Smite is better than LoL, let me count the ways

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 6:48 am

I've mentioned this before in the LoL thread.

But back then it was largely an off hand mention of Smite being better, but without as much detail as largely at the time it was still in beta and while I was impressed by it I didn't play it much having experienced a fair degree of fatigue for the Genre from having played League Of Legends a lot (and indeed enough to become very sick of both LoL's and the genre's short comings at the time) just before I got hold of Smite.

However, I'm now less sick of the Genre, and Smite has officially left its semi-open Beta and is now open as free to play for all. And as a result I've been playing it a lot and really very much enjoying it, as well as enjoying it's range of fairly awesome features.

So I'm going to provide them with some free advertising and talk about the things I like about it here...

House Keeping About Comparisons
I think the LoL/Smite/DoTA2/500 billion others comparisons are appropriate here.

I've tried DoTA2 and found I dislike the pacing. But it had awesome features and user friendly interface and was generally far better quality of life experience than LoL ever was.

Playing Smite has been full of plenty of nice user friendly quality of life stuff and also also sorts of fun features that I have very much enjoyed and felt were pretty damn awesome things that the genre REALLY benefits from having and which LoL didn't have back in the day.

Now I know in the mean time LoL has been painfully slowly evolving like it always kept promising and yet barely ever delivering on. It eventually grew a second game mode, it has an extra map on which game play is totally broken that it completely fucking neglects and so on.

But Smite has all that only better and with more stuff already. And is already adding more stuff and a nice pace.

I don't feel I NEED to go back and point out how shitty LoLs second game mode was, how shitty it's three man map is, or how it's volvanoe map was cancelled or all it's other failings and delays on features. I don't feel I need to go check that it is STILL that bad, I have a great deal of faith nothing has changed as the whole culture of the developer was always one of total failure and incredible laxness in that respect.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, Smite is a 3rd Person MOBA... which makes it better than LoL
This is a huge big giant deal.

It's not top down like the traditional 2d RTS games at the genres roots. It is 3d (in appearance, game play is close enough to 2d) and you view it all from a 3rd person perspective.

It changeseEverything. Even though the basic underlying mechanics are pretty similar to a 2D game and there is pretty much no elevation baring a few special jump or fly character abilities, everything feels different and better.

So much better that 3rd Person by far feels like the genres natural and preferable perspective and 2nd person feels relatively clunky and inadequate.

It's particularly evident (and immersive and enjoyable) in chasing and pursuit, team fight positioning and map awareness, and in skill shots.

It is especially notable on skill shots as almost every ability in the game including basic attacks, are "skill shots". And the third person perspective only helps with and greatly enhances that excellent design choice.

Smite Is Free Play... better than LoL
And has a better model than LoL, probably second in fairness and generosity only to things like DoTA2.

The only stuff you HAVE to pay actual money for are some skins. All the characters and some of the skins are available for in game currency earned from playing and if you mainly just want to unlock gods you can earn that at a very comfortable pace and probably unlock a few characters a week with moderate effort/marginally realistic commitments of game time.

Some of the gods are for some reason super cheap, but most are a fixed standard price that matches that pacing and the only exception seems to be whatever god is "brand new" which is double price... until it isn't brand new then its standard.

Also if you want to pay you can pay for annoying funny money game currency... or you can just pay a flat fucking real money price (a modest one) for all the characters ever.

A significant improvement over LoLs eternally inflated character prices, but MORE of an improvement because LoL includes a sort of "Tax"/Money Sink for your free in game currency and Smite doesn't pull that sort of bullshit.

There is no "runes page" bullshit. There are not even bullshit "summoner powers" to unlock by persistent leveling up as a player.

Leveling up as a player pretty much exclusively grants you bullshit status icons, access to more skins and junk, and access to more organized and competitive game modes.

In the mean time there is no fucking "rune page" of compulsory currency sink that you need to throw away resources on instead of unlocking characters to be effective. And even the whole "fuck you no blink ability to level player blahblahblah" is replaced by two active ability items you can buy off a long list in the individual matches with not just in game but in match currency.

Oh and yeah, there is a weekly rotation of free to play characters. But it is ALSO supplemented by a daily rotation of a "special" match of the day that will further increase your access to characters you have not yet unlocked.

It is by far a more fair, a less exploitative, a less greedy and more comfortable model for both monetization and persistent "player experience points advancement" bullshit.

Smite has far better character/visual flavor/design
LoL is a visual and flavor fucking cluster fuck. Even DoTA2 is kinda... meh in flavor even if significantly more consistent and higher quality on art and technical assets.

Smite wins out on it's art style and quality (only just, but notably in that it has ANY consistent and pleasant style and ANY damned technical quality) which is definitely nicer and more uniform than LoL's while still not nearly being as nice as modern systems could easily manage.

But it seriously clearly wins out on choice of fluff/character flavor.

Smite just draws on real world mythologies for Gods and Deity like creatures for it's characters.

And that is brilliant. Characters are recognizable and interesting, fluff factions are the same and over all visual design is a great deal more uniform and compelling without LoLs laughable failures where they not only had stupidly variable character styles and art styles but couldn't even fucking stick to the same basic fucking scale for human sized totally fucking human total fucking humanoids.

I'd say the worst outlier/offender for style in Smite is cupid, and frankly he (just barely) works well enough within the uniform style of the game and looks pretty convincingly like some sort of cherub as rendered in that style.

Smite Has Better Match Making than LoL
I'm not saying it's perfect. But I'm getting better more even matches more often, and stupider more obviously lopsided matches less often.

And that's at what must be a relatively low level of game history since I've only just started playing according to it (despite playing back in beta, that sorta doesn't count now).

Which is notable because low level match making in LoL was some of the worst of it.

But there is something ELSE significant about the match making in Smite that is totally fucking awesome.

There are multiple game modes. Each game mode has a match making que. And each match making que STARTS GAMES AT FIXED INTERVALS OF TIME ANNOUNCED IN ADVANCE.

You go to your play "Normal Game" menu, theres a bunch of queues by game mode, and each has a fucking counter, a bit over 2 minutes at most and many of them will be counting down under a minute.

If you join a queue for a game mode when that counter runs out then you almost inevitably WILL get placed in a game. As long as you don't join in the last 15 seconds you will generally successfully be placed, and just occasionally even if you select a game mode starting "NOW" you will be placed.

No fucking indefinite waiting in queue while the match maker keeps farting around. And with combined with a last minute penalty free "are you really there?" check to enter the pre match character selection there are almost no cases of AFK at character select, and with a penalty for leaving at character select (but no penalty for last minute drop outs right before it) there are ALSO almost no bullshit disconnects/leavers at character select.

You might think multiple game modes and the fixed intervals might hurt the match makers attempts to make appropriate match ups by dividing the available community of players too small... but after a couple of weeks of play I'd have to say I've hardly seen any evidence of that.

The first maybe half a day they ran their "beta" version of their latest game mode it seemed like that was happening... and after just one day it settled in and now seems fine.

Smite Has A Better Community Than LoL
I've ran into VERY few abusive players. Very few leavers. Even the most obvious "fuck you guys I'm AFK" that I've run into have been sneaky and tried to do it silently.

Because there are flat out direct rewards for being polite and productive, and clear and direct penalties for being reported.

I think LoL may have been finally starting to lean to SOME sort of model there. But this one has been there since the beginning and the community just seems better.

Sure I haven't got into the competitive league matches yet. I could see extra stress and acrimony happening there.

But I used to play LoL primarily outside of the competitive league mode too... and it was FULL of abusive incompetent assholes blaming everyone else for their own failures then AFKing, spamming chat with abuse and deliberately feeding just to ensure no chance of a win or even an enjoyable game experience.

Game Balance Seems Better Than LoL
OK fair enough I am yet to become AS familiar with Smite as I once was (but no longer am) with LoL.

And also fair enough it IS clear some characters ARE weaker than others, some passives and abilities are kinda relatively shitty compared to the sometimes rather obviously better ones.

But over all characters seem way better balanced. LoL's rejects were... wow-lol-fail-bad levels of crap. The not so great characters of Smite are just... not so great. Or often simply harder to play.

At least that seems to be the initial impression I've gotten after playing most of them and against most of them.

It didn't take long playing LoL to realise there were VERY clear character power imbalances.

Thought that may have been heightened by the fact that LoL was more likely to have (some) characters significantly more lacking in diverse toolkits of abilities while in Smite...

Smite Character Abilities Are Better Than LoL
Every Smite character I have so much as looked at is loaded with a diverse toolkit of abilities.

It's not that they have more of them. All of them get one passive, 3 actives, one active ultimate. Pretty standard fair.

But many if not most abilities have significant multiple utility. Dashes are rarely ever just dashes they always DO something else, AoEs almost always do something else, almost everything almost everyone does is useful in multiple situations and contexts.

Not only does almost every character have "something good" they generally almost always have something meaningful to contribute in almost any context.

And that just doesn't happen in LoL, in LoL some characters were "hahaha I have one ability on my character that does everything your character does with 3 abilities and an item!" and other characters were just sad and useless outside of narrow edge cases.

Items Seem Better
Again, I need to become a little more familiar.

And I think, as with most games in the Genre defensive items may just be a little too good value for money.

But WAY less so than was the case back when I was playing LoL. Tanks seem over all better balanced when selecting their defensive gear.

And bruisers are not automatically as unkillable as tanks can get, and making themselves a bit tanky seems to sufficiently lower their damage output in appropriate ways giving them an appropriate middle ground role. Unlike in LoL which was increasingly dominated by bullshit "Fuck you I do ALL THE ROLES!" tanky/dps bullshit characters.

It's also worth noting the games alternative to LoLs lame summoner skills are in match items you can purchase and upgrade to give you 2 active abilities. They are cheap yet appropriately costed, there are a large selection of base active items, and each one on it's third upgrade has two variants. It's by far a more enjoyable and adaptive experience, and allows players to take appropriate actives for the context and progress of the game AFTER it starts, which helps reduce situations where the game is lost before it begins because someone brought a character that needs some sort of active counter from at least one person on the team and no one fucking brought it.

