Am I alone in feeling like perversely, it's only people who aren't big Lord of the Rings fans who could get into this game? I feel like anyone who likes the franchise all that much would have to twitch at this totally abstracted portrayal of the characters.

It's kind of like an old Japanese licensed game, where someone told them what "Lord of the Rings" was about, and then they built a game full of nonsense that just had some of the basic concepts down.

I WAS a fan of LOTR. I almost finished the books, got half-way through the third and got bored. The Hobbit was way cooler, took me 2 days to read that one since I was so interested.  The movies were good when they came out, now they're too long, almost like watching Titanic for the fourth time.    So yeah, so far your theory holds true.

@ajamafalous: I'm kind of amazed HoN is still pulling those numbers. Although I guess it is f2p. Really though no one ever talks about HoN just because hardly anyone cares about it.

I'm sort of curious what the long term MOBAs end up being. Certainly 8 or however many it is now games that are very similar are going to present some kind of an issue (or maybe not, if most people start playing those style of games and go between them seamlessly).

It will probably turn out to be as good as the initial social game craze.

@Zekhariah: I don't think I agree with that at all. You can have multiple competitive RTSes or FPSes being played at once with a healthy player base. TF2, BF3, CS, the various CoDs, even the old Quake games still have communities of people playing them. The basic action is the same, but diverse enough mechanics are there that they appeal to different people. You still see tons of FPSes coming out every year, but they either don't do anything new or don't do anything better than the stuff with big communities, so they die rapidly.

You're going to see the same thing with MOBAs I think. Maybe this'll get a foothold because it's on consoles, but I don't think that's enough to keep a healthy community. It sounds like they made concessions to the console instead of coming up with new design ideas, which is dumb.

Maybe you're right that due to their nature MOBAs won't have the people that play multiple games like you see with FPSes, but I think saying that LoL, Dota 2, Smite, Awesomenauts and SMNC are all extremely similar.

Also, I heard someone on another forum (I forget where, it might have been the RPS comments) suggest "LPG or Lane Pushing Game" instead of MOBA. That seems some much more descriptive of the actual mechanics than MOBA or ARTS.