"Why Dota Sucks" - A dismemberment of the Dota genre

Mike Lowell, author and creator of learntocounter.com, has been releasing a series of chapters from his book tackling every aspect of the dota genre: its history, its esports phenomenon, its underlying systems...

With one intention in mind: to chastise and purge the dota player, who does not know any better than to frolic in a cesspool, content and unconcerned with finding better forms of entertainment!

Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you call dota games, it doesn’t matter who is developing them, and I don’t care what anyone else is saying about them. They suck. The genre is so fundamentally dysfunctional that it should have been laughed off the board the second it was considered anything more than a sideshow in the world of Blizzard RTS games. Dota is the Frankenstein of terrible game design concepts, the culmination of every damaging design trend in modern videogames. And yet, dota games—particularly Dota 2—are being held to the same regard as the most beautifully crafted videogames ever assembled. The ongoing narrative for Defense of the Ancients is that a series of amateur content creators with limited programming experience and few financial resources created a Warcraft III map that was not only better than Warcraft III, but surpassed the collective efforts of a billion-dollar videogame industry and its world-class game creators. A story that should set off red flags in the mind of any reasonable person has become a rallying cry for transformative change in the world of videogames.

Mike Lowell

You will not find a more systematic and comprehensive analysis of the dota genre anywhere else on the internet.

Prologue: http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-prologue/

Introduction: http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-introduction/

1: http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-chapter-1/

2: http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-chapter-2/

3: http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-chapter-3/

More coming soon!

If you wish to address the author, I suggest you do so on the 'Articles' section of his forum. Oh and before you start driveling on how "ITS JUST YOUR OPINIONS MANS" like a mouth-drooling idiot, I ask you read the following:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_pluralism/

lol, as if anyone's gonna read that.
Also he sounds really upset, not even calling the genre by its correct name and all...

Shitty article, take it with a grain of salt.

I stopped playing DOTA 2 a few months ago, it's a drug. You go through withdrawal, everything. Even with that in mind, I still know... It's a fantastically crafted video game. In every sense of the word. People will get salty because it's such a popular game. That's normal I guess. But completely impulsive and illogical. DOTA 2 is a good game.

Btw they're called MOBAs, not "Dotas" or whatever the **** this twat wants to call them.

"Dota genre"

Sorry but... This author doesn't even bother to call the genre for it's name... MOBA, he simply doesn't like it, i'm not gonna read a series of essays of a guy trying to justify why he doesn't like the MOBA genre, he sounds like one of those corporate guys who rejected some of the greatest artists and musicians because they thought what they offered "sucks"

By the way TC, insulting people for disagreeing with the author of those articles is honestly not the way to get anyone to read them, i'm not gonna read them, specially if you are already insulting and attacking people

"Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you call dota games, it doesn’t matter who is developing them, and I don’t care what anyone else is saying about them. They suck."

and this is where i stopped reading. I'm not about to sit down and read someone's reasons as to why he sucks at dota 2 and why others should hate it like him.

TC, are you Mike Lowell?

I see no other logical explanation, as to why you would promote a dumb, poorly written article by some salty casual gamer.

What a shitty article.

Dota Genre ? not MOBA.

Shall we call FPS "COD Genre"

The Dota genre? LOL

Must be a casual console peasant.

These articles are cancer and the author should be ashamed. Dota 2 > your favourite MP game, bitch

I read some, skimmed over most of it.

At the end of the first chapter he says you don't need to play much of DOTA to criticize it because he claims to be an expert of the arguments he will talk about. He also says that people perpetuate the myth than Starcraft is the best RTS ever.

Second chapter was a history lesson in how the game came about. His point was that the design of the game was forged because of many restrictions to the engine and software, not good design principles.

13 chapters? What in the ****. Who is going to read all of that and why would you stagger the release of each chapter? He waffles on far too much imo.

http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-prologue/

The quotes above should suffice. None of you have the attention span to read a 6-paragraph prologue, let alone critique it.

@Socijalisticka: I read the little intro you put into your first post, I read your pre-emptive insults towards us

Your pretentious "you don't have the attention span" doesn't help your case either, we are not going to read "why the Dota genre sucks" when the writer doesn't even have the decency of calling it for what it is

This little essay boils down to a bitter blog post of someone who doesn't like MOBAS, not worth my time, or anyone elses for that matter, keep thinking it is though, lol

I enjoy Dota. Many people do, am I in the wrong for that?

