Lol Lords? Lol!

Aaron Phokal:
I think this means we should have a rediscussion next week, with Gueststar: Lord Cogswell.

I’m holding my thoughts until this happens.

I’m not coming on to argue WHY someone should play the game. I’d just like to give an impression from the POV of someone who plays the game like it’s a career. Mainly, I want to be able to defend myself instead of sounding like I endlessly bashed DOTA for its graphics.

I will go on a bit of that topic: Yes, we all agreed we didn’t like DOTA, but it’s because the map is really, really, hard to make out on first glance. Sometimes cartoony graphics are better for these games because they help bring in more than just the die-hard players. Such as why World of Warcraft thrived in 2005, it’s open to any player to try and play the game.

Jim made the point that a guy throws a boat for an ultimate: That. is. awesome. I laughed and loved it every time I used it. Do I wish that League had some crazy ultimates like that? Sure….but Jim didn’t get to see but a handful of characters: Ashe shoots a giant crystal arrow, Gangplank rains cannonballs from the sky, Hecarim charges forward with shadows of himself, Fiddlesticks has a literal crow storm when he uses his ultimate, and on and on and on. There are some really cool particle effects…but they aren’t as flashy as DOTA.

Within the last 4 – 5 patches (which would be about 2 months), we’ve seen new particles come into the game. We’ve seen flashier ultimates, we’ve seen a graphical update, and we’ve seen character model remakes. All of this is starting to make the game more graphically pleasing…but it’s going to take awhile for them to have every character like that.

I believe that DOTA had the chance to sit down and say: “Okay, this is what League is doing. How can we do it better?” and with that, they made it a point to have super flashy spells. That last sentence is totally opinion and has zero fact behind it.

I’m still not a fan of the dark, dreary, layout, that makes it hard to distinguish lanes an creeps from champions. There are a few other things about the game that I don’t like, but they’re probably because I don’t fully understand it. Because of that, I’ll just latch onto the graphics and complain while I play League every night

I’ve been playing DotA 2 recently as well. It’s fun.

I guess my biggest critique on DotA 2 is that mistakes are punished so much more, even more than LoL. So games are a lot more one-sided and upsets are rare. That may just be because I haven’t really seen a lot of high level play(I’ve seen a couple, they seemed to be one-sided still). Also Heroes/Champs/Lord can scale up and become unstoppable if they get kills. In LoL, if someone gets early advantage they still need to be careful that they don’t lose that advantage.

I have to agree with Adam that LoL’s graphics is much more discern-able to the eyes. Although I’m pretty sure you can get used to it after a few dozen games. The camera is further away so you can see more and overall, gameplay and visual, there’s a lot more info you need to take in when playing DotA 2.

You should play some matchmaking Jim, that’s where the real fun/rage is! I’m willing to play some DotA 2, though it might be difficult to find a common time.

linthuslyth:
You should play some matchmaking Jim, that’s where the real fun/rage is! I’m willing to play some DotA 2, though it might be difficult to find a common time.

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Ahoy, are you in our Steam Group?
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/splitkick

I usually launch LoL through Steam, so you can always see if I’m playing either or online. Just let me know what username to expect.

I have never played LoL or DOtA.

I’m pretty sure I have an addiction myself…