Author Topic: Moba balance comparison, please comment  (Read 183079 times)

Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #405 on: February 18, 2014, 06:28:07 pm »
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #406 on: February 18, 2014, 08:56:21 pm »
Played my first game of Strife. Impressions:

The good (and the new)

1. Feels great! Very nice graphics, responsiveness, presentation, and overall feel.

2. Integrated courier. Each player gets their own (invincible courier) that can deliver items to them from the base, then has a short cooldown before it can be used again.

3. Health and mana regen when out of battle for ~15 seconds. With this mechanic and the previous one, the player basically never has to go back to town.

4. Speed boost while in town to get you back out into the battle quickly.

5. Killing Roshan (Nashor) gives your team a giant Gorilla that goes down a lane and kills things (mostly towers).

Awesome mechanic
Last hitting still exists but gold is automatically split between any allied heroes in the lane. This makes supports vastly more relevant. Honestly it's pretty genius.

The interesting...

1. Each player gets a "pet" which they choose from outside the game and which persists between games, giving you special abilities and growing in level over time.

2. They keep the LoL "bush" mechanic, it's almost exactly the same.

3. All heroes free to play.

The bad...

1. There's some kind of mastery/crafting/item system that levels up your power outside the game. I suppose the pet is part of this as well. I obviously hate this kind of thing but I know too little about it at the moment to understand how much of an actual impact that it has.

Overall excited, looking forward to what else they do with it.
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Offline Riabi

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #407 on: February 19, 2014, 07:00:35 am »
From what you can tell, how important is last hitting?

Offline Misery

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #408 on: February 19, 2014, 09:22:51 am »
Well, my damn connection is fixed finally, getting rid of the old modem (again) finally, FINALLY did the trick, after waaaayyyyyyyyyyyy too long dealing with it.  Mighta done it earlier, but... snow... so much snow... it never stops...

And about bloody time, I've barely touched any of the multiplayer stuffs in like a month and a half.

Granted, I'll still have to put up with Comcast's occaisional outages that happen entirely on their side, or the bit where the connection goes really wonky if there's big storms around, but that's much less irritating than it only working for 2 minutes at a time.

Lessee, as for this Strife game:

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2. Integrated courier. Each player gets their own (invincible courier) that can deliver items to them from the base, then has a short cooldown before it can be used again.

Ahhhhh, I like this one.  Dota, I dont like the courier system very much.  Not because it's a bad gameplay concept, because it definitely isnt, it's a pretty good idea, but because you have to deal with the entire team having ONE of the things, and, well..... yeah, you cant always rely on your teammates to be fair about it (or logical about it) unless you're always playing with the same group of people, which many players such as myself cannot do.

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5. Killing Roshan (Nashor) gives your team a giant Gorilla that goes down a lane and kills things (mostly towers).

This had me at "giant gorilla".

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Last hitting still exists but gold is automatically split between any allied heroes in the lane. This makes supports vastly more relevant. Honestly it's pretty genius.

This is a good one too.  I'm glad more games are doing this now, the last hitting is a bit too blasted obnoxious for my tastes, so this sounds good.  Dawngate does a very similar thing, though it's dependant on the "role" you choose, but generally as a support I dont have to always be out of gold, and I dont have to last-hit anything, period.  I just need to be nearby when minions/creeps/mobs/somethings are killed, wether they're last-hit properly or not.  And I can get more gold by simply irritating my opponent with constant pokes, which is highly entertaining.  Typically I have enough to get all the items I need, something I cant really say about Dota or LoL at all.   Infinite Crisis is doing something about the last-hitting as well, in that missing a last hit doesnt cause less money to be had, it instead simply drops the money onto the ground in the form of a coin that you must pick up, instead of giving it directly to you.

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2. They keep the LoL "bush" mechanic, it's almost exactly the same.

Feh.  IS there a non-Dota moba that doesnt do this?  I mean, I can sorta see WHY they do it, but.... bah.  Never cared for it too much.

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3. All heroes free to play.

About bloody time this one happened.  I understand the F2P model and why they work the way they do, but still.  Valve can do it in a different way, so others can too, they just havent...

