If you go back to what I originally said, my main argument was that a game's skill-ceiling is determined by how many meaningful choices a player is offered at any given second while playing said game. In this game, at least the way you describe it, the player must move their characters in one of ~10 different directions every millisecond, and continue doing this for minutes (which become hours) at a time. In essence, the amount of meaningful choices the player has to make, EVERY SINGLE SECOND, while playing this game, is astronomically higher than in most other games in existence. One wrong choice out of thousands and you're dead.
In addition to that, you've proven my point about complexity. Do you not think that hundreds of thousands or millions of bullets being sprayed across the screen in certain patterns over a period of seconds, minutes, and hours amounts to complexity? To ask the player to memorize every single bullet, moving in tandem with thousands of others at any given millisecond, on every pixel of the screen, and learning these complex and intense patterns are, from what you're describing, something a person could spend a LIFETIME doing and still not be able to beat the game. This kind of intellectual and mental burden is a level of complexity way beyond what most games would ever require of you. Even DotA requires less than a full time undergraduate college semester's worth of knowledge in order to be proficient at, and while some may argue that that's a LOT of learning, it's nothing compared to the intellectual tax and complexity of Futari, the game you've described. You may not choose to see millions of bullets in particular patterns as complexity, but it most certainly is friend, because complexity can appear in many different ways.
Actually, I think you entirely missed what I was saying here.
One of the biggest things you kept saying about Dota.... or, well, not so much you, as half of the blasted fanbase.... is that Dota's complexity of play is one of it's biggest assets and creates alot of depth. That Dota is hard to learn to play, and has all of these complicated mechanics about it, pretty much IS the key thing that people like to repeat about it. They think that that is what creates the challenge. You have to learn how to last hit. You have to learn how to pull. You have to learn how items are crafted. You have to learn how items synergize. You have to learn the matchups. And so on.... it's a very, very large list. Futari? For all it's difficulty, the actual difficulty of simply playing the game is.... non-existent. You have to learn how to move. You.... well you shouldnt have to learn how to SHOOT, because you just hold a button down. That's it. That's all there is. That's the thing: There's an enormous difference there BEFORE you actually get to the part where the real difficulty begins. In Dota, or any competetive game, what I refer to as "true" difficulty begins the moment you confront your opponent. Learning the controls and such? Pah. That's just the preamble. Same as in Futari or any shmup; that's just the prelude to the curtain of doom. And that's the thing about it that gets me: Dota gets all of these complexities that, instead of adding to the depth of the gameplay..... the gameplay being everything that happens once your opponent enters the scene.... instead, it adds to the "learning how to play" part. You have to spend too much time on mechanics that easily COULD be simplified without losing the challenge. Futari, or any shmup.... hell, freaking Space Invaders... proves that the "learning how to play" part doesnt at all need to be ultra complicated for the actual game as a whole to be ultra difficult. The two are entirely split. Futari's extreme difficulty, also, I mostly used as an example; and that's just that one mode. The other modes are more.... normal-ish. The arguement could be applied to anything in that genre.
People always say the same thing about games like Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, blah blah blah. How the skill ceiling is way high, and you gotta do all these things, learn all the frame whatsits and combo notations and hitbox somethings and blah blah blah, and that's WHY it's so high....
....and I say that's all a load of rubbish. Why? Because I've never met even a single opponent in any of those games (that I actually play alot, I dont do Street Fighter for instance, it's too slow-paced for me) that DID those things.... and yet didn't end up losing to me ANYWAY. And I do none of them, this due to finding them A: boring, or B: irritating, or C: just really stupid. They're all arbitrary, and they seem to be considered necessary as if the people saying such a thing would have to admit that the game in question is actually not as complex as they like to repeat it is. And yes, with these games I know what *actual* high level play looks like.... I'm not saying "Oh, I took down some local guy that's good at tournaments, clearly I'm really great". I mean "I've played them absolutely to freaking death for years, and for the one I play most I knocked out the second-ranked guy in the region awhile back, not just this minor area, and have seen Evo and all that to compare to". It's the genre I'm best at, better than shmups (which should say something, to anyone that's seen me do those) and I do literally not even a bit of that stuff I consider arbitrary. I found that it DOESNT add much of anything to the games, despite popular opinion, and so far, nobody's been strong enough to fully prove me otherwise.
