So, anyone playing League of Legends?

[kingcomrade]

I tried out vlad and man he's really really easy to play.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I can see people at the low end saying LoL is easier to play based on that. A lot of the things that separate a shit player from a decent one in DotA/HoN aren't in LoL. (Necessity of teleport scrolls, last hitting,penalty for death.)

At the high end of play games aren't more or less difficult really. They can be more or less complex, but that doesn't equate to difficulty. Chess is a hell of a lot more complicated than blackjack, but that doesn't mean any moron can count multiple decks of cards and keep the numbers in his head. And hell, chess is simpler than pretty much any RTS. It just means it's play is refined to insane levels of thinking multiple moves ahead. There's still a huge gulf between the best players and the merely proficient.

Also, free blink on every hero seems insane. No wonder people don't often die in the upper tiers.

 

[Phage]

I tried out vlad and man he's really really easy to play.

KC! That's a bot game vs AI, you can get those kinds of scores with any hero.

Anyways, I can vouch that KC and fyezall are good players.

 

[Markman]

They gonna split Europe. Good things is no queue, no US servers and 14 day IP boost after transfer. I'll get to play with potatos all the time. Yea

http://riot-web-static.s3.amazonaws.com ... u2-map.jpg

 

[Phage]

Sorry for your pain.

 

[Ulminati]

They gonna split Europe. Good things is no queue, no US servers and 14 day IP boost after transfer. I'll get to play with potatos all the time. Yea

http://riot-web-static.s3.amazonaws.com ... u2-map.jpg

Hrm, that'll split my friends list pretty neatly in half. The announcement says they'll allow people to do a one-time transfer if they feel they've landed on the wrong server to avoid splitting groups of friends up. I wonder how I'm going to talk ~30 people to join me on server X with the other ~30 people.

 

[Markman]

Btw, ill be online in about 30 minutes on US if someone wants to premade so we can troll some noobs. Bought Malphite recently there so it should be fun.

EDIT- There seems to be a chat problem on US, my friend list is empty. Ive created a chat room called Rpgcodex, if someone wants to play join the channel.

 

[Grunker]

Well, Last Hitting is still in LoL regarding your own creeps. There's just no defensive Last Hitting. But it was always an uninteresting detail, I thought, left over from the engine of WC and by accident becoming a mechanic.

 

[Ulminati]

Well, Last Hitting is still in LoL regarding your own creeps. There's just no defensive Last Hitting. But it was always an uninteresting detail, I thought, left over from the engine of WC and by accident becoming a mechanic.

Essentially, the way it works is like this:

In HoN, you last-hit the enemy creeps. When you have a moment to spare, you last-hit your own as well to deny the enemy gold and XP.

In LoL, you last-hit enemy creeps. When you have a moment to spare, you try to hit the enemy champion to force them back and deny them gold and xp.

Having to focus slightly less on the creep HP bars is not dumbing the game down. It just encourages the players to focus more on hitting one another.

 

[Grunker]

Well, Last Hitting is still in LoL regarding your own creeps. There's just no defensive Last Hitting. But it was always an uninteresting detail, I thought, left over from the engine of WC and by accident becoming a mechanic.

Essentially, the way it works is like this:

In HoN, you last-hit the enemy creeps. When you have a moment to spare, you last-hit your own as well to deny the enemy gold and XP.

In LoL, you last-hit enemy creeps. When you have a moment to spare, you try to hit the enemy champion to force them back and deny them gold and xp.

Having to focus slightly less on the creep HP bars is not dumbing the game down. It just encourages the players to focus more on hitting one another.

That was my point. In essence, I find the entire Last Hitting mechanic to be simplified and boring. It's my main gripe with the game. I recognize that I don't have an alternative that works better right now, but I'd like to see a better mechanic for gold-gathering in teh futar.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

The link I posted several pages ago has an interesting section on that, in addition to denying.

 

[Grunker]

Well, he's right. Except for one thing. To conclude that they are both beyond repair seems to have very thin basis. A game designer should be able to solve the problem with creeping to an effective degree one way or the other. ALSO: It is straight-out bullshit to say removal of denying causes removal of depth. Depth is not just "how much is possible" it's "how many strategies are valid in the context of what is possible". In that regard denying easily removes as much depth as it adds.

In essence; his argument is counter-intuitive. He says 1) Last-hitting is a bad mechanic, 2) I favor denying. But if it is a bad mechanic, how can it better to create more of it if it doesn't result in removal of the main problem; stagnancy?