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1. There's some kind of mastery/crafting/item system that levels up your power outside the game. I suppose the pet is part of this as well. I obviously hate this kind of thing but I know too little about it at the moment to understand how much of an actual impact that it has.

Eeehhhh.   This one I dont mind too much, in concept.  My one problem with it is that players dont START with the necessary whatsits to fully use it, they must be earned, very, VERY slowly.  At least the exact implementation has been different enough from one game to the next.  Dawngate's is.... er..... confusing, frankly.  That one's complicated and I havent fully grasped it yet, but I do like the way it works. It'd take too long to give a full explanation of it.  Infinite Crisis finally added this sort of thing as well (as I knew they would) but I havent had a chance to mess with it yet so I dont know how it works.  The pet thing in Strife here sounds a little weird, but no weirder than the others, I suppose.  Probably.



Be sure to let us know what your impressions are as you continue further into it.  I'm interested in this one.  I've a feeling I'm not getting into it for awhile, but as new ones go Dawngate and Infinite Crisis will hold me over just fine for now.



Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #409 on: February 19, 2014, 01:49:01 pm »
From what you can tell, how important is last hitting?
I haven't played that many games, so you can take this with a grain of salt (you can basically take everything I say with a grain of salt), but last hitting seems moderately important relative to the other MOBAs I've played.

Having said that, it's fairly easy to do. It's probably on the League of Legends level of last hitting, and since there's no denying, it makes it even easier. If you're a DotA veteran (or a MOBA veteran), it should be no problem. Add this to the fact that your lane mate's last hits also add to your gold count, and it's probably the easiest out of all the games I've played. The hardest place to last hit (and the exception of course) being the attempt to do it under a tower. In addition, there are like a million "neutral camps" (no idea why), so even if you suck at last hitting this seems to be another decent source of income that you can exploit.

Overall though, at least at this point in closed beta (i.e., I'm not sure if this is intentional), the biggest deciding factor of a game is each team's control of the "team objectives". So basically, what decides if you win is how well you can defeat the towers, inhibitors/rax, the "dragon/gold fury", and then the Roshan equivalent. There is definitely an emphasis on team objectives at this point. If you kill the "Roshan" monster boss, like I said you get a giant gorilla that eats towers for breakfast and is extremely difficult to kill.

In addition, once the inhibitor/rax is gone, it simply doesn't come back. So in this sense, once again, team objectives are extremely important. Finally, the LoL "Dragon" equivalent gives your entire team quite a bit of gold when killed, yet unlike in LoL it respawns like every 2.5 minutes so it's potentially a huge source of gold for your entire team and is a constant area of contention.

The fact that (at this point) there are no ward consumables in the game rewards the team that has greater map control, because it allows them to have greater control/domination of team objectives.

Wards have been replaced (I use this word lightly) by "observatories" which are like the Starcraft 2 equivalent to the Xel'Naga Towers. In other words, if one player (from either team) walks near one of these observatories, it gives that team vision in a large area around it. Once again, these kinds of features give a large advantage to the team which establishes map control.

So far I'm really liking the out-of-combat self-regeneration system. It saves you a lot of time and keeps you in the battle, per say, much more than any other MOBA I've played so far. Being able to stay in the action is a big part of establishing that map control I was talking about earlier, and it's probably a bad idea to be taking a lot trips back to base when you have so many mechanics which remove the need.

Sorry this was written badly, I just got finished with a massive Spanish exam and my brain is mush.
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #410 on: February 20, 2014, 12:20:36 am »
Well, they just implemented the matchmaking system into the beta today.

It's the coolest MM system of any MOBA I've seen so far. You pick your hero/champion/god/character/person before you even QUEUE for matchmaking.

I have no idea how it sorts things, but for my last attempt, I was in a game within like ~5 seconds of picking my character and hitting the "find match" button. Not sitting in a lobby waiting for people to figure out what the hell they're doing, not discussing strategies or arguing roles with my team, literally at the loading screen of the game 5 seconds later.

I have no idea how they're planning to balance this. Perhaps the idea of solidified "roles" has been removed, and since wards are no longer in the game, and since all heroes share last hit gold in the lane, it's not super important that you pick a specific team composition in order to win the game?

