifically move towards the idea that everyone selects a different skillset, this curve is thrown completely out of whack. Blame can be passed out in dota games because there are so many specialized strategies that can have an impact on your statistics. You can “carry”, “support”, “solo”, “jungle”, and so forth. You are expected to play a role within the team whose relative value often goes well beyond the score screen.18 This has created a sloppy, messy format where it is nearly impossible to hold players accountable for anything.

In essence, “teamwork” is not unlike the rallying cry of “strategy” that is common to discussion of RTS games, the idea that the genre should focus on broad decision-making and cast aside the fast action common to games like StarCraft and Command and Conquer. But in dumbing down the action component, the RTS game that focuses on strategy will compare unfavorably to the games that do both strategy and action well. Quite similarly, a game of “teamwork” will compare unfavorably with the game that uses team action as a framework for complex, satisfying interactions between individuals. While centralizing dota around this teamwork may obscure the simplistic interactions generated by the basic chess pieces, it will simply bore the players who demand more from their action games, team or elsewise. In other words, dota is defined by “teamwork” because its creators have failed to provide anything but teamwork.

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Why Dota Sucks — 11. Why Dota is “Toxic”
Posted on October 31, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: The dota genre has become notorious for its “toxic” community. And in response to the matter, developers have invested significant energy in community enforcement tools that ignore the real problem. Because the genre was specifically designed around a five-on-five team format, and alternative modes are ineffective and uninteresting, the game lacks the sandbox modes that would allow players to learn the game in a “safe” environment. The result is that players of differing skill levels, interests, and commitment are funneled into the same player pool in a genre where players are largely dependent on each other for success. The inevitable result is a community of screaming lunatics, and the culture is best demonstrated in the genre’s emphasis on the game guide, because playing and learning the game on your own accord will subject you to the wrath of those players. But instead of addressing the design flaws head-on, companies choose community enforcement because it is cheaper and easier to build than a properly-designed game.


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We have been left with the fitting conclusion that a genre of “teamwork” is now notorious for the hostile behavior of its player base.1 The most common term used in the discussion, to the point where it almost comes to parody itself, is that the dota community is “toxic”. While one could argue that many of today’s popular games feature toxic communities—particularly those on the console circuit—the nature of the dota community was cataloged in the early days of Defense of the Ancients and it was one of the reasons that Warcraft III players held dota in low regard.2

But this is not merely blood on the hands of the community. The total failure of developers to do the right thing—to curb this negative behavior—is best explained by Riot Games’ decision to build a thirty-man team that would analyze behavior in the League of Legends community.3 It’s a team of hard-working individuals that includes a “cognitive neuroscientist” and a “behavioral psychologist”. And on cursory glance, this makes for great public relations. Even if it exposes outsiders to the nature of your player base, it allows Riot to look proactive in acknowledging the problem and attempting to deal with it. It also allows the company to look like they’re on the cutting edge of game development, and using “Science!” in order to build a better game.

But in doing this, Riot is effectively asserting that the toxic nature of its community is a player issue, and they are continuing an industry standard in blaming the consumer for everything. In reality, Riot’s position is one shared by a cabal of dota developers who feel that community enforcement is the correct approach to player conduct, and they’re doing it to cover for a failure of game design. “Wait, what? How the hell does that work?” What I’m going to tell you will blow your mind: Dota does not have a toxic environment because it is “casual” and it has nothing to do with the audience that the game attracts. Dota is defined by the toxic behavior in its team game modes…because there are no proper singleplayer modes. Or, to be more specific, there are no game modes that allow the individual to learn and play the game on their own accord.

Discussions of toxic behavior most commonly focus on how inclusive a game is, the idea that the more expensive and complex games are going to shut out the younger, less mature audiences that can’t afford or understand them. But that discounts the impact that the design of a game or genre can have on its community.4 While dota is certainly inclusive on both an economic and conceptual level, it is the core design of the genre that provides the gasoline for the fire. And I should add that I do not believe the creators of the genre are entirely at fault for this. Whether IceFrog, Guinsoo, Eul, Meian, Ragn0r, or elsewise, these mapmakers never anticipated that their Warcraft III custom map would become a commercial genre, and they designed their maps for the team sizes that were encouraged by the Battle.net custom game system. But in doing this, Defense of the Ancients became an early front-runner for one of the troubling trends in multiplayer videogames, in which the games are designed and subsequently balanced for a specific team size and very specific map layouts, instead of having the flexibility to work in multiple formats, gametypes, and environments.5

What has been lost in the focus on “dota as team sport” is that the games which kicked off the versus multiplayer revolution—Street Fighter II, Doom, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Descent—all featured interesting singleplayer modes.6 The RTS genre that is home to excellent team modes is not only a thrilling test of individual mettle, but features a number of compelling singleplayer campaigns. The MMORPGs which are defined by their late-game group action are preceded by a range of content that can be accomplished on the individual’s time and interest. Even games almost entirely identified by their multiplayer modes, particularly the Halo and Unreal Tournament series, feature proper singleplayer modes.

