Improving Mobas for a solo experience

[Hearteater]

Like last hitting. I mean really, why is that even a thing? What does it add? I just don't get it.

It's a resource gathering mechanic with specific properties that the original MOBA were designed around.  It has a lot of noteworthy features that affect game play.  For example, let's consider replacing it with minions just dropping a bag of gold when they die, and after say 5 seconds, that bag disappears.  To collect the bag, you move your character over top of it.  Some of the differences include:

• Ranged characters gather gold poorly, because they must run into melee range.  This is particularly bad if they are fragile because the opposing characters can much more easily deny them access to gold.
• The ability to be a good gold farmer is tied to speed and mobility, rather than range.
• Single target characters can gather gold as efficiently (but not as fast) as AOE characters because even minions they don't personally kill drop a bag of gold they can grab.  Single target melee characters are better than single target ranged (which are the worst farmers in this system).
• In a lane with one or more allies, it is more difficult to control were gold is going, because the bags of gold are much easier to pick up by accident than it is to accidentally last-hit something.

These difference will require different character designs.  For example, ranged "carries" exit the scene because they farm so much worse.  Instead, your tough, fast melee characters get the most gold.  So now melee base stats need to come down because they'll be getting a larger boost from items, while ranged characters need to be much stronger to compensate for less gold.  Not impossible to design such a game, but different.

Riot has mentioned they'd love to do away with last hitting, but they haven't found something that fits well into its place yet.  Not to mention the issues with getting players to accept change :) .

[keith.lamothe]

Last hitting is kind of an annoying mechanic to me, I'd prefer getting x% of the gold for minions I've hit, where x is (damage I did to minion)/(damage done by all champions to minion).

But I understand that Riot's players would... well, riot

And it would be a definite step down in complexity and probably encourage a lot of strange behaviors.  Though I think last hitting in general is kind of a strange behavior, particularly combined with the dynamic of "don't push the lane until you're ready to take the tower down".  Whaddya mean I'm not supposed to nuke any enemy minion I see into the ground?

[Wingflier]

That's one thing I think DotA does better, by having denying in the game, you can keep the creep lane back until you're ready to push.  In LoL you have to push the lane, tempting your own demise if you were just wanting to farm.

Neither mechanic is that ...intuitive per say, but it's pretty easy for players to understand that press "A" and clicking a creep when it's low health will kill it and give you a reward.

One last thing I'll say is that there have been a lot of different ideas tried over the years for how to "replace" the last-hitting mechanic - Like standing in range of a creep dying gives you the gold and the exp, or like Keith said, having the gold be based on damage done.

I used to be a huge protestor for the last-hitting mechanic of ARTS games.  I feel that it slows that pace down and doesn't allow you to enjoy the "fun" part of the game, which is fighting heroes and destroying towers.  It also seems like a random skill that has nothing to do with the rest of the game.  You could be good at micromanagement, positioning, teamwork, using your skills correctly, and all the other skills required to be a good MOBA player, but if you can't last hit you'll probably still suck.

However, I think over time I've come to like it a lot more than I did.  Last hitting is a skill just like any other in the game.  It's really just an exercise in patience, timing, and playing mind-games with your enemy.  I've come to appreciate the psychological aspect involved that I didn't really pay attention to before.  Granted, when there's no enemy to be found it can become somewhat of a grind, but then again you should have no problem getting them if there's no competition.

Then again, I've had like 9 years of practice, so maybe that's why it doesn't bother me anymore

I would really respect Riot if they removed last hitting from their game.  Since you can't steal the last hits from your opponent, or play psychological mind-games with them, it seems to serve no purpose other than being a relic of DotA.  Changing it to something else would require a vast rebalance of the game, but they seem to be rebalancing champions constantly anyway.  I would respect them a lot more if they came up with something a lot more streamlined and interesting than what they have, which doesn't really fit into the context of the game they've created (in my opinion).

[Hearteater]

Last hitting allows control of gold gathering, while still allowing a lane partner to push the lane.  Since only last hits get gold, my lane partner can AOE everything, and if he kills nothing, all it does is push the lane.  I can still get 100% of the gold.  If gold was based on damage done, support players would be taking gold from their carries whenever they damaged anything.

And speaking of pushing, it is all about how safe you want to be gathering gold.  Basically, the safer one team is, the less safe the other team is, and it is a zero sum system.  There are several techniques to the early game laning phase and there is a lot of finesse involved.  Blasting through minions is like grabbing 4 systems in the first 30 minutes of an AI Wars game.  Very risky.  But if it is a snake map and you get a choke set up on the 4th system with a Gravity Drill, maybe you can make it work out.

