You might want to reconsider blizzard...overwatch is doing extremely well and has not been out for very long.

Just for off the cuff figures, the LoL subreddit has 942k subs, and overwatch has 743k subs. Overwatch is very promising

True, Overwatch is amazing, as is Blizzard. However, I caution against using subreddits as a general sense of popularity. Subreddits are a fraction of a fraction of these games playerbase (LoL and Overwatch included) and tend to largely be North American English speakers. In the case of LoL, there is a huge Chinese and Korean playerbase that is simply absent from that forum.

I'd say the same thing about twitch and esports in general. lol seems to be the premiere esport game, but I feel like other developers do a much better job catering to different types of fans- namely more casual players (Blizzard definitely falling into that category).

Riot feels less like a game developer and more like a sporting league (ala the NFL) Do they even have any other games planned?

Also Overwatch has some of best art direction/aesthetic quality of any game I've ever seen. League is my goto example of art direction failure.

I couldn't disagree more - the visuals in Overwatch are in fact the main reason I left it after the open beta.

Overwatch is very pretty (both games are in my opinion), however it is so busy. There are no visual cues in the design - characters and scenery share the same palette, important elements (like payloads, turrets, etc) don't stand out. No way of knowing where the important flow points are other than to play the game a lot (no indication of where the playload will go). Having had such a great example in TF2 that did all this so well it was just sad trying to get to grips with Overwatch.

League of Legends on the other hand had an amazing visual update a year or two ago and they explicitly addressed all these kind of issues. Making sure the map doesn't distract from the important in game information.

Both games have a lot of characters and a lot of knowledge burden for the players, so anything they can pull off the player makes a big difference when first starting.

>There are no visual cues in the design - characters and scenery share the same palette, important elements (like payloads, turrets, etc) don't stand out.

All key characters/items have a unique silhouette which makes it easy to pick out at a glance

>(no indication of where the playload will go).

There's a giant colorful line on the ground that denotes the path the payload will take

Not saying you have to like the game (It seems like it's not for you).

Silhouettes are a good start, but take these two images as an example:

http://gameplaying.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/overwatch... From this image I have no idea who is on what side in this battle. The sniper blends into her spot as she is a similar colour scheme to the metal work. Where will the car move next if it is being escorted? There is so much going on it takes a lot of knowledge to understand what is happening.

http://i.imgur.com/l3pCIgk.jpg Here on the other hand it is obvious what team everyone is part of. All character pop out as they are very different to the background (colour and shape wise). The track shows where the payload is going and where it will roll back.

TF2 has great visual clarity, it gives you information clearly without having to explain it to you. Obviously for many the lack of visual clarity in Overwatch is not a problem - which is fine, but Blizzard made a choice which is not without cost.

As for the a payload line, it definitely wasn't there in beta, it's possible they've added one, but this video from a few weeks ago suggests they have not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiAitNchwYM

That's either an old screenshot or they've disabled some features. The stock game has a red outline around all enemy characters and red names over their heads: https://vice-images.vice.com/images/content-images/2016/09/0...

The outline certainly helps with team identification. I don't play Overwatch so it is certainly possible things have improved a lot, but from the video I linked before I think it still looks very noisy to my eye.

That's funny - I play Overwatch and never have played TF2 and I can tell at a glance what's happening in the first image and have trouble distinguishing much of anything in the second (the path of the pyload is at least clear).

I think the visuals are perfect and can't relate to a single thing you write.

For a more modern game, yeah, but StarCraft 1 is just in a league of its own, specifically vanilla (the Valkyrie and devourer feel a little off-key, along with some of the BW textures). The feel of every unit, texture, and doodad and even the sound design in vanilla is just perfect.

> ... even the sound design in vanilla is just perfect

The sound of the tank when it switches to siege mode is one of the best and most satisfying sounds I have ever heard in my life.

Good old HISS-KACHOOSH.