And what these game modes achieve is that they act as a “sandbox”. They are a place where players can learn the game’s theory and design in a “safe” environment, a place where players can experiment without being harshly punished for any experimental or underwhelming actions.7 Even if these game modes will not always prepare you for the demands of live combat against other human opponents, and even if the relative value of many skills and concepts will shift dramatically in the transition to multiplayer, they are a way to familiarize yourself with the core concepts and do it in an enjoyable format.

Because the dota genre was designed for a specific game mode—versus multiplayer between two teams of five—it lacks this sandbox. It is not that the alternate game modes and content do not exist, but that the nature of the genre’s birth and development have made them boring options. The genre lacks proper singleplayer content (campaigns) for the simple reason that it is expensive to produce. It lacks proper skirmish modes against computer opponents because so much of what makes the genre appealing—broad team tactics, communication, and the process of drafting a team—was designed for use with other human players. (And even if the AI could be rendered an appealing aspect of the experience, the creators of dota games would not have the financial impetus to provide it.8) It lacks proper one-versus-one modes because “playing dota solo” is a complete waste of time. And because the genre is so rigidly adherent to five-on-five, it lacks the wide range of team modes where players have no expectation of anything less than carnage and chaos, a sandbox where players can get a feel for team action.9

So, you remember what we said about RTS games and custom maps? How a variety of game modes can accommodate players of differing needs and interests? Because the dota genre does not make these compelling or interesting choices, the sandbox becomes the five-on-five mode, where players of differing interests, intensity, and skill levels are forced into the same player pool. And, quite crucially, it is a game mode where teamwork is the chief barometer of success and failure. In order to learn the game, you must become a direct and significant burden on other players. Don’t know what items you should purchase? Don’t know how to play your character? Make the wrong play? You will cost your teammates the game and you will hear it from them, no matter what language they speak. That is why the genre is toxic, and toxic to the point where Riot Games includes “Unskilled Player” in their system for reporting “offensive players”.10

It is a failure that is best demonstrated in the culture of guides and documentation which now surround the dota genre. Unlike instruction booklets and tutorials, which teach you the rules for a game, the guides exist to specifically show how you should bend those rules to favorable ends. When we mentioned the Purge Gamers guide at the beginning of this book, that was just a cursory introduction to the culture. Web sites such as LoLKing and Dotafire act as massive community compendiums, where each character is accompanied by dozens of guides written by dozens of individuals. These guides will not only tell you which items to purchase and what order to select your skills, but what your specific aims and goals should be over the course of the game. The culture is so pervasive that many dota games integrate the guides directly into the game.11

Perhaps you will argue that the dota genre is not the only place where players have come to worship at the altar of the guide, and would point to the prevalence of guides for fighting games and real-time strategy games. Here is the difference: Those games can be learned and enjoyed by simply playing them.12 13 Because the dota genre lacks this sandbox, and it has isolated the “real game” in the cut-throat multiplayer modes, reading guides is preferable. The guides have become such a ubiquitous part of the experience that deviating from the knowledge found in these guides—and going “against the meta”—will subject you to the wrath of other players. “Playing the game and experimenting with your options”, as videogame players have done over the last forty years, is a dead-end. You either play the tedious singleplayer modes—which are tedious because they were constructed after the genre was formalized—or you cost your teammates countless games and attract their unhinged attention. And if there are flaws so deep that players want to skip or expedite the learning process, then it is probably a bad game.

Perhaps there was once a time and a place where everyone playing Aeon of Strife or a Defense of the Ancients was new to the concept, and everyone was just getting the hang of things. That time has long passed. As it has been established, the culture of dota is that you must put in the time and energy to learn the game before you choose to play it, as though you’re training and trying out for a sport. But in a sick sense, these guides aren’t really written for the new player. They’re written for the veterans who will be inconvenienced by the beginner who wants to learn the game by simply playing it. The expectation, as created by the structure of dota, is that you must be able to contribute from your very first match. But if your game does not give veteran players the agency to overcome lousy teammates, and if your game does not give weaker players the game modes where they can learn the game without inconveniencing others, then the inevitable result is a community of raving lunatics. That is what “teamwork” will accomplish, and why it will yield a “toxic” community.

