Honestly, I would go so far as to say I hate DotA, and all it's ilk.

At first I assumed it was just because I was bad at it, and had never been a big fan of any RTS or even Diablo-style games. But there was something more to it, something that was actively offensive to me about it's mechanical design. That I could put my finger on what it specifically was that I hated about the game drove me nuts, and so to-date, I have put in:

• 24 Steam hours of DotA2. That accounts for 19 games, 12 of which are full public matches, and 6 of those twelve were wins. All games were with one or two friends on voice chat. Spent around 5 bucks on cosmetic items with Steam wallet funds made from selling trading cards.
• Level 12 in League of Legends, but with reportedly 9 or 29 wins, which I think depends on whether or not you count bot matches. I've unlocked 3 champs by choice, and have also put in $10 (but to be fair that was for the Nurse Akali skin which was a donation to Haiti).
• A few hours each into Awesomenauts and Super / Monday Night Combat, and possibly some others trying to be a DotA-like without the classic interface.

*edit* I put these here for the sake of honesty. I'm not claiming to be an expert player, nor am I trying to make an argument that DotA is a bad game that everyone should stay away from. Before I began playing there was something I didn't like about the game, but I couldn't pin down what it was. It has taken this long for me to understand the game and it's system to the point where I realize and can put into words the elements of it that make it a game I don't want to play. *end edit* (Putting time into a game I don't like isn't unique to DotA for me. I have a number of Halo achievements you wouldn't expect to see from someone who has openly said they don't like the Halo games.)

I have trouble finding exact stats on how much time I've put into DotA-likes, but it's more than I ever wanted to play. But in that time, I have managed to pin down and think about how to fix the problems that I think overwhelm an otherwise tense, strategic, and fairly deep game.

The First Problem - The Mental Jump

I come from a background of largely FPS games. So when I show up, and the team kills are posted at the top of the screen, and you tell me that you win once you destroy the other team's core, it sounds like a lot of objective based TDM skills will be transferable. In actuality, they are not.

In objective TDM, cover your teammates, distract and flank opponents, and kill them so that you have time to do the objective while they rush back from wherever they spawned. DotA is deceitful, because there is a valid situation where you can follow this very pattern: the lane push. Clear the wave, kill or chase off the heroes in lane, and then hit the tower and try to take it down before the heroes come back. So the FPS'er in me says, "Alright, well we need to kill the core to win, we need to kill these towers to kill the core, and we need to kill or chase off the laning heroes to kill the towers. So let's attack, chase them off, get the towers, and get the core all before they do the same to us. This is what we need to get good at." Even now, explaining it this way makes a lot of sense to me. However, the RPG roots of DotA give it an element that makes this entire understanding of the game essentially useless.

Heroes level up. Stats go up, items are bought, abilities get better. And they stay better for the rest of the game. In traditional DM games, players spawn on the same level. Same health, same crappy gun, same possibilities laid out before them. And they get better over the course of a match through picking up new guns, getting power-ups, and controlling secure spots on the map (either through traps or just finding a good wall to put your back against). But when someone kills you in DM, you respawn just as you were when you first entered the game. The playing field is being kept even by resetting players every so often. Dota has momentum. A positive feedback loop. Once someone gets big, they stay big, and it only gets easier for them to get bigger. The only way to even the field is for other players to catch up.

So that's the unapparent truth of DotA. Kills and towers seem like an obvious measure of progress, but they're largely irrelevant when compared to team levels. DotA is about the race to get yourself (and ideally your whole team) leveled up faster than your opponents. While watching a Heroes of the Storm stream, I noticed right away and was relieved to see that they put the team level right up at the top of the screen, just as big as the team kills. The towers aren't there to be an objective to take out, they're there to buy you time to grow powerful. If you can get big enough fast enough, then you can do whatever you want, including taking those towers and rampaging straight on to the core. But before the level difference is wide enough to pull off a game winning sweep, you're likely going to use that power to harass the other team. Which leads to what I've found to be the second biggest mental plateau into understanding DotA.

The only effect you can have on another player is to deny them something - to inhibit their growth. Denying isn't unique to DotA. Not by a long shot. In the traditional FPS setting, you could deny another player by grabbing a power-up before they do. But it's a better move to just focus on killing them, because then they won't get that pick-up, AND any other progress they made this life will be reset. Killing a hero in DotA doesn't put them back any, it just denies them the time on the field earning experience. But at the same time, you can deny them that by pushing them out of lane, by tricking them into wasting time fighting you, or simply killing the unit they're about to get XP off of (this specific denial mechanic is specific to DotA, but the rest are valid almost anywhere). And all of these are generally more efficient than killing another hero, but give the same effect as a kill, so they are more important than kills. To kill or deny is the choice to waste your time and theirs, or just theirs while you continue to farm and grow.

