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Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their l

Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch. It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.

jdmichal 5y ago
I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.
bluescrn 5y ago
With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.
- Majromax 5y ago
  > If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve. That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos. That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
  - antifa 5y ago
    You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.
- rollcat 5y ago
  I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :) Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.
ajuc 5y ago
MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft. I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
- wyre 5y ago
  Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Zero-K is a surprisingly good free (open source), community driven RTS. When you look past the dated graphics, it gives you a deep TA style game that tries to also give a few quality of life features to reduce APM count a bit. It's not for everyone, but it can be a lot of fun.
harpersealtako 5y ago
MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor. If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time. If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping. I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
- jdmichal 5y ago
  > I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls). Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.
- jessewmc 5y ago
  I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing, playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who didn't play competitively. This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.
- jgon 5y ago
  I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.
throwaway6734 5y ago
If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been growing over the past year with the release of the definitive edition
thrower123 5y ago
RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring. You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.
- Retric 5y ago
  SC2’s co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It lacks much strategic depth, but it’s still surprisingly fun if repetitive.
- izacus 5y ago
  Yep, although there are now new games which kinda balk the trend - Iron Harvest has a pretty good SP campaign, Total War series is still going strong with its SP focus as well.
vkou 5y ago
> It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
- majormajor 5y ago
  The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3 games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful and annoying.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort. That's a big initial bite to get down. I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through. But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go. I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
- chrishynes 5y ago
  Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health, armor, etc. To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"... Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies, but that's also offset by most abilities having a geometric component to how they're targeted or have area of effect. Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game. There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes). RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop. If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved. I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.

jdmichal 5y ago

I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.

bluescrn 5y ago

With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.

Majromax 5y ago
> If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve. That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos. That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
- antifa 5y ago
  You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.
rollcat 5y ago
I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :) Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.

ajuc 5y ago

MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft. I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.

wyre 5y ago
Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.
gmueckl 5y ago
Zero-K is a surprisingly good free (open source), community driven RTS. When you look past the dated graphics, it gives you a deep TA style game that tries to also give a few quality of life features to reduce APM count a bit. It's not for everyone, but it can be a lot of fun.

harpersealtako 5y ago

MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor. If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time. If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping. I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).

jdmichal 5y ago
> I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls). Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.
jessewmc 5y ago
I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing, playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who didn't play competitively. This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.
jgon 5y ago
I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.

throwaway6734 5y ago

If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been growing over the past year with the release of the definitive edition

thrower123 5y ago

RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring. You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.

Retric 5y ago
SC2’s co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It lacks much strategic depth, but it’s still surprisingly fun if repetitive.
izacus 5y ago
Yep, although there are now new games which kinda balk the trend - Iron Harvest has a pretty good SP campaign, Total War series is still going strong with its SP focus as well.

vkou 5y ago

> It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.

majormajor 5y ago
The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3 games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful and annoying.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort. That's a big initial bite to get down. I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through. But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go. I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.

chrishynes 5y ago
Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health, armor, etc. To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"... Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies, but that's also offset by most abilities having a geometric component to how they're targeted or have area of effect. Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game. There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes). RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop. If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.

the_only_law 5y ago
Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved. I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.