In a MOBA, a lot depends on lane composition and where the junglers are.  You do need to (or rather should) push a lane into a tower when your opponents leave to shop, but this causes the lane to reset (meaning, the minions will meet in the middle) which is 50-50 in terms of safety for each team, but also denies the enemies an entire wave of xp and gold.  Honestly, until you've really gotten your play experience and skill up there, just trying to last hit consistently, while avoiding enemy harassment and dealing out your own harassment is plenty to worry about.

It's kind of like playing Billards, but both people are making shots at the same time, except your allowed to throw your beer at the other guy without warning, and both of you have girl friends watching that will join in suddenly.

[Wingflier]

I agree with what Hearteater is saying:

(I have do this for fun!)  Hearteater, your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of Elderberries! (hehe)

But where I disagree with him is that it's a good mechanic to ask players to literally do nothing if they don't want to push the lane.  Sometimes you don't want to push the lane, especially if you feel you're in danger and/or there's a lot of players missing.  In League, this basically just means doing nothing.  Even taking last hits pushes the lane and puts you in an unsafe position, in DotA you have the option of continuing to last hit your minions, as long as you focus more on denying theirs. 

I don't think any mechanic in the game which asks players to "do nothing" is really that good.  In many ways the resource buffs to AI War has been one way of accomplishing that.

I think there was a blog on this topic once, let me see if I can find it:  http://www.gamereplays.org/heroesofnewerth/portals.php?show=page&name=heroes-of-newerth-s2nome-article-about-denying

Pretty good read if you're interested.

[keith.lamothe]

Sometimes the last-hit + don't-push mechanics do equal do-nothing in League, at least in my experience.  Keep moving around to not make it too easy on gankers, but basically nothing.

But if there's an enemy champion in the lane, then there's usually something to do.  I generally play ranged characaters with decent harass, and I take out my inactivity on the champion's healthbar   Alternatively, avoiding them doing the same.  And I suppose one could go nail a creep camp, but I imagine the team jungler might take a dim view of that if it's on your side.

[BobTheJanitor]

Maybe I shouldn't have been so specific in my complaints. It's not just last hitting, that just stands out as the most obvious odd thing that entire game strategies have been built around. I don't expect the originals to change now, that's part of their foundation. I'm just interested in the evolution of the genre. A new game setting out to be dota-ish without the old mechanics is free to innovate without making their fans collective heads implode. Awesomenauts and Super MNC just have gold drop where the creeps die. You either pick it up or you don't. The enemy can even pick it up. In fact since most encounters in Super MNC are at range, you end up collecting more coins from your dead bots than the enemy bots.

[LaughingThesaurus]

What I find a bit interesting about that in Awesomenauts is some footage I've seen, a player will die and a teammate will actually pick up that guy's money so that it stays within the team rather than feeding the enemy. For money drops to work it seems like a mix of range and melee combat is necessary. Otherwise, like you said with Super MNC, you end up picking up a lot of your money... which seems a lot like getting rewarded for your allies dying.

[keith.lamothe]

Otherwise, like you said with Super MNC, you end up picking up a lot of your money... which seems a lot like getting rewarded for your allies dying.

Given the MNC satire of the commercialization of sports/combat, that may well be intentional

[LaughingThesaurus]

Otherwise, like you said with Super MNC, you end up picking up a lot of your money... which seems a lot like getting rewarded for your allies dying.

Given the MNC satire of the commercialization of sports/combat, that may well be intentional

Yeah let's go with that.

[BobTheJanitor]

What I find a bit interesting about that in Awesomenauts is some footage I've seen, a player will die and a teammate will actually pick up that guy's money so that it stays within the team rather than feeding the enemy. For money drops to work it seems like a mix of range and melee combat is necessary. Otherwise, like you said with Super MNC, you end up picking up a lot of your money... which seems a lot like getting rewarded for your allies dying.

Well Super MNC uses both XP and cash, although picking up cash also gives you a bit of XP. But yes, there is a bit of rewards for your own creeps dying. On the other hand, if they are dying you're probably facing off against an enemy player on the other end and you're shooting their bots at the same time. So you really do sort of both end up getting the same amount of coin that you would be getting if you were picking up the coins that came from the bots that you killed... so it pretty much evens out. If your bots aren't dying, then you're probably pushing the lane forwards, so you do get the enemy bot coin drops. It's different, but it works.

And yeah, like you said with Awesomenauts it's mostly close up fighting so you can grab the coins that drop for your teammate's death and deny them to the enemy if you're there as well. It uses no leveling at all (although characters do show a level, that's just total coin gathered divided by 100 so it's really just an at-a-glance power indicator) purely upgrades bought from the cash drops, so controlling those is a big part of the strategy.

