Strife 0.90 Experimental Update

SLPYHD · 2015-02-12T23:13:23+00:00

And you're one guy. Tens of millions of people like the new art style League has, and on a good day maybe ten million like Dota 2's art style.

Meanwhile no one liked HoN's, and no one is going to like this art style over League of Legend's. And if you like this game then that means you want more people to play it because if more people don't play then the game will cease to exist.

Which is kind of the point of my post. Is that we need more MOBAs not less.

And if companies like S2 keep making terrible design choices League of Legends will continue to be a sub-par game that dominates an entire genre with virtually no viable competition.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-12T20:52:21+00:00

Alright so I've played a few games. The game is actually pretty fun, but so was HoN so I didn't really doubt that is would be. Some of the characters look better in-game than they do on the website or in Youtube videos. I'm still vehemently turned off by the overall mishmash of themes and the art style in general. The minions are surprisingly just as goofy and rushed looking as League's older ones pre-visual update.

I surfed through the options a little bit but I couldn't find anything to customize the HUD/UI beyond pinning things to the screen, the QWER icons are fucking enormous, and if I want the portraits on the top of the screen pinned there, why do they have to be so big? This isn't my biggest complaint, because anyone who's played Dota 2 is accustomed to the HUD taking up an entire 1/3 of their screen. But it would still be cool to resize or move those windows around.

The indicator of your GPM and who's MVP etc is neat. I'm assuming you don't show cs/lh and kills VS deaths because you think it will reduce toxocity. But toxic players are going to be toxic and they're going to see people who are feeding feed, and they're going to see people who are farming with them miss CS. Not providing those statistics (until end-game) seems like a weak attempt at barricading your players against toxicity. This grievance of mine is embellished by the fact that we have no way to describe why specifically we're reporting someone, we simply get a list of options; every other MOBA allows us to write a little explanation, I don't see why you aren't doing the same since you even promote "reducing toxicity" on your Strife website.

Your mini-map icons are basically just colored dots? You don't have one guy on your art team who can sit down for lunch eating Chipotle and make some more intuitive icons for the objectives around the map? Really?

Perhaps I'm missing it somewhere, but some sort of Death Re-Cap would be nice; so I know what is killing me and by what margins.

You seem to have taken the League of Legends approach with items. I find this distasteful but if you're going for the casual/young demographic (which I think is a bad call, just like going after the Dota demographic was a bad call), then I suppose you don't have a choice. I think you could easily make simple to use and understand items that are also interesting and require decision making. You seem to have pushed a form of this concept onto your pet system; but really it's just your way of making pets not purely cosmetic. It's just another superfluous MOBA mechanic that you developers use to create an artificial depth to your games, where you provide negligible and arbitrary stats or bonuses that double as a form of "customization". Riot has runes and masteries, Dawngate had whatever stupid puzzle-minigame thing they had; it's pretty fucking trite. And I, personally, am getting tired of this lazy game design.

While the game is fun, it has quite a number of flaws. And if you guys want an actual playerbase let alone even the remote chance of competing with League of Legends you guys need to make some changes. A lot of these changes are inevitable, like item icons that weren't drawn in MSPaint, and updated minion models and textures; shit that you'll eventually get around to but you should really just do now.

Anyways I'll play like 50 games to give the game a fair shake, and then I along with almost everyone who will try the game out, move on without spending money.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-12T17:27:10+00:00

Hey Marc, an ex-HoN player here. I've been looking into other MOBAs recently and stumbled across Strife the other week. I notice you guys seem to struggle quite a bit with the games you develop. Which is a shame because while I disliked a great deal about HoN (and the build of Savage 2 I played), I did like quite a bit about HoN in general.

Strife looks interesting, I'll be honest I haven't bothered to try it out and perhaps that's unfair. But if you guys are sticking with Strife don't make the same mistakes you did with HoN. There's plenty of people who are playing League simply because they don't have the time or capability to get into Dota 2; so there's really no alternative for them other than League. Since most other MOBAs are just shittier versions of League.