But instead of rethinking the genre to accommodate the player base, it is simply easier for developers to retrofit the genre with solutions that effectively exist outside of the game. That’s why Dawngate allows players to hand out “karma” to productive, helpful, and otherwise pleasant teammates.14 That’s why Dota 2 allows you to rate the cooperation of your teammates on a match-to-match basis. And that’s why Riot Games is constantly upgrading their mechanisms for community enforcement. These systems are a hell of a lot cheaper than the new game modes and alternative approaches to design that would require developers to rethink much of what now defines the financially-lucrative dota genre. So, in the meantime, it is easier for developers to appear proactive about a solution to the issue—whether “cognitive neuroscientists” or elsewise—than it is to provide the correct one.

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Why Dota Sucks — 12. Novelty (Why Dota is Acclaimed)
Posted on November 5, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: The reason that dota is held to critical acclaim is simple: The novelty of the experience. Videogames now face a world where documentation and the internet leave few stones unturned, and players are quickly confronted by familiar situations that showcase the optimal tactics. Dota counters this reality with a game model that can not only weather the decline of novelty, but manufacture novelty on a regular basis. By combining a massive range of choice, large team formats, and a persistent development process, dota games assure that players will rarely have to revisit familiar matchups and situations, creating the illusion of a game with “endless depth”. The goal of this development model is to stave off the moment that dota ceases to be novel. If players are left to a familiar matchups, familiar strategies, and familiar situations, they will quickly realize that the concepts and elements that define the genre are terrible. And when it is time to determine where these games stand in history—without developers scribbling corrections in their thesis—they will not hold to scrutiny.


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For all of the design choices in the dota genre, there is an endgame at hand. How did the dota genre earn a reputation for complexity and depth? How has the game found room on greatest games lists? How has it become a figurehead for the “hardcore” in a new generation of videogames?

One word: Novelty.

We’re a little over forty years into the commercial history of videogames. And so far, it has been financed by novelty, the feeling of freshness that comes with original ideas and new situations. Most commonly, this novelty comes in the form of improved hardware, which allows for concepts and graphics that could not have been achieved with the previous generation of toys. But during the last decade or so, there has been an erosion in this contract.1 It’s not just the novelty of improved hardware that has begun to disappear. The novelty and mystery of individual games is on the decline. Prior to the turn of the century, print magazines and the internet dispensed a steady but small and uncertain train of content. You could go an entire generation without knowing about Doki Doki Panic, even if a discerning American child knew there was something odd about “Super Mario Bros. 2“.2 But thanks to today’s internet, a global communications network where people from around the world are in sync with each other, the mystery of videogames—much like the mystery of the world around us—has been in freefall.

Never is this more true than in the world of multiplayer games. Where insider information was once limited to one’s social circle, the internet allows the entire player base to share and catalog the winning secrets. We’ve already discussed the wikis and websites that allow players to crowdsource information, but those are just a drop in the ocean. Replays allow players to watch matches in the game client and scrutinize those details on a frame-to-frame basis.3 Professional videogame tournaments and walkthroughs are disseminated through massive video sharing sites, showcasing the optimal tactics in a massive range of games. Stat-gathering databases, both company- and player-run, catalog a world of data for players to access and exploit. Even those who ignore the documentation are going to copy the tactics used by the players who rely on it. If someone discovers something that shakes the fabric of a game, then it will either be widely copied or dismissed within weeks.

In a world where documentation and theory can be distributed across the planet in seconds, and in a world where games are being cataloged down to the source code, the novelty of a game can dry up almost immediately. And what happens when the novelty of a videogame is gone? There is only pleasure to be taken in what is already known. There is only satisfaction to be taken in things you have already seen and done. There is only satisfaction to be taken in the repetitive elements. Does the game world provide a convincing atmosphere? Do those mechanics provide satisfying audio and visual feedback? Are these games built on an inherently liberating and exciting premise? Does the game present a solid grasp of the design theory that made the genre so interesting in the first place? When the novelty of a game is gone, you must be able to find pleasure in situations which you have already engaged and considered.

Typically, in order to do this, you need to play games which force an understanding and appreciation for the things which define familiar situations. As an example, the older arcade and console titles often asked you to string out a small handful of lives in order to complete a brutal obstacle course, and it was a practice that demanded an understanding of the game systems. But today, “hard” games like Super Meat Boy remove the tedium from death, giving players infinite lives in order to brute force bite-sized levels. Many videogames are now akin to a movie, where you “watch” it once and then move on to the sequel. Even the normally ruthless multiplayer modes have fallen victim to the philosophy. Thanks to accurate matchmaking and the shared accountability in the popular team games, players can become an “average player” by winning half of their games against those who are as clueless as them.

