MOBA and games journalists

Is it weird that no currently big podcasts seem to know anything about them? Are they just getting old or what? This seems bigger than Minecraft or something like that.

Their huge, but they have such a barrier to entry that if it isn't your thing, you aren't going to get into it, and a lot of the major publications that do major podcasts don't have the types that play mobas around. There are plenty of podcasts out there that cover them, but are usually not the general purpose stuff from places like Giantbomb.

It's not like there's a ton to talk about. The big MOBAs people know about have either been out for a while or are still either far from launch or don't have a release date. When something big comes out they'll cover them.

I don't see what would be the point in all of a sudden having the bombcast start covering LoL or the weekly updates to the Dota 2 beta.

Edit: Also with the general attitude of the community surrounding these games, do you really want to have anything else than a pro cover these games? They get enough shit for no reason already, let's not give people more reason to complain. The closest on the GB crew i can see being able to compete in a game like DOTA 2 after putting enough time and talk intelligently about it would be Brad and he seems plenty busy with Starcraft 2.

moba games are usually successful but made by small teams wihtout a big publisher behind them. Covering those takes effort and tbh (as much as I like GB and other gaming sites) they usually tend to only cover bigger games that have marketing behind them. Minecraft is a good example. That game is huge and has been for ages yet GB could never be bothered to even check it out enough to make a quicklook. Now that it's out on the xbox and has microsofts marketing behind it it seems to have gotten more "real" and was worth a quicklook and extended talk at the podcast.

Not that they need to cover them, it's almost like they go "Those darned kids and their moba's and their dota's"

I'd say it's because the majority of the playerbase are massive cunts.

It's the same reason you don't find them playing Counter Strike.

Well, the cover new ones that come out, QL and TNT's and they seemed to have liked the valve beta that happened awhile ago but I dunno? They aren't really into covering games that have been released awhile ago.

@Tim_the_Corsair said:

I'd say it's because the majority of the playerbase are massive cunts. It's the same reason you don't find them playing Counter Strike.

Actually, the people I've met in SMNC have all been really cool dudes so far! if that counts as an actual MOBA.

EA/Activision/Ubi doesn't make one.

It's still a niche genre in the grand scheme of things, and it's also probably the most shut-in exclusive group of gamers I can think of. Honestly, it sounds like that community doesn't want exposure and new players fucking up their stats.

Their huge, but they have such a barrier to entry that if it isn't your thing, you aren't going to get into it, and a lot of the major publications that do major podcasts don't have the types that play mobas around. 

Simple, MOBA games require a ton of time to get into and an even larger commitment to keep up with. Game journalists have to spread their time thin between a ton of games, it just doesn't seem like it's a place where their time could be best spent. If you care about MOBA games, then you probably know more about them than game journalists would ever be able to cover anyways.

If I recall correctly, Gamespot has started doing a series of articles giving basic tutorials on how to play League of Legends. Honestly though, while online tutorials help with stuff like that (indeed, without stuff like MOBAfire I would probably not have played as much LoL as I do) the only real way to get good at all is good old fashioned masochism. Considering the number of smurf accounts at lower levels of LoL, it's any wonder that I got past those early levels unscathed.

As for why it isn't covered by most sites, it's simple: The mindset of game journalists is to play a game for the allotted time and then move onto the next one. Stuff that requires a significant time investment is frowned upon, because why would you want to play any significant amount of a MOBA when you could play whatever generic, forgettable action title that came out last week or the 3 hour indie puzzle darling? Also, the communities for said games aren't exactly the most friendly. There's a lot of smack talk that goes on, usually from your own team when you (are perceived to) screw up.

DOTA has been around since warcraft 3 how much coverage deose it need besides esports stuff?

Ryan Scott (ex-GFW dude) is way into League of Legends. I think he does a column on it somewhere.

Same goes with any multiplayer game. Seems like the gaming press never commits to anyone besides for a week or so.

It's why multiplayer focused shooters that have a subpar singleplayer experience, no matter how well done the game is, can get so much shit. Gameplay is overlooked and severely underrated. On the flipside, you have RPG's or any story-heavy game with ridiculously shit gameplay praised as amazing and gratifying. Just a general rule of thumb

I'm not well versed in the entire MOBAsphere but I think there's a lot of myths here.