While you are obviously an extremely talented player and naturally good at fighting games, what you've just presented is only anecdotal evidence for your argument. In Super Smash Brother Melee, for example, a player who has mastered all the advanced tech skills (of which there are well over 50), character matchups, and movement mechanics will have a massive advantage over someone who is simply good at fighting games. That's because mastery of said mechanics allows the player to perform many actions that a player who is using only the basic mechanics can not, and to do them much more quickly (significantly higher actions per second). Master of fighting games you may be, I highly doubt you could beat the renowned masters of tech skill such as Mew2King, Mango, Armada, and many others who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to these techniques.
Hm, I wouldnt be so sure about that.
If those players are attached to a game I'm not into as much, in this case, Smash? Then indeed not, I probably cannot beat them. Ye gods, not as rusty as I am. I'm getting back into that one, but I've only just started back in on it, and it DEFINITELY isnt Melee, which I dont like.
But something like Guilty Gear? Been there, done that. Yes, against players of the sort of level of which you speak (seriously, I've put *alot* of hours into fighting games, specifically ones of that exact type. That I have literally nothing but free time, all the time, just makes this worse... ahh, I really have no life, do I, haha). It's not that I dont use all of the game mechanics.... because I do. Were I playing Melee, I'd be using all of them 50 techs you speak of. It's that I dont do all of the EXTERNAL stuff. The game itself does not have a funky little screen that comes up during the middle of fights where you look at frame data or something like that.... that's an outside activity, not a mechanic of the actual fight. Nor does it have you suddenly stop moving, and drop a practice dummy (that doesnt move) for you to start hitting. That, too, takes place outside of normal matches. A HUGE number of things like this are there, that are entirely outside of the fight, and sometimes, like with frame data, done out of the game entirely. But actually playing the game? Playing it well? MASTERING it? It's not about any of those things. What matters, as far as real mastery, is what you do in-game, VS what your opponent does; THAT determines wether you've mastered it or not. All of that frame data and whatnot, that's all completely useless if you CANT HIT ME. It stops mattering. The same with character matchups.... your guy has an advantage supposedly over my guy? Pah. If I hit you enough, and you fail to hit me.... that matters not. Things like that. Or if I do something that's fast enough to just overwrite what you just tried. In GG, as well as Arc's other games, there is a game mechanic called a "burst". I wont go into the whole explanation, but the idea is that if your burst is charged, you can be in the middle of getting smacked around by a combo (not blocking), hit the Burst, and your character leaps straight up, there's a flash, and your opponent is knocked away. This is a fast move, it happens very quickly. It's meant to sort of be the ultimate defense; it's very limited but when used right it can help you alot. Of course.... that doesnt matter if the burst doesnt work. If I'm in the middle of hitting you, right, and suddenly you jump up to burst (and again, this is an extremely fast thing), I can do a cancel (spend super meter to cancel current animation, used mostly for making combos) into blocking, you'll finish your burst, but because I'm blocking, it'll do nothing.... and I'll simply continue from where I left off. That sort of thing.... you cant learn by looking at frame data. None of that external stuff will give you the ability to do this. All of that complexity wont help you.
Basically, it's doing things in a different way, learning in a different way, as opposed to doing things or learning things in a "better" way, which is usually the arguement used here. I dont need to learn in the hyper complicated way, in order to play at a hyper-powered level. There's a long-ass reason as to why I specifically can do this, but that's not relevant to Dota and all of that... that I can do it at all is enough. What I'm basically pointing out is that all that REALLY matters is what happens once you're in the thick of things.... the skill ceiling isnt risen by all of that needless complexity that takes place outside of it. You can have a high skill match with most or all of that stuff removed. Which, again, is like the difference between Dota and other games. That added complexity it has is not necessary, in terms of producing a high-skill environment. What matters is only what you do with what's there. Just as I can ignore the fighting-game external stuff during a match without my skill level being affected, so too can game designers go against the idea of adding extra complexity, without destroying the skill ceiling. That there's no denying or no pulling or no.... whatever.... just doesnt matter. If your opponent is still better than you in one of these mobas (or whatever), you're going to have one hell of a challenge on your hands nonetheless, and because of this, your own skill can still go higher, which is proven by the "other guy is better than you" bit. The skill ceiling simply isnt quite where.... or what.... people like to think it is.
....hopefully that analogy is actually making sense, because I'm not entirely sure it is. Ahh, this always happens to me when debating, is I'll lose track of what I was saying in my previous horrible text blob...