This mechanic, and the core idea it brings of the only way to affect opponents is to get under their feet, I think leads to what most people consider the biggest problem of DotA-likes.

The Second Problem - "Stop feeding."

The part of DotA where players fight, are popping skills, trying to land combos, dodging, coordinating on lanes, and ganking and stuff is solid. But unless that goes tit-for-tat, one side of the fight gets bigger, and the game goes back to being entirely about momentum. Since the momentum race is apparently, once again, the biggest factor of a match, it means the denial and stifling of the opponents growth is the main way players fight. To get under their feet. To yank each small victory away from them. This means that the main competitive mechanic is for players to be spiteful, annoying, sadistic, vindictive, little shit-heads to each other. That's it. That's the way this versus game is played.

So when people wonder why this game is known for having a pretty vitriolic community, and Valve has had to try so much to keep players friend, I don't find myself too surprised. Personally, the problem that I feel I've run into more than anything else is players on my team yelling at me to, "Stop feeding!" I think this is a pretty good summation of the symptoms, tho.

And just so we're on the same page, if you're "feeding the enemy," that means that the enemy is killing you over and over.

...Did you catch that? The way that someone else is doing something, but you're getting yelled at for it? Strange, isn't it?

Well, let's try it again. "Stop feeding," maybe more translates into, "Stop letting the enemy kill you." Okay, there's something actionable in there. You could stop presenting yourself to the enemy. If they're killing you over and over, it means that at some point they a subtle edge over you 2 or 3 times, and it rolled and now they're straight bigger than you and you can't stand up to them anymore. So fighting - or even harassing, or maybe even just standing in sight - means dying. So don't fight. But to not be in lane means they're not going to be hindered in their farming. That's unacceptable too, though, because hindering enemies is the only thing to be done in the game. Well, the other solution is to get help from someone else on your team and gang up. But everyone else is already dealing with their own stuff, trying to deny the enemy in their own lane. Moving to rescue you means a deficit in another lane, so that hasn't really helped anything.

So really, "Stop feeding," actually means, "You've already fucked up, we're basically down a man." DotA is a game where it is arguably more harmful to your team for you to play badly than to not play at all. So don't start playing unless you're a prodigy, I guess.

It's just such a weird and kind of shitty loop. If everyone is playing optimally, then both teams stay even because both are getting so undermined that no one can rush ahead. And as soon as someone slips up, that's when the other team has a chance to get ahead. The game has no risk-reward mechanics to let you push your team forward by being skillful, nor are there any real mechanics to knock your opponents backwards. You are either playing optimally, or failing to step on your opponents foot and / or not optimally farming experience.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The Divine Rapier and the Gem of True Sight are two items with drop on death. A hero carrying these items can be regressed by killing them, because it will force them to lose an item they earned. But with the way the rest of the unfolds, it is I think more likely that the player who bought the item will be blamed purchasing it at a poor time when they couldn't hold onto it, rather than the killing player be praised for taking them out.

Getting better at a game and learning to play skillfully is inherently satisfying, but DotA has such a dismal basic game flow that it really kills any want I have to get to that high level of play. It's like a water slide but instead of a pool at the end it's just asphalt. You're likely to get hurt, you're just trying to keep it from being too much that you can't go again. And even the water slide itself, in this case, I think isn't quite worth riding on.

The Third Problem - Needless UI missteps

Some have said that the minutiae of DotA is part of the depth of it. I wouldn't call it the depth, however. Rather, I'd say the subtlitites of DotA are split between mechanical idiosyncrasies and plain poor design. The courier and TP scrolls, compared to the recall ability of League of Legends, are an idiosyncrasy. Systems that accomplish the same task, but change certain specific considerations in how to best accomplish it, but ultimately has no impact on the overall flow of the game. On the other hand, there are some specific, frustrating, and as far as I can tell pointlessly complex subtleties which I chalk up to being remnants of modding an RTS up against the very limits of its engine. Attributing these aspects to the depth of the game is bullshit, and anyone .