I've only ever played LoL, but it wasn't hard to get into at all. I went through the in-game tutorial. That was it for the longest time. When I really started digging on it I went to Mobafire, to read up on particulars for certain champions (Warwick4life), but that was after I was already SL15 or something and had bought a bunch of champions. LoL, at least, is really easy to understand.

I only ever played in pub games -- I played maybe one bot match, ever. Yeah, some of the community can be shitty, but no more than here, or anywhere else on the net. I never experienced this ubiquitous hostility people believe is the case. Ever. It was more the exception than the rule. Sometime people were even friendly.

Granted this was about a year ago, but I doubt it's changed that much. Maybe I was just super lucky in the eight months I was playing, but I doubt it.

Because they require ~100 hours of play to get a grasp one, and spending that much time with a bunch of jerks isn't worth the increase in readership.

The same reason they dont really cover fighting games, even QLs of those games get them the MOST shit from sites like SRK and random YouTube comments, imagine that... but more.

The community can just be the biggest dicks sometimes

@SlightConfuse said:

DOTA has been around since warcraft 3 how much coverage deose it need besides esports stuff?

While I agree that they don't need to do much coverage on this front I would say it for a different reason. League of Legends is changing all the time as they patch quite often. The MOBA games all have major differences between them and its just like the difficulty of covering an MMO in detail as it changes.

It's not that I want more coverage of it or anything like that. It just seems like they don't know anything about what seems like a huge new genre. 

i tried league of legends. its extremely hostile community to new players drove me away pretty much instantly.

i mean the couple days i tried to get into LoL i experienced more hostility directed at me than my 5+ years on Xboxlive, and pretty much any other game. now i don't care how good that game is, it might be the most amazing game ever created, but damn do i not care anymore because of that community.

so i can totally see why they might not cover it. i played for almost a week and i dont really know what was going on in the game. anytime i was in a game i'd be like "hey guys, im new, how can i help?" and nothing but vile spiteful hateful comments thrown my way.

maybe i just had bad luck? either way, i'm not interested in MOBAs anymore. hell the only people interested in MOBA's really are people who already play them. so any content and commentary the GBcrew tries to create for it will just be trashed because they don't know it as well.

@Clonedzero: Keep in mind I'm not justifying the behavior, simply explaining it.

The thing is, each game of League of Legends is going to take 20 minutes at least(that's the time at which a team can surrender). Games can be ruined by one person. These games can sometimes be ruined as quick as 10 minutes. This is where the hostility comes from. No one wants to waste their time, if you're playing poorly you are essentially wasting the time of everyone else on your team. There are plenty of resources out there to help you learn how to play MOBAs. There's bot matches and custom games in LoL at least(it's the only one I play, though I have played the WC III mod quite a bit). There's guides out there that will detail for you every aspect of a champion. Builds for it, who they're good with and bad against, how to efficiently and effectively use their skills, skill orders, and pretty much anything else. When you jump into a game and essentially say "I don't know how to play, someone teach me" you're tipping everyone off that you are about to waste their time. There isn't time during a game to sit there and teach someone how to play, and someone isn't going to learn to be good over the course of the game. These are things you should do on your own. I played a handful of custom games of LoL to get used to the genre again and learn some of the items as wel as a champion or two. From there I just gradually learned, starting builds using the recommended until I learned the items will enough to deviate. Again, not justifying, I hate all the assholes that plague MOBAs, but I know why they're like that at least.

Also, I very strongly disagree that MOBAs are done growing.

Anything that requires more than a few days of commitment doesn't really mix well with the reviewer life-style. You can see it in several genres. MMOs, fighting games, shooters. Most reviewers even find the idea of playing the same game for a longer period of time unappealing. It's sort of one of the important traits of a reviewer, wanting to see new things rather than sticking with the old.