I favour LoL because it had the guts to do away with some of the terrible designs in DotA, which HoN didn't to the same extend. But I don't think the differences between the games merit an argument than one is shit and one is golden.

What it comes down to for me, push come to shove, is that my friends play LoL. I have no incentive to stop playing a game that I primarily play with my friends when the alternative is all but a desert when it comes to active players I know.

 

[Damned Registrations]

HoN has actually been changing some of the old shit recently. The map was redone a bit to even things up, and the 'secret' shops just sell wards now. I'll agree it's still too set in the old ways though, and some things are probably never going to change, like the movespeed cap. (Which I find especially silly since they go around the attack speed cap and nobody cares at all.)

One thing about denying that was important though: A player with enough skill (And attack power) could use denying to control the creep line if left to his own devices. So if your outer tower was lost and your forest was warded so the enemy didn't want to try ganking through it, you can hold the creeps well on your side of the map indefinitely, raking in the gold and xp. This tends to be ruined in lower level games by the fact that nobody wards and half the time some retard will come along and nuke an entire creep wave you were carefully managing. I'll agree that this is more boring than forcing players to hunt other players for gold or push towers, but those factors have a lot more to do with hero abilities than anything else. If you can harass the hell out of someone in lane, it's the better option over denying shit. The problem is the prevelance of heroes that have no ability to do so in the early game, either due to mana costs or short range. I can't imagine playing such a hero in LoL is very fun during the laning phase if you can't even deny shit. Hell, some staple heroes wouldn't even be viable in HoN without it.

But yeah, in the long run this just adds exactly the amount it takes away, giving more relevance to heroes better at offense than defense, mostly.

 

[Grunker]

I agree with most of what you say, DR, but with regards to heroes with good harass/good laning being prevalent:

You're right to a certain degree. One of the strongest bot-lanes in LoL is Corki + Taric, because they have good harass and can be violently aggressive. Similarly, Nunu is the most popular jungler even though he turns to shit in late-game because he is such a boss in the laning-phase.

BUT: Ashe is arguably the game's best ranged carry. She has the stats to back it up, and most pros describe her as insanely good. And she's got a very bad lane compared to other ranged carries (Vayne, Corki and Miss Fortune comes to mind). She is just such a bomb in team utility on top of her being a good ranged carry.

As I said, 44/70 champions were played in Dreamhack. Only Ashe and Nunu were played in over 50% of the matches.

I'm not saying it's not like this in HoN (I don't know much about HoN's champion-selection), I'm just saying that the added focus on good laners is only true to some extend. Team's with Ashe will just focus on more movement between lanes or attempt to get out of the laning phase more quickly.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah, obviously there's still room for them, especially in a duo lane, and especially if they're ranged. But a hero like Bloodhunter or Pebbles, who relies on having an early level advantage, needs a solo lane, and just wouldn't work if they couldn't use their superior ability to last hit (One through healing, the other through raw damage) to deny the enemy some experience and have an advantage early on.

HoN and DotA actually have pretty stagnant hero selection in the top end games, but it's more for lack of balls amongst the playerbase than anything else. Whenever anyone does pick a 'bad' hero they tend to do just fine. Same principle applies to hero builds. Pebbles for example would do pretty well as a melee carry, given his insane damage bonus and passive resistance to stuns. Nobody ever plays him as anything but a nuke combo whore though. There's an item that boosts attack speed by an insane 100% for a short duration but nobody ever uses it because you take some additional damage (20%), despite it's obvious uses for finishing off people that cant fight back, or for jungle farming, where obviously ending the fight 50% faster is going to result in you taking 33% less damage anyways, as well as a faster farming rate.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Well, he's right. Except for one thing. To conclude that they are both beyond repair seems to have very thin basis. A game designer should be able to solve the problem with creeping to an effective degree one way or the other.

I believe the crystal was his desired solution, but I doubt that will happen in HoN. Maybe in another game. To be honest I don't fully understand how it would work and I'm not going to fire up WC3 just to find out, but I'd be open to trying it. I took the beyond repair comment to mean that the games are set that way and there's not much to be done. How is a carry going to get all the gold they need without farming when they're designed to be weak until they get sweet items? Some things HoN has been trying to do are increasing the gankcentricity and pushcentricity (hell yeah I just made that up) of the heroes and giving more gold for assists and stuff. In other words, providing more ways to break up people's farm / win the game other than baby-sitting a carry for 40 minutes. Games that devolve into both teams farming are boring, but I've noticed there have been less of those lately.

ALSO: It is straight-out bullshit to say removal of denying causes removal of depth. Depth is not just "how much is possible" it's "how many strategies are valid in the context of what is possible". In that regard denying easily removes as much depth as it adds.