So how the hell do you expect players to develop an appreciation for repetitive elements when understanding them is not a requirement for success? And if you are a company (Riot, Valve) that has positioned your videogame as the electronic equivalent of sport, a game which is ideally played over years and decades, this is a huge problem. Now, no matter how interesting and playable your game is, people will eventually grow bored with it. That is an inevitability. But a world where players view “the same matchup you’ve played a thousand times” as an inconvenience—even if your core concepts are really, really good—only makes this more difficult. How then, do you convince these players to play one videogame for years on end? The answer is simple: You must manufacture novetly. You must build games which can offer new situations on a regular basis. And in doing this, you must hold off that moment where your user base falls victim to a “stale metagame”, or “boring matchups”, or whatever.

And this, my friends, is the sterling achievement of the dota genre! What the creators of Defense of the Ancients inadvertently pioneered was a game model that was designed to defeat the decline of novelty, a game which can offer new situations even as a world of replays, video streamers, salaried players, and tens of millions of players hammer down on it. If players cannot understand the interactions that comprise a matchup, then you must give them as many matchups as possible, as many choices as possible, and change them on a regular basis. As we have gone from chapter to chapter in this book, we have explored what may very well be the longest novelty curve in videogames. Dota is a genre where the seas are shallow enough to stand in. But for the person who never steps out of the boat, it appears to be an endless ocean.

A wide range of choice is a means to novelty. Defense of the Ancients follows in the stead of games like Pokémon and Borderlands, which offer a huge range of choice in the absence of a deep and satisfying construct. The “deepest” games in the dota genre offer over one-hundred-plus characters and one-hundred-plus items to the player, along with a world of runes and talents. It can take hundreds of hours to simply engage all of your options. And in the case of the Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2, you can extend the novelty by wrapping your game rules in sloppy programming, which will result in unintended consequences and surprising outcomes. From this range of choice, you are presented with thousands of one-on-one character matchups, and the internet will never be able to meaningfully catalog or discuss all of them. The developer can then extend the novelty of the experience by turning it into a business model, creating characters on a regular basis and charging players to buy them.

But even if you can master a number of those characters and matchups, the standardization of the genre around large team formats becomes a bombproof means to novelty. There are so many possible team combinations that the player base could never hope to catalog them in a meaningful manner. And because organized and professional matches require teams to go back and forth in selecting their characters, the top players will be forced to explore a wider range of combinations instead of simply playing against the optimal. Even if you have played thousands of games, new novelty will come in the form of lane assignments and team strategies that you have never seen before.

What about the top amateur and professional players? After all, some of them play hundreds of matches every month, and because they’re playing against the best, they may very well see familiar matchups. From here, the balance update becomes a means to novelty. By using this massive range of choice as a base, you can create a surge of novelty every time you update the game. Even if the update only impacts a handful of heroes and items, its impact on the game can be far-reaching, and players will have to discover what these changes have done. This will offer veteran players a breath of fresh air, and for everybody else, it will create the illusion of a “balanced game” with a naturally-evolving state of strategy and tactics. So, even if players could document the ins and outs of the game, the second that the developer hits the reset button, all of that knowledge must be re-evaluated or discarded, because it is now out of date.

There are certainly other factors which are designed to keep players hooked to these games, and certainly other factors that have allowed the genre to become popular. However, the reason that the dota genre is held to critical acclaim is the novelty of the experience. The massive range of choice assures that players rarely have to revisit a familiar situation, and every time the creator updates the game, they are building new novelty within the confines of a comfortable, known commodity. So long as developers continue to provide this persistent support, there will be so much novelty that no player of any skill level or time investment will be able to overcome it. By offering players a virtual world where you are always seeing new characters, new matchups, and new strategies, you will create the illusion of a game with “endless depth”.

This is the genius of “games as a service”, a persistent development process that is intended to be nothing more than a series of distractions. Not only is it intended to offer new novelty on a regular basis, but it encourages players to continue playing a game that they do not necessarily enjoy because the developer has created an expectation that they will continue to try and improve the game. And with it, the goal is to stave off that moment where the experience ceases to be novel. When the creators of dota games no longer provide this novelty, players will eventually be confronted by optimal matchups, a “solved game”, and a virtual universe with few unknown quantities. All of the remaining pleasure will come from familiar situations. When this occurs, one of two things will happen. The first is that players will not understand the repetitive elements, grow bored with them, and move on. Or two, they will recognize that the repetitive elements in the dota genre are terrible.

There is no better example of this than the 2013 Diretide fiasco, in which an annual in-game event that was intended to commemorate Halloween in Dota 2 never surfaced. When it happened—or rather, did not happen—the community lost their mind, flooding social media sites with their displeasure4 and occupying the news in games for roughly a day or two. When players bombarded the Dota 2 MetaCritic User Ratings with zero-out-of-ten scores, the most common complaints ranged from a “lack of communication” on new updates, to “no new heroes”, to “GIVE DIRETIDE”. With a single battle cry, the community rose up and told Valve that their game is not interesting enough to play on its own. And that in order to hold their attention, Valve must continue to bombard these players with new updates, new content, and new novelty.