Blizzard = equal part casual and competitive. Works for neither. Hearth Stone, Heroes of the Storm , Overwatch. All extremely boring to watch, but HS takes a bit to understand the RNG > Tactics of that game and grow tired of the unbelievable happening for and against.

Pretty boring imo. I prefer watching TF2 even though it has much fewer viewers. It's not a fair comparison, I know. The TF2 comp community has been active for almost a decade now. I'm hopeful that OW will improve in the future.

Regarding OW, a lot of what made TF2 attractive has been scrapped in the name of making the game "accessible" to casual players. That's fine of course, but it unfortunately makes the game less fun to watch at a high level. For example, there is almost zero skill required for advanced map traversal (save for Lucio). In TF2 on the other hand, rocket jumping and sticky jumping are non-trivial, and are critical for map dominance. Another thing I find weird is character caps. The goal (in theory) was to ensure that there was variety int the meta, but it doesn't look like it's working tbh. It also shows that Blizzard doesn't really trust the comp community to independently minmax strategies for team comp.

Let's not even start talking about the collectible system. TF2 does this masterfully through the trading and crafting systems. I can get every single item in the game without spending a cent, including cosmetics - without relying on RNG of course. Blizzard on the other hand is in it for the $$$. Have you ever heard of a card game where you can't trade cards? An absolute joke!

But Blizzard is doing quite a few things damn well. Most prominently, their approach to openly communicating changes and stuff that's in progress is very refreshing imo. I hope other devs learn from this approach.

I wouldn't call overwatch boring to watch

Has it not dropped off in number on Twitch?

It seems more like there was an unusual spike that wore off quickly [1]. Still, an order of magnitude fewer viewers than LoL [2].

[1] http://sullygnome.com/temp/bd061c88-c4f9-4f70-9231-a5089bbd7...

[2] http://sullygnome.com/temp/d49580c6-7a16-4601-915b-df42bc752...

I find Starcraft2 fun to watch but it's not like I hang out on twitch to watch each day. Usually if a tourney lines up with a weekend where I can stay up until 3am is where I indulge :)

Dwindling twitch numbers doesn't always mean a game isn't fun to watch.

> All extremely boring to watch

What? I've watched Hearthstone and Overwatch on Twitch several hours a day since launch and I will probably never be bored. They are by far the best streaming games out there IMO.

In fairness Hearthstone was never meant to be competitive and I wish Blizzard would just have a separate "competitive" bracket where they ban all the RNG cards. Trying to make a game that fills both niches of casual rng-based play and competitive tournaments leads to a less good product.

If you don't HS because of RNG, try DireWolf games, namely Eternal.

Overwatch seems like it shipped with servere networking issues that were plastered over by lowering the rate the server ran game simulations at. The nature of the issue and the way the lead was kind of buried until they had a fix months later (they hardly ever mentioned the setting that masked it until then) make me curious if that was nearly a showstopper for them, or more of a stretch goal for them.

AFAIK the server has always run at the same rate, and the update was just to how often the server sent new data to clients — it would receive client updates and run the game very frequently, but only send updates every 47 ms or so. I feel like rather than being some critical issue they were trying to bury, it's more likely they just didn't initially think updating client state for every single frame was necessary, or at least not high-priority.

The details buried at the bottom of patch notes pointed to there being severe bugs with the higher rate from clients going out of sync to abilities not working (it was under the "high bandwidth" option in patch notes)

That wasn't their first, either. Were you there for release day of vanilla D3? Millions bought it at midnight only to stay offline for a couple days.

Here is interview with Overwatch SEs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ

Valve is pretty cool. Both their products and their internal policies.

And regarding Riot, their marketing is (was?) really shady.

> And regarding Riot, their marketing is (was?) really shady.

If you're going to throw shade like this it'd be helpful to bring some examples, I have no idea what you're referring to so this contributes nothing to my understanding other than FUD.

I'm a long time Dota player, I started playing in 2005. Pendragon, one of the original Riot employees (maybe co-founder? can't really remember), owned the official Dota site, dota-allstars.com.