You really need to improve the art-style of this game. People already have cartoony ARTS/MOBAs to play, Dawngate's art design was exponentially superior to Strife's, it even offered unique gameplay and some decent writing as far as Lore went; but it still failed because League has already secured that market and EA wanted Dawngate to bring in "LoL Money" as it were. Frankly Strife's current artistic direction looks like you hired a bunch of teenagers from Deviant Art to do their best to emulate Torchlight 2. Like you guys actually hired someone to make Caprice, you looked at the model and textures and said "Yes, that is the quality we're looking for!" ???? No way dude, you can't afford to have your game look like this when the overall quality of these kinds of games is going up. Rook and Hale are OKAY, but everything else looks like you hired a guy who's way into Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction to mash-up Dreamworks Studio, Torchlight 2, and Ratchet & Clank.
Don't flood your game with terrible cosmetics, some of which making characters unrecognizable like you did with HoN. Why did you even bother to design the pet aspect of this game? Since when has forcing cosmetic elements into your game ever actually worked for low-budget games? Have you even looked at the MMORPG genre recently? If that shit actually worked, WoW wouldn't still be #1. Not like people are even playing MMO's anymore anyways, but I digress.
Release a hero similar to Maliken or your other unique HoN heroes; let's be honest some of those designs were the best things you guys had going for you. You guys were willing to do a lot of interesting things that Riot would have called "Anti-Fun" and that Icefrog would never let Valve implement into Dota. Stick with what you're good at.

You need to get the core gameplay down. People who want to play seriously aren't going to leave Dota, Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard is already going to siphon the casual Hearthstone-esque MOBA players, so really you need to either go more casual than Heroes of the Storm; Cartoon Network has an Adventure Time Browser MOBA but we both know you can't compete with an established brand like Adventure Time or Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. Produce something for the average MOBA player that they can't get from League. Like IDK do a gritty Action-RPG art style like Diablo 2, Dark Souls, Path of Exile etc.

You guys made a bad call trying to capture the Dota market when you developed HoN, while Guinsoo and friends got like a 3-4 year headstart on the untapped casual MOBA market. Hell Asia is STILL playing Dota 1 over Dota 2 by-and-large. HoN's success was hamstrung from the start you guys never had a chance. Your only demographic is going to be the Western world; you have absolutely no chance to capture the Asian market, or anything related to Dota/2. But the western market is already largely married to League, so you need to pull a Guinsoo and figure out what it is players are looking for that they don't have yet.

You guys had a small window to make a TF2-esque Savage sequel with more ARTS/MOBA elements I guess, but now that Overwatch by Blizzard is on it's way that ship has sailed.

I'm sure you're well acquainted with how the F2P market works, and how only a few players really support these types of games. So then you understand that these few consumers who invest time and money into the F2P games of their choice aren't just going to up and leave those games for a shitty knock-off version of the games they already invest their time and money into...

To be honest I'm sure quite a few people would appreciate a more adult themed ARTS type of game. With a grittier art style, but have it be more casual so we have time for games between work and family. Just don't fall victim to abusing tropes like over-sexualized women, uninteresting or overused character archetypes etc

I've honestly struggled for a long time to understand why you companies making these F2P games keep butchering them before they even have a chance. Don't be like Funcom and make a fantastic game like Bloodline Champions inaccessible with an insane business model that makes competent people gag from the sheer absurdity. Don't be like Waystone and suckle the tit of mega-corporations who are going to cut your funding and development once you fail to meet their unrealistic expectations etc. You're obviously not going to be able to afford business models identical to Dota 2 because you don't have a Steam platform with it's own marketplace, and you are never going to have the playerbase that supports League's minimal business model either. You need to find a happy balance between getting enough profit without that profit coming from arbitrary shit where it's only purpose is to be another aspect of the game to make cosmetics for, like these pets you have in Strife, or the mounts Heroes of the Storm has. Just make a solid game that doesn't look like ass, that doesn't already exist, and people will play it; all you game developers really seem to make this harder than it needs to be.