The rest of your argument seemed to come down to personal preference but I'll try to paraphrase each part as not to make this post too entrenched:
Last hitting: You said that denying is just another form of last hitting. Well yes, but it allows the support to last hit, giving him more options than simply right clicking the enemy hero occasionally, and allows him to have a bigger impact on the lane.
Laning: You said that the laning phase of DotA is boring, but also that the lethality of the game is too high. These two statements seem to be in conflict with one another. If the lethality of the game is so high, I see no reason the laning phase has to be boring, and played with the right combination of heroes, it usually isn't. You also made a statement that you don't want to own new players, you want a fair challenge. My cousin and I usually pick a powerful combination of heroes, then go to THEIR safelane (sometimes called the suicide lane for the allied team) to give ourselves the extra challenge of trying to win a difficult lane on their turf. Trust me, pulling off a duo in the 'suicide lane' is never easy, and often results in disaster.
Teleporting: You said you don't like teleporting because the game lethality is too high? Then you brought up some kind of reference about holding down the Alamo alone or something to that effect. Such sentiments aren't relevant to me. Being able to teleport to help an ally is one of the major things that separates DotA from most of the other MOBA games. It takes a high level of map awareness, planning, and decision making to decide when it's worth it to leave your current lane or activity to jump to an ally's aid, and it can completely change the course of the game. It also vastly adds to the amount of meaningful choices available to the player at any given moment. Yes, a TP scroll takes up an inventory slot, because it's so incredibly valuable ;p
Ahh, to clarify a bit:
Laning: The problem of "slow laning" plus "high lethality", to me, basically means that the action is too short, the non-action is too long. It's a LONG game, one way or another, and laning periods are also long. Combat, when it happens, is short as heck, due to the lethality. So to my eyes, what this means is that when the exciting parts DO happen.... they're over so very quickly. They end up not using up very much of that laning time, and as such, they dont break up the dull bits very well. A quick few swats, and it's over, and it's back to waddling back and forth, poking minions again. Something like that. I prefer the way other games do it, because the prolonged combat means it takes up more of the laning phase, and can also be combined with the bit where you're dealing with creeps/minions/somethings. It's a CONSTANT back-and-forth, attacks flying all over the place, as opposed to Dota's way, where you dont do it at all until that final moment, where the final moment is the ENTIRE fight.
Teleporting: yeah, very subjective. It's that lethality bit again. The other games simply make something like TP scrolls not necessary. You still need all the map awareness and all of that, and you still need to BEGIN your travel quickly, to go help.... you just dont need a special teleport thing taking up space, because you can use your own actual movement and area navigation instead. You run there. The TP scroll just always felt... unnecessary, because of the lethality aspect. Again though.... very subjective. Some people really do like just blinking across the world, hah.
Of course, the other way around.... bloody FLASH in League, yeah? I always hated THAT too. Why is it even a "selected" skill if you ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE IT? Argh.
But yeah, I too am looking forward to seeing how HotS goes forward with all of these ideas. It's interesting, because they seem to be trying to hold onto these old ways of doing things while also NOT holding onto them. A lack of items, yet still creating situations involving careful builds, just as if you DID have items. Stuff like that. That seems to be the entire game's design philosophy... change it up alot, but not REALLY.
It'll sure as heck be a test of their design skill, to see if the final version of the game can pull that off!
I do wish they'd start handing out more of the entry keys though. I keep talking to people about this game, but they cant play it for themselves, because they dont have a key yet! It's.... kind of irritating. A certain friend of mine is like you, he loves Dota and is quite interested in HotS, and I can explain it to him.... but I just cant REALLY convey what it's like by just words. He'd have to play it... and he cant!
Hate that about beta testing sometimes. Moreso with multiplayer games than single-player.
All of this does make for alot of interesting debate though. .....interesting PEACEFUL debate. If I rambled about this anywhere else, I'd just get screamed at...
Like I said, this all just comes down to personal opinion for the most part anyway. No reason to get upset about it!
Yes, you havent shouted at me yet; I'm amazed at this forum sometimes, really. Only here have I brought up stuff like this WITHOUT getting yelled at! It's.... kinda sad, really. So many forums I've been to, but the number of them where proper debating of gaming stuffs, instead of the screaming sort of debating, can be had is so very low.... I dunno why people are always so ANGRY all the time. Arent games supposed to be fun? Too many have lost track of that these days, I think.
...and then they keep going anyway. I dunno. I'll never get that. If you're not having a good time anymore and are just angered all the time with the game, why keep going? Just doesnt make sense to me, but they do it anyway.