Not long after launching LoL, Pendragon replaced the whole site, including: hero page descriptions, various Dota related web-tools, forum, etc., with a JPEG link thanking the Dota community for all the fish and pointing everyone to the LoL site.

He released the forum database available 5 years later, I think, when it didn't matter anymore.

The LoL advertising during the early period was extremely Dota-hostile. Dota 1 had its flaws, but they were basically pissing all over it.

Tournaments where LoL was played were paid to ban any kind of LoL competitors (generally aimed directly at Dota 2).

Etc., etc.

As one of the people who lived through/was affected by this, I can't ever in good faith support or work for Riot because I just can't shake the "this is the kind of person I would never want to work with" feeling Pendragon earned himself. Since he's one of the primary founders, that feeling is inextricably emotionally tangled up with how I feel about the company as a whole.

Here's a video that goes in depth if y'all are wondering what this is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBI9NlPqRi0

Thankfully it doesn't matter anyway, because Dota 2 is simply a better game ;)

ALL LIES - Pendragon replaced the whole site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100712013033/http://www.dota-a...

The wayback machine is great. I heard these rummors years ago and they never stop. Look up the site from whatever date you want. Mescon closed allstars.com on July 22, 2010 citing dropping statistics and his love of League of Legends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

DoTA -Allstars is a variant of DoTA and had been passed down from one person to the next in development and is stil developed by IceFrog at Valve.

Dude, you even have the guts to use caps. I was there, I had an account with basically the same name (http://da-archive.com/index.php?showuser=725213). Then one day my account went poof, with not much notice. Not a problem for a free service, but a lot of people volunteered to get the forum database and migrate it.

Guess what... he released it when LoL was entrenched, a few years later. That's how you can see my profile, on a tribute site where someone imported the database dump.

But at that point the community had already left and the valuable Dota web property was used to ramp up LoL. LoL would have made it without it, but these tactics where shady.

Blizzard Shut eventually shut down the website. It was actually there in the way back machine and then Riot bought the website then sold it to Blizzard. Blizzard then shut down the website.

Not lies the thing he took down is the forum. https://www.reddit.com/r/DOTA/comments/12zjm6/access_to_the_...

So the forum went down but not the website. AND the website didn't redirect to League of Legends and it is actually the wrong name?

Altered Truths?

Minor correction: DotA-Allstars is no longer actively maintained, as of a few Dota 2 patches ago.

http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Game_Versions

How they listen to their community? It took literally years for a sandbox mode and replays to be implemented, both of which the community carried on about for ages. For a game that wants to grow in professional competitive circles, those features are pretty damn fundamental and it blows my mind that they took this long to exist.

I'd also argue that they're not too keen to try new things, given that even the devs themselves intentionally pigeonhole champions into a strict set of roles [1], something that has resulted in a relatively stale meta (another frequent complaint about the game from some circles). In their defence, this sort of locked-down style of meta evidently works for a large number of players, so I understand why they don't rock the boat on that regard.

[1]: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/gameplay/...

Dota has always been much more interesting to me. It's like a sandbox full of overpowered stuff that they leave for the community to figure out how to best exploit. And lol is like yep this patch you will use these champions and you will play them in this manner. And if you don't you will be punished heavily by other players for not playing "correctly".

I say it without any understatement that Icefrog is probably the best game-balancing developer ever.

Riot try hard to be the new Blizzard but it won't work, they have just one game which is very popular but it's nothing compare to Starcraft / Warcraft universe in term of quality. I really don't like MOBA ( HoTS included ) it's the type of game that killed RTS / MMO.

Are you aware that Riot Games is wholly owned by Tencent? Not disagreeing with you but they're part of a much bigger picture. Tencent even owns 12% or something of Blizzard.

> Riot try hard to be the new Blizzard

In what way?

I'm not so sure. They've banned players for not playing the game how they've decided that you need to play the game.

Is Riot still using an Adobe Air client as a launcher for League of Legends?