Oh and there are just 4 "starter items" you can't upgrade. They are remarkably better balanced than the LoL ones (back in the day you usually just bought the defensive one or ignored them), and each has a sufficiently good unique ability that it can dramatically influence your early play and you might even buy one counter to your character's role depending on in game context of match ups in lanes. Find yourself dual laning with a partner who you want to feed or who just last hits way better than you? Buy the support starter item and share last hit benefits.

And yet all the starters are just bad enough that while an early purchase of a second (different) one might just be acceptable it mostly isn't and you would totally sell them later in the game as their non-scaling main ability becomes appropriately obsolete. AND yet skipping starting items and going straight to the start of longer term investments is totally a viable fucking thing.

In fact did I mention? The basic item model/interface is pretty fucking awesome.

6 passive items. One of them will be your boots. Generally they only have "special" abilities on their final upgrade they ALL have three fucking upgrades and most branch at least once or twice. Almost all items are appropriately contextually viable. NONE of your 6 items are active and you do NOT clutter up character control with random fucking active items.

You can have different items in your six slots from the same item upgrade tree but you can never have the exact same item twice. It's not just that you don't fully benefit from stacking the same item multiple times. You just flat out cannot do that.

Instead you get 2 slots for active items ONLY. And generally EVERY character uses 1-2 active items and the same damnable key binds for them and the same damn complexity/difficulty commitment.

AND you get fucking potion slots I don't see entirely WHY you want them, potions mostly suck unless you get stuck in a late game even match maxing out your wealth and you buy the big game finisher ones. I suppose a few heals and maybe some manas are totally not an ENTIRE waste of any change you have from your starting item purchases.

But importantly buying potions DOES NOT clutter up your fucking standard item bar, your potions use the same two fucking slots and key binds, don't conflict with your active item slot and keybinds, and you can stack multiples of the same potion in the same fucking slot. This is something players in fucking LoL were asking for as basic quality of fucking life interface bullshit SINCE DAY ONE and I bet they still haven't fucking done it to this day.

Oh yeah. And you can set items (and character skills) to "autolevel" for you as they become available through experience or from visiting the shop while carrying cash. Oh yeah and you can fucking select the items and skill order in advance of games for those auto-buys if you want to AND you can then turn that off in the match if you need to vary it contextually.

But that's part of...

Smite's Interface is WAY better than LoLs
Smite is user friendly. Smite shares information with the player. It's all there. It's all there at all times. In game there is a short cut key to give you COMPLETE details on ALL your skills including actual current numbers of applicable bonuses.

You can select autoshop/autoskill selections in advance, you can stop using them in play, you can (I'm told) import them from fucking character guides on the internet IN the interface of the game itself. And I don't actually use that because the interface for shopping/skill select on the fly is pretty damned acceptable and custom item/skill purchase based on in game context is actually pretty admirably beneficial.

But it's more than that. Jungle camp monsters have visible timers on them (once killed by a team mate or sighted as dead) telling you when they respawn. Why? Because in games like LoL players were using "cheating" 3rd party software to do just that. Other games responded by banning such options from tournament play... and leaving them in the wild to make matches decidedly unfair for the entire rest of the player base. Smite responds by saying "Transparent clear game information for the players THATS A GOOD THING and just making it fairly and evenly available to EVERYONE.

Similarly there are tiny quality of life improvements. When an enemy is sighted by your team there is an automatic ping on the mini map. It's not as loud or as obvious as a manual ping of a location or enemy but it is an audible que that with minimal experience very nicely almost subconsciously prompts you to glance at it and improve map awareness.

It is all brilliant.

Smite's "Standard Mode" is better than LoL's
OK your standard map is a fairly standard three lane affair. But with notable improvements in that the final towers regenerate, and the last objective at the enemy base fights back (with strength based on the number of final towers still standing) which makes for some good potential for last minute come backs.

The Jungle on the 3 lane map is marginally less important and it seems like while "need jungler" meta is stubbornly persistent it isn't actually absolutely necessary the jungle is better designed to encourage almost anyone and everyone to dip it instead, and Junglers are pretty heavily compelled to COME THE FUCK OUT OF THE JUNGLE and engage in the actual game significantly more at all phases.

The biggest jungle failures I've seen are ones who try and play it like LoL used to and go in and stay in for most of the initial laning period only emerging as either power houses or total fucking failures shortly before mid game with MAYBE the most competent of them attempting a gank or two in between.

Smite Junglers who seem to succeed basically just regularly dip the jungle and roam lanes as appropriate far more than LoL ones were compelled to.

All in all fuck the jungling meta and Smite rather nicely undermines it in all the best ways.

Smite has better alternate game modes compared to LoL
LoL has a three player map the developer officially openly abandoned and mocked as unballanced crap they didn't give a shit about. Smite apparently "doesn't balance" around their three player map. But I'll be fucked if it's half as obvious as it is for LoL. Characters play differently on the three player map... but I've yet to see any not be viable on it, indeed I've yet to see any change from viable to not viable depending on if you are on the three or five player maps.

I think a lot of it is also because while LoL's three player map was a sprawling complex cluster fuck of excessive jungle... Smites is a fucking single lane with only 2 minimal very limited jungle paths. It's basically three player single lane from go to finish and it works brilliantly and balances much like the early to mid game of the "standard" five player conquest mode.

LoL has a crappy domination game mode. Finally. It was crap. It had alternative item bullshit too. Which was crap. Smite DID have a crappy domination mode. I've played it. It's crappy. It's also been retired. It comes back sometimes for the special match of the day. Which makes nice variety. But seriously. The right decision there dropping that one. The mode might have worked but the map was total ass.

Instead Smite created a nifty Arena mode with a very strong emphasis on direct sprawling 5 on 5 team fights from start to finish. It still (sort of) has laning in that it has creep waves. But has no towers, points are lost for character, creep kills, and live creeps that make it to the enemy side, but there are NO TOWERS or similar building based objectives and the whole thing plays out a lot like one really broad lane with a few obstacles to dance around and a couple of jungle camps mostly in the open.

Arena is very dynamic and enjoyable and rather compelling in it's differences to the main "standard" mode, but with a focus on 5 on 5 team fights doesn't require or create altogether too great a divergence in character/item balance requirements.

But Smite has more fucking modes.

Smite has a version of the standard mode (for normal non-competitive queues) with a more advanced draft/character selection mechanic than standard. I don't know the details. I need to "own" a few more characters to try it. I THINK LoL was JUST finally starting to implement basically that exact feature back when I left. But they'd taken their time about it considering it was a basic community demand from day one. Smite has launched with it.

It also has an "Assault" mode. 5 vs 5, Everyone gets a random god pick. There is no returning to base to shop/heal unless you DIE, its all in a single lane (with towers etc... on this one) and there flat out is no jungle. I'm not too keen on it, but it plays well and it is basically THE description of a "game mode" players in LoL were forced to use lame "custom games" they got NO in game points/currency from back when I was still playing even though, yet again it was a basic demand from the community from day 1, and again Smite launched with this.

Not content to stop there they are testing a new map/mode. Two lanes, bunch of jungle, towers, 5 vs 5... and every now and then you get enough kills or kill a special jungle camp and basically get a mobile tower running up your lane that everyone can teleport directly too from a door near your base/spawn point/shop. It's still officially "Beta" but seems to play pretty fucking well, and yet again manage to do so without major upsets or required changes to the games basic character/item balance. I'm pretty impressed and play it as much as most of the modes.

And all these modes have a relatively standard (though I think, cumulatively pretty nicely generous) "first win of day" bonus you can earn for more free currency to unlock more characters (and SOME cosmetic items). Combined with the fact that all of them are on fixed reliable, but variable, count downs for the match maker it nicely compels people to play diverse games and even out the queue populations. No queue seems to be the ghost town that it could be.

Aside from that there are also two competitive ranked "league" queues (standard conquest mode and the 3 man mode) but I still need about a million more player experience for that. That is basically the ONLY thing you need player experience for, but you need to be level 30. You ALSO need to have "mastery" with 16 different characters, which means you'll have to play something like maybe 5-15 games with each of them depending on game type, length and whether you win. Do that and you'll fairly safely have the experience and a lot of unlocked gods. Might take a month or two though.

So there are some pretty hefty (but also appropriately diverse) hurdles to even enter the competitive modes. Normal queue however is pretty enjoyable as is and rewarding on points/god unlocks.

BUT also...

Smite has the very best game mode of them all
Smite also has a Match Of The Day game mode. And it changes every day.

The map/mode is different all the time ranging from the abandoned domination to Arena or Assault or whatever.

However match of the day also has non-standard limitations on which characters you can pick to play.

It usually removes the limit on the number of the same character you can have on a team. Indeed one common match type limits EVERYONE to the same character, one arbitrarily selected by the mode. And it's honestly ridiculously hilarious.

Other times character selection is limited to themes like "All High Damage Tagged Characters" or "All Egyptian Gods" or "All Randomly Selected Egyptian Gods". I played a game which randomly resulted in 4 Ras running around. It was somehow marginally MORE hilarious than the standard "everyone just has the same thing" match of the day format.

And importantly you are not limited to your unlocked characters in this mode. You don't "own" Hercules, he isn't on the random rotation but match of the day is all Hercules vs all Hercules, or has Hercules in its random or selectable themed category. No problem, you can just fucking play Hercules.

It's a lot of fun, and it is very often worth playing the match of the day for sheer novelty, bonus experience with specific gods, and the win of the day bonus.

So why would any one play fucking LoL
It's your old WoW dilemma. Sheer momentum making up for whatever. But in the mean time, there are a LOT of MOBA games around at the moment.

And a few of them have prospects to be fairly big, or already are. Smite and DoTA2 have large communities. Smite and DoTA2 I have directly experience with and can see some rather clear reasons why people would play either (and personally significantly prefer Smite). I've seen a few reviews suggesting Blizzard's and EA's contributions to the genre look like they have some fairly notable quirks/variations/advancements that may make them attractive, and they shouldn't have problems getting large enough communities to be playable.

But LoL... LoL has a big community. A shitty one. It has bad items, bad maps, bad modes, bad characters, bad art, and a really shitty bunch of developers who never get anything done and have a terrible attitude towards their own (shitty) player base.

