Analysis video : reducing the skill gap in a game

General Discussion
21

Gonna tackle this because it’s a genuinely interesting discussion. So this is already a thing in fighting games. In “anime fighting games”, characters often do fairly low damage and the bulk of your damage comes from fairly long combo strings (there are characters that buck this trend within those games but for the most part, this remains true). More “traditional fighting games” tend to rely more on smaller, higher damage combos.

It works in these sub-genres of fighting games because the genres themselves are built around it. Trying to turn HOTS into the “anime fighter” of MOBAS would be a terrible idea because it would need the entire game to be reworked for it to be both enjoyable and competitive. Simply lowering damage output and lowering cooldowns would increase the length of games without doing anything really positive for the game. All you’d be doing is shifting more of the skill required to play HOTS over towards Micro-play and pure mechanical skill. That might seem great but then it means that drafting and hero builds take a seat even further back which somewhat defeats the purpose of Mobas.

22

Making some things easier does not make the game easier because you still face an opponent that might be very good at an easy game.

Compare Sc1 and Sc2. Sc1 is much harder to get into because of technical reasons. In sc1 you can only select a few units at a time for example. In Sc2 you can select all units with one click. I don’t think this difficulty of having a complicated/limited user interface and weird control groups is interesting complexity. SC2 made a lot of things easier which shifted the focus on more interesting things (the actual game and not the technical challenges to actually play it).

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23

On the sc/sc2 example , i like it and to add to this .

In sc1 , you could only select up to 12 units , but if you had more than 1 caster , they would all cast at once.
If you had 12 high templars and wanted to storm the enemies you would drop 12 storms , regardless if you truly needed that many to kill those lings/hydra.

In sc2 : if you had 12 templar and wanted to storm the enemy marines, you had to hit your hotkey for storm, for each storm you wanted to drop.

Were one easier than the other ? Not really, they both had pros and cons.

Sc1: i mean , dropping 12 storms at once is a tiny bit overkill but the option is there lol .
It would make it easier to cover a large area since the storm locations would match the positioning of the templars.

SC2: you have to drop each storm individually but it gives much more control over how many energy you wanted to spend but also if the target was moving , at least you could reajust.

Some people preferd sc1 while others prefered sc2 , for me i just love both , i dont see any being superior , they are just different .

Sc1 is more about micro managing i find and sc2 gives you that sense of a full scale war sometimes when 2 large armies collide .
Both are APM intentive , simply not the same way !

24

What do you think about lasthitting in MOBAs?

Compare DOTA (you can even last hit enemy minions to deny them exp) to LOL (can only last hit your minions) to HOTS (don’t really need to lasthit).

Personally i like the shift away from last hitting because it shifts the focus on more interesting things and that’s also a reason why HOTS is my favorite moba. Is HOTS less complex than DOTA because of this? I am not 100% sure but i would think not :smiley:

25

Wow that sounds amazing to me.
A game that relies more on skill than on the choices made before the match even starts.
Though I don’t think that is the effect this would have.

I’ve always hated death loop combos in fighting games.
Marvel Vs Capcom 3 seemed like trash to me, when you get hit once and then there’s nothing you can do but watch the 97 hit combo go on.
The key isn’t just lower damage, it’s increased opportunity for the players to interact. That’s something I loved about Killer Instinct’s combo breakers, and the need to perform a finisher at the end for the combo to really pay out. Or Smash Ultimate’s overall lower reliance on combos.

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26

Yep like "This is what vampires “should be like” Sometimes people create imaginary rules.

27

For me last hitting doesnt make a game more complex or requiring more skill.
It just breaks the concept of team play.

When i was playing lol, everyone picked a lane and diidnt wanted to budge from there. It was their lane, their XP .
It jus makes to want to play isolated in a team game which for me , a team game should have things being done as a team

I would be ok with it if everyone who contributed to the kill gained equal amount rather than only one person gaining all the profits. That was it doesnt discourage others from helping or being helped if needed.

I rememeber at once point i was playing the ice bird ( if someone could confirm name it would be nice too lol ) and someone was about to get killed , i saved then and killed the attacker, instead of a thank you , i received a tyrade of insults because i “stole his XP” …

Im not against a last hit mechanic , as long its done right and in a way that doesnt break the theme of a team game. If a games mechanic encourages its players to solo rather than help a teammate…

.sorry that’s not a team game.

