• came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    17 days ago

    i can't even really remember how long ago it was that i looked into league of legends, but it was a long time ago. i don't think it was brand new, because lots of people were already playing it. i was looking for a game to play with friends online and so a friend of mine told me about how two guys we knew back in high school played it all the time now and we could play with them / use it as a way to keep in contact. and it was "Free" so what was there to lose?

    so we download it and get online, only the guys from school are not really interested in showing us what's up because they are trying to achieve something and insisted we play some randoms for a while to figure it out and get better. and we quickly find that the options for noobs not paying money are limited. so we join a game anyway, and start getting told me we suck and are ruining the game because the acronym commands we are being issued by someone who has decided they are in charge of this "game" are inscrutable.

    this experience was supposed to sell us on investing more time into it so we could buy stuff in game to "be better". i think i uninstalled it after a few hours. people look for different experiences in games. personally, my idea of free time isn't something where i want to let some random asshole frustratedly boss me around so i can make numbers go up and have fake money to spend on becoming more comfortable with being bossed around and eventually become one of the people who bosses others around. seems a bit too much like some other game we all have to play already.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      17 days ago

      I feel much the same way about it.

      It doesn't help that "MOBAs" in general are made from the dessicated husks of what used to be the RTS genre, except stripped of map and strategic variety yet at the same time excessively burdened with floods of monetized waifu "hero" units intended to pressure users into buying them awooga outfits.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]
      ·
      17 days ago

      I miss Heroes of Newarth's matchmaking and it should be like that for most games. Because HoN is more like DotA 1.5, it's centered around carries. You build your team around your carry.

      So if your carry is one of the "hard carry" heroes, you need the other four players capable of protecting them for 45 minutes while playing 4v5. After 45 minutes of farming, the hard carry will 1v5 the other team. If you're the other team, you want assassins who gank the other carry and heroes that push quickly. Maybe you have a carry with a large area of attack ult, so your team's other heroes will want AoE abilities, too.

      How this translated into matchmaking was the best player on your team picks what carry they're best with and then everyone else picks based around that and countering whatever the other team picks. It didn't matter if you had people below the starting 1200 MMR because your team captain was 3000 MMR. You could actually focus learning how to play. You could watch how your team's more experienced players played and they'd help you figure out what to do.

      Sometimes you'd be on a team where everyone had the same MMR and it was clear you all knew the same things. The other team might have someone with over 1k MMR on each of you, but they also had someone with 1k fewer than you.

      Anywho it was nice because there wasn't stuff like "bronze, platinum, mythic." There was only the climb. It was similar to chess.