I already wrote a short blog post on high skill floors, and the nature of making simple tasks harder. There is difference between what I talked about liking there and what I'm haranguing against here. When raising the skill floor, it needs to be done with purpose. The difficulty and depth of DotA comes from the skill in engaging fights, the experience to know when to pressure, defend, or farm, and the knowledge to to adapt to enemy builds. There are very few issues that make up the set I'm attacking here, but they anger me most because they really have no purpose, and other games adhering to the formula have already gone on to smooth them over for what I feel is a better design.

The courier has given me much trouble in my time with the game. Not the existence of the courier, mind you. Giving you sustainability in lane while also being a vulnerability leads to tactical decisions which require mastery to use effectively. But the way it is incorporated into the interface is kind of a mess. More than once I've run into troubles with juggling items from different players on the same carrier, having it deliver items but then leaving return home with items because of a miscount of slots, being unclear with what it's holding unless you click on it, then being able to leave it adrift from a mis-click or just forgetting that it is still the unit under your control. Again, some of this is clearly left over from a game engine that expect control over multiple units, but in what it now a game which keeps a player's mind focused on control of a single unit. So I'm not saying that the courier is the problem, and being able to do interesting things with it is good and does add to the game, but there is no reason beyond stubborn expectation that there shouldn't be a better, clearer way to integrate and control it.

As much as I can complain about the integration of the courier, I have almost as big a problem with the shop itself. The layout is inscrutable unless you have everything memorized, or you search for what you want. But if every item is laid out so it's all only one click away, and you have to type out what you want, something has gone wrong with your layout. You can select guides going in that just highlight what you should go for, but as not an expert player I've found myself having to react and adapt often enough that I never get a chance to follow through on a guide. More than that, there have been times I've bought the parts to complete an item, but when they get into my slots and combine it picks unintended items that I already had and I wind up with a combined item that wasn't the combined item I clicked on to purchase the remaining parts. I don't even know what leads to that happening, but it happened from no fault of my own, and can be a setback if the unintended item you wind up with can't be reclaimed or used for something else useful. And if there's some kind of claim that juggling items in your slots to make sure the right combinations happen is some level of depth, then the person making that claim is wrong. Choosing a specific item and winding up with an entirely different one because of some unforeseen hitch in the engine coding is inexcusable.

Maybe if I had gotten into the original DotA my feelings would be different. But after hearing the extents that went into rebuilding DotA for DotA2, even to the lengths of programming in specific cases to reproduce glitches caused by the original engine that didn't occur in the new one, I found myself almost disgusted. It's that mindset of staying blindly loyal to the original, rather than trying to make major improvements and create a better game, that drives me to prefer League of Legends. Still the lesser of two evils, mind you, but the point remains.

There is one specific point that continues to stand out to me as illustrating the difference in philosophy between DotA and League. In DotA, every movement on the character requires a new click. In League, if you hold down right click and move the cursor, your hero will adjust and run towards wherever your cursor currently is. It's a subtle change, but I think it's exemplary. DotA development is tweaking, trying certain things big things to see what they can get away with that people will enjoy, but leaving everything else as is, almost to a fault. Perhaps because they're scared that if they change something as core and visceral as the controls they'll be hit by universal blow-back. Where as League feels like a product where everything was reconsidered to see if it could be made better for what the game was, unafraid to depart from the game's history. They also made a number of idiosyncratic changes along the way, but the interface alone feels like something that was created to support the game, not hacked together just to get the idea up and running.

That meta-game masteries and rune pages stuff is total bullshit, tho. Makes the momentum kick in a bit even before the match has actually started. The hero unlocks I don't mind tho, keeps the pool from being too overwhelming for new players, and by the time you figure out who you like you'll be able to unlock a couple.

In a way, I look at DotA-likes and feel like with just a bit of tinkering you could play them almost entirely with twin-stick shooter type controls. The interesting and challenging part of the game isn't the interface, it's the decisions you make mid match, trying to eek out a sliver of footing that you can snowball into a win. There is no denying that the well matched teams have a great back and forth that makes for tense and engaging games. And Heroes of the Storm looks to negate the power of momentum by unifying levels across the whole team, but my guess is that without building stats piecemeal a lot of players will feel like it's some kind of slimmed down experience. But increased evenly matched team-fights and interesting, unique maps may make up for it, while making the game into a pretty different beast. I feel League has had success with their 3 other modes / maps (Twisted Treeline's two lanes helps get rid of that "I couldn't hold my lane and now my team is a man down" feeling). But ultimately, I don't think any of these fixes would make me want to play a DotA-like, because I really don't enjoy a game where all you do is be vindictive little shits to one another.