More accurately, LoL took the basic dota formula and streamlined aspects of it, altered other bits, and generally tried to make a unique game. Removing last hits and denies for creeps and also changing the way they and towers behave, making a persistent passive skill tree for each player that they can adjust and level up outside of the game, as well as some basic active skills, giving each hero a unique and always active passive skill, changing the way stats and items work, and dozens of subtler changes all went toward making it a unique game that doesn't replicate WC3 dota.
Heroes of Newerth copypasted dota wholesale into a new engine, and for the longest time the only differences between it and WC3 dota were the graphics, speed, and matchmaking. Since release it has been making progress that's roughly parallel to WC3 dota, but has continued to borrow ideas. Besides the new engine, altered items and heroes, and matchmaking, the game tries to emulate WC3 dota completely.
Demigod, which I only ever played once, also used the basic concepts of dota to make something new. It had fewer heroes, slower gameplay, and more of an emphasis on the creeps and towers. It has a deliberate pace and doesn't play at all like the other games.
The dota Icefrog is still developing in Warcraft 3 is arguably the most complex and evolving version of the game. It has nearly twice the heroes of HoN, three times as many as LoL, and like fifteen times that of DG. It still gets updated regularly, and the goal of each update is to make the game more aggressive and faster paced, which the metagame usually reflects. Compared to HoN, the actual gameplay is, because of the WC3 engine, a little slower and more deliberate, so even though they play the same a player will get used to the one over the other.
He suggested that by trademarking the name, Valve is attempting to take ownership of the name and "exercising control over its future."
Which, to me, is a bit silly concern. Seems like they think Valve is just going to usurp the entire genre or something. I could understand it if they just came out and said "I don't like what they're doing because I was involved in making DotA", but this whole "it belongs to the people" aspect of it is just moronic, mostly because people are idiots and will immediately ruin anything that is given to them.
Yah because of course Valve would sue developers and modders
/Sarcasm
I agree with one of the comments in the article -
The now LoL developers are not worried about the community, they are worried about their profit margin. Valve making a DOTA style game with the DOTA name can only mean bad things for them.
Yes LoL is free, but there are paid benefits type things.
Put it this way, if Valve can do for DoTA what it did with Team Fortress, then that would be pretty huge.
I mean lets be honest here, Team Fortress classic was darn near inscrutable to outsiders on a lot of levels, it was pretty niche and the community was frequently hostile. A bit like DoTA.
Valve managed to take that (admittedly after about 10 freaking years of iteration), and:
1) Make it easily accessible to new people
2) Make it popular
3) Keep the core gameplay and depth whilst still managing to streamline it.
I mean there was a the big uproar over the removal of grenades from the game for example, but that decision was pretty much proven to be the right one with time.
Now throw in the fact that they also have a tendency to update their games for free, and well, if it takes off, it's probably going to sap a few players from titles like LoL.
Valve does good by the players with things like this. I trust them to do right by the name DOTA, and put a game that will allow people to finally get off Battle.net. If it was another company, I might give a shit about them TMing the name, but...it's Valve. We can trust them, and they have IceFrog...so this whole thing seems like the most legit attempt to create a stand-alone DotA that we've seen.
What are the chances that this will be like Alien Swarm and a free release?
Who knows. Though Alien Swarm was a project done in the off hours by two guys Valve hired and had working on other projects. Whereas they've seem to have specifically hired Icefrog to make a new dota, which I don't think implies they plan on making it free.
There's no reason for it to be free, but I'd bet against a cash shop and all patches and updates would be gratis. Though since it's a PC game that shouldn't be a surprise.
I'm more wondering whether it might be multiplatform. DoTA has a bit more scope for that than your standard RTS, assuming you worked a decent control scheme.
With all the hotkeys involved I don't see it being practical, not to mention things like denying are pretty apm intensive, and the absolute importance of moving around in the lane, especially early game.
And good luck trying to orb walk or animation cancel.
But that's if the game is still dota. If things get changed enough who knows? Though Valve doesn't seem so big on consoles, and consoles don't seem so big on constant, free, content updates.