“But what’s wrong with novelty?” Maybe you have a point there. After all, isn’t “novelty” why we buy new games and hardware in the first place? Well, first off, as we mentioned earlier, the persistent development process can compromise the integrity of a virtual world by saying that very little is ever set in stone. But quite frankly, any videogame—from the ugliest flash game to the most compelling masterwork—can offer me new novelty. Hell, there’s an entire universe out there filled with new and novel experiences that I have yet to explore. I play videogames because I enjoy the hell out of videogames. And it goes without saying that if I am going to spend my time with games, then I want the best games. Period. Any game developer in the era of digital distribution can rearrange the deck chairs on their sinking ship. But only the master craftsmen are providing the games that are worth playing and worth going back to.

And yes, dota is not the only genre that thrives on the novelty of a new experience. After all, you are probably wondering why I am holding these criticisms against this genre but not the roguelikes and strategy games that make liberal use of procedurally-generated game worlds. The answer is simple: In their best moments, those games are really fucking good. And with a couple of changes, they would probably be awesome even if you were playing them on the Civilization equivalent of Final Destination.5 What applies to “complexity in choice” also applies here: Can you provide new novelty on a match-to-match basis? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, you must create a construct and a machine that is worth exploring even when all of the variables are known.

When it is time to determine where these dota games stand—without developers scribbling corrections in their thesis—they will not hold to scrutiny. Players will recognize that League of Legends is one of the ugliest, simplest games to ever hit it big. They will recognize that Dota 2 is an unintuitive game, and just incomprehensible enough that it is not fun to learn through the act of play. They will recognize that Demigod co-opted the Supreme Commander game model for use in a character-action game and is about as exciting as one would expect. They will recognize that Awesomenauts is the side-scrolling take on “baby’s first action game”. They will recognize that Heroes of Newerth is bound to the same limited template as all the other dota games. And they will recognize that Dead Island: Epidemic—as initially competent as it may appear to be—is outclassed by the superior action games which have come before it.

In many cases, the modern game design process is an attempt to avoid the unfavorable comparisons to the older, classic games which have outclassed them. Whether you accept this means of pandering is up to you. But through the coming years, I will spend time with many games that can not only provide that novelty, but an experience that can stand against the very best. I won’t have to worry about whether the game is going to get “patched” and I won’t have to worry about whether its creators are adding new content. When developers move on to create new games and ditch support for the older ones, those games can only be judged by the things that remain. The games that remain compelling at their core—even if they feel a little familiar from time to time—will be the ones that win out. Dota will not.

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Why Dota Sucks — 13. Why Dota is Popular
Posted on November 10, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Synopsis: The common narrative for dota’s popularity is a myth that can be debunked with a brief look into the history of Battle.net. The real answer? The genre takes the core impulses that drive players and makes them more appealing. It builds on the bare appeals of many popular computer games. It takes the addictive level-up mechanics and turns them into the central attraction in a versus multiplayer game. It rewards “time played” as the primary vector for early improvement. And in addition, the genre is bound to a distribution model which gives it a huge advantage over prior models and prior games. The end result is a genre with wide appeal that can be distributed around the world with ease. It is important to understand this, because the dota genre (and other games) is waging a full assault on the videogame publishing model, the most important quality control mechanism of the last three decades. The wide popularity that can be achieved with digital distribution will be used to defend these games, and it will be crucial to separate popularity from quality in order to get the most out of this medium.


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The common narrative is that dota games were deeper and more complex than the real-time strategy games they emerged from. As a result, dota not only became more popular than RTS games, but one of the most popular genres going. This, at a time when many of the best games in recent memory go unnoticed by the general population, dismissed as “too difficult” or “too complex”. This, at a time when videogames have gotten easier across the board. This, at a time when the popular games worth holding to high praise are making their mark through grand visual and technical leaps, and not the laser-like focus on “gameplay” that defines dota games. In other words, the narrative is that dota became popular by doing the things which almost always lead to smaller audiences.

“Dota became popular because it was deep and complex” is an outright myth, and it can be debunked with a brief look into the history of Battle.net. The number of players on Battle.net in 2004 and 2005 are a fraction of those now playing the games inspired by Defense of the Ancients.1 Most of them were not there for the breaking out party. I was. I watched as the battle lines between Warcraft III and Defense of the Ancients players were being drawn. And I can say with confident, first-hand authority that nobody took the Defense of the Ancients player base seriously. They were considered a laughingstock because they were investing their emotional energy and reputation in a custom map, and even within the custom game scene, those maps were never considered anything less than a way to waste time.