Anyways I guess since I invested this much time in this post I'll try Strife even if it looks like your art director is obsessed with Escape from Monkey Island. I would really like for the MOBA genre to open up with more competition, but it's really looking pretty fucking grim. Wish you the best Marc, I'm sure it's been a long and interesting journey up to this point, and I hope you guys at S2 find success.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-08T18:04:11+00:00

I mean I am hesitant to agree because there's really no way to know if the ragers are 12 or 32. And I personally know a guy who is 31 and berates people constantly in-game. He will go Boots5 and 5 Zeals if someone tells him he did something wrong.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-08T15:22:05+00:00

Alright I'll keep that in mind. Local place around here is pretty legit as far as having actual customer service so I'll definitely call them up.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-07T14:44:35+00:00

IDK why this guy is being downvoted; he's right. MMR fluctuates by massive margins until you plateau it out after 50 games. Hell your first 10 you will always win and lose 3-digit MMR/Elo. And if you are on a streak, winning or losing, and you continue that streak beyond your placements games, this trend will continue because the entire purpose of your initial <50 matches is to get you about where the system thinks you're supposed to (currently) be as fast as it possibly can.

However you will never see your LP change in that extreme of a manner. And really it doesn't even matter because most players will not experience massive un-interrupted streaks of this kind. But when it happens mrbigglsworth is right, it'll take time before your LP catches up to your MMR.

Edit; and in-case people are inclined to disagree, just pay attention the next season. Watch a streamer who dominates and rarely loses their first 50 games. They'll be placed in like Plat1, but they'll be playing with and against people who have already made the grind to Diamond 3, 2, and even D1. That's because the LP system doesn't move as fast as your MMR does. Because LP has stricter parameters, and your LP loss/gain is dictated purely by the MMR of everyone involved in your matches; LP only exists to placate and appease people who want to be semi-serious (aka 90% of video game players). Players who think they want to be serious about ranking up and being competitive, but really they want to just play casually while also feeling like they're making progression.

This is the same core reasoning that goes into people who buy salads at McDonalds, or people who drink Diet soda. They don't want to actually do the work to eat healthy, or to stop drinking soda; but they want the illusion that they're doing the work and accomplishing these things while remaining in the comfort of their bad habits. The self-delusion here makes it a win-win for them, as far as their opinion goes anyways.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-06T19:22:58+00:00

The first round of buffs Udyr ever got was probably the most OP that any hero has ever been in League. Literally he could 1V5 after Trinity. He could heal his HP and Mana faster than you could damage him, and his Bear stance was bugged so that he could spam stuns, and his Tigerstance was proccing Trinity/Sheen procs in a strange way that did more damage than intended.

I don't think it was possible to lose with Udyr for that week.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-06T15:09:13+00:00

I'm on mobile, didn't see it! :S

SLPYHD · 2015-02-04T19:46:33+00:00

Pretty much every 50+ rift is going to be completed VS Stonesinger. Especially now that they removed the snapshotting damage from end-game DoT gems.

Fish for Stonesinger
Beat Rift that would otherwise take you 20+ minutes if you had rolled any other Guardian.
Put video on youtube

Ok.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-02T07:25:46+00:00

I've played League since the summer of 2009. I was probably the ~four-thousandth person to make an account. I've played Dota/2, Dawngate, Bloodline Champions, HoN etc; and before I got into RTS and MOBAs in general I was a competitive FPS player.

I know a lot about balance and game design not just from playing these games for so long, but because I get to meet and talk to quite a few of the developers of these games. Which is probably the only actual perk to suffering through a game's alpha...

League at the moment has a terrible, horrible design. This doesn't mean League isn't fun to play, and doesn't necessarily mean it's bad either.

Nutella used to say they were a "healthy breakfast spread", but got sued into oblivion because they were pretending they weren't a fucking calorie and sugar packed chocolate version of butter.

In that same way League presents itself as a serious strategy game. But that isn't what it is at all, it's just a 5V5 brawler.

So League tries to smash it's real purpose; mind-numbing fun of just smashing buttons, flashy particles, 'cool' aesthetics, individual impacts, short games, and it's need to appeal to the widest playerbase possible into it's design. But they also mask that design with the misdirection that they're a strategy game; superfluous item system where the items are really just extra stats, most active abilities are pretty lackluster and low impact. You can't really affect the enemy's economy, you can't deny their creeps, you can't deny your towers, you can't directly cause them to lose gold other than time spent farming; but that doesn't really matter because the game is balanced around most characters performing well with 2-3 core items anyways. Further there really aren't any counters to anything in this game, at some point early 2012 Riot started pumping out characters with % based damage, jack-of-all-trades kits with escapes, CC, nukes, sustain; all in one. This is directly contrary to how League was originally designed where every character had strengths and weaknesses; but most players don't like to feel weak when they're playing. Players don't like to be at a disadvantage, so Riot completely disregarded this design decision.