And good luck trying to orb walk or animation cancel.
Haha oh god what
Reminds me of all the tourney players rage when Sakurai took out [strike]exploits[/strike] 'skill manoeuvres' out of Super Smash Bros Melee when he released Brawl.
You can be pretty goddamn sure all of those 'non intuitive' exploits will be viled away if valve is releasing a game. They don't cater to a niche.
And good luck trying to orb walk or animation cancel.
Haha oh god what
Reminds me of all the tourney players rage when Sakurai took out [strike]exploits[/strike] 'skill manoeuvres' out of Super Smash Bros Melee when he released Brawl.
You can be pretty goddamn sure all of those 'non intuitive' exploits will be viled away if valve is releasing a game. They don't cater to a niche.
Orb walking/animation canceling is hardly an exploit, but I'm assuming you don't even know what it is, so: The only semi-decent guide I could find
This is something present in all Blizzard RTSes because of how they do attack animations, namely, they have a 'swing' where your character is 'winding up' for the attack, and a 'backswing' which is the part of the animation that plays after the damage is dealt. You can cancel the either phase of the attack animation by giving another command, so the idea behind animation canceling/orb walking is to cancel right after the damage is dealt, so you get none of the backswing.
It is an exploit. By which I don't mean map warping teleport exploits, but anything non intuitive (ie not in there by deliberate choice) that gives you an advantage by removing a disadvantage that was placed there. Stuff the community finds by accident and you'll find on strategy wikis or forums where the hardcore peeps can learn them. Not something new players will discover or find in pop-up tutorials while they get beaten up by the veterans attacking faster than they are. I'm pretty sure anything fitting this category will get removed and streamlined by Valve, even if most of the current Dota playerbase is aware of the moves.
It is an exploit. By which I don't mean map warping teleport exploits, but anything non intuitive (ie not in there by deliberate choice) that gives you an advantage by removing a disadvantage that was placed there. Stuff the community finds by accident and you'll find on strategy wikis or forums where the hardcore peeps can learn them. Not something new players will discover or find in pop-up tutorials while they get beaten up by the veterans attacking faster than they are. I'm pretty sure anything fitting this category will get removed and streamlined by Valve, even if most of the current Dota playerbase is aware of the moves.
so you get none of the backswing.
Exploit, see?
Well, one, I'd assume Icefrog/Valve wouldn't 'streamline' DotA to the same degree as LoL if he really simplified the game at all. Two, of course it's in there by design. If you couldn't cancel the attack animation, you would lose a ton of control of your units. Let's say you attacked moved into the fog, and wound up picking a fight with something you can't beat. You want to run away, but your unit already initiated it's attack animation and so can't do anything for a little bit. In a game like DotA not being able to move for .5-1 seconds because of an accidental attack could easily mean your death.
Sorry to be a newb, but what's the difference between the different DotA-style (okay, AoS) games?
In terms of infrastructure
League of Legends - has free content, but has a premium section with more awesome stuff
DemiGods - ???
Heroes of Newearth - ???
In terms of gameplay
LoL - ???
DG - ???
HoN - ???
LoL - Free to play, more noob friendly, less rage playing the game
DemiGods - You can upgrade towers and creeps
Heroes of Newearth - Tons of rage, very Elitetist due to stats, not recommanded for new players without a mentor
It is an exploit. By which I don't mean map warping teleport exploits, but anything non intuitive (ie not in there by deliberate choice) that gives you an advantage by removing a disadvantage that was placed there. Stuff the community finds by accident and you'll find on strategy wikis or forums where the hardcore peeps can learn them. Not something new players will discover or find in pop-up tutorials while they get beaten up by the veterans attacking faster than they are. I'm pretty sure anything fitting this category will get removed and streamlined by Valve, even if most of the current Dota playerbase is aware of the moves.
so you get none of the backswing.
Exploit, see?
So you'd have no problems with it if the game had an ingame tutorial explicitly telling people about it?
There's been a bunch of stuff that would be considered exploits in fighting games that didn't get removed in later games, showing that the developers 'approve' of them. Perhaps this could be considered something similar.