Alright. Let's give this a look-see. Prologue and Intro are worthless, 'cause it's a load of blather with no actual points being made. So we'll have to see if the other things have points.

ETA: Skimmed part 1, whole lot of more blather about nothing at all.

Wait a fucking minute. This article isn't even complete. You've linked to the fucking intro to someone's TL;DR, which as of right now has absolutely no actual arguments for why the game and the genre sucks. There's no substance. Nothing to discuss. If the article were complete, or at least to the part where he made a point (let alone a "dismemberment" as the TC claims, which it most certainly is not), then there'd be a point, but as it is it's just a bunch of TL;DR that amounts to nothing.

GG, TC, you made a shitty thread.

According to TC and the author of the article, you are ignorant and don't know better, just like the rest of the people who had the audacity to like MOBAs

There's a difference between not having an attention span, and immediately recognizing something for the crap that it is. Just the first line in the quote you included in the op is more than enough to show that it's not worth reading.

Surely, if Dota 2 is such a "fantastically crafted video game", you should have no trouble in tearing through his arguments.

My posting history and his would suggest otherwise, both in our views, writing composition and style. Since you're accusing others of being "casual gamers", out of curiosity what RTSes do you play?

What arguments?

@Socijalisticka: The only argument in that little wall of text is "DOTA SUCKS AND YOU SUCK FOR LIKING IT!" and "STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T!"

I mean for crying out loud... "With one intention in mind: to chastise and purge the dota player, who does not know any better than to frolic in a cesspool, content and unconcerned with finding better forms of entertainment!" right off the bat you admit this is just an attack on MOBA players for liking something you don't

There are no arguments. Unless you consider something supported by fallacies an argument.

I'm a complete motherfucking casual ****. I play Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Sakura Spirit, etc.

It's also just highly self-indulgent and pretentious writing.

I don't like boiled rice does that make me right and most of Asia wrong?

It's an opinion blog and nothing more, no one can prove him wrong and he can't claim to be right. 70 odd million people will probably strongly disagree with him though.

As we have already mentioned, modifications of the game and the game engine could not be disseminated for use on Battle.net. This meant that most custom maps were standardized around the user interface, control scheme, and game concepts in Warcraft III. Most damningly, the Warcraft III game engine does not provide native access for the “mouselook”34 mechanics now synonymous with first- and third-person action games on personal computers.35 But in addition, the peer-to-peer networking technology used for online play in most RTS games is designed for a game model with a large number of moving parts. Action games with fewer moving parts use a client-side prediction model to minimize the effects of networking latency, and not only could Battle.net not provide this benefit, the service (as designed for Warcraft III) uses a quarter-second hard-coded internet delay. While this was intended to prevent players from gaining a substantial advantage with a better internet connection, it discouraged the adoption of the concepts that are a mainstay in other excellent action games. And while the Warcraft III game engine has hosted concepts ranging from first-person shooters to Diablo-style action games, custom keyboard layouts (and the maps that used them) never caught on because they generate substantial input latency.36

So hopefully, you understand where I am going with this. It didn’t matter what game it was: Warcraft II, StarCraft,Warcraft III. Blizzard mapmakers were influenced by incredible restrictions at every step of the way, and not the kind we typically associate with the design of videogames, where designers attempted to overcome the technical limitations presented by limited hardware. Things that were considered common in other genres were impossible to distribute through Battle.net and impossible to perform in the various Blizzard RTS game engines. The result is that dota is a rarity and oddball within videogames. It is one of only two genres whose rules were foremost defined by software limitations—the limitations of Blizzard game engines and their content creation tools—instead of hardware limitations.37 Every time that Blizzard custom maps made their grand leap, there was simply another set of barriers that got in the way of “building the best game possible”.

The beginning of chapter 2 provides needed historical context. Chapter 1 addresses the barriers placed on critiquing the dota genre (i.e how skilled do you need to be and how much playtime is necessary before you can critique Dota 2), and the role of esports in placing that barrier.

You know what, i'm bored. So I'll go ahead and read through this shitty article and address each point, maybe then TC will go away.