The point being that last hit gets the gold is simply one possible way of doing this, and there's a lot of room for experimentation within the genre. If you start out with one idea and balance around it, anything could work. You could have everyone in range get xp and gold for a kill. You could have the entire team get rewarded, no matter where they are on the map. You could make enemy creep kills reward the enemy team instead of your team (that sounds insane, but both sides would have to do it or just let creeps constantly batter their towers). There's a lot of ways to experiment with the formula, and a whole lot of things besides just how you gain power to consider, and I don't think we've seen the best possible version yet by a long shot.

I'm just glad the experimentation is finally coming along. I don't know who's going to be the first MOBA version of what Half Life was for the FPS genre, suddenly making everyone realize that the formula can be twisted in all sorts of unexpected directions and become something brilliant. Or who will have the first big success with something that really bucks the trend. I was kind of hoping it would be Valve, but it appears that they plan to follow the original DOTA formula to the letter. Maybe once that's finally released they will experiment with different game modes. I can see why they're doing it standard first though, I mean Gabe could always fill a few more Olympic sized pools with money.

[LaughingThesaurus]

The thing about Super MNC that I'm not so sure about though, is just the fact that it 'just evens out'. If a competitive mechanic of a game can be described as "Well, it works out in the end" then it's not really a very deep mechanic now is it? But then, the difference between that and Awesomenauts is that Awesomenauts has some melee, some range combat.

There's an interesting dynamic there where... ranged classes could say be more powerful by default, while being weaker survivability-wise. Standard affair... but when it comes to the earning money game, they're actually slower and harder to earn money with unless they kill creeps outside of the main lanes or putting themselves in danger. That's some decisionmaking they have to do. Of course, to collect anybody's money they have to most likely be in range of the dangerous melee guys, or at least in the line of fire with all the other guys that have guns.

But then, the melee sluggers... they have it easy with how they can get money just from being in the game. No decisions to make there... but imagine if their upgrades weren't quite as strong, or that the characters aren't incredibly strong damage-wise to begin with? The decision making comes in what to do with the buckets of money that you get, not in the heat-of-the-action moment of grabbing coin here and there where safety permits.

Likewise, either team can "deny" money for the other team and earn money for themselves by just taking the money. The issue I guess develops when people are not only preventing enemies from getting money, but gaining money themselves. That seems like a pretty dominant way to play. I imagine if the game were balanced in such a way, however, where money really feels like a scarce resource, there will be more than enough fighting for it that denying money is really just a side effect of "Oh god I need upgrades for my paper armor"

I'd like something like that more than last-hitting at least. Not that last hitting is wrong, it's just not fun for me. I've tried it. I think we just don't know enough about whether we could really make something awesome like that work out. Balancing it is the tough bit. It's just last hitting has that established gameplay dynamic already, and everything in LoL/DotA/etc was balanced considering that. Imagine a game balanced on considering something like this?

Edit: Basically take what doctorfrog said and put my name on it instead. =/
Edit: I actually meant the guy above. BobtheJanitor. Whoops.

[RCIX]

This got popular while I was busy

I think there was a blog on this topic once, let me see if I can find it:  http://www.gamereplays.org/heroesofnewerth/portals.php?show=page&name=heroes-of-newerth-s2nome-article-about-denying

I honestly like the idea Nome pointed out here, and I might jsut see if I can red-bait somebody into replying to it.

(although I like the more casual model of just going for a fun build and not being punished for it rather than the more obsessive formula where you have to have a specific upgrade order and everything is all math-ed out ahead of time lest you lose horribly)

League is a lot less about this and a lot more about keeping in mind your champion's viable build choices and what each item does for you, then selecting the best item based on the enemy's purchases/champions/power.

I don't think any mechanic in the game which asks players to "do nothing" is really that good.  In many ways the resource buffs to AI War has been one way of accomplishing that.

This is my core beef with so much of MOBA design. Ganking is forcing someone to choose between doing nothing by tower hugging (or just running), and doing nothing by being dead. Zoning is forcing someone to choose between doing nothing by running away to avoid the zoner, or doing nothing by taking extreme damage/dying. Basically, all the stuff that's "i'm making you do x or you die". The other side of mechanics I hate is the "I'm doing this to deliberately take away power from you, over trying to gain more power for myself". Most of the stuff in "I'm making you do nothing" falls into this.

[Kahuna]

I mean really, multiplayer online battle arena? That could describe anything from quake ctf to a co-op game of AI War (if you stretch arena to encompass a whole galaxy

Sounds like you haven't played any MOBA games. Quake doesn't have lanes, champions/heroes, creeps, turrets, shop nor nexus. Neither does AI War. Well AI War kinda does have Nexus...

