How long until the MOBA market dies?

Ever since DotA was initially released as a mere custom map for Warcraft 3, a new era for RTS games was born. Aptly named MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), this new genre has exploded in popularity in the last couple of years.

I enjoy playing League of Legends and DotA 2. In the past, I've even put a lot of hours into Heroes of Newerth whilst it was in beta. Because the MOBA community numbers in the millions, lots of game developers are trying to seize a piece of the cake.

In fact, there are so many of these games in production, that within the next year the market will be flooded and diversified to the point of ruin, just like the MMORPG genre. People say you can't have too much of a good thing. Take one look at the MMO market and say that again. Sure, there's a lot to choose from; but the premise behind Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games is to play online in with a huge playerbase. In fact, the term massive is getting more redundant by the day. Why? Because with every shit developer in the world looking for some easy money, new MMORPG games come out weekly. With each new release, a chunk of the people who play MMO games peel off to play it. Eventually, there will be so many games that when you finally find one you enjoy- you will be annoyed to discover that there are only 10 other players.

The reason I'm ranting about the MMORPG market is because this is happening to the MOBA market. Slowly but surely the genre is being overpopulated with bad titles. There's a Lord of the Rings MOBA, even Marvel and Blizzard are making their own versions for a slice of profit. And that's what it comes down to. The gaming industry is happy to kill off a brilliant genre of game for a little bit of money.

You can argue that more battle arena games are better and you would be partly right. It's like the arms race. More competition means developers have to step up your game and beat the other companies to the next level of content. However, that's not what will happen. Instead, all you will see is clones of LoL and DotA with copyrighted characters from another franchise. Instead of trying to innovate the MOBA genre, companies will simply fall into complacency and copy the others.

It's happened since the beginning of the gaming industry, someone makes a popular game that breaks ground and pushes the industry to new heights. For the next year, every major developer tries to copy them on the simple principle: 'If they can make money from it so can we!'. One step forward, two steps back. Up until recently, this shameless copycat behavior can be seen as nothing but an annoying tribute to some of the greatest gaming experiences ever produced.  However, with gaming becoming deeply tethered to the internet in the last few years, reproducing the same game with a different cover is damaging the online community and the industry. The worst part is that ultimately, there's nothing anyone can do about it.

I understand my article may make the issue seem more serious than it is. It's not killing the gaming industry, you will still be able to play your favorite MOBA games and enjoy them with your friends. They will still be fun, and you will still have people to play with. But in a few years when you're waiting for 30 minutes in a queue to play one match, how long will it take for you to find another genre and drop MOBA's altogether?

I'm sure this is a topic lots of people have an opinion on. If you have any input leave a comment and let us know!

Monkey King

So, here's proof that HoN designed their Monkey King in 2009, albeit under a different name. Riot have stolen yet another character design?

Heroes of Newerth has always been similar in some champion abilities and such, but never to this extent. Not that I'm complaining, mind. It's pretty win they steal ideas, it's what the best companies do.

HoN devs have explained they did concept designs for Monkey King before LoL was even in open beta.


Proof of Monkey King concept art for HoN in 2010.

HoN Monkey king 2009

LoL Monkey King 2010

Thank you to the anonymous who provided a link with evidence that shows HoN had the idea first (after ancient mythology that is).

So, Maokai.

This is my first post on this blog, and I must say Riot have given me ample topics to discuss. But a quick introduction is in order. Hi, welcome to my League of Legends blog, I will be posting frequent comments on the game and it's many great points and possibly even greater mistakes. Feel free to comment with whatever you want, be it flame or compliment.

Anyway, moving on. Today i'm going to talk about Riots choice in new content.

The new champion has been announced. Maokai, the twisted treant is set to be released next tuesday, keeping in with the bi-weekly deadline Riot uses to introduce new heroes. Despite this system being incredibly flawed, it's a refreshing way to keep players entertained by giving them a consistent guarantee of new content.

What stands out about Maokai, is the clear fact that he has been stolen from HoN, the other competitor to DotA and League of Legends. If you are a Riot obsessed lover, which you really shouldn't be because of their abysmal customer service, stick this in your pipe and smoke it.

Deadwood - Heroes of Newerth

Maokai - League of Legends

I mean, come on - this can't be coincidence. Whilst they look remarkably similar, the real question is: did Riot intentionally steal this design?

At a guess, I would say yes. One thing League of Legends has always retained is it's creativity, but with this new attempt at copying one of the two treant characters in HoN; makes me think they stole all their other ideas too. Now I'm not going to preach about originality in games, that's just incredibly stupid. I mean, look at World of Warcraft or Call of Duty for God's sake. They are the world's most popular games and they stink of copied and recycled concepts.