There has been a lot of fighting over the matter of what to call the videogame genre conceptualized in theStarCraft third-party map Aeon of Strife and popularized in the Warcraft III third-party map Defense of the Ancients. Because some of the creators have settled on a name for the purpose of marketing their own game, fans not only feel compelled to defend their chosen game from outsiders, but the genre label that has been affixed to it. As a result, we need to settle the matter before we conduct the full order of business.

This book is intended to be a complete deconstruction of the “dota” genre, a book written for those who love videogames. This book will refer to individual titles as “dota games”, the genre as the “dota genre”, and will use a lower-case stylization in order to distinguish the term from Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2, the two games1in the Dota series. Let’s explain why I have opted for “dota” in favor of the alternatives.

The most notorious term that has been proposed is the “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena”. Like most things on the internet, the origins are always up for debate. However, it appears the term was used as early as May of 2009, when Riot Games’ Tom Cadwell used the term to describe their upcoming game League of Legends.23 The popularity of the term is now been concurrent with the popularity of that game. But “MOBA” is notorious for a reason: It is simply a marketing term that Riot adopted in order to disassociate themselves from Defense of the Ancients. Quite simply, Riot didn’t want to call League a “dota game”. But unlike the other labels that were intended to market a game, MOBA may very well be the most nondescriptive term ever used to describe a game or genre. What is now applied to the top-down high-fantasy action in League of Legends could just as well apply to “arena shooters” like Quake III and Unreal Tournament. It’s a label which was intended to distance League of Legends from the most relevant games, rather than to be compared with them, and can be entirely ignored.

All of the above = thought drivel

The other popular contender is “Action Real-Time Strategy”, used by Valve Corporation in order to describe their 2013 game Dota 2.4 Since then, the term has been adopted by many fans of that game. For starters, “ARTS” does a disservice to fans of real-time strategy games, and it implies that RTS games like StarCraft, Supreme Commander, and Command and Conquer do not have enough action in them. But in addition, games which have received the ARTS label are commonly character-action games—games where you play from the perspective of a single character—which feature the base-building and unit construction typically found in RTS games. To call Dota 2 an ARTS is to associate it with a line of games—Herzog Zwei, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Guilty Gear 2: Overture, Brutal Legend, and many others—which do not have anything in common withDefense of the Ancients or Aeon of Strife.5Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2 may feature elements commonly found in Warcraft III, but hardly the base construction and unit control that defined prior ARTS games, and the dota genre is best left to a separate distinction.6

Let's see. Why is it called an Action Real Time Strategy game? Maybe because it builds upon the formula of RTS, stripping the macro management aspect and adding an emphasis on individual and micro management and Action RPG esque gameplay. Equating Action. Action + Real Time + Strategy Aspects. ARTS. Makes sense.

The most compelling argument is actually one of the least common, and comes from those who believe the genre should be called, “Strife games”, “Strife-likes” or “AoS-likes”. It’s a direct nod to Aeon of Strife, which introduced many of the concepts that are now associated with the genre.7 But in the course of this book, we will explore in great detail how Aeon of Strife merely built the concept for a genre which is today defined by its “gameplay”,8 the interactive components that separate videogames from other media. Even if Aeon of Strifepioneered many of the concepts in the dota genre, developers are most commonly drawing their inspiration from the specific design, pacing, and style of play that was tweaked and refined for use in Defense of the Ancients. This book will show how the creators of the genre did exactly that.

For this reason, it’s simply the easiest and most effective to identify the genre with the game that brought it wide popularity and codified most everything commonly associated with the genre today.9 Much in the way that roguelikes are identified by their adherence to a game template codified in 1980′s Rogue, dota games are identified by their adherence to a game template codified in Defense of the Ancients. For this reason, the rest of this book will eschew all the other terms and go with “dota”. Perhaps one could wage an argument over the stylization of the term, and would prefer “DOTA”, “DotA”, or “Dota”. But “dota” simply takes the stylization currently applied to the Dota series and uses the precedent that was set by Rogue and the roguelike. While the lower-case stylization may initially seem off-putting, I am comfortable that it is a good choice, and that it will become natural in the course of reading this book.

**** off with this. And if this idiot actually wanted to use what he considered correct by his own logic, it should be "dota-like". not simply dota.

But enough about all of this. Let’s talk about dota.