EDIT:

I've never even tried, outside of vague fooling around with bots.

Ah there.. Ok.

[Wingflier]

This is my core beef with so much of MOBA design. Ganking is forcing someone to choose between doing nothing by tower hugging (or just running), and doing nothing by being dead.

Well I like to think that complex, multifaceted decisions are still being made during these situations, they're just being made by teams instead of individual players.

In DotA, when a team of player goes to gank somebody, that gank has to be successful (hopefully with a tower), otherwise it's a huge waste of time and resources that could have been spent farming.  A big part of the Asian strategy in DotA is the idea that farming a lane is much easier and safer than going for a risky gank.  If your last-hitting skills are good enough, your team will actually make more money farming 3 lanes than ganking one. 

So while you as a player may only have a few choice durings an imminent gank, your team, and their team, have already made a very important choice from a plethora of options. 

In DotA, during an imminent gank, you have several options:

1. Try to defend the tower alone, and hope it will save you.  If there are too many opponents, this probably won't work.
2. Call for help.  If you have a competent team, they will be carrying teleport scrolls, and will come to assist you.
3. Hide in the forest.  This kind of puts you into a corner, but it wastes precious time for the enemy trying to find you/get vision of you, during which it creates extra time for your team to come assist you.
4. Juke your opponents.  If you know the map layout well you can pull off some epic juke maneuvers and possibly get out of the situation alive, and back to your base.  Using fog of war correctly in DotA is a quite a pro skill to have.  You don't need it to play the game, but it will certainly make you a better player.
5. Teleport out.  If you know you're about to be ganked, and you know your allies aren't coming, you have the option in DotA to teleport back to base quickly.  In LoL this takes 8 seconds so you'll never make it, but in DotA it only takes 3, and they have to STUN you to cancel it, not just damage you.  This gives you the option to hide somewhere safe for a few seconds and escape.  You'll still lose the tower, but it's better than losing your own life AND the tower.

In other words, I don't think "ganking" only gives the player 2 options.  In League I can see how it does because most of the options I listed above aren't available, but in DotA, your team has many choices on how to help you, and their team has many choices to make in terms of whether the gank is a worthwhile endeavor.

Zoning is forcing someone to choose between doing nothing by running away to avoid the zoner, or doing nothing by taking extreme damage/dying.

Zoning doesn't really exist in DotA, at least not to the same extreme degree as in LoL.  For one thing, creep pulling can keep your opponent from zoning you, because the more they keep the lane by their tower, the easier it becomes for you to pull.

Secondly, the denying mechanic makes zoning a bit superfluous and unnecessary.  You could miss your own last hits and put yourself in a vulnerable position to push your opponent out of the lane, or you could just deny all their creep instead and accomplish basically the same thing.  The nice thing about the denying mechanic is that the disadvantaged player is still DOING SOMETHING.  They may not be getting as many last hits as their opponent(s), but they can still get last hits, or attempt to, instead of hugging the tower.

The other side of mechanics I hate is the "I'm doing this to deliberately take away power from you, over trying to gain more power for myself". Most of the stuff in "I'm making you do nothing" falls into this.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here, possibly mana burn?  Mana burn is a powerful (and rare) mechanic in DotA, but there are ways to counter or prevent it.  For example, Anti-Mage is a hero in the game who centers around the mana burn mechanic (hence his name), but he is far from overpowered or uncounterable.  I would go so far as to say he's far from the most annoying hero to play against either.  BKB stops mana burn if I recall correctly, so that's one option.  Another option is soul-ring which drains health to give you mana, so even being at 0 mana, you can still cast a spell if used correctly.  Arcane things on your feet give your whole team a 150 mana boost, so there's another counter to having no mana.  A fully charged magic stick gives you 225 mana, so there's another possibility.

Probably the best way to counter mana burn is to just shut down or disable the person burning.  The vast majority of mana burn mechanics in the game rely on physical attacks, so if you can slow, stun, or otherwise disable the attacker, they can't burn your mana.  Heaven's Halberd is an item specifically made to "disarm" an opponent, so that's one powerful and relatively inexpensive option you have as well.

So I agree with you in one sense:  If you do nothing to plan for these kinds of events and mechanics, they basically cause you to "do nothing".  But there are many things you can do in advance (starting with the picking screen) to ensure that doesn't happen.  This is a very different design philosophy than most games have nowadays (punishing you for mistakes you may have made 20 or 30 minutes ago I mean), but personally I like it.  Punishing a player (or team) for not planning better is a good mechanic, even if a lot of people hate it.