If you are playing LoL you are playing the wrong game. Smite is probably the right game, I'd accept DoTA2 or one of the other major newcomers who offer something different. But seriously. There are currently right now on the market games like Smite that are in all ways significantly superior.

I know people will largely see this as an attack on LoL. And in many ways it is. But basically this is advice. I was a LoL player. There were many aspects of that which I enjoyed. But there was a lot of shit too. There are now options out there which are similar but significantly better on the good aspects and sufficiently less shitty on the shitty aspects. As someone who enjoys the genre it has moved on to better things and I advise you to thoroughly check out what it's moved onto because it is seemingly way more fun.

Or to put it simply. Smite is awesome. You should play Smite.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Tue May 13, 2014 8:43 am

This is partly normal crazy and partly very special crazy.

DotA is more user-friendly than LoL?
You are insane. This is a game with global, auto-targeting executes (no warning), teleports that cancel if you click ANYWHERE on the map, couriers that can be killed, and no going to base to heal. DotA is legendary for having terrible user interactions and the design team has been shown not to give a crap.

3rd person is better
This is completely opinion. I hate 3rd person because having people run behind me and attack is really annoying. Turning speed is one the reasons I hate DotA 2 and 3rd person games are just... bad.

So this really isn't a universal advantage. Moving on.

Smite is Freer than LoL
Special goodies are nice, but lacking mastery/rune pages means the best role your character can take on at level 1 should be their only role. Runes and masteries allow people to get around that, and increase flexbility between matches. So there's a net positive, but it looks like you don't have enough experience to be familiar with it.

Smite Looks Prettier
Are you crazy? The movement animations on Smite gods are all them hovering while their legs move in unrelated ways beneath them, the animations are 40% bright neon circles and the rest have little to no animation, and there's basically no texture on anything except the map.

The heroic figures in Smite are also boring. Everyone is human-sized. Even the incredible dragons and ettins are sized like people. I don't see how this is a pro at all.

And then there's the low-quality graphics. And the crappy frame rate. And let's not even talk about the art. Tyr's eyes are pointing different directions. What the hell.

Smite has better fluff... or something
They copypastad some stuff out of another religion, wee original and interesting and therefore better!

No wait, you're still crazy.

I seriously have no idea how a hero that shoots bees is regarded as somehow flavorful or interesting. It's literally 4 dumb bee stereotypes. Bee stinger, bee's like honey, bee's attack you, bee's live in hives. Wow how enthralling.

Queues are Better
I can only assume you played below level 10 in LoL because that's where the problems lie. You were probably squashed by someone who owns another account already and way trolling. I know that feeling.

But seriously, Smite's matchmaking is nonsense. LoL has great ways for detecting performance levels to match with smurfs with each other and keep regular players together. And crying that you have to wait a whole extra minute while it finds you a not-shitty match is... I dunno... really stupid?

Smite's Community
No way, a tiny community playing a game where chatting is more difficult and teamfighting is less important has less raging?!?!!?!1!!one!

And seriously, the number of leavers is ridiculously large. It's another side effect of new games, and you don't notice people posting about it for the same reason no one posts about the community--it's not a special aspect of Smite, because Strife / Infinite Crisis / 300 Heroes / etc all have the same exact things for the same exact reasons.

Game Balance is... no wait, what?
You honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Honestly.

Smite characters are diverseAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Bacchus is like Ares, but they switched up the crowd control. Just like almost every god, he has a buff, a small crowd control ability, a small nuke, and an ult that's either CC (guardian), nuke (mage), or buff (hunter). They're worse than the old LoL champions.

Items are better
You should play maybe 20 games of Smite, and perhaps learn what tanks do, before you say crazy things. Damage provided by items is absurd, tanking doesn't really exist, the starter items are basically identical to LoL's (mandatory if you're any good, hint: you are not good).

Then you say more crazy things, like players want separate potion slots (nope, also not a good idea if you want lane bully flexibility), that auto-buying and auto-leveling are good (wat wat wat), and that the items in Smite are "contextually viable" (just how many games have you actually played?)

Smite's interface is better
I really don't understand some of these complaints. LoL doesn't have a shortcut key for getting details on your skills, you just use your mouse and hover over them. Everybody can do it.

Importing guides from the internet is a good thing, but LoL has custom guides you can make and it really takes 3 minutes or less so I don't feel bad for you. Autoshop/Autoskill is a terrible idea and being able to turn it off doesn't make it less terrible.

The reason LoL doesn't want jungle clear timers and automatic enemy detection because they want some sort of skill cap so proficient players can be distinguished from non-proficient ones. Smite is a casual's game (quit crying, you know it is), and since no one of high skill level is going to be hanging around, they don't worry about making the game difficult to master. You like this, but a lot of people don't.

Standard Mode
So you again demonstrate a total lack of knowledge as to how LoL works. It appears that you find joy in finding random components of Smite that LoL has, then claiming LoL doesn't have it. It's really weird.

Smite's Alternative Modes
These are so hilariously poorly-balanced. The 5v5, no towers map is absolutely terrible because it encourages wombo combo champions. You probably don't play at a high level of skill, so I'm not surprised you don't see this. But seriously, Ares on that map is dumb.

And no, more modes =/= better. I don't know what kind of stroke you had that made you think more content means higher-quality content, but you should see a doctor and take your foot out of your mouth.

ASSAULT MODE IS IN LOL. IT'S CALLED ALL-RANDOM-ALL-MID. IT EXISTS. WHY ARE YOU SO DUMB. WAAAARARRGAGGL.

Smite has a random game
Yay casuals can play random games. They can also play Halo 3 grifball. Or curve fever 2 or whatever. No one cares.

So why would you play LoL
Jeez, perhaps it's the better playmaking potential, better champion design and design philosophy, more interesting meta, or integrated minigames. Perhaps it could be the better graphics, the better audio, the less leaver-prone atmosphere, the better build direction, the more defined counterpicks, or the decent user interface.

I don't know. It's probably a combination of all of those things.

GreatGreyShrike · Post by **GreatGreyShrike** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:25 am

I play mostly DotA 2, myself. I tried Smite and LoL both for ~10 hours, so I don't consider myself any sort of expert on either of those two games, and can't possibly offer a meaningful opinion on any aspects of either of them other than the art style and graphics which is to my mind the least important part of these games.

That said:

...You Lost Me wrote: DotA is more user-friendly than LoL?
You are insane. This is a game with global, auto-targeting executes (no warning), teleports that cancel if you click ANYWHERE on the map, couriers that can be killed, and no going to base to heal. DotA is legendary for having terrible user interactions and the design team has been shown not to give a crap.

That said: I looked up 'executes' and it apparantly means deaths to non-player sources in LoL? I have no idea what you're talking about here with global auto-targeting executes and would appreciate more words on this subject so I could understand what you're trying to say here about them, because I don't even understand what the words you are typing mean.

Teleports being cancelled happens if you tell your hero to move while they're channeling a TP. The items (TP Scroll, Boots of Travel) and Nature's Prophet's Global Teleport that allow you to channel and teleport don't let you move while casting them, so if you do move it ends the spell. They're balanced around this set of restrictions. Compared to LoL TP/Recall I'm not sure either is more intuitive than the other - based on my experience as someone familiar with DotA, LoL's TP system seems infuriating and backwards at first exposure, while for someone familiar with LoL based on your post, the reverse seems to be true, so I think this is basically a subjective difference between the two games that doesn't clearly make either inferior or superior, just different.

Couriers can be killed: So? You can send a thing to deliver items to you, and if you do it while deep in enemy territory it can die, but if used safely almost never can die? I don't really see the problem here. It grants an opportunity in the game for high-risk plays (sniping it gives a gold boost to your entire team and hurts the enemy team a lot, but is usually hard to do and requires you to be in risky places).

Finally:
No going to base to heal: You can still go to fountain/base and it will heal you in Dota 2. You don't want to do this early on unless you have to, of course, because you miss out on gold and experience early - but I understand LoL discourages running back to base to heal too?

There's a lot of things which are legendarily bad and obscure for Dota that I think are quite real complaints about how the game work. These include, but are definitely not limited to:

- Illusion mechanics are stupid and obscure and complicated (what the illusions inherit compared to what they do not is *fucking stupid* legacy mechanics from Dota 1, and is way more complicated than it should be.)
- Some heros have luck-based mechanics that are frankly bullshit - they can make or break a game if the person is exceptionally lucky or unlucky early on. See Chaos Knight and Ogre Magi.
- Damage types is a stupid mechanic, and the difference between physical/magical/pure/composite/HP removal/universal is way too many to fucking have and the fact that physical is broken into normal, pierce, siege, chaos, and hero damage is also bloody stupid.

There are lots of real and legitimate problems with Dota 2. I just don't understand any of the ones you listed.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:38 am

While agree with nearly or every thing You Lost Me said, I really want to emphasize that I have played every new Moba that has come out, and every time I am looking for one thing, and every time that is better champion design, and every time LoL has better champ design, and Smite is no exception.

Pseudo Stupidity · Post by **Pseudo Stupidity** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:47 am

When somebody says Execute they tend to mean "ability meant to finish a kill." LoL does call getting killed by a non-player an execute (no idea why), but they also call spells that are meant to get the killing blow (bonus damage to low-health target spells) executes.

The thing that bothered me about Dota and gives me no desire to play its sequel is just how fucking punishing it is if you fall behind or aren't really good. I'm a competitive asshole, but I don't like games where comeback mechanics...don't exist. Dota 1 was very, very punishing if you fell behind at all because you lost gold on death, could deny creeps, and there were fewer ways to outplay opponents (imo, of course) to come back. That and fuck the legacy str/agi/int shit.

Smite just looks like a clusterfuck (I'm not one to complain about quality of graphics, but the NUMBER of effects on-screen at times and their sameness makes me think it's a shit game) and I haven't and probably will never actually try it. I've seen some streams of it and I had some friends who play LoL tell me it was the best thing ever, but naturally they stopped playing after a week or two and kept playing LoL. Smite just looks like it's trying to catch people with the gimmick of "Third person MOBA" and isn't polished to the point where I'd want to play it. I'd try it if it was ever cleaned up to the point where I could tell what the fuck was going on when more than 2 people start fighting.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:49 am

...You Lost Me wrote:DotA is more user-friendly than LoL?
You are insane. This is a game with global, auto-targeting executes (no warning), teleports that cancel if you click ANYWHERE on the map, couriers that can be killed, and no going to base to heal. DotA is legendary for having terrible user interactions and the design team has been shown not to give a crap.