If I had to describe the dota genre1 to someone who has never heard of it, I’d say it’s a little like taking the battles in The Lord of the Rings and turning them into a team sport. In this genre, participants take the role of powerful heroes and lead their disposable followers into battlefields more like a football pitch than the fields of war. If that seems a little odd to you, I suggest you get comfortable with it, because it’s getting attention that the old guard in game development would kill for.

Riot Games’ League of Legends is played by tens of millions of people every day2 and Valve Corporation’s Dota 2 is far and away the most popular game on Valve’s wildly popular Steam game distribution service.3 Dota hasn’t merely positioned itself as an appeal to the masses, ala a Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. The genre has surpassed the StarCraft and Counter-Strike series as the figurehead in the growing circus of professional videogame tournaments and is getting high praise from some of the most capable videogame players. What was intended to be little more than a series of distractions in the Blizzard Entertainment real-time strategy ecosystem is now the hottest genre in videogames.

So that’s the question: How could the dota genre possibly “suck”?

Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you call dota games, it doesn’t matter who is developing them, and I don’t care what anyone else is saying about them. They suck. The genre is so fundamentally dysfunctional that it should have been laughed off the board the second it was considered anything more than a sideshow in the world of Blizzard RTS games. Dota is the Frankenstein of terrible game design concepts, the culmination of every damaging design trend in modern videogames. And yet, dota games—particularly Dota 24—are being held to the same regard as the most beautifully crafted videogames ever assembled. The ongoing narrative forDefense of the Ancients is that a series of amateur content creators with limited programming experience and few financial resources created a Warcraft III map that was not only better than Warcraft III, but surpassed the collective efforts of a billion-dollar videogame industry and its world-class game creators.5 A story that should set off red flags in the mind of any reasonable person has become a rallying cry for transformative change in the world of videogames.

I shouldn't need to point out what's wrong about this paragraph.

Now, I am not the only person who thinks this praise is unwarranted. In the age of the internet, what’s popular will always have its detractors, and the minority is very vocal on the matter of dota. Unfortunately, it is confined to the usual sloppy discourse that can be found on internet message boards, and this minority is disorganized and heavily outnumbered. So where are the “videogame experts”? Where are the qualified and talented writers? Aren’t the critics and the journalists supposed to be the highbrow snobs that shout down the masses? Well, for those of you who don’t know much about videogame journalism, it’s pretty much the low point of human civilization, a world of writers with no credentials and fewer standards. And if the bigger game journalism web sites (GameSpot, IGN, Kotaku, Polygon) get their hands on this topic? Well, shit. This is the field of journalism where one of its most visible writers made a list of “Five Games for People Who Don’t Have the Internet” and two of them required the internet.6 What do you think is going to happen?

Even if these critics were masters of their craft, the issues of game journalism go deeper than that. This is a field of writing where you do not say things that will aggravate the game companies that pay for advertising space, a field of writing where you do not argue against the reckless passion of the consumer hive mind. Time and time again, the internet will band against negative reviews before the game has been released to the public.7 And, quite hilariously, positive reviews which are not positive enough.8 Since the game reviews on the popular scandal rags are so consistent in their lack of insight, they function almost entirely a marketing vehicle. And you can bet your ass that these writers are not going to attack the hugely popular and profitable figureheads for “e-Sports” and earn the ire of the fanatical audiences which help to propagate “games as sport”.9 But at the end of the day, the business model of game journalism is to corral the herd as they move from topic to topic. They talk about the topics that drive web traffic, the things that people are interested in on a day-to-day basis, and then move on to newer stuff. This means lots of disposable discussion, and not the complex, lengthy criticism that is necessary to dissect dota.

With no one else taking action, I decided that leading the crusade would be a worthy project and a wonderful way to begin a much larger conversation. So, here we go. The purpose of “Why Dota Sucks” is to fully deconstruct the history, circumstance, and design of Defense of the Ancients and the games inspired by it, and to show how flawed the genre really is. You may consider the title inflammatory, but quite frankly, it’s the most honest and accurate title that I could come up with. The deconstruction will focus on dota games in the direct lineage of Defense of the Ancients and Aeon of Strife, including League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth,Smite, Demigod, Awesomenauts, and Dead Island: Epidemic. The goal is to put forward the most complex and complete analysis of the dota genre that anyone will ever author and to provide the desperately-needed foundation for a discussion that has gone nowhere over the last decade.