It is an exploit. By which I don't mean map warping teleport exploits, but anything non intuitive (ie not in there by deliberate choice) that gives you an advantage by removing a disadvantage that was placed there. Stuff the community finds by accident and you'll find on strategy wikis or forums where the hardcore peeps can learn them. Not something new players will discover or find in pop-up tutorials while they get beaten up by the veterans attacking faster than they are. I'm pretty sure anything fitting this category will get removed and streamlined by Valve, even if most of the current Dota playerbase is aware of the moves.
so you get none of the backswing.
Exploit, see?
So you'd have no problems with it if the game had an ingame tutorial explicitly telling people about it?
There's been a bunch of stuff that would be considered exploits in fighting games that didn't get removed in later games, showing that the developers 'approve' of them. Perhaps this could be considered something similar.
I'd call it an exploit. Part of the cost of doing an attack is that you have to wait for the animations to complete. Otherwise, why have them at all? Unless you just want to make arbitrary skill mechanics, just to really stick it to new people.
I'm pretty sure anything fitting this category will get removed and streamlined by Valve
Was the point of my post. I.e. don't expect the unintuitive hidden exploits to stay that way in that form. Valve tends to cater to the whole playerbase and make the games accessible.
Choosing is losing. Attacking leaves you open, a window of opportunity for your opponent. Etc.
It's an exploit in the same way combos and cancels are exploits in fighting games. Or, to bring things closer to home, rocket jumping -- which is and always was an exploit that developers just keep around because people like it. Shooting yourself in the foot with high explosives is not intuitive.
Whether it was meant to be there in the beginning is irrelevant. It's in the game, most people who play know about it, the devs know about it and even encourage it. In fact, without animation cancelling and orb walking half the heroes in the game would be totally useless.
How deep are you willing to go with this? You want to take out blocking, where a person deliberately moves their hero into the pathing of another unit or hero to keep them from moving? Because that's pretty unintuitive as well, but also really, really important to the game. Are all the juke spots added to the map to manipulate how line of sight works also exploits? Putting wards in the creep camps to stop them from spawning; spawning illusions to remove debuffs and abuse the invulnerability window; using orb attacks to avoid creep aggro; using spells that break magic immunity against heroes with it; getting melee bonuses on ranged attacks with heroes that can switch between the two; or pretty much anything else that allows for creative and interesting play.
Icefrog knows about all this stuff and he encourages it. If Valve wants to make a dota clone there's a million other kids that would do it faster than Icefrog. Why would they hire him if they were just going to make him dumb the game down, and why would he agree to it with the knowledge that he'll be alienating a dedicated fanbase that he clearly values.
Or is it more likely they'll just add some tutorials to explain the mechanics that make the game fun for everyone else?
Moving fat units to prevent other units from moving seems quite intuitive to me. A child understands it. A unit is in front of your unit and you can't move forward. Connect the dots.
If you were to say that triple clicking on the fat unit in the animation frame where he places his right froot in front of the left foot to cause a small extra knockback - no.
Rocket jumping is streamlined and promoted as a feature.
Another example close at home: scout pistol firing. Or where using scripts or rapidly clicking made you able to shoot the pistol faster than simply holding it down. Didn't stay that way when Valve found out. They like their shit accessible.
I'd say that whether something is a bug/exploit depends on how the developer views it and what iteration of the game you're talking about. I hear combos were a bug in the first Street Fighter, but in the later games the developers have most certainly made sure to control what moves can be cancelled into which.
I only found out what strafe jumping is a couple of days ago and it's pretty stupid. Quake Live has a tutorial and traning level to teach you how to do it, so I guess the developers encourage it, but I still think it's pretty dumb.
I'd say that whether something is a bug/exploit depends on how the developer views it and what iteration of the game you're talking about. I hear combos were a bug in the first Street Fighter, but in the later games the developers have most certainly made sure to control what moves can be cancelled into which.
I only found out what strafe jumping is a couple of days ago and it's pretty stupid. Quake Live has a tutorial and traning level to teach you how to do it, so I guess the developers encourage it, but I still think it's pretty dumb.