They have a new client that doesn't used Adobe Air anymore.

When asked what technologies they use in the new client:

"HTML/JS/CSS for the UI, C++ for the core functionality. We're planning on publishing a deep dive blog on this during alpha, so make sure to keep your eyes out for it!" [1]

edit: "ggregoire" posted a better answer below [2].

[1] http://na.leagueoflegends.com/na/site/2016-season-update/cli... (See the comment posted by Riot employee "CapnBranFlakes")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13438077

They have written and released a new client at the end of 2016. They use HTML, JavaScript and C++.

More info: https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/architecture-league-c...

I don't think so. They just released a new client (might still be in beta, I have not logged in for months).

I don't think there is even a comparison between Riot/LoL vs. Valve/Dota2 when it comes to esports prize pools (Dota2 3x's LoL?)... Blizz is throwing a lot of money around too but it feels desperate.

Perhaps the deficit demonstrates Riot's skill in maintaining their community?

Re, the community:

Early on riot was horrible at community management. They fired Bobaganoosh, eliminated all RP aspects of League by cutting out descriptions, stories, and the JoJ! A lot of people started to flee, and when Riot realized it, they promoted Nikita from intern to the posterchild female that gamer guys oogled. Around that time, before I quit playing I angrily sent an email how Riot was killing their community and needed to do some sort of "Summoner Highlight" segment to promote their fans that care. Nikasaur picked up on that idea or already had it and started showcasing summoners, which was cool.

I'm glad they've moved on and up from that. Jax dodge best dodge.

This Moba and TowerDefence genres that started as maps and mods of RTS games (Age of Empire 1/2 and WarCraft3).

I personally find this grinding gameplay style boring. Like Farmville or playing at a casino or lottery. Pointless and boring repetitive. I prefer real games.

Sadly, triple-A RTS games are no more, no new release for 10 years (beside SC2, which I dislike). Halo Wars 1 and C&C4 marked the end, and the low point of RTS by causualisation to fit the consoles. Whereas modern games like Watch Dogs 2 on consoles have a more complex control schema and RTS elements with it's drone and hacking.

One day I want a new AoE and C&C with modern graphics as PC first triple-A game.

You're essentially arguing nothing more than personal preference; I don't think this holds much weight beyond that. You could essentially make the exact same statements about chess. "Every game starts exactly the same, the pieces never vary (without modding), and there hasn't been a new release for centuries. Yawn." Not everyone likes chess either, granted, but it's hard to deny that the variations that can arise from a simple set of rules can continue to compelling experiences for players.

Your line of reasoning makes zero sense. In a single comment you manage to claim MOBA type games are "Pointless and boring repetitive." but then celebrate RTS-style games which have similar mechanics to MOBAs.

> I prefer real games.

FWIW MOBA's and TD style games are real games.

To each his own. I find DOTA (a MOBA) extremely entertaining. Far from repetitive. There are so many heroes with so many different dynamics that can arise from one game to the next.

I don't really consider it a grind at all. MMPORGs are where the true grinding occurs.

Dawn of War: Warhammer, Age of Wonders 3, Paradox games, Civilization...

It may not be quite like it used to, but strategy as a broader genre is still going strong.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak also came out in 2016 and was a great RTS.

TBH blz neglects war3 because they are riding the wow cash cow.

War3 has always had a healthy community. In China war3 community was the pincle of any gaming community in history.

Blz stops releasing balancing patch after 1.23, not sure exactly. Then the games all become identical. The players dwindles. Most go to war3 DotA. Even then blz had a chance to capture the next big thing in their ecosystem. They neglected it.

War3 has been a total disappointment for me personally. War3 game is way more entertaining imho. Blz really advanced the state of art of RTS by mixing traditional RTS with RPG elements (I bet it's not blz invented). The graphics shows a good presentation appealing to showing to large crowd.

Sadly they squandered the golden opportunity...

What do you mean 'real games'? Mobas have far less in common with Farmville or casinos than MMOs; did you mean to bash those?