Before we begin discussing the genre, we need to set some groundrules for how this book will approach the topic. And with that, you may have already figured out that this is not an academic piece. I do not intend to subdue my writing style in order to strive for a larger audience. I’ll laugh, I’ll cry, I’ll curse. And in the process, I’m going to take on a lot of targets, including the developers who make these games and the player bases who complete the consumer contract. While I will provide sources as necessary, this is an opinion piece through and through. Much of videogame history has been told through the internet, and the nature of the internet will make many things difficult to source. In many instances, the best that I can do is give you my word and honesty on the topic. I may have a strong opinion on dota, but my opinion is strong enough that I do not need to compromise the integrity of that opinion. I have nothing to gain by lying to the reader. If I wanted to make money by bullshitting people, there’s a hell of a lot more money in politics.

“But all opinions are subjective opinions, and opinions are like assholes! Everyone has one!” You’re absolutely correct. Opinions on game design are subjective. Opinions on television, books, and movies fall under the same brush. In order to understand and compare the concepts in certain videogames, you will have to make good use of math and logic. But at the end of the day, the conclusions drawn from “objective data”—and determining whether or not it makes for a better game—are subjective. And that’s perfectly fine! There is nothing wrong with being biased. We’re all biased towards certain points of view, as impacted by our own life experiences. If the critic is worth his weight, then his goal is to properly outline those biases and to leave as little as possible to interpretation. An opinion is not invalid simply because it is an opinion. If the argument is a bad one, then you should be able to explain why it is bad. Those subjective influences should be apparent in my writing and you can be the judge of them.

In approaching the topic, I’m going to provide a particularly valuable subjective perspective. As you may have figured out, the dota genre owes no small favor to the real-time strategy games created by Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and StarCraft developed a rather glowing reputation for their third-party content, and Blizzard’s games provided the backbone and foundation for the dota game model. This is an indisputable reality of the dota genre, and we will thoroughly explore this reality in the course of the book.

In providing perspective on this matter, I will tell you that in a past life, I would have been described as a Blizzard fanboy.10 I have been playing Blizzard’s RTS games since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was released in 1994 and I am very familiar with the content and design in all of their real-time strategy games, leading up through 2010′s StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. I have been playing these games in an online environment since 1999, through services like Battle.net, ICCUP, and Garena. Fans of dota may want to conclude that I am simply a bitter RTS player who saw a more popular genre emerge from his hallowed halls, but that is not the case.11 The decline in the number of RTS releases has simply allowed me to go back and play what I missed. I am merely announcing that I watched the dota genre transform into a face of videogames and that I can provide readers with valuable first-hand insight.

Ok, I stopped here, after a few paragraphs of pointless tangents, attempting to justify his opinion which is about as interesting and gratifying to read as a shitty bible story. I cannot stomach this shit. It's not even about my attention span. It's like trying to force myself to eat horse shit.

Tc, if you actually support this guy's opinion, **** off.

Thank you for qouting at least something substantial. But the whole article is full of tangents and I CANNOT fucking stand them.

As for those 2 paragraphs. He's criticizing the MOBA genre based on it's origin? Origins provide means for criticism? So what if my mother had dementia, does that make me an unnatural mishap and an abomination? I might be strawmanning here, but that's a terrible argument.

The limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine molded a few design choices, correct. But in DOTA 2 any choices that were limited by the engine, were revised within the Source engine (which is evidently a very capable engine). IceFrog was and is responsible for balancing the game out, he was a developer of the original DOTA, and still works with Valve for DOTA 2. Any decisions that he thought were limited by Blizzard's engines, were shaven off in DOTA 2. And yet, the game remains very similar. Why? Because the formula itself is enthralling, it's immensely competitive, exciting, intense, rewarding. That is why people like MOBAs.

I don't even know why I'm bothering so hard. This is just a dumb opinion piece and you're telling people that they have short attention spans just because they don't want to read some salty bigot explaining his stupid, bitter ideology.

I'm scared of just how bad this article could be based on the paragraph posted in the OP.

Not even going to click the link for fear of supporting the writer of that article.