However, what I will preach about, is an obvious theft from the only rival competitor in the so-called "MOBA" game genre. Did Riot fall behind on their schedule and just take the easy way out? We'll have to wait and see. I think the skills of this new champion will reveal the answer. If they are similar to HoN, we'll know.

For those of you who never played HoN, here are the skills of Keeper of the Forest and Deadwood (from what I can remember):

Deadwood
-AOE snare with a delay
-Ability to run through the trees in the terrain and gain speed/damage
-A punch attack that arcs out in a cone shape, stunning and dealing massive damage
-Picks up a tree, can be used for more attack damage or to be thrown at the enemy

Keeper of the Forest
-A shield that can be placed on allies, granting health regeneration and armour
-Placeable ward that can be used on trees for map control
-AOE disable that can lock down the enemy team
-Invisibility that can be cast whilst next to trees

So summoners, make sure you watch out for skills that are closely related to these, because that means Riot are being lazy with their new investment money from Tencent. Well, more lazy than usual anyway.

Even though HoN has transferred characters over from DotA, they managed to tell the community their intentions prior to making the character. What annoys me about LoL, is it looks like they've tried to hide the fact they are using one of HoN's heroes as a template for their own. Either that or the forum mod team failed harder than usual.

If you managed to get this far, well done. The last thing I shall say is, despite my little rant about Maokai, I do think a lot of characters in LoL are original and fairly well executed, if not balanced. So good on you Riot, take it with a grain of salt, you bastards.

I have also found a list of beta skills that Maokai might use, sourced from PC gamer:

Abilities

• Q: Maokai’s arms resemble Hellboy’s: one average sized, one large enough to knock out an elephant. Maokai’s Q makes him slam his trunk-arm into the ground, sending a shockwave rippling through the earth towards the enemy. The shockwave acts as a line nuke, similar to Ezreal’s Essence Flux (W) ability. Originally, the wave resembled Kassadin’s Force Pulse (E) and granted Maokai bonus armor, but the result was a messy spell that just didn’t fit.
• W: His bread-and-butter initiating move. Maokai explodes into a multitude of arcane splinters, phasing out of existence for a brief moment in order to reform at the feet of an enemy champon, growing out of the ground underneath them to damage and root them in place for a few seconds. This ability is single-target (imagine if Master Yi’s Alpha Strike (Q) stunned a champion instead of jumping between enemies) and is not channeled, as Maokai ceases to exist during the spell, similar to Alpha Strike.
• E: Like the Vulture’s spider mines from Starcraft. Maokai plants an acorn into the ground, which lies in wait for a unfriendly passerby. Once it’s found a target, the acorn will pop out of the ground and run to the enemy champion, exploding for light AoE damage when it gets there. This is great for traps, keeping an eye on enemy movements in the jungle and useful in team fights due to its small AoE damage. It can also be used as a scouting tool, similar to Teemo’s Noxious Trap (R), but Maokai will be much more limited in the number that he can place.
• R (ultimate): Maokai’s ultimate ability fits right into the current meta-game, where teamfights often decide who wins or loses a match. Think of it as the defensive version of Anivia’s Ultimate. Maokai creates a placeable AoE that drains mana per second while active. Allied champions standing in the area will receive more and more Magic Resist as the spell absorbs damage. It can be maintained as long as Maokai has enough mana, but it’s costly, so we never had it on for more than 6 or so seconds. When the ability is toggled off, Maokai’s cooldowns will be reduced according to how much damage was absorbed during the spell. If you soak up enough spell damage, you can reach a threshold that will, in essence, allow you to double-cast your other abilities as magic flows back into Maokai.
• Passive: Maokai’s passive gives him some decent staying power early on in the laning phase, when champions are casting spells to ensure last-hits and harassment. He gains increased health regeneration when champions near him (enemy or ally) cast spells.

Well, if Riot sticks to these then Maokai should be a fairly unique champion. He has a stun, a ward, and his ultimate may or may not be gamebreaking. We'll have to wait for the spotlight and see!


EDIT: Just to clarify for the fools out there: I know HoN weren't the first people to imagine a living tree. I don't know how you can summarise that from this article, because I never said such a thing. A simple explanation would be - Riot used the idea directly from HoN, regardless of whether the treant archetype came from lord of the rings or an old mythology.

How could anyone think that one of their devs stumbled across a musty tome with ancient talking tree lore and then decided it would be a good idea for their game. Of course they didn't jackasses, they stole it from HoN.