You talk about game play mechanics in response to a mention of user interface and community features. You aren't even interacting with the same thing.

3rd person is better
this really isn't a universal advantage. Moving on.

I'm sorry but no. It is a flat out more immersive experience. And you can totally measure it. To the point the it is a well known fact that 3rd person games in general are more immersive and reactive than top down games. And too bad if you are a lame player with no map awareness who gets freaked the fuck out by someone sneaking up behind you and ganking your lame ass. 3rd person makes that a greatly improved experience all around and it greatly enhances game play that actual awareness and facing are more important.

Runes and masteries allow people to get around that, and increase flexbility between matches. So there's a net positive, but it looks like you don't have enough experience to be familiar with it.

Rune pages are flat out a needless feature their "customization" is bad for game play and they are inflexible and prevent flexible adaptive game play based on the context of events that occur in matches.

But most of all runes pages existed exclusively as a currency sink to burn your free currency because you have to spend A LOT of it on rune pages to function at a viable level.

Rune pages are there so you have less free currency and end up spending real money to unlock the over priced LoL characters. If you don't fucking get that you are, quiet frankly, very stupid.

Smite Looks Prettier
Are you crazy? ... Everyone is human-sized.

So firmly in the camp of liking how in LoL the humans are never actually reliably human sized then. Gotcha. I don't think your asthetic tastes really have any weight there.

Smite has better fluff... or something
No wait, you're still crazy.

So... Teemo is a good thing then? What about the fucking pedophillia joke girl who goes on about everyone seeing her bare tibbers constantly (ha ha, what a hilarious pun they have her repeat every fifteen seconds, I can barely contain my giggling disgust)?

Real world mythology isn't original, but it has plenty of redeeming qualities as a background and source material and is fucking a billion times better than pedo-bear girl.

I seriously have no idea how a hero that shoots bees is regarded as somehow flavorful or interesting. It's literally 4 dumb bee stereotypes. Bee stinger, bee's like honey, bee's attack you, bee's live in hives. Wow how enthralling.

Then you are fucking stupid that is an awesome thing and much more fun and again, a million times better than a walking pedophilia pun who sets things on fire for no reason.

Queues are Better
I can only assume you played below level 10 in LoL because that's where the problems lie. You were probably squashed by someone who owns another account already and way trolling. I know that feeling.

I ran to level 30, exeperienced all the and played for easily a year after that and had platinum on the casual solo queue, whatever the fuck it was called I can't even remember. So I guess fuck you for pulling the usual stupid assumption/lame argument as defense that very stupid people have been pulling for a long time.

crying that you have to wait a whole extra minute while it finds you a not-shitty match is... I dunno... really stupid?

It ran to a hell of a lot more than an extra minute. Especially as I ran up the ranks there. And that was even when the fucking thing didn't break and enter the weird ass fail state it used to where it would NEVER match you unless you left the queue and rejoined.

And seriously the fixed start times on multiple ques with a variety of attractive game modes all works brilliantly in combination. It's one of those "why hasn't everyone been fucking doing this for online match making for ever?" things. It works beautifully, and not only should other MOBAs be using it but online FPS and other games with multiple modes and relatively short matches/levels/whatever should be using it. It's fucking brilliant.

What isn't brilliant? Sitting waiting watching a timer that just keeps counting up, occasionally literally forever.

Smite's Community
No way, a tiny community playing a game where chatting is more difficult and teamfighting is less important has less raging?!?!!?!1!!one!

Actually the chatting is actually easier, the sorta "quick chat" feature (they have a name for it, I forget it) they have for announcing common game information and requests is really very handy and widely used.... and open for abuse yet rarely ever abusively spammed.

Oddly the ones who do tend to abusively spam it... seem to be people trying to pull LoL specific tactics... and failing...

And seriously, the number of leavers is ridiculously large. It's another side effect of new games,

I'm experiencing less leavers, presumably in the noob match ups, than I experienced as a level 30 platinum casual in LoL. Enough less that in making that claim I feel pretty safe that I'm not just letting bias color my memories.

And if I were to compare the leaving and abuse and griefing I saw in LoL's noob queues pre level 10, hell pre level 20... even pre 30 it's well and truly nothing. Comparing the same part of the community it is massively better than the experience LoL provided... conveniently also at a very similar time in that (now aged) game's life cycle.

it's not a special aspect of Smite... all have the same exact things for the same exact reasons.

But LoL does not have it. ALL those games, according to you, are better than LoL in that regard. It's still Smite 1: LoL 0 on that particular point regardless, and is still just one more reason why people should play Smite in preference to LoL.

Game Balance is... no wait, what?
You honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Honestly.

Your compelling claims and argument have clearly out performed me.

Smite characters are diverseAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Bacchus is like Ares, but ...

Hey look the are the same except they are different!!! And all the other gods... they also sometimes have similarities!!! Everything they do either moves things, crowd controls things or damages things! Or worse, various strange combinations of those things you just don't understand it hurts your little tiny brain! WHY ARE THINGS SOMETIMES LIKE EACH OTHER ?!?

You are going to have to trust me. But you in fact CAN combine various abilities made out of similar components in a game with relatively simply underlying mechanics and create complex and diverse emergent abilities and play styles. I might have hoped posting on an RPG design forum you might already know that, but I guess not.

No, no need to thank me for that one, you are welcome.

Items are better
You should play maybe 20 games of Smite, and perhaps learn what tanks do, before you say crazy things. Damage provided by items is absurd, tanking doesn't really exist, the starter items are basically identical to LoL's (mandatory if you're any good, hint: you are not good).

LoL's defense items were vastly too good. Smite's are in a good place. Tanking very much DOES exist. I've played a crap load more than 20 games and teams without a viable well played tank tend to lose, especially in the "standard" conquest mode but to varying extents in the other modes too.

Then you say more crazy things, like players want separate potion slots

Fuck you, it was always a prominent request in the LoL community all through it's Beta era.

that auto-buying and auto-leveling are good (wat wat wat)

It's a great option to have for beginners.

Because you can customize the fucking selections to your preference in advance it is a great option for idiots like you who apparently, even in you own claims don't understand why sometimes spefic item selections might be better or worse due to some situational context like enemy god selections or the specific gods you are laning against early game.

I mean since YOU claim that context doesn't mean a thing to you selecting YOUR prefered build in advance and having it auto buy for you instantly, which DOES potentially return you to laning and team fights earlier, and ensure you have always spent your skill points before every skill use IS a clear advantage. For you. If your bat shit crazy idea that context and situation never influences item selection were remotely fucking true.

Smite's interface is better
I really don't understand some of these complaints. LoL doesn't have a shortcut key for getting details on your skills, you just use your mouse and hover over them. Everybody can do it.

It's a better presentation in general, and in combination with standard 3rd person movement controls and you can more easily read it while still running out to initial positions. But it's just one of a wide number of improved interface and quality of life functions.

Autoshop/Autoskill is a terrible idea and being able to turn it off doesn't make it less terrible.

Again, it's an idea the LoL community had repeatedly requested. And having control over it both in activating it, de-activating it, and customizing it is all around the best possible situation a player could ask for. Because no matter what you might want from that simple quality of life interface feature, including nothing at all. THIS game has it covered. And time and again Smite has this philosophy and it is a good philosophy to have.

The reason LoL doesn't want jungle clear timers and automatic enemy detection because they want some sort of skill cap so proficient players can be distinguished from non-proficient ones.

Bullshit. No, really flat out bullshit.

Those timers exist for LoL and are used. Claims about "skill caps" are blatant excuse making and bare ass covering by lazy developers with a bad attitude that just don't give a shit about fairness and transparency for the portion of the community that isn't effect by tournament level rules enforcement. Which is you know basically all of it.

Smite is a casual's game (quit crying, you know it is)

I am a casual. Everyone reading this is a casual. YOU are a fucking casual.

So I guess you agree we should all be playing Smite then.

they don't worry about making the game difficult to master. You like this, but a lot of people don't.

They improved the function of the mini map and you decry it as an assault on your awesome non-casual eliteness and believe it will drive similarly "elite" players from the game.

Well, no. Better game feature functionality, improved interface and more even handed fair transparency don't do that. In fact if you ask actual competitive professional players, I mean the ones who actually ARE paid non-casuals, not blow hard self deluded dumb fucks like you, or people who make an actual career out of promoting and creating e-sports you might just find that exactly these sorts of improvements are what they want in a game.

Smite's Alternative Modes
These are so hilariously poorly-balanced.

I remain impressed so far about how much they are in fact balanced. Looking at them closely as I wrote this thread up I found myself noting just how much many of the modes look exactly like specific phases and aspects of the standard mode.

Joust is a three man lane. Pretty much a constant equivalent to a gank+2 man lane vs the same. The Arena mode you decry as terrible is just a constant 5v5 team fight outside of tower range, which as it turns out is a large part of standard mode too. And the same basically goes for the rest.

it encourages wombo combo champions. You probably don't play at a high level of skill, so I'm not surprised you don't see this. But seriously, Ares on that map is dumb.

Looks like you don't play at enough of a high skill level to have faced and dealt with character combos AND apparently seem to think that combos are somehow NOT a part of standard modes. Or indeed part of LoL.

I mean hell I played LoL in an era when it had a SERIOUS issue with AoE stacking team combos, decried by the developers then directly worsened by them "addressing" it by releasing more characters that stacked AoEs into that particular combo.

And no, more modes =/= better. I don't know what kind of stroke you had that made you think more content means higher-quality content, but you should see a doctor and take your foot out of your mouth.

In a game you might reasonably play many, many hundreds of time variety IS the spice of life. Hey that's almost good enough to be a common phrase. Hmmm. It's almost like your "waah variety bad!" is complete shit.

Variety is good. A variety of enjoyable functional game modes IS an attractive feature in Smite, and LoL's lack of such a thing despite constant demands and endless undelivered promises from LoL's developer IS a distinct stroke in Smite's favor.

