League of Legends addresses many of your apparent concerns with Dota's game design. But guess what? Its online community is every bit as toxic and obnoxious. Both are skill-based team games that are played over the Internet, require a lot of coordination, and usually take over 30 minutes per match. You can address in-game bad manners at the margins with something like Riot's tribunal system or Valve's reporting system, but I doubt you can do much to eliminate the problem without also eliminating those essential features of their game design.
I mean, look at the great online games of yesteryear - say, Quake for example. Quake's mechanics are fundamentally simple. Run, jump, pickup stuff, shoot. There's only 9ish weapons to figure out in the average Quake-like game, and in most cases the behavior is "point at what you want to die and click the button". Learn the maps so you can control the pickups. The hardcore players will have to learn to exploit the bugs in the motion model to get a little speed edge, but that basic stuff is all there.
And in a Deathmatch game, you know what happens if you suck? You die. Over and over and over and over again. But since it's a free-for-all, there's no teammates you're letting down. Nobody screaming at you about how much you suck. And even in a teamgame, the teams are larger so one weak player can fade in the back. And none of his teammates are watching him suck and screaming at him, they're all too busy playing and can't see what he's doing through walls. If he drops out, nobody cares.
But you can't say Quake et al are low-skill. See also RTS games - RTS team-games face many of the same problems as DOTAlikes, but in most RTSes the 1V1 matchups reign supreme, and FFA is also a popular option. In a 1V1 a newbie will get utterly annihilated repeatedly and there's the same bad slippery slope of DOTAlikes, but nobody will hate the loser like you'll see in a teamgame where everybody just watched one idiotic ally spend the last 25 minutes ruining their fun. Plus, RTS games at least will give you the dignity of a quick death unlike a DOTAlike where you'll still spend several minutes watching the towers go down before the victor is declared.
You could make a super-simple DOTA-like game with only one hero to choose from and super-simple combat mechanics and you'd still see all the cultural and mechanical problems you see in modern DOTAlikes. You'd still have players screaming at the newbie who's accidentally feeding. You'd still have players hurling verbal abuse at each other while they get pointlessly pummeled because the game is functionally over but doesn't have the dignity to end even though the leveling has made it completley moribund.
It's not about skill, it's about a long-form team-game with bad slippery slopes. A low-skill game with that format would still be cruel to newbies, just like high-skill games that avoid that insanity are newbie-friendly (see any twitch-FPS for example).
Games like that already exist and they don't capture any of the aspects of Dota I find compelling. The new Infinite Crisis game is essentially the Dominion game mode from League of Legends with DC superheroes and villains. There was another game like that announced recently for iOS with the slogan "No farming, just fighting." Those games all sound terrible to me. They're tailor-made for the attention-deficient iPhone gaming generation. Can the rest of us have a few games to play?
Quake was a great game but it's strategically and tactically shallow. Dota is an intrinsically team-based game with the tactical and strategical depth of a game like Starcraft. Arguably it surpasses Starcraft's depth in some areas owing to the many 5v5 match-ups you can generate from a pool of over 100 heroes. I disagree with nearly every adulteration Riot made in designing League of Legends, but even they realize that you cannot alter these features without making a different kind of game entirely.
Not every game has to be like chess where the rule set can be learned in five minutes.
Classic FPS's in minstagib mode are generally very simple to play with a total of about 3/4 controls and are very much skill, not trivia based, and an anathema to console gamers and noobs. Skill is not about memorizing dictionaries of trivia.
Anyway, key word is trivia.
The difference in skill between the ex-pro, or even several of the just very talented players and the rest of us is immense.
The trivia helps, knowing counter items and the like helps but at high level play all sorts of things become very important. For example positioning of your unit(s), to either miss a spell being cast or to physically block the person you are trying to kill makes the difference between a major win or complete loss of a fight. Or your ability to farm, last hitting creeps, stacking/jungling and maximizing your gold per second.
So yes at low level Dota is all about the trivia. I'm a better player then a random new player because I know the characters, their abilities and the items. But at the end of the day despite putting in hundreds of hours I pale in comparison to a Excellent player because I don't have the reflexes, or the split second analytical mind. In addition, and most importantly, I've not put in the hours upon hours of purposeful practice that a pro dota player has.
Dota is a skill based game.
There are built in user contributed guides that suggest what what to build and why, with the guide's author comments on both individual items and skills, for every hero and numerous alternative builds. There is in game voting on the quality of each guide. It's a cinch now in Dota 2 to buy basic stuff even if you've literally never played a hero before, and also easy to try experimental builds for fun right in game.
The skill is all judgement calls and spacing. Memorizing item or skill progressions is irrelevant and indeed "trivial" in the sense that it plays little part in the game or your thinking during it. On the other hand, having the skill to use the blink dagger and catch opponents or save yourself is essential.
