Delete: MOBA

http://www.giantbomb.com/multiplayer-online-battle-arena/3015-6598/

And promote it to being a fullblown genre not just a concept page. Which as I understand it according to wiki convention do not have their own pages (Platformer, FPS, RPG etc).

e.g. The "Action" genre page looks like this http://www.giantbomb.com/games/?genre=1

I think given the proliferation of these games in the last 3-4 years, The mainstreaming of esport events like Ti4, it's clear it's no longer just a subgenre of Real Time Strategy games.

Mechanically games like

• Awesomenauts, (Wiki genre listing - strategy, platfomer)
• Super Monday Night Combat, (shooter)
• Smite (Action)
• and likely Battleborn (likely a FPS hybrid when it releases)

share very little mechanically in common with RTS games but all are very clearly MOBAs. And there are more MOBAs coming all the time, many of which are likely to fuse other genre core mechanics even more drastically in an attempt to differentiate themselves form DOTA2/League of Legends.

I think giving games the ability to be selected as a MOBA as a genre is more communicative to a wiki reader as to what those games are instead of the editor trying to approximate what other genre they are closest to (while selecting MOBA as a concept) and could prevent some confusion down the road.

This probably should be done pretty soon before too many more games get linked to the page and make it more work to reclassify all the associations that could be broken.

Fwiw wikipedia and many other outside references from what I can tell already considers MOBA to be its' own unique game genre. Colloquially MOBA seems to have won the naming war for this type of game too.

As the person with the most wiki points on the MOBA page, I suppose I have the most to "lose" in terms of time and points lost, but I think it's more important we get this right. When I spent a couple hours working on this page I found to be sitting there nearly empty ~three years ago, these games were not nearly as popular or established as they are now.

This would have to be a staff call.

Maybe @jeff or @brad can weigh in with their thoughts?

@nuclearwinter: thanks for the reply!

Yeah That makes sense. I figured this might have been a staff level type question, new genres don't pop up everyday and I imagine this might be harder to change than most requests of this nature. wasn't sure where to put this, hopefully this was the right forum for it.

Just wanted to get the conversation started

It's worth considering, for sure. The genre seems defined enough now that it wouldn't necessarily erupt into full-on battles about what is or isn't a MOBA.

Ideally we'd get to a point where the genre pages are fleshed out in a way that allows for a wiki component so that your work on the concept page would have a place to live.

Fair enough, Thanks Jeff!

Figured the wiki might be going into uncharted waters with this one, to my knowledge there has been no new genres since 2008 besides MOBA.

Oh while I very much appreciate the thought, please don't worry about my work on the page. If deleting it is the right call for the overall benefit of the wiki, I'm totally fine with that. It probably could use a major rewrite/update anyway given the events of the past couple years anyway.

@slag: From what I've seen, MOBAs have had the same growth as FPS games. It used to be that any first-person shooter that was released was immediately labeled a Doom clone, sort of like how all MOBAs were, for a time, just considered clones of the original Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III mod. Even getting people to accept MOBA as vernacular was a bit of a struggle at first. It's definitely become its own genre at this point.

That's the parallel I had in mind too and one I've been thinking about for a number of years. I always kind of wondered at what moment does a genre ,well..., become a genre. Whenever that moment was for MOBAs, I think it happened a while ago. Maybe as early as 2009 when LoL was released, possibly as late as last year when DOTA 2 was officially released. More likely sometime in between.

I've been playing DotA/DOTA 2 since the DotA Allstars days, so it's been really interesting to watch a genre get created right before my eyes.

I think part of the issue with getting MOBA as the accepted name was that MOBA was a very obviously calculated corporate label slapped on a very grassroots community, even if it was done by insiders per say. But no matter how you feel about it, I think it's pretty clear what name won out.

More importantly, why in the hell is Fifa an Action game?

EDIT: It isn't, your link is just busted.

Hunh? I just checked it again and it seemed to work just fine for me...

The link sends me to the page of all games (43246 Games), whereas this link takes me to only Action games (11984 Games):

http://www.giantbomb.com/games/?letter=&sortBy=&platform=&genre=1&theme=&minRating=&rating=&region=&___developers=&___publishers=&fromYear=&toYear=

It's weird too because it has the same filter options as yours theoretically, as everything other than genre is blank, and genre is still set to 1.

@bollard:

Oh I see what see what you are saying now, man that's weird! I had checked the first 3 games on I guess what was the total list and saw they were all were classified as action (well they were when I looked the list seems to change, I'm assuming based on what's been recently edited) so I thought it had worked.

@slag: Yeah that list keeps changing, Fifa isn't there anymore. Weird that it doesn't work though.