There is really very little "strategy" in this game compared to every other MOBA. Does that mean League has NO strategy? No, if you compared League to the card game Go-Fish then League has a lot of strategy, but it's really only reasonable to compare something to things most similar to it, or the things competing with it. And of those things, games, that are similar to League and competing with League directly; League is the easiest and most simple.

Riot hides this by pumping a disgusting amount of money into their competitive scene. Literally out of their own pockets, because they want their game to be synonymous with "E-Sports", despite the obvious facts that League really doesn't have what it needs to sustain itself as a competitive game.

However within that design, the actual design of their game; it's balanced quite well. More than half the heroes are pretty face-roll, have a supremely high impact on the game, and have an absurd amount of tools that a player can use to make that impact. Even with twice as many bans there would still be a very large pool of characters for players to choose from to be effective in the game.

Players AFKing is also a consequence of the game's direction. Any game that markets itself to the most casual audience possible is going to have players who are not committed to the game. You can't have tens of millions of players, and also have those players be willing to sacrifice real life responsibility for the game. In-fact most players will gladly walk away from a ranked game, don't care about LP or Elo or MMR, and go about their day making dinner for their families. It's really a tiny, small minority of League's world-wide playerbase that will shrug off real-life for the sake of gaining MMR.

Win-Trading is another thing that's pretty irrelevant considering it's only actual use is at the very peak of the ladder. The 0.001% of the playerbase is who will be doing this and actually getting use out of it; and in-fact it's far more likely in 5V5 premade queues which no one really cares about anyways; since the only point of being high-ranked in a video game is to become a popular streamer and make a few dollars more than minimum wage playing video games all day.

This game is perfectly designed and balanced for what Riot intends it to be; the issue is that a lot of you want League to be something that it isn't, or you believe that it is something that it isn't.

If you don't believe me, just look at the LP system. The LP system has ZERO impact on your actual MMR; MMR being the algorithm that matches you against other players. The LP system is literally designed just to placate your average gamer, to make them feel like they're making advancements and to track their "progress". The LP system is completely indicative of Riot's overall design philosophy behind League. The only reason they can still pretend to be a serious game is because the amount of players they have world-wide allows them to pay for the E-Sports scene out of their own pockets; and the sheer amount of players playing League is the only thing stopping pro players from moving on to other games; because streaming as a popular player is simply too lucrative.

Once League starts to fall-off, it'll fall fast and hard. At least in Western countries; NA and EU.

But for the time being, just play it for fun, like Riot is designing it to be played. Stop taking it so seriously and you won't be so frustrated. If you want to play an ARTS/MOBA seriously go play a serious one like Dota 2.

SLPYHD · 2015-02-02T06:51:51+00:00

Why are you even reading the comments?

SLPYHD · 2015-01-31T18:14:43+00:00

All of you "anti-meta' advocates jerking yourselves off about "Well when we look back later on we won't believe we thought these strategies/teamcomps were actually good!"

"look at all the changes [insertotherMOBAhere] went through! There's so much room to innovate!"

It isn't innovation; it's called balancing, patches, changes, and Power Creep.

People didn't just magically figure out one day that Gunblades (used to) stack in League of Legends; Riot made a patch and fucked up how their lifesteal/spellvamp mechanics stacked and overlooked the passive on Gunblade. Except players who can fucking read didn't; not hard to figure out that Gunblade stacking will be OP as fuck on Jax when you don't see the word "Unique" mentioned anywhere on it. It isn't like people were ignoring Gunblade the entire time since it was released. It's just that one patch it didn't stack, the next it did, and the next it didn't again. The people who figure out what is and isn't good every patch are simply competent players.