What about it strikes you as dumb? It's been around since Quake 1, so I'm surprised you didn't know about it. It's also one of the main features that makes Quake unique, so of course the devs are going to stick with it. It's unintuitive at first, but it's very easy to learn.
Rocket jumping isn't streamlined -- I'd say in TF2 it's less streamlined than in most other games -- but it had to be added to the game just because it's a bug that's been around since Quake 1, and the original Team Fortress, so everyone knows about it.
Even if the rockets don't kill you in one hit, the logic is not quite sound. There are games where the rockets or whatever don't kill you in one hit, but you still can't rocket jump. It was an exploit left over in Quake 1, and ever since then devs have had to make a conscious choice to add it to their games.
Blocking units is more than just who's fat and who isn't, and is not just a thing you do. It has to be carried out with deliberation and skill, and is intuitive only to people who know about it. Besides that, it was only one point out of many that I can continue to bring up.
There comes a point where the removal of everything and everything that has to be taught or learnt starts to remove what is unique about the game.
Of all these exploits/techniques/whatever, strafe jumping just seems like by far the least intuitive one. How the Quake Live tutorial told me to do it, was to stand to stand at an angle to the jump, move towards the jump by using both the forward and strafe buttons and then jerk my view as I jump. I very little idea how or why it works.
Rocket jumping I can totally understand.
Blocking and killing your own units in DotA and HoN aren't things I would ever have thought about on my own, but when being told about it, they both immeadiately make sense.
I was aware that units in WC3 (and HoN) have swing speeds, and while I knew you could move away as soon as attacking, I wasn't aware that there was a backswing.
It seems you're just not understanding what animation cancelling and orb walking are.
Or how attack animations work in general.
You can't actually attack faster, just more often, and it isn't nearly as unintuitive as it seems. They're not scripts, and even those are tolerated to a point.
For instance, Quake allows most scripts, and up until someone figured out a perfect forward rocket jump script those were allowed as well. That was the point where the game started to break, because anyone who had the script could instantly achieve the maximum speed for the minimum damage with a single button press, after which rocket jump scripts were disabled even though they just simplified things that people could already do. There are dozens of other scripts that give players advantage but aren't disabled because they don't break the game at any level.
If you go back and watch the video on orb walking you'll see that the purpose of it is to keep the opponent in range, not to attack faster. Keeping them in range lets you land more attacks, obviously, but for different reasons than it just breaks the game open. Same with animation cancelling. You're just taking over where the auto-attack AI fails.
Of all these exploits/techniques/whatever, strafe jumping just seems like by far the least intuitive one. How the Quake Live tutorial told me to do it, was to stand to stand at an angle to the jump, move towards the jump by using both the forward and strafe buttons and then jerk my view as I jump. I very little idea how or why it works.
It may not be intuitive in an obvious sense, but that doesn't make it hard. It's just nearly impossible to describe with words, which is why there are demos and videos to watch.
Rocket jumping wouldn't be any more intuitive if every game hadn't copied it. It's just that none of them copied strafe jumping as well, so it's had less exposure.
Of all these exploits/techniques/whatever, strafe jumping just seems like by far the least intuitive one. How the Quake Live tutorial told me to do it, was to stand to stand at an angle to the jump, move towards the jump by using both the forward and strafe buttons and then jerk my view as I jump. I very little idea how or why it works.
It may not be intuitive in an obvious sense, but that doesn't make it hard. It's just nearly impossible to describe with words, which is why there are demos and videos to watch.
Rocket jumping wouldn't be any more intuitive if every game hadn't copied it. It's just that none of them copied strafe jumping as well, so it's had less exposure.
I disagree. As other people said, I can understand the logic of why rocket jumping works. I read the wiki article on strafe jumping and while it has detailed instructions on how to do it, I don't understand at all why you have to press strafe and jump at the same time, what turning does, or where the added velocity is coming from.
They can blather on about the community all they want, I still think they're more worried about their bottom line than anything.
Edit: Reading further -
PCG: Is it more devious than people might think on the surface?
Pendragon: We give Valve the benefit of the doubt because of their history, but our concern is that by a single organization taking ownership of the name, the community at large would no longer be able to contribute to DotA like they have for years.