I don't know, but so far I really like it.
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #411 on: February 20, 2014, 08:52:34 pm »
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline Misery

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #412 on: February 21, 2014, 09:13:52 am »
Feh, that's tempting..... but I'll pass on it myself for now.

Cant stand "beta event weekends" and similar things.  I just avoid them like the plague.  Tend to be a glitchy lagsplosion of laggy lag. Among other problems.  And I aint good with time limits and scheduling.

I'll just continue to wait for more info and a proper, full beta account.

Definitely feel free to continue to explain stuff about the game as you play further into it though.

Offline Riabi

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #413 on: February 21, 2014, 09:27:14 am »
Feh, that's tempting..... but I'll pass on it myself for now.

Cant stand "beta event weekends" and similar things.  I just avoid them like the plague.  Tend to be a glitchy lagsplosion of laggy lag. Among other problems.  And I aint good with time limits and scheduling.

I'll just continue to wait for more info and a proper, full beta account.

Definitely feel free to continue to explain stuff about the game as you play further into it though.

Same here... 100%.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #414 on: February 21, 2014, 10:00:36 am »
A stress-test weekend is kind of a double-edged sword for the players, yea.  On the one hand you get to play a game you're (probably) pretty excited about.  On the other hand you're walking into a situation where a complete lag-death-of-the-universe would constitute a successful outcome for the developer (as that's a useful test result).
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #415 on: February 21, 2014, 10:18:13 am »
Haha, you guys look at it from an entirely different perspective than I do, which is more akin to: All the noobs are coming, ANNIHILATE!

In all seriousness, after winning my first 4 MM games, things are starting to get a bit more difficult. There is a small bit of lag (so far) on their MM servers, but it's something I'm sure they'll fix relatively soon. They've been running the HoN servers for 3+ years now, so they've got quit a bit of experience with this.

Oh by the way, there's now a popular DotA tournament running Captain's Draft mode instead of the usual Captain's Pick mode. In other words, players have to pick from a randomly selected pool of 24 heroes instead of the default 90 something in the game.

As you can imagine, this makes for intense and epic games where unusual and funny combinations are being used, breaking the monotony of the established metagame.

You can watch Na'Vi using Pudge in the second set of games in the tournament. HILARIOUS fun.
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Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #416 on: February 21, 2014, 02:12:27 pm »
Wingflier I checked your stats today and you have a 55% win ratio in Conquest, which is  exactly what the matchmaking tries to achieve. I don't think it's that bad For you ;)
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #417 on: February 21, 2014, 02:15:23 pm »
Wingflier I checked your stats today and you have a 55% win ratio in Conquest, which is  exactly what the matchmaking tries to achieve. I don't think it's that bad For you ;)
The question is whether it achieves that by giving reasonably-evenly-matched battles, or by giving freebies and "where did you dig up teammates this bad?" in roughly equal proportion? ;)
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Offline Wingflier

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #418 on: February 21, 2014, 02:44:00 pm »
Wingflier I checked your stats today and you have a 55% win ratio in Conquest, which is  exactly what the matchmaking tries to achieve. I don't think it's that bad For you ;)
Uh, doing it in such a way that the first 20 matches were a wash for my team, then the next 20 matches were impossible to win is not exactly what I would call good matchmaking.

There have been some "even" matches (as in both teams were relatively even), but in most cases it's been a landslide one way or another. When you're getting put against people that are level 10 with a certain character and with 30 mastered gods, with people on your team that haven't even mastered a single person (happens regularly), then I've gotta say that's not a very good way of achieving balance. It may be a good way of achieving a specific ratio, but not balance.
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Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: Moba balance comparison, please comment
« Reply #419 on: February 21, 2014, 07:34:54 pm »
THAT, however, I very much agree with :P


The trueskill system is odd, to be honest. I'm not sure it's the best way to go. The idea is that it should try to match everyone against people of roughly equal skill as often as possible, and then every few matches, it'll match you up against someone who is WAY worse than you, or WAY better than you, just to see if it needs to adjust anything.
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