Indeed the only strong argument LoL ever trotted out was that it would split the player base for their (crappy) match making.

And Smite pretty much handily proves that to be a bunch of shit. With a much smaller player base they have a perfectly functional match making system for multiple variable modes. LoL has a much larger player base. what the fuck is their excuse for not being able to do this?

ASSAULT MODE IS IN LOL. IT'S CALLED ALL-RANDOM-ALL-MID. IT EXISTS. WHY ARE YOU SO DUMB. WAAAARARRGAGGL.

Back when I played. I made it clear I left LoL a while ago. Back then they were barely even the faintest of rumblings about rumors of maybe even one day finally making it an official mode. After the community demanding it for a VERY long time. Indeed for a long time LoL's developers openly told the community they were never going to support that game mode officially and they should keep going and playing custom matches like they had been for years and to fucking shut up about how easy it would be to revamp the tutorial map or just make a single lane map for a custom mode because fuck you players you don't know anything and making LoL maps is apparently fucking impossible for the makers of LoL... even when they had already made them.

THAT was an attitude and a state of affairs that existed for I think you will find... years.

They have it now? After kicking and screaming and saying "but we don't wanna!" for what 2 or 3 years minimum to my knowledge? That's nice. But Smite provided for the sorts of game modes the community wants at release. Without that bullshit. And that is something LoL had NOT achieved when I left it, well after it's eventual official release.

Smite has a random game
Yay casuals can play random games. They can also play Halo 3 grifball. Or curve fever 2 or whatever. No one cares.

I should have just quoted this bit as proof that you are a stupid asshole who's opinions and recommendations are worthless. It would have been quicker.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 12:09 pm

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:Smite just looks like it's trying to catch people with the gimmick of "Third person MOBA" and isn't polished to the point where I'd want to play it.

Smite just went to official release very recently. It's been kicking around in "not entirely open beta" for rather a while before that.

I played it when it first went to "not entirely open beta", stopped after a short while and returned now with release. And it is a lot better. Though I think mostly in game play, balance and variety. Oh and matchmaking, that stuff is new too. But there have been graphical improvements including some complete character re modellings and changes to attack routines and accompanying animations.

All in all though I have never found the game altogether too confusing on "action clutter" or whatever it is, maybe it's because I sometimes play FPS games with much faster pacing, much more visual clutter and larger numbers of players. But even large team fights are pretty easy to follow what is going on, and whatever limited confusion is well, appropriate and interacts well as something you increasingly can both enjoyably survive and exploit as you gain some experience with the game.

However graphic quality is still well below what modern systems are capable of (and not just capable of, but easily capable of), but as mentioned... still ahead of LoL (which... did they ever do their much promised graphic engine overhaul they had spent years increasingly getting quieter about or is it still using it's 2009 engine?) ... but probably behind DoTA 2 and almost certainly behind many of the newer competitors coming in from Blizzard and EA and every other person.

But I stress again, that the art style is pretty damn good and has some uniform styles and themes and actual an actual consistent scale. Which again, is compared to LoLs cluster fuck of styles including pedo bears and joke mascot furies and apparent complete inability to have human sized humans be even remotely consistent in scale, to the point of making anyone with even a high school level of knowledge of scale and proportion run away in terror and revulsion.

Pseudo Stupidity · Post by **Pseudo Stupidity** » Tue May 13, 2014 12:16 pm

I'd like to take a moment and say PL's knowledge of the LoL meta is not at all accurate, and wasn't even accurate for the times he was playing.

He thinks AoE stacking is OP, which was a thing for season 2 (I think) but the split push meta happened in response to that and ended up crushing AoE spam. They never nerfed giant AoE stacking, the game already had answers to it and people just used those answers. You can still make a team of Amumu (his ult was actually buffed at one point because he was such shit even though he was an AoE king), Galio, Morgana, Graves and Wukong, it'll just be a one-trick pony that loses to a Janna/Zyra/Nidalee/Jayce pick. People who complain about giant AoE stacking tend to be the less skilled players because they're the ones who think you have to teamfight all the time.

He thinks LoL's defensive items are too good, which was actually a thing (again, in S2) that was patched quickly. The bruiser meta did happen for a while, but that was a stupid top lane champion design issue rather than an item issue, and was fixed reasonably quickly. The height of Irelia was a shitty time to be a top laner.

His talk about Platinum queue times is an outright lie. I'm 70 lp in d1, and my queue times just barely pass 5 minutes some of the time. Queue times in LoL aren't that bad unless you're at the very fucking top of the game, which is when they have to be or else you're getting mismatched like crazy. If I queue up for a normal game with friends I'm in a game in less than a minute.

For special modes, LoL does its best to balance modes. It makes items for different game modes and puts in a decent amount of work trying to get balance into the different modes. I kind of like that it doesn't just add tons of shitty modes. I do kind of wish they'd of kept URF forever.

Edit: I took a peak at another Smite stream and those effects are still a bitch to see through. Unless denying vision is the point of shooting fire at people that's really fucking annoying.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 12:38 pm

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:He thinks AoE stacking is OP, which was a thing for season 2 (I think) but the split push meta happened in response to that and ended up crushing AoE spam.

I'm pretty sure I left before season 2. Or maybe right around the time between season 1 and 2, give or take some margin.

But I think it was around the beginning of season 1 (edit: actually remembering it was around or just before the release of Trundle a little googling tells me it must have been around or just before December 2010, so that's the correct time frame) the developers of LoL told the community that THEY thought AoE stacking teams were OP and needed nerfing and it was totally one of their top priorities.

Then they did the opposite.

I haven't even actually expressed my opinion of AoE stacking teams from the era. I just repeated what LoL's developers were telling the community when I was a part of it.

Personally I at least recognized they were a thing that happened in LoL and happened in the standard game mode, on the standard map. Which, like apparently all potent or beneficial combo's, You Lost Me inexplicably seems to think is somehow exclusive to Smite Arena mode. Which is odd.

And I do think they were very good at the time, and briefly got a lot better with some additional potent AoE stackers thrown in immediately on top of that. I'm not sure they were ever genuinely over powered but I think they verged on it. However they didn't make a large enough number of appearances in solo queue as they required too much organisation to pull off the basic character selection requisites let alone actual in play AoE stacking for that level of play. So I didn't see it enough to ever really be sure.

They never nerfed giant AoE stacking,

I don't know if they did. I certainly know while I played they indeed in fact did not nerf it.

But they absolutely definitely at one point official announced that nerfing it was one of their top three design priorities. Hell I'm pretty sure it was the first on the list, possibly second.

He thinks LoL's defensive items are too good, which was actually a thing (again, in S2) that was patched quickly. The bruiser meta did happen for a while, but that was a stupid top lane champion design issue rather than an item issue, and was fixed reasonably quickly. The height of Irelia was a shitty time to be a top laner.

Unless Irelia became incredibly and I mean incredibly ridiculous her "height" was some time in season one about the time of her release and was in fact pretty incredibly crazy. For pretty much that reason but at a distinctly different time. I wouldn't put it past LoL's designers to repeat the mistakes they fixed in her later on in season 2 though. They tended not to learn from their mistakes, even the ones they fixed.

His talk about Platinum queue times is an outright lie. I'm 70 lp in d1, and my queue times just barely pass 5 minutes some of the time. Queue times in LoL aren't that bad unless you're at the very fucking top of the game, which is when they have to be or else you're getting mismatched like crazy. If I queue up for a normal game with friends I'm in a game in less than a minute.

Well I would HOPE they are better after an additional 2-3 years of development. With any luck, unlike the FIRST 2-3 years of development they may even have FINALLY gotten rid of that bug where wait time was sometimes, and without any way of telling when, infinite. Which they still hadn't gotten rid of. After 2-3 years of development.

In the mean time... maximum queue times are about 2:30 on the fixed time system that Smite uses. So I guess twice as fast as your 5 minutes. And with their fixed time format that should remain the same even when you start getting rated higher by the matchmaker.

Presumably it's possible that the league mode I have yet to reach has a longer fixed timer, but since it's visible... even if it exceeded five minutes... you could just not join it if you felt like getting to a different game sooner.

I continue to stress, the fixed time queues thing is a very nice arrangement for match making and queue methodology for online games in general I remain impressed.

Pseudo Stupidity · Post by **Pseudo Stupidity** » Tue May 13, 2014 1:58 pm

PL, the thing is that super early League should have made a ton of mistakes because they were the game that made MOBAs popular. League made many mistakes (I wasn't around for release Xin or Vayne, but I''ve heard stories) but they get to make those mistakes as long as they fix it quickly. It's a competitive online game where they add new characters more often that once a month and do a major change to the core game every year.

What matters is how League works right now, not how it worked 4 years ago. League right now has excellent queue times for the quality of its matchmaking (5 minute queue is near the top of ranked, at gold/plat it takes ~1 minute to find games), excellent balance and build diversity, and few genuinely unfun mechanics. There are very few times in League where something will happen and you'll say "that was complete and utter bullshit," and that's really good. Ability combos are supposed to happen, but they're supposed to have counters as well (CC stacking? Cleanse/QSS/Mikaels. Huge burst? Guardian Angel. Big initiate or poke? Banshee's veil) and League does that sort of gameplay very well.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 13, 2014 2:08 pm

Allow me to summarize PL's argument:

Lol in 2014 may be better than Smite in 2014 in nearly ever respect, but by golly, Smite on release is better than Lol on release, since LoL was released years prior.

In no way does my complete and total ignorance of the changes that occured in the last three years of LoL in any way effect my ability to accurately judge it.

Further, there is absolutely no reason to expect that LoL, a game which has grown and evolved and incorporated new elements at a signficiant rate, and just recently instituted a much better system for "Hahaha so random" games than Smite has will continue to adapt and change at a faster or equal pace to Smite, a game which "came out" in 2014, and owes most of the "improvements" it has over LoL of 2010 to things it directly copied from LoL of 2013-14.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Tue May 13, 2014 4:23 pm

DotA 2 is perhaps the least user friendly game I have ever played on the PC. The interface shows a truly astounding degree of awfulness, and any and all attempts to fix it are shouted down by endless grognards because it's "making the game easier" or "not like the original dota" so they don't even try anymore. It's enough to have made me give up on the game.