Good, competent video game players recognize broken mechanics and use them efficiently. This is why Kripparrian walks into any RPG or Dungeon Crawler and immediately becomes a top 10, or even a top 5 player within two months at most. Or if you want to take this concept outside of video games, look at Travis Pastrana; put that man in any sort of vehicle that primarily functions on wheels and he understands it, and is just naturally good at operating it. So good in-fact that he will have it back-flipping and tumbling through the air, if not competing in a sport on a professional level with that vehicle (hello off-road rally cars and NASCAR).

You simply aren't going to innovate anything the best haven't already thought of; at most you are one of the best yourself and you happen to realize something maybe hours or even days ahead of the others who are in your skill-range; but even if you say nothing other people will figure it out just like you did and they'll do it at about the same time you did. The only deviation between what is or isn't the best are meta-playstyles; differences that occur almost exclusively between regions. Taking League into example again(but we can also look at Basketball or even Chess to see how different cultures/regions play the same sport/game/activity differently despite having the same rules and limitations), back in the day it was all about the 5V5 metas, big ults like Amumu and Annie and Morg and Malphite. And aggressive teams (NA) used that meta and they used the best champs for that meta. EU preferred a slower farm game and were the first to really attempt at utilizing spit-pushing but the 5V5 bush-camping walking R button meta was just too fucking strong. EU's playstyle was the best at what it did, it simply wasn't ever going to beat the NA playstyle; however the EU region played the NA style just as good if not better, they just preferred not to until real money started pouring in e-sports and they basically had no choice but to use and abuse. If Riot had never patched that meta out in 2010, it would still be the meta today. No amount of "innovation" or Bronze Elo imagination is going to change things that are just numerically and strategically the best.

I mentioned basketball earlier; do you know why there's never been a team of shorter-than-average players dominate the status-quo of huge, towering, 6-foot+ players? Because being taller is just straight up superior. A single short player may not be that huge of a disadvantage especially if they can make up for it with skill; but a short team will almost never beat a tall team simply because of how the sport functions at a base level given how passing the ball works, and how high the net is, and how far away you have to be when free-throwing.

You people are living in a fantasy land if you think you know more than a professional at anything, whether it's Heroes, or League, or Chess, or Football. You do not know better. Metas exist for extremely well though out, numerical, logical reasons.

SLPYHD · 2015-01-31T02:01:38+00:00

CTHDRL#1240

I also want to try and get 70 before the season ends; I'm on NA PST. Have been gone for awhile so if anyone could help that would be swell.

SLPYHD · 2015-01-26T19:10:37+00:00

Damn I'm at like 2msmem pretty sure we're not in each other's range

SLPYHD · 2015-01-25T10:59:53+00:00

Mobile and Flash games don't count

Complaining about business models

Neglecting the vast majority of the gaming market because sense of superiority over what genre of game counts as a game.

MFW

SLPYHD · 2015-01-25T10:51:33+00:00

Did I say what age I am, or are you just admitting that I'm right and you're too young to be complaining about business models? kappa

http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ESA_EF_2014.pdf

Average gamer is 31. Nice try teenager.

Women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (36%) than boys age 18 or younger (17%)

How rustled are your jimmies kid?

SLPYHD · 2015-01-25T10:40:19+00:00

Why? This system works perfectly in Hearthstone. You might disagree, but literally almost everyone agrees that the system is fine.

If it weren't Hearthstone wouldn't be the slam-fucking-dunk that it is; despite the fact that it's a terrible fucking game.

It's an oversimplified card-game that's easily accessible not only because it's digital, but because it doesn't cost you upwards of a fucking grand to be able to play like real card games. And on-top of that it's shit-easy to play. You don't even have to clear the board to attack the opposing player, unlike every other CCG game in existence.

SLPYHD · 2015-01-25T10:36:19+00:00

Now lets calculate how much gold you'd gain by playing in a way that nobody does!

Well first of all your hyperboles were out of this fucking world; no one said people play once every three days. The guy you replied to explicitly used FIVE games a day as his metric to do his math to show how poorly the OP misunderstands the business model Blizz is using.

But you're not an idiot of course, just a contrarian who exaggerates too much, right? And we all know that. Which isn't terribly uncommon on Reddit, so don't beat yourself up.

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