I’ll back this with the most anecdotal of all evidence, and you can take it for what it’s worth. In order to play the desirable Clan TDA matches on Battle.net, you needed to acquire a Warcraft III “icon” for use with your game account. This meant winning twenty-five games with any of the four races (or the “Random” race selection) on the Warcraft III ladder.2 Using the robust sample size that was provided by this system, I would estimate that the vast majority of players—roughly eighty to ninety percent—had losing records in Warcraft III. And most of the time, those losing records were in the “Random Team” modes, where a trained monkey could win half its games. While I am not arguing that videogame skill carries from genre to genre on an equal curve, the evidence consistently showed that these players were terrible at Warcraft III.

Dota players were not videogame experts, they were not masters of their craft, and they didn’t want a more complex calling in life. Quite simply, Warcraft III was too hard for them, so they found something easier.3 In reality, these players were seeking the relaxed social experience, the lower barrier of entry, and range of choice that these disposable maps could provide. The Battle.net custom game scene was little different than the world of low-quality games that you can now find on your phones. (And if you want to perpetuate the myth that amateur content creators could rearrange the Blizzard game assets and create better “games” than a commercial company, then please continue to do so.4) It is from this culture of custom game development that Defense of the Ancients became the golden, shining turd in the toilet bowl of Blizzard custom maps.

So let’s explain the real reason that dota became popular. It has nothing to do with the quality of any dota game. You see, the history of popular videogames is more predictable than one may think. The genres and the faces may change, but the impulsive appeals that drive players do not. As an example, the Japanese turn-based role-playing games of the nineties found wide popularity by prioritizing narrative and level-up mechanics in a medium dominated by shorter, skill-based action games. But once Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto III showed that storytelling could be done in more capable genres, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare could do level-up mechanics in more capable combat systems, and World of Warcraft could transform the RPG into a social affair, players were left to accept the Japanese role-playing games for the simple turn-based games that they are. The genre’s trump card was no longer special or interesting because everyone now played that card, and players dumped the genre in droves.

Dota functions in much the same way, only it is taking the core appeals of prior games and making them more appealing. The novelty of the experience is just an extended hook. The genre builds upon Warcraft III by offering that game’s content-rich backdrop, stylized visuals, and defining concept (the hero unit) in a simpler, more accessible model. It offers fans of the Diablo model the versus multiplayer experience that they have sorely lacked. It provides the fans of popular MMORPGs a “five-man raid” without the significant time investment required by MMORPGs. It offers fans of e-Sports a five-man team sport with the largest tournament scene in the history of videogames, and by extension, the most appealing mountain to climb. And thanks to the low barrier of entry created by the simple control scheme, it offers players a ready-made social gaming venture. In doing this, the dota genre can stand out on a platform where the games that would provide an immediate rebuttal to Defense of the Ancients—particularly fighting games and brawlers—have been a secondary attraction.

On top of this, dota takes the addictive level-up mechanics of gaming’s past and weaponizes them. Level-up mechanics are typically explored in the long playthrough of a role-playing game or a dungeon crawler, and Warcraft III used the concept as a supporting feature. But the dota genre has turned the leveling systems into one of the central attractions in a fast-paced versus multiplayer game. You can now get the adrenaline rush that comes with “making numbers go up” over the course of a sixty-minute match, and then quickly do it all over again. Even the systems outside of a match encourage players to “level up”, whether they’re acquiring Runes in League of Legends, unlocking new characters in Smite, or acquiring loot in Dead Island: Epidemic. Dota can do these addictive leveling systems and do them faster and more efficient than other genres.

And on top of that, dota caters to the long-held misnomer that “time equals skill”. The early learning curve is almost entirely predicated on the memorization of heroes, skills, and items. Because the genre offers so little room to shape a tactical engagement, and getting caught out of position often means death, it means that if you do not know what a certain skill or ability does, then it will cost you dearly. As a result, players can constantly improve by simply learning their available options, because learning what a spell does is another situation that will not resign the player to death. You not only derive pleasure from this illusion of improvement, but from this “improvement”, you will derive pleasure from leveling up faster and more efficiently on a match-to-match basis. And by the time you have learned all of the heroes and items—something which may take hundreds of hours—the game will become a comfortable and known quantity.

But it is not just the game mechanics that make dota popular. Defense of the Ancients was widely perceived to be a “free game” for use with Warcraft III. Because there is no preconceived notion as to what dota loses when it is adapted to the free-to-play format, the genre gains a huge advantage over other distribution models.5 Console videogames are bound to an expensive price point that has to be maintained in order to protect the publisher business model and keep their shareholders happy. Even the videogames which were previously sold in boxes—games which can now be sold for pennies on the dollar through digital outlets like Steam—will have a difficult time matching “free”. “Any price” requires a flash judgment as to whether the game will be worth your money. If you’re a kid, “any price” will require your parents’ money. And “any price” endangers the chance of getting your game into the lucrative Asian videogame market, where rampant piracy has made free-to-play the standard.