Akula · Post by **Akula** » Tue May 13, 2014 5:12 pm

...You Lost Me wrote:DotA is more user-friendly than LoL?
You are insane. This is a game with global, auto-targeting executes (no warning), teleports that cancel if you click ANYWHERE on the map, couriers that can be killed, and no going to base to heal. DotA is legendary for having terrible user interactions and the design team has been shown not to give a crap.

Ooh! Ooh! Moba fight! And flash is still better than every other summoner spell even after it has been nerfed more than once; new hero's are consistently are much better than their older counterparts in a transparent effort to make you spend more money on the game; new support heroes are released maybe once a year when a hero is released every other or every third week; you can't buy anything when you are out of the base at all; I don't even understand "no going back to base to heal" because you can totally do that, you just can't sit in the bushes to channel for 8 seconds to do so; the LoL version of lane control is tanking creeps in front of the top lane turret and at least was one of the factors in that lane being both slow and very snowbally; Defensive itemization was super boring in that the best way to defensively itemize was to get atmogs and then stack either chain mails or null cloaks depending on what was killing you, made even worse by most of the upgraded defensive items being inefficient compared to the basics (this sort of changed with the season 3 item rework in that the basics were also nerfed).

The point of that massive paragraph of nits is that all your complaints are super petty. I won't pretend to speak for PL, but the Dota 2 client is much better and more user friendly than the league client. Which has everything to do with Riot not expecting to succeed and making a really shitty adobe air client, then not being able to untangle themselves from it. Both games can be fun, but I like Dota because it demands 0 real dollars to play every hero at full effectiveness while league barely allows you to keep up with hero releases unless you play 4-5 games a day. Also no role enforcement baked into the heroes, that is a pretty big deal and a large plus for dota in my opinion.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:He thinks AoE stacking is OP, which was a thing for season 2 (I think) but the split push meta happened in response to that and ended up crushing AoE spam.

The AoE meta was season 1. The split push meta was almost solely the result of Shen being remade into a very strong hero in season 2 and had nothing to do with the AoE meta which had been dead in the competitive scene for quite a while. Split pushing came up after the focus on jungle invasions and jungler resources denial became a thing when M5 crushed Dreamhack with it.

He thinks LoL's defensive items are too good, which was actually a thing (again, in S2) that was patched quickly. The bruiser meta did happen for a while, but that was a stupid top lane champion design issue rather than an item issue, and was fixed reasonably quickly. The height of Irelia was a shitty time to be a top laner.

That wasn't the bruiser meta though? I mean Irelia was repeatedly nerfed until she wasn't a viable pick but the bruiser meta was the Warmogs/Atmas/Force of Nature/Trinity build contrasting with the dual AP will of the ancients compositions. And neither of those were fixed quickly, I was playing during s2 and those builds lasted from the beginning of the season to nearly the end for the first and until they reworked the items for the second.

PL, the thing is that super early League should have made a ton of mistakes because they were the game that made MOBAs popular.

You seem to be confusing the fact that LoL is the most popular moba with it somehow establishing the genre, the Chinese dota scene is probably the genesis of the genre's popularity; though league has had more success in the rest of the world.

Surgo wrote:DotA 2 is perhaps the least user friendly game I have ever played on the PC. The interface shows a truly astounding degree of awfulness, and any and all attempts to fix it are shouted down by endless grognards because it's "making the game easier" or "not like the original dota" so they don't even try anymore. It's enough to have made me give up on the game.

I don't even know what to say to this. You don't offer any specifics or anything that was "shouted down" so I don't think anyone can understand where you are coming from.

Pseudo Stupidity · Post by **Pseudo Stupidity** » Tue May 13, 2014 5:47 pm

Akula wrote:And flash is still better than every other summoner spell even after it has been nerfed more than once; new hero's are consistently are much better than their older counterparts in a transparent effort to make you spend more money on the game; new support heroes are released maybe once a year when a hero is released every other or every third week; you can't buy anything when you are out of the base at all; I don't even understand "no going back to base to heal" because you can totally do that, you just can't sit in the bushes to channel for 8 seconds to do so; the LoL version of lane control is tanking creeps in front of the top lane turret and at least was one of the factors in that lane being both slow and very snowbally; Defensive itemization was super boring in that the best way to defensively itemize was to get atmogs and then stack either chain mails or null cloaks depending on what was killing you, made even worse by most of the upgraded defensive items being inefficient compared to the basics (this sort of changed with the season 3 item rework in that the basics were also nerfed).

Moba fighting? Let's fucking do it. The thing is, all your complaints are refuted with "that is all old shit and none of it is true anymore except for Flash, which the game is balanced around now for better or for worse." Thought maybe you were being satirical about PL's complaints?

Akula wrote:Both games can be fun, but I like Dota because it demands 0 real dollars to play every hero at full effectiveness while league barely allows you to keep up with hero releases unless you play 4-5 games a day. Also no role enforcement baked into the heroes, that is a pretty big deal and a large plus for dota in my opinion.

LoL slowed champion releases to once every 3 weeks (if that often). You still have to play once a day (and win!) to own every single champion in the game, but you certainly don't need to own every single champion in the game. There's even some benefit in making people purchase champions (with time or money) so they actually learn those fuckers. Playing with or against "First game X" is always a kind of lame experience.

Are you complaining about League heroes not having role enforcement baked in, or are you complaining that they DO have role enforcement baked in? Because they don't have it. Most champs are only suited for a few roles, but that's just how it is. Champions are going to be better at certain roles than they are at others. It's not like you can't stick Janna mid and still do fine.

Akula wrote:The AoE meta was season 1. The split push meta was almost solely the result of Shen being remade into a very strong hero in season 2 and had nothing to do with the AoE meta which had been dead in the competitive scene for quite a while. Split pushing came up after the focus on jungle invasions and jungler resources denial became a thing when M5 crushed Dreamhack with it.

I wasn't around for S1, so I must have missed it. I thought it was there at the start of S2 as well, but I could be wrong. Bronze/silver has always been the domain of AoE crushing the universe, and that's where I was then.

Akula wrote:That wasn't the bruiser meta though? I mean Irelia was repeatedly nerfed until she wasn't a viable pick but the bruiser meta was the Warmogs/Atmas/Force of Nature/Trinity build contrasting with the dual AP will of the ancients compositions. And neither of those were fixed quickly, I was playing during s2 and those builds lasted from the beginning of the season to nearly the end for the first and until they reworked the items for the second.

I remember the atmogs bullshit, and that was definitely the bruiser meta. Who builds atmogs? Bruisers. Riot tried to fix it quickly (by nerfing the champs, it took them a while to finally realize it was the items that needed nerfing) and they did manage to swing the balance around on a bi-weekly basis. GP was OP, then Irelia, then Shen, then GP, then Wukong, then Irelia, then Shen...They just nerfed all the bruisers all the time. I consider fixing a major gameplay issue within a few months pretty quick given how many champions were affected by it.

Akula wrote:You seem to be confusing the fact that LoL is the most popular moba with it somehow establishing the genre, the Chinese dota scene is probably the genesis of the genre's popularity; though league has had more success in the rest of the world.

LoL didn't establish MOBAs (Riot did invent the term!), but they were the stand-alone game that was made. Dota was a custom map in WC3, it wasn't more of a stand-alone game than Sheep Tag was. LoL was the first game that really bet on the AoS (that's what Dota and all those were called, right?) genre being any good. I was there for the pre-Dota shit. Dota was the first wildly popular map of the genre, but I consider LoL the pioneer because they actually risked money on it.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Tue May 13, 2014 6:25 pm

No role enforcement in DotA? Are you high?

That said: I looked up 'executes' and it apparantly means deaths to non-player sources in LoL? I have no idea what you're talking about here with global auto-targeting executes and would appreciate more words on this subject so I could understand what you're trying to say here about them, because I don't even understand what the words you are typing mean.

Like PS said, execute also means "spell designed to kill people". The one I'm talking about in particular is Zeus's ult, which is so interactive that it's basically a numbers check.

Teleports being cancelled happens if you tell your hero to move while they're channeling a TP. The items (TP Scroll, Boots of Travel) and Nature's Prophet's Global Teleport that allow you to channel and teleport don't let you move while casting them, so if you do move it ends the spell. They're balanced around this set of restrictions. Compared to LoL TP/Recall I'm not sure either is more intuitive than the other - based on my experience as someone familiar with DotA, LoL's TP system seems infuriating and backwards at first exposure, while for someone familiar with LoL based on your post, the reverse seems to be true, so I think this is basically a subjective difference between the two games that doesn't clearly make either inferior or superior, just different.

This is a user experience problem. If I perform an action, then prime another one, I don't want the first one cancelled, I just want it readied. LoL's TP system requires you to actually cancel the spell before you teleport, clicking to prepare your movement does not count. And since one of those burns a cooldown or forces you to waste gold while the other doesn't, you can see how it's more frustrating.

Couriers can be killed: So? You can send a thing to deliver items to you, and if you do it while deep in enemy territory it can die, but if used safely almost never can die? I don't really see the problem here. It grants an opportunity in the game for high-risk plays (sniping it gives a gold boost to your entire team and hurts the enemy team a lot, but is usually hard to do and requires you to be in risky places).

I didn't phrase this right. It should have been "couriers are terrible for users, and they can be killed so it's more annoying". The UI of couriers is what's bad, because five people fighting over control of a flying item holder is bad bad bad. Couriers dying is just icing on the cake.

No going to base to heal: You can still go to fountain/base and it will heal you in Dota 2. You don't want to do this early on unless you have to, of course, because you miss out on gold and experience early - but I understand LoL discourages running back to base to heal too?

LoL discourages running to base by letting you teleport to base. The hero ability hud features a B button called "Recall" that lets you get to base immediately. DotA 2's UI is such that you don't know when to go back and when to hang around unless you've played a bunch of games. This was a stretch when I said it, but I was mad because PL was being dumb.

I agree with your other problems, but they're not problems with the user interface, which is what I was responding to.

________

And I recently am reminded why I do not talk to PhoneLobster. In his twisted mind, a girl that summons demons, shoots fire, and wears normal people clothes is a pedophile joke because "bare" and "bear" sound the same.