Not to say that there isn't a fair share of unintuitive things. A good example is how even though the objective of the game is destroy the enemy base most of the times a team will avoid attacking the enemy buildings until the very end of the game.
You're saying that because obviously you haven't progressed past the trivia plateau.
There's a LOT of skill involved in DotA. You need a few hours of play to acquire the basic mechanics and principles of the game, but you need a lot more hours to become a good player - even if you already know your heroes and your builds. I've spent more than 1000 hours playing the original DotA (since 2004) and Heroes of Newerth, and I've seen a lot of mediocre players with a shitload of experience, as well as a lot of absolutely terrific players with only a few hours of play behind them.
Memorizing the basic knowledge required to play the game doesn't make you instantaneously a good player.
Besides, there is a great portion of skill in laning. You can watch best players like dendi winning 9 times of 10 on the middle lane against other top players. It's a spectacular feat.
It's a third person, heavily skill shot based MOBA. So no you don't have to be pro to learn how to play. The skills rollover from other games (especially WoW), so you don't really have to relearn basic mechanics. And new players are matched with all new players (so besides from smurfs), you should have a relatively easy time.
As a side note, Valve has recently crowdsourced the prizepot for The International 3 with great success (their large DotA2 tournament) [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/MasterCard/status/354621397135409152 [2] http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/
MOBA games aren't really that hard to get into. Millions of players find it rather easy to get into. In fact, if numbers are anything to take into account, MOBA games may be the easiest type of competitive game to actually get into.
To be clear, my complaint is not about skill-intensive gaming. My problem with the DOTA format is that it makes you hate the weak teammates in so many different ways, and putting together a single match requires such a large commitment of time from so many players.
Compare vs. TF2 where the 6v6 pro circuit exists but casual players still have access to 12v12 pubs where nobody cares if you suck or you drop. Or compare vs. StarCraft where there's an extensive single-player campaign and a 1v1 community online, and the only person who hates you if you screw up in 1v1 is yourself, and at least when you fail in a 1v1 starcraft game the end will come blissfully swiftly. And nobody would say that SC or TF2 are low-skill games.
Do you hate rocket jumping and wall hugging in Quake as well? Both are essential to playing Quake at a decent level. Both started as accidental features (call them bugs if you will) but were then given the official stamp of approval and carried forward through all the sequels.
In other words, you are committing the genetic fallacy.
Denying started as an accidental feature or bug. But it was found to be interesting and the game has since been balanced around it. Now, you can only auto-attack allied creeps when they are below 50% health, the XP from denied creeps is higher for melee heroes, etc. As a game mechanic, it emphasizes that the laning phase is a head-to-head contest between adversaries that can disrupt each other's progression through means other than direct harassment. The usual retort is that it's bad because it's counterintuitive. But what does that really mean? Not every game mechanic can be intuited. The rules of chess are not intuitive. Games are formal systems with a veneer of verisimilitude.
That's a subjective opinion. Creep denial is typically one of these game mechanics that differentiate skilled players from unskilled ones. I find it a highly valuable feature. It defines so much of the meta-game, particularly for the middle lane.
Dota2 seems to be a lot more newbie-friendly than the original DotA. Eg: you get hints on which items to buy and how to combine them to create better items. But I would still put it in the newbie-unfriendly category. Nothing, nothing can generate so much hate and rage as a DotA match. I have lost IRL friends to it.
Just to be clear, I love the game and I still play it when I want some adrenaline.
The skill level with DOTAlikes is not the problem.
The problem isn't DOTA (though for obvious reasons its more extreme) - its the general format of unorganized online competitive team play. If I'm bad at Starcraft for instance, and get thrown onto a ranked team game - my team suffers, and balance can only control so much of that. The social infrastructure is too limited to be effective at preventing things like rude comments, scapegoating, lack of mentoring, or easy pairing with people you enjoy playing with. Immature young adults + no consequences + people they'll never see again = crap behavior. And sadly, the social features haven't progressed (in some cases regressed) since I played TF 15 years ago.
It sounds weird but I think it taught me to be patient and to fight till the end.
There is a concede vote option in HoN, it can be called after 15 minute with 5 of 5 votes (which becomes 4 of 5 after 25 min), so if whole team agrees, you can end the misery.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090624132302/http://www.gotfrag...
Long high-commitment match-ups make it bad for people with other committments, a hyperlong list of powers and heroes makes for a tremendous amount of trivia to learn, there's the various play mechanics that make you hate the weakest man on your team (and can examine his failings in detail), and the way DOTA2 embraces counterintuitive hardcore tweaks that were eradicated in other iterations (like killing your own troops to deny the opponents XP).
I like the pro gaming circuit, but a truly good game is one that's approachable, friendly, and deep.