@YI_Orange: yeah, i realize all that. i too played the WC3 mod alot. back then it was alot more friendly and relaxed.

maybe i look at it differently. but im not wasting anyones time. i was more than willing to help however i could. thats why i always asked. i was new and didn't really know what to do, i wanted to contribute to the team rather than bring it down. instead of giving me some simple instructions like "go down this lane and hold stuff off" or something. they insulted me. now they're wasting MY TIME. which i value more than some jerkwads time who rather than giving simple directions to a new player like a mature reasonable person would do, they waste my time by insulting me. thats ridiculous.

i am absolutely convinced that league of legends has the worst community of any game currently out. even their forums that i went to were festering with hostility.

ive played lots of extremely team orientated games where one player can bring down the team if they do stuff wrong. i've never seen this type of hostility. in other games like that, they'd want to help their teammate so they have a better chance at winning.

but really my point is, that i can absolutely see why journalists and reviewers try to stay away from league of legends because that community is absolutely disgusting. never before has a gaming experience lowered my faith in humanity this much. i know that sounds like an exaggeration but its not. fuck the league of legend community. fuck em.

Internet aggression and bad attitudes didn't exist before League of Legend.. er.. DOTA, according to these threads.

I also enjoy how every new player thinks it falls on other players to teach them how to play the game when they could've looked up guides on the game's own forums or Googled-It, too, written by the players that they keep blaming.

It turns out that people playing the game wanted to play the game, and not start an online tutoring session sometimes! heh! Newbies are always blameless, guys. Completely innocent. Ignorance is an excuse all the time, officer.

LoL's framework increased the amount of time it takes for the player to reach the end game due to the rune pages. The time commitment for LoL is *gigantic* since the rune pages can influence different behaviors at different stages of the game as the match slogs on. So in order to increase the player's options for strategies, they need to put in an amazing amount of time to fill out the variations of runes/pages.

Dota, while still heavy on time commitment, doesn't suffer from rune pages. Everything in the game is available at all times to the players, at the very least, but the number of possible permutations to begin forming a solid image of what the game is at various levels of play is still dramatic for something that's essentially just multiplayer.

I agree totally that most games journalists, especially GiantBomb, don't need to cover the older MOBAs because there have been already a number of resources available to players to read up on from within the communities themselves, but if they were to approach these games, would definitely select Brad, as someone in the thread already mentioned since.. I severely doubt that anybody would approach this other than as an Endurance Run.

I hate the fact that internet accepted "MOBA" as the name of a genere, it's completly fucking retarded

@Olu said:

I hate the fact that internet accepted "MOBA" as the name of a genere, it's completly fucking retarded

It's hilarious!

@Olu said:

I hate the fact that internet accepted "MOBA" as the name of a genere, it's completly fucking retarded

Well, on Wikipedia it's apparently "Action Real Time Strategy" game. Though that's more problematic unless you want to exclude Super Monday Night Combat and Awesomenauts from the genre. Which I guess suits the hardcore RTS fans well, but less so those on the outside to whom those games are a far more accessible way to learn the basic MOBA concepts.

GB has covered like every new MOBA that has come out with QLs and articles. They are kind of similar. Also pretty boring to watch. and by pretty boring i mean insanely boring. Though I think Twitch cites MOBA as the number one viewer getter League of Legends.

@ArbitraryWater said:

As for why it isn't covered by most sites, it's simple: The mindset of game journalists is to play a game for the allotted time and then move onto the next one. Stuff that requires a significant time investment is frowned upon, because why would you want to play any significant amount of a MOBA when you could play whatever generic, forgettable action title that came out last week or the 3 hour indie puzzle darling? Also, the communities for said games aren't exactly the most friendly. There's a lot of smack talk that goes on, usually from your own team when you (are perceived to) screw up.

Close but no cigar. The mindset is "I get paid to review new games. There are old games I like & will play, but I do not have enough free time to invest in learning something that time consuming from scratch in between reviewing games, playing games that they straight up enjoy & do other activites such as make dinner & have a social life. No where near as insidious as you (really dickishly) put it.

TL;DR? People like things that you don't like, stop being such a dick & just accept that, k?

Also like I think what OP wants is a MOBA dedicated site. Is there one of those. Like an SRK for MOBAz? Can all those MOBA guys congregate and yell about feeding or something.

Why doesn't Giantbomb cover the latest telescope or fishing rod releases?

Because like with fighting games and MOBAs, they would have no idea what they are talking about.