Akula · Post by **Akula** » Tue May 13, 2014 7:09 pm

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:Moba fighting? Let's fucking do it. The thing is, all your complaints are refuted with "that is all old shit and none of it is true anymore except for Flash, which the game is balanced around now for better or for worse." Thought maybe you were being satirical about PL's complaints?

I was satirizing the person I was responding to because I think most of his complaints don't hold up if you actually play dota and league for the same amount of time. Though PL has an even more outdated view of what LoL is than my own. I'm also pretty sure that support champions are not released often compared to champs that fit other roles still. But I played LoL for like 2 years and they released 1 hero that was actually designed as a support in that time. Maybe things have gotten better since, but supports were vastly underrepresented in champion releases and barring a massive tectonic shift from riot I feel they always will be.

LoL slowed champion releases to once every 3 weeks (if that often). You still have to play once a day (and win!) to own every single champion in the game, but you certainly don't need to own every single champion in the game. There's even some benefit in making people purchase champions (with time or money) so they actually learn those fuckers. Playing with or against "First game X" is always a kind of lame experience.

The rotating top of the heap and the expense of much of the champion pool is a limiting factor, and especially unfair to new players. When Shen was buffed, after being the second worst hero in the game for a long time, I bought him with real money because earning 3k points would have taken a few weeks of pretty regular play. I don't think that it is contentious to say that a person with 50 available champs is better off than one with 20, and the fact that you can purchase a mechanical advantage like that irks me. Even if that advantage is somewhat small. I think we just have different perspectives on this, I agree that learning champs is important but I don't think it should have an impact on champion availability.

Are you complaining about League heroes not having role enforcement baked in, or are you complaining that they DO have role enforcement baked in? Because they don't have it. Most champs are only suited for a few roles, but that's just how it is. Champions are going to be better at certain roles than they are at others. It's not like you can't stick Janna mid and still do fine.

League champs have role enforcement baked in. When I talk about role enforcement I am mostly referring to how champs are made to be good at the "tanky top/AP mid/jungler/support+AD bot" composition that the game hasn't deviated from since season 1.
Beyond that, riot works to fit champs into one of those roles as much as it can. Graves is designed as an AD carry. Lulu is designed as a support. When Lulu was a viable top lane and mid she was made worse at those roles in order to make her conform to what she was "supposed" to be. Alistar was made a worse and worse jungle because he was good at it but he was designed as a support in that timeframe. I find it funny that you bring up AP Janna, cause that had seen a resurgence towards the end of my time playing league and the last patch I paid close attention too saw her nerfed as an AP. Riot is pretty clear, if this support is good mid we will make it a worse mid. If AP Yi starts to become a thing we will make AP Yi worse because that isn't the way that the champ is supposed to work. Riot builds champs to fit the roles that are already established in the game.

I wasn't around for S1, so I must have missed it. I thought it was there at the start of S2 as well, but I could be wrong. Bronze/silver has always been the domain of AoE crushing the universe, and that's where I was then.

I would lay money that it still dominates Bronze/Silver level play, but in S1 is was also a large part of the pro scene.

Akula wrote:That wasn't the bruiser meta though? I mean Irelia was repeatedly nerfed until she wasn't a viable pick but the bruiser meta was the Warmogs/Atmas/Force of Nature/Trinity build contrasting with the dual AP will of the ancients compositions. And neither of those were fixed quickly, I was playing during s2 and those builds lasted from the beginning of the season to nearly the end for the first and until they reworked the items for the second.
I remember the atmogs bullshit, and that was definitely the bruiser meta. Who builds atmogs? Bruisers. Riot tried to fix it quickly (by nerfing the champs, it took them a while to finally realize it was the items that needed nerfing) and they did manage to swing the balance around on a bi-weekly basis. GP was OP, then Irelia, then Shen, then GP, then Wukong, then Irelia, then Shen...They just nerfed all the bruisers all the time. I consider fixing a major gameplay issue within a few months pretty quick given how many champions were affected by it.

I think we agree here about everything but the time frame of quickly, I think that the revolving door nerfs were a poor solution that didn't actually address the problem; indeed they couldn't until AD carry itemization changed. Irelia, strangely enough, was one of the few bruisers that often deviated from Atmogs.

LoL didn't establish MOBAs (Riot did invent the term!), but they were the stand-alone game that was made. Dota was a custom map in WC3, it wasn't more of a stand-alone game than Sheep Tag was. LoL was the first game that really bet on the AoS (that's what Dota and all those were called, right?) genre being any good. I was there for the pre-Dota shit. Dota was the first wildly popular map of the genre, but I consider LoL the pioneer because they actually risked money on it.

That's fair. It beats the release of HoN by a few months.

...You Lost Me wrote:Like PS said, execute also means "spell designed to kill people". The one I'm talking about in particular is Zeus's ult, which is so interactive that it's basically a numbers check.

But this is extra confusing because that isn't what it means in the League vernacular when I played. An execute was a spell that scaled with the opponent's missing HP like Lee Sin's second Q. Necrophos ult is the only spell in dota with that kind of scaling, while they pop up in league all the time. Zeus ult is no more of a number's check than Karthus ult in the context you bring it up. Or Darius's ult.

...You Lost Me wrote:This is a user experience problem. If I perform an action, then prime another one, I don't want the first one cancelled, I just want it readied. LoL's TP system requires you to actually cancel the spell before you teleport, clicking to prepare your movement does not count. And since one of those burns a cooldown or forces you to waste gold while the other doesn't, you can see how it's more frustrating.

You can use shift to ready an action after a channel completes in Dota. I occasionally blow my Town Portals, but considering that dota's Town Portals can take you directly into fights it is more important that you are able to cancel them easily.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 13, 2014 8:00 pm

Akula wrote:I'm also pretty sure that support champions are not released often compared to champs that fit other roles still. But I played LoL for like 2 years and they released 1 hero that was actually designed as a support in that time. Maybe things have gotten better since, but supports were vastly underrepresented in champion releases and barring a massive tectonic shift from riot I feel they always will be.

2013 and 2014 include:

2 supports.
1 mid that can support.
2 ADCs
2 mids that can top.
2 tops that can jungle.
1 "adc" that can "Top" Also called worthless piece of trash Quinn.

As a jungle top player, I'd say supports saw more love over that time period than Jungle really did, or than top, since that includes Thresh, but all we got was Zac and Aatrox, both of which didn't survive being nerfed, unlike Thresh. (Zac is actually fine except that the meta shits him a bit.)

Beyond that, riot works to fit champs into one of those roles as much as it can. Graves is designed as an AD carry. Lulu is designed as a support. When Lulu was a viable top lane and mid she was made worse at those roles in order to make her conform to what she was "supposed" to be. Alistar was made a worse and worse jungle because he was good at it but he was designed as a support in that timeframe. I find it funny that you bring up AP Janna, cause that had seen a resurgence towards the end of my time playing league and the last patch I paid close attention too saw her nerfed as an AP. Riot is pretty clear, if this support is good mid we will make it a worse mid. If AP Yi starts to become a thing we will make AP Yi worse because that isn't the way that the champ is supposed to work. Riot builds champs to fit the roles that are already established in the game.

Except that they have gotten a lot better. Lulu is a better mid than support, and Riot is totally fine with that now. Annie is a support, not a mid, and they are totally fine with that now. I'm not sure why you would complain about them telling you that is not how you play the champ using the AP ratios they gave the champ. Yi has gone all over the place, but the bottom line is that AP Yi was a stupid playstyle that didn't mesh well with the game. Of course, now we have Feral Flare Yi that is a stupid playstyle that doesn't mesh well with the game, but if you have over 100 champs some of them are going to be shitty things that shouldn't exist like Teemo.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue May 13, 2014 10:09 pm

Top down or 3rd person view, I just like contsole style controls over mouse+keyboard clickity clicking.

So does Smite have auto-attack, or is it manual dodging and attacking like Devil May Cry?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 10:44 pm

OgreBattle wrote:So does Smite have auto-attack, or is it manual dodging and attacking like Devil May Cry?

I don't know the devil may cry control scheme. But combat and it's controls are not as elaborate as in your "spectacle fighter" genre if that's what you mean. It's a pity because I would totally play Prince Of Persia vs God Of War or whatever the hell, but I'm pretty sure that's outside the un-adventurous limits of developers trying to appeal to the MOBA fad. Sadly.

Instead it's just fairly standard 3rd person controls. WASD movement and mouse click to attack. Even standard attacks are "skill shots" and hit detection is either essentially a bullet traveling your range for a ranged attacker or a short line directly in front of you for a melee attacker (though melee attackers now have variable hit routines with differently timed and damaging hits, and some of them drop a hit with a small AoE at some point in that routine).

Abilities have rather variable mechanics for hit detection but tend to be hit button, place or aim template/direction, click mouse. (And you can change the exact way that works with smart cast and quick cast options and stuff, but the default is pretty usable).

The game has handy usability guides like options for cross hairs, how or if templates appear on the ground, and even a range ruler along your main front axis.

Dodging is a big deal and almost everything can be dodged. With the possible exception of abilities that throw a temporary pet at you. Especially the one annoying pig attack one. But it's not the problem it was in Beta.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:09 pm

Kaelik wrote:Lol in 2014 may be better than Smite in 2014 in nearly ever respect,

Care to mention how because the only claim you seem to have produced is "I like the character ability design better in unspecified ways".

Now as I mentioned in the initial post. A lot of my information on LoL is indeed out of date, but I didn't even bother checking for whole bunch of features potentially added because back when I left they were breaking long delayed promises on additional modes and features all over the place. The developers clear attitude and apparent trend into the indefinite future was not just one of stubborn resistance to improvements but one of actually scaling back and repeatedly breaking previous promises of already over due improvements.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me if LoL ever did their infamous "graphic engine remake", by the sounds of the "we don't need variety, same map and same mode for ever and we we eat that diarrhea of an idea and say we love it!" it looks like new maps modes, and that variety which IS an important draw for Smite is indeed still lacking in LoL.

Have they reopened the test servers they shut down because it was becoming too obvious they were deliberately ignoring the results on those testing servers?