Your statement seems at odds with itself. Looking at your other posts, though, I will assume you are trying to say denying removes or limits harassment. I disagree with this. Denying is a useful tool and gives you more options instead of just last hitting or harassing, and has uses outside the initial laning phase as DR pointed out. I think that's enough to say denying easily adds more depth than it removes. Also, I enjoy unintended mechanics and wish more games would let things like that slide instead of being so uptight.

I favour LoL because it had the guts to do away with some of the terrible designs in DotA, which HoN didn't to the same extend. But I don't think the differences between the games merit an argument than one is shit and one is golden.

What it comes down to for me, push come to shove, is that my friends play LoL. I have no incentive to stop playing a game that I primarily play with my friends when the alternative is all but a desert when it comes to active players I know.

The games have more similarities than differences, for sure. I think I actually object more to the way LoL is presented and handled than the actual gameplay (features, graphics, shop system, heroes, runes, Adobe Air, etc). I never played DotA, and actually started playing LoL before I moved to HoN. Also, I thrive in solo matchmaking, for whatever reason.

 

[Damned Registrations]

My favoutire AoS style map was quite different from DotA. It was called Advent of the Zenith. There was almost no gear to farm (The items were very expensive for very little benefit) and instead gold and credits you could only get by killing heroes were used to create additional creep spawners, which also functioned as powerful creep generals defending the bases they were in. There was no real farming to speak of, aside from people playing defensively to catch up in levels. But the gameplay completely revolved around assaulting bases and killing heroes, instead of accumulating power on a hero. Aside from that, the heroes had very interesting abilities and playstyles. 2 of them didn't even have basic autoattacks, and one had a 10-15 second channeling kamikaze spell that nuke the whole area around him, including buildings and allies, for an insane amount of damage.

Shitty video showing one of the characters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT-CRj_CO38

It's also noteworthy that one of his abilities 'Execution' renders him invulnerable while being channeled. Several heroes have abilities like this, which makes for some very skill based turn arounds involving dodging attacks or finishing off someone when you only have a sliver of health.

The map died a horrible death when the creators abandoned it shortly after releasing a version with a new hero and a bunch of easily fixed bugs on old heroes.

 

[kingcomrade]

I tried out vlad and man he's really really easy to play.

KC! That's a bot game vs AI, you can get those kinds of scores with any hero.

Anyways, I can vouch that KC and fyezall are good players.

Yeah I'm not gonna play against people queuing solo. I have little interest in that. It's actually kind of relaxing playing against bots, they did a way better job at AI than whoever did the ai map in dota

 

[BirdsCanFly]

Finally broke my 10 loss streak with a good Cho game.

 

[Grunker]

@KC: Playing versus AI is EXTREME easy-mode and it gets boring as fuck after a very short while. Bots behave predictably and if you get below 30 kills after getting a bit of experience with the system there is something seriously wrong.

 

[Ulminati]

Ranked or GTFO

Did I mention I like Morgana?

 

[kingcomrade]

Well my friends had me play some Dota today. total failure 3 times in a row.

When the enemy team is Lina Slardar Mirana Clockwerk Mortred and you aren't on a real good team it can go wrong very quickly. Our team was a terribad Spirit Breaker (who probably cost us the game by being bad). me as Earthshaker, Lion, Pheonix, and Dragon Knight. Top tier heroes against has-beens, lol. That's how long I've been playing, I still remember when Dragon Knight was a pick/ban. I think they nerfed Earthshaker at some point, too.

@KC: Playing versus AI is EXTREME easy-mode

Yeah but like I said, it's kind of relaxing and is helping me learn the heroes. I'm decent enough at dota because I've played it a lot, but I actually don't entirely like playing it seriously.

 

[Zed]

Is there a HoN thread or is this the general Dota-like games thread?

Anyway been playing quite well recently, gone from 1500 from since I started to 1600+ now and I still play better than most people I've seen at 1700 so I expect I'll get there sooner or later.

 

[Ulminati]

Is there a HoN thread or is this the general Dota-like games thread?

Anyway been playing quite well recently, gone from 1500 from since I started to 1600+ now and I still play better than most people I've seen at 1700 so I expect I'll get there sooner or later.

There is a HoN thread somewhere in general gaming. It's just that it's not terribly popular, so it died.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Started playing this today. Sucked horriby on my first two non tutorial games as I picked heroes without mana pools and didn't realize how to play them until I'd bought some stupid things and picked the wrong skills.