This gives the dota genre a huge advantage over the existing multiplayer genres and their existing userbases. These long-time fans understand the destructive impact of free-to-play and will fight the model at every step of the way. Even giving away a demo that can be used against paying customers becomes difficult. Microsoft is put in the position of explaining why a “free-to-play” game like 2013’s Killer Instinct can be purchased just like any other game. And when Epic Games announced that they were working on a new Unreal Tournament game in 2014, they had to stress that their game is “free” and not “free-to-play”.6 The stigma of free-to-play scares off long-time players but is harmless to the younger audiences that are playing dota.

Dota has found the sweet spot in a videogame industry that is trying to get its games in the hands of as many people as possible and finding ways to charge them later. It’s a genre that takes the barest appeals of various games and sandwiches them together. In doing this, it can breach markets that have never exposed players to classic console, arcade, and computer games. (Dota can appear to be the best if you live in a part of the world where you’ve never seen anything better.) As a result, the dota genre has become the figurehead for a movement occupied by World of Tanks, Dungeon Fighter Online, and CrossFire. It’s a movement where anyone with a couple of bucks, a mile of passion, and the right distribution model can self-publish their videogame. And if they play their cards right, they can get it around the world in weeks, win over those who identify as “gamers”, and make millions in the process.

So why is it important to understand this? Today, the dota genre operates almost entirely outside of the videogame publishing model, the most important quality control mechanism in the last three decades of commercial videogames.7 The existence of a console videogame market where it costs tens of millions of dollars to build a competitive product is proof of this. Only a decade removed from the height of publisher control in the game industry, companies no longer need that publishing model to get their game in places where people can find them. And, as many companies have proven, these games can become more popular without the help of Sony or Electronic Arts. Just as journalism has declined into a smattering of corporate-run news outlets and a collection of untrained individuals, videogames are following suit in a lot of ways. More people are making more games than ever before and there’s a hell of a lot more mediocrity to go around.

Yes, today’s videogames still kick ass and they’re still pushing boundaries. But with the decline of the publishing model and a slate of game criticism that has failed everyone, the market will be wholly incapable of separating the chaff from the wheat. You will be asked to evaluate a world where more commercial videogames are released than you could ever hope to engage.8 It will be more important than ever for you to become the content filter, to become the means by which one weeds out the good from the bad. The one thing synonymous with this medium is change. Well, things are changing once again, and you must be equipped to embrace or cope with that change. If you don’t, you risk falling into the same trap as every other generation of consumer. You’ll look only at what’s popular, look only at what gets the most marketing, and assuming there’s nothing left to please you.

The easiest way to become that filter will be to educate yourself. In the coming years, companies will hit you with the next League of Legends and the next Dota 2. They will throw millions of dollars in marketing behind these games. They will run tournaments designed to sell these games as “world-class experiences”. Many of these games will become very, very popular, and claiming they are anything less than perfect will expose you to the wrath of the communities that play them. The pressure to fall in line and accept these games as “classic” or “perfect” will be overwhelming. And while popularity does not disqualify quality, the best means to enjoyment is to judge games with your own instincts, rather than the approval of others. Dota may be popular, but don’t let anyone tell you that makes it good. Make your own decision.

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Why Dota Sucks — Conclusion
Posted on November 13, 2014 by Michael Lowell
Videogames have seen the most exponential growth of any media format in human history, where the combination of new hardware and design theory has allowed each decade of videogames to outclass the previous one. It is difficult to overstate how rapid this transformation has been. In five years, Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty became Total Annihilation, with players throwing over 100 different units and buildings at each other across land, sea, and air. In four years, Wolfenstein 3-D became Descent II, a flight simulator with a twenty-weapon arms system, three-dimensional freedom of movement, and some of the most complex level design in the history of videogames. In roughly a decade, Street Fighter II had given way to the team-oriented engagements in The King of Fighters and Marvel vs. Capcom series, while the Arcana Heart, Guilty Gear, and Melty Blood series would exhaustively explore air combat.


Even if the games, the companies, the players, the trends, and the distribution models change from year to year, it is indisputable that there is more capacity to do great things, and with it, to create better games. And yet, in roughly the same time that a variety of genres went from proof of concept to their apex, the dota genre has gone from Defense of the Ancients…to Dota 2. Much as the katana has been mythicized as the ultimate sword in the face of constant warfare and technological improvement, dota has been held as the ultimate genre in the face of a rapidly evolving medium. Any of the flaws that have been discussed in this book could be enough to keep any other videogame from being worth your time. Yet here we are, with an entire gallery of awful choices that now define a single genre.