Indeed by the looks of what rabid LoL fan boys who stupidly believe they are themselves non-casual super elite pro gamers, presented here it looks like the infamous volcano map that had been in eternal development and officially killed off forever before I left remains dead. It looks like the developers incredibly lame excuses about it being magically "impossible" to make new maps or modes work remain the order of the day. It looks like in fact the only "new" mode/map added was ARAM which is as I said kinda underwhelming since it took years of kicking and screaming to get them to do that, and they used to use the "the new map would be impossible to make" excuse on it too despite it being about the simplest possible map making task imaginable for them to undertake.

I'm not seeing Riot make any change in attitude. The criticisms about expensive new champs, the greedy profiteering on nerf/release cycle exploitation, the stupid fixed meta enforcement, the nerfing of alternative roles and "we put it there but we hate it being there" Teemo characters etc... suggest all their bad practices even outside of reluctance/incompetence when it comes to new modes/maps/engine/interface upgrades remain entrenched.

IF the game has somehow massively improved some time between 2011ish and 2014ish how has it done that what the fuck has changed other than a spam of new over powered and then shortly after sales have peaked repeatedly nerfed new champions?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue May 13, 2014 11:55 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:Care to mention how because the only claim you seem to have produced is "I like the character ability design better in unspecified ways".

I wasn't making an argument for the greatness of LoL, I was summarizing your shitty argument about how it doesn't matter that you are wrong about literally every thing that you say and your only defense is that LoL in 2010 was worse than the Smite that didn't exist, and the Smite that now copies LoL improvements made since is totally more worth our time.

PhoneLobster wrote:I'm still waiting for someone to tell me if LoL ever did their infamous "graphic engine remake",

I don't know or care about graphics, or about whatever pseudo promise for better graphics you are making up or massively distorting or accurately referring to that occurred before I started playing.

But I do notice that the graphics have gotten better since I started playing, and that even the graphics when I started in late season 3 where a billion times better than what I saw from earlier vids that could have been sometime between beta and Season 3.

PhoneLobster wrote:by the sounds of the "we don't need variety, same map and same mode for ever and we we eat that diarrhea of an idea and say we love it!" it looks like new maps modes, and that variety which IS an important draw for Smite is indeed still lacking in LoL.

Well I mean, aside from the four maps they always support at all times, they have added variant modes on those maps, At least four in the last few months with a new one coming soon that run for a few weeks to a month, and then are removed when no one is interested any more, almost certainly to be cycled back in.

PhoneLobster wrote:Have they reopened the test servers they shut down because it was becoming too obvious they were deliberately ignoring the results on those testing servers?

As long as I have played they have used the PBE to test all kinds of new changes, including new modes, or new champs, and there is no particular evidence that they ignore those tests, and in fact a great deal of frank design talk by Riot in forums about what they have learned from different PBE tests.

PhoneLobster wrote:it looks like the infamous volcano map that had been in eternal development and officially killed off forever before I left remains dead.

Yes, they didn't make the Volcano map, because it didn't add anything that the ARAM map didn't already have. So they just use the ARAM map for the 1v1 / 2v2 modes.

PhoneLobster wrote:It looks like the developers incredibly lame excuses about it being magically "impossible" to make new maps or modes work remain the order of the day.

Well I mean, aside from all the maps they made. But yes, I can see how them saying that they don't make maps unless the new map provides something the old ones don't is exactly the same as it being impossible to make a fifth map when they made four.

PhoneLobster wrote:It looks like in fact the only "new" mode/map added was ARAM

No, it looks like the only "new" map is ARAM to go with the three other maps they have, but that they have made four other modes applied to those 4 maps as well in the last few months and are currently testing a fifth on the PBE servers.

Or I mean, that is what it looks like to people who base their impressions on evidence and reality, as opposed to whatever convenient lies they can pull out of their ass, only to retreat behind the defense "Bu-bu-but in 2010 that wasn't true" when their bullshit is completely fucking wrong only to repeat their lies three posts later.

PhoneLobster wrote:"we put it there but we hate it being there" Teemo characters

You mean aside from the constant nearly complete overhauls of champs in reworks to fix them to remove game damaging design? Not much.

PhoneLobster wrote:IF the game has somehow massively improved some time between 2011ish and 2014ish how has it done that what the fuck has changed other than a spam of new over powered and then shortly after sales have peaked repeatedly nerfed new champions?

In all the ways people fucking told you before you retreated behind your "But I don't know that because I am deliberately remaining ignorant of 2014 so that I can compare Smite to LoL of 2010 and feel good about my choices because Smite copied some improvements of LoL."

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed May 14, 2014 1:27 am

Kaelik wrote:
PhoneLobster wrote:Care to mention how because the only claim you seem to have produced is "I like the character ability design better in unspecified ways".
Well I mean, aside from the four maps they always support at all times, they have added variant modes on those maps, At least four in the last few months with a new one coming soon that run for a few weeks to a month, and then are removed when no one is interested any more, almost certainly to be cycled back in.

By "four maps" you mean...

1) Tutorial/ARAM map. That they refused for years to make claiming it was too hard.
2) Summoners Rift 5v5 "standard" map. Yawn. The one they actually balance for.
3) The Twisted Treeline 3v3... which they officially told the community was broken beyond repair and they would never bother fixing/finishing or balancing for in any way ever again.
4) The stupid map for their incredibly crappy domination mode.

Now by "added 4 variant modes in the last few months" I hope those are somehow on top of "standard", "ARAM" and "the crappy domination mode".

So tell me more about those. Because your whole "Totally 4 maps you clearly know nothing about!" thing seems kinda like a pile of bullshit what with 3 out of 4 of those directly referenced in my opening post and ARAM discussed extensively since. I'm going to guess that these "extra variant modes" are similar, simply based on the general stupidity of your argument to that point.

edit: also as for "not knowing what you were talking about with maps" it's odd that you single out the Volcanoe map as not needed because the tiny ARAM map totally had 1v1 and 2v2 covered. What with the Volcano map as originally promised was supposed to be an extra giant map for huge sprawling 6v6 game play.

ubernoob · Post by **ubernoob** » Wed May 14, 2014 1:50 am

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed May 14, 2014 2:06 am

ubernoob wrote:Off the top of my head:
1) 6v6 map called Hexakill.

I've seen something on that. That's just on summoners rift right? So the history on that went "we are totally making a huge different map for 6v6" then "we can't do that 6v6 map is impossible to balance with a custom map" and finally "screw it, we'll just raise the player limit on the standard map, that's cool right". Better than nothing but a fairly shitty history.

2) A 5v5 where each team everyone plays the same hero (5 jannas vs 5 ziggs for example). The hero in question is semi random. This was called "One for All"

That's acceptable. I like it. I think I prefer the similar format in the match of the day in Smite, as it provides greater variety over time and a compelling reason to play at least one daily novelty match. But it's close enough to be comparable to some of the match of the day modes.

3) Ultra Rapid Fire (URF is an april fools joke) where everything happens super fast and is totally awesome.

I was given to believe that was gone. And anyway, I always hated any and all material Riot ever produced in relation to their April fools "jokes". Riot has a sense of humor... which... well it's the same sense of humor that produce whatsher face and her bare tibbers puns so... yeah...

If we throw in the fail domination mode and ARAM, count things like 1v1 or 2v2 on the ARAM map as different modes... I suspect that's about the entirety of the horn Kaelik is attempting desperately to toot on.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed May 14, 2014 2:55 am

PhoneLobster wrote:By "four maps" you mean...

First off, you do get that you have to contend with the game as it exists now right? Like, you don't get to "win" the argument about how Smite is a better game because of something some person who no longer works for Riot said in 2010 when current LoL flatly contradicts whatever they said. (Assuming of course, that you are not just pulling this out of your ass, because that is your MO.)

PhoneLobster wrote:1) Tutorial/ARAM map. That they refused for years to make claiming it was too hard.

On the other hand, it is a map. It does exist. Just like that mode that you bragged about Smite having. It really exists. And the fact that some person who doesn't work for Riot anymore made a forum post talking about the technical difficulties in a new map four years ago does not in fact make this map stop existing, and does not change the fact that this map has existed longer than the game of Smite.

PhoneLobster wrote:2) Summoners Rift 5v5 "standard" map. Yawn. The one they actually balance for.

Yes, that is a map. That exists. That isn't the only one they balance for, but whatever.

PhoneLobster wrote:3) The Twisted Treeline 3v3... which they officially told the community was broken beyond repair and they would never bother fixing/finishing or balancing for in any way ever again.

Once again. No one cares what you claim unverifiably that Riot said in 2010. The map exists. It isn't actually broken in any way. They do balance for it, although the differences are small in balance, they do make them.

PhoneLobster wrote:4) The stupid map for their incredibly crappy domination mode.

And literally 100% of Smite modes are stupid and crappy. So fucking what? It is a mode that exists and people play.

PhoneLobster wrote:Now by "added 4 variant modes in the last few months" I hope those are somehow on top of "standard", "ARAM" and "the crappy domination mode".

As stated, they are the assorted variations of One For All, URF, Hexakill, and Showdown. And Mirror One For All.

PhoneLobster wrote:Because your whole "Totally 4 maps you clearly know nothing about!" thing seems kinda like a pile of bullshit what with 3 out of 4 of those directly referenced in my opening post and ARAM discussed extensively since.

You are a fucking idiot. Learn to read. I specifically made the distinction between maps and modes, and explained repeatedly and clearly that the four modes are variations on the existing maps.

Not like you and your vague praise for the totally infinite numbers of maps/mode of Smite that are vaguely somewhere between 1-100, but probably 4 maps and 8 modes.

PhoneLobster wrote:edit: also as for "not knowing what you were talking about with maps" it's odd that you single out the Volcanoe map as not needed because the tiny ARAM map totally had 1v1 and 2v2 covered. What with the Volcano map as originally promised was supposed to be an extra giant map for huge sprawling 6v6 game play.

Once again you colossal fucking retard. No one cares about your personal forum arguments from 4 fucking years ago. They had a volcano map in design for 1v1s. They discontinued it and went with the Howling Abyss. They did this like four months ago. No one cares if they also had a map in 2010 they discontinued, because that is completely fucking irrelevant to the existing maps right the fuck now.