Thats just bullshit. Icefrog is still updating the WC3 DotA, despite being a fucking valve employee.
They can blather on about the community all they want, I still think they're more worried about their bottom line than anything.
If that was true, you'd think they would have trademarked DotA to begin with and just named their retail game after it, instead of making something new.
Of all these exploits/techniques/whatever, strafe jumping just seems like by far the least intuitive one. How the Quake Live tutorial told me to do it, was to stand to stand at an angle to the jump, move towards the jump by using both the forward and strafe buttons and then jerk my view as I jump. I very little idea how or why it works.
It may not be intuitive in an obvious sense, but that doesn't make it hard. It's just nearly impossible to describe with words, which is why there are demos and videos to watch.
Rocket jumping wouldn't be any more intuitive if every game hadn't copied it. It's just that none of them copied strafe jumping as well, so it's had less exposure.
I disagree. As other people said, I can understand the logic of why rocket jumping works. I read the wiki article on strafe jumping and while it has detailed instructions on how to do it, I don't understand at all why you have to press strafe and jump at the same time, what turning does, or where the added velocity is coming from.
You understand the logic because it's ingrained.
Rocket jumping was an exploit in Quake 1, left over because they made self-damage less than real damage and it was the first 3D fps that offered mouselook options. Before Quake 1 it wasn't even possible to rocket jump -- the best you could do was run into a wall and blow yourself up. Anecdotally, this is how rocket jumping was discovered, with one of the devs finding himself cornered during a in-house test of the multiplayer and deciding he'd rather take himself out than let the others kill him. So he pointed his rocket launcher at the floor and was surprised as everyone else when instead of dying he flew over everyone's heads and escaped. They thought it was cool enough to keep, and that's why we have it today.
Most other fps don't make such huge distinctions between self damage and normal damage, so if you hit yourself with rocket splash you'll take as much damage as everyone else and just die. That's why devs have to go out of their way and make rockets (and some grenades) do less self damage, adding rocket jumping as a "feature" where it shouldn't actually be possible. The in-game logic dictates that even if you did get some extra height or speed by shooting yourself with rockets, you'd lose so much life that it wouldn't be practical.
Strafe jumping is just as much of an artifact of early game engines, but it doesn't translate to consoles and has died because of that. If you ever SAW it you'd get an understanding. It's like trichording in Descent, but probably easier to understand on a practical level. There's actually solid math behind both systems.
Old and off topic, but I guess I'm going to drag this up anyway.
I think if you can't explain strafe jumping in words, it's obviously less intuitive than rocket jumping. I've never successfully rocket jumped in my life, and until your post I didn't even know you took less damage. Quake and other competitive FPSes have never been my thing. But at some point I read the description and it made sense (and again, up until this point I thought you were just riding the blast and eating the damage, staying far enough from the impact point to avoid dying).
And on the other hand you have strafe jumping, where neither wikipedia nor you explain why it works, other than that there's some solid math behind it. I did watch it and I might be able to replicate it, but I don't see how that makes it any more intuitive. If the math is so hard that it's almost impossible to describe with words, that seems nonintuitive.
Posts
Thats debatable.
Heroes of Newerth copypasted dota wholesale into a new engine, and for the longest time the only differences between it and WC3 dota were the graphics, speed, and matchmaking. Since release it has been making progress that's roughly parallel to WC3 dota, but has continued to borrow ideas. Besides the new engine, altered items and heroes, and matchmaking, the game tries to emulate WC3 dota completely.
Demigod, which I only ever played once, also used the basic concepts of dota to make something new. It had fewer heroes, slower gameplay, and more of an emphasis on the creeps and towers. It has a deliberate pace and doesn't play at all like the other games.
The dota Icefrog is still developing in Warcraft 3 is arguably the most complex and evolving version of the game. It has nearly twice the heroes of HoN, three times as many as LoL, and like fifteen times that of DG. It still gets updated regularly, and the goal of each update is to make the game more aggressive and faster paced, which the metagame usually reflects. Compared to HoN