What's funny is that both the article and TC (further hinting at them being the same person) are defending themselves with "pluralism" and describing people who disagree with him as "sub humans". Yes, what a great way to defend yourself, saying that people who disagree with him resort to ad hominem and don't tackle the argument at hand, when his entire reasoning is hatred masked by indigestible logic.

Fun fact: The pluralism thing he linked to is a from a site whose owner is a confessed scam artist, Nietzsche fetishist, and raging egotistical nutjob who thinks that electrons are "useful fiction."

Anyway, looking at those two paragraphs of blah blah... one of the things it complains about is how the Warcraft III engine doesn't allow mouselook. Pretty stupid complaint given how Dota 2 has full mouselook. League of Legends has the camera locked onto the hero by default, but that can also be turned off. Not a valid complaint.

So while that's all very interesting, it has little relevance to explaining why the MOBAs that are popular today suck. Chapter 1, which you (TC) have just admitted is just bitching about "barriers to criticism," is similarly irrelevant.

So again, I say: what arguments? The article linked in the TC does not have any actual arguments about how Dota 2, League of Legends, and other games in the genre are terrible, because the author has not posted (perhaps not written) them. Thus my point stands that your thread is useless.

Yea, the genre sucks but what else are hermies gonna play while they wait for console ports? Moba and overhyped flash games.

A whole lot of words to say a whole lot of nothing.

Still trying to guess on who your main is.

There's nothing of worth in the whole "article", I will assume it's just plain trolling.

I didn't read it but I kinda see MOBAS as bastardized RTS games. I like Dawn of War 2's model a lot better, its basically a MOBA where you control the minions/decide which ones to build but you have a "hero" to control as well.

That game's multiplayer was massively under appreciated

Fun fact: just because you write a big boring essay on something, doesn't make your opinion any more valid than someone you just says "yeah, they're pretty fun, I enjoy that genre".

1. He's a hardcore RTS fanboy who is hating on Mobas for a completely different reason you hate on them. Do you love RTS too?

2. Stay forever behind in aaa/aa scoring games and stay forever getting the worst version of multiplats. Leave the real gaming to "hermies".

The only argument he has yet to make so far is that the game was made by a bunch of amateurs so it can't possibly be good in which I'll answer that his opinion piece is written only by an amateur so it can't possibly be good.

Be sure to make another thread when he's actually finished it though.

Wow, what a load of rubbish. I have to assume this is click baiting for ad dollars

"Blah blah blah i suck at dota so i think it's bad blah blah blah."

Another guy who's opinion i couldn't care less about.

1. RTS and mods were the only thing that made it worth owning a PC back in the day. Now, moba is taking over and broken ass mods like DayZ are being sold as actual games.

2. Stay waiting for those GOTY and GOTG and begging for those console ports. Unfortunately, hermies either wait for dirt cheap steam sales or pirate the games, that's why the big devs make you wait or don't bother porting at all.

The genre is called MOBA, stupid article writer

Also Heroes of the Storm >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>LoL and Dota 2

Sigh... What kind of fucking loser writes a bible about why what other people enjoy is bad.

Heh, not until after I finished typing that last sentence did I realize that basically defines system wars, right?

That was clear from the start. What RTSes do you play?

Are you suggesting that "Multiplayer online battle arena" is descriptive enough to distinguish League of Legends from Quake 3: Arena? How so?

To call Dota 2 an ARTS is to associate it with a line of games—Herzog Zwei, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Guilty Gear 2: Overture, Brutal Legend, and many others—which do not have anything in common with Defense of the Ancients or Aeon of Strife

If we conveniently forget that these games ever existed, then we can suitably call Dota games ARTS. In addition, I'd hardly constitute dota games as micro-intensive. It's alright if you're 5 and selecting an item in the middle of a fight is too much for your brain to assimilate.

1. Nice opinions.

2. I'd rather take exponentially more aaa-aa scoring games than 1 or 2 more GOTY's in an entire gen. Oh and multiplats, bets on PC. Enjoy your 30 fps on low.

If you're taking the time to write a thesis on why you hate a specific genre of gaming, you're just mad that you suck at it...

the sakura spirit master

You might as well call all games crap.

I like DOTA 2 but if you don't like it more power to you I guess.

I know it's beyond dumb to tell a person on a gaming message board to get a life, but god damn man... priorities dude. Get them together.

You've gone through way too much trouble to simply say "stop liking what I don't like".