So, I hope this book has succeeded in deconstructing a controversial and polarizing genre, opened your thoughts on the topic of games, and introduced you to points of interest that you may not have previously considered. In the long run, I hope this book leads to an insightful discussion of the genre. (If that doesn’t happen, then I can assure you the discussion will be very entertaining.) By this point, you should realize that this book is not so much to give an opinion on dota—as marketable and inflammatory as it may be to say that dota sucks—but to show you how I got to that opinion. I provided this opinion because I want videogame players to be progressive and open-minded about their interests. And that means keeping yourself honest, as a way to become more informed about the topic and to get more enjoyment out of the games you love.

But I am also concerned with the discourse in games writing, game discussion, and game criticism. Outside of the occasionally talented and committed individual, this is a circle of discussion that has completely failed everyone. And, quite frankly, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of writers who embrace the game journalism slaughterhouse in the pursuit of a quick buck. I’m tired of writers who think videogames are a platform for their unrelated emotional outrage. I’m tired of videogame players who think “personal preference” is carte blanche to defend their bogus talking points. And I’m tired of videogame players who feel that criticism of a beloved game is equal to a personal attack. This book is my way of showing you that game criticism can be done better and it can be done well.

Obviously, I believe that the current cast of dota games deserve nothing less than the trash bin. But if you have been paying attention, and you are familiar with the games that I hold to high regard in this book, it should be obvious that I think the premise of the dota genre is an awesome idea. There’s few things cooler than walking onto the battlefield, staring down armies who fear your mere presence, and giving them a formal introduction. That is why the dota genre does such a wonderful job of disappointing me, and it’s not unlike the way I feel about the Dynasty Warriors games and their countless derivatives. The concept of dota is awesome, but its creators have gone about the concept in the worst possible way.

The good news? Some developers have expanded on the baby steps that were taken by games like Monday Night Combat, Dead Island: Epidemic, and AirMech. Those games adapt concepts in the dota genre to more interesting systems for combat, strategy, and movement.1 As slow and painstaking as this evolution will end up being, the goal is to continue moving upward. And I will tell you this: Give me a dota game with the combat of a God of War, a Bayonetta, or a Devil May Cry. Give me a dota game with the visual flair of a Kingdom Under Fire II or an N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights. Give me a dota game with the vast armies found in the busiest real-time strategy games. Give me a dota game with the devastating magic in a Sacrifice or a Black and White 2. Give me full control of the battlefield as Brutal Legend and Guilty Gear 2: Overture have. Give me these things, and you bet your ass I will line up to play them.

Actually, hold that thought.

In concluding this story, we must understand that there is no “making dota better”. Remember what I said at the beginning of the book: I want to make games better, not dota. The dota genre is fatally flawed. That’s because other genres are identified by a concept. Fighting games feature close-range combat between two or more participants. First- and third-person shooters are focused on shooting things. Because of this, these games can offer an incredible range of ideas while remaining in the same classification. But in this case, dota is identified by its mechanics, the strict adherence to a ruleset conceptualized in Aeon of Strife and then expanded in Defense of the Ancients.2 Dota is identified by the very specific things that dota does.

This means that AirMech is not a dota game just because it features elements familiar to dota. It is a spiritual successor to Herzog Zwei that incorporates elements of Defense of the Ancients. Titanfall is not a dota game because it features disposable computer opponents and strict six-man team sizes. It is a first-person shooter with dota elements, a game that has more in common with Call of Duty. Bloodline Champions is not a dota game simply because it uses a skill system similar to the one found in Defense of the Ancients. It is merely a top-down brawler with ideas that are familiar to the dota genre.3

There is an uncomfortable reality in the world of videogames that some genres are simply better than others. And as technology continues to improve, as game developers deliver better experiences, the theory will become reality. The best possible stealth game will be an action game featuring stealth as a supporting feature. The best possible Diablo clone will use the lessons of 3D brawlers as a base for dungeon crawling and loot gathering. Consequently, the ideal “dota” game will have more in common with today’s third-person action games than Defense of the Ancients. And in order to build that game, you will have to throw away most of the theory that we now associate with dota. Much in the way that Resident Evil ceases to be “survival horror” as it places a greater focus on action, and much in the way that Xenoblade Chronicles abandons its turn-based roots in the pursuit of an ambitious open-world action game, the changes that would be necessary to make the best dota game possible would end up being something which is not like dota at all.

In other words, once you turn dota into something that doesn’t suck, it stops being dota. And that is why dota sucks.