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28

The problem is that its near impossible to make 80 diffirent heroes very closely balanced at both the low and high skill level. In fighting games the same issues already shows up with a half roster. And in tekken (which has a much bigger ability variance compared to street fighter) you already notice that certain characters are more often picked by lesser skilled players, and some by higher skilled.

1 thing however that fighting games can do, which hots cant is make perfect 1v1 countering options. If an enemy has faster abilities, you get compensated by still having quick defensive capabilities, and some quick initiators to ‘stun’ the enemy and start your chain.
In 5v5 that simply doesnt work that easily.

Thats why comparing hots to fighting games is a bad thing to do, they are too diffirent. And thats why hots balance is much harder aswel.
And as a result, they try to balance acros multiple levels, and sometimes just change for the sake of change (changes the meta on all levels). Its not perfect, but it does the job well enough.

1 thing that however is popular is making the hero have a very high skill ceiling by introducing micromanagement into easy heroes. These easy heroes would otherwise often end up being OP on higher skill levels, or always remain useless. By making the skill floor low enough, but increase its ceiling massively, you can sometimes end up with a player who managed to master the hero.

And that sometimes breaks heroes for certain players by making the hero too difficult to simply have fun with it. And since most players actualy fall in the lesser skilled group, its heavily disliked.
After all, it makes it feel like the game is getting balanced towards only highly skilled competetive players. While for them it doesnt matter at all if a hero is useless, they will automaticly play by that meta anyway, and in most cases enjoy it aswel.

Thats why most heroes should be balanced towards gold’ish style, with varieties towards silver and platinum, and only nerf heroes when they are blatantly OP on master+ levels. Sure, they might be somewhat stronger than others, and by that be a default pick. But thats not an issue. For this you can still introduce talent based hardcounters on heroes that are generaly UP to potentialy boost them as counter option.

But power creep is actualy a problem in 5v5 game types, it forces the game around instant kills and makes heroes that arent capable to assist in it quite useless. Its much better to increase the time to kill so all heroes are much better capable of joining in into the combo. This adds a better balance for a team game.

There is a reason why TF2 is still popular, for a game that feels quite quick, the TTK values are quite high. Sure, in an optimal case its still near instant (1s), but in plenty of fights, it can easily take a constant barrage of damage for 20+ seconds (and thats excluding the uber which can add another 8 seconds).

Its best to make optimizing TTK values as hard as possible. Otherwise its going to cause 1 thing: “Players will optimize fun out of the game”.
In this case, they optimize the meta in such way 80% of the heroes becomes near useless. If they cant optimize that aspect, they have to become creative again. And the more options you make, the more ways to optimize they get. At some point, it becomes near impossible to optimize the fun out of the game. Thats when a game has proven to work properly.

Even in a basic shooter like CS where headshots are the best optimizing you get, you can always optimize a counter tactic towards the most popular tactic. It becomes “rock paper scissors” state which is a random generator game and therefor cant be optimized.

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29

This is exactly the effect it would have. Also it might sound great to you but in reality, it defeats the purpose of this game being a Moba. Draft and characters builds are SUPPOSED to have a lot of impact in the Moba genre. Draft allows you to have certain matchup advantages (even fighting games have this to an extent) and building properly means you are aware of the overall gamestate and how your build affects your ability to win. That is the entire point of having different characters and different builds in the first place.

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30

It’s nonsensical.
It’s the reason people draft dodge.
Putting too much stock in draft makes the game essentially rock-paper-scissors.
There’s a reason heroes have talents that allow them to take on abilities outside of their role. Muradin can build some damage, Jaina can take a talent for shields. And that reason is to allow players to adapt mid match to combat this very thing.
That’s where skill really lies.

No, the point is to increase the possible strategies and allow players to be able to play different styles that suit them.
Mobile gank squad, split push ratting, synergistic deathball.
When everyone plays the same the game is less interesting, which is why the devs trying to force people to play the objective is nonsensical.

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31

Yeah making heroes easier is going to bore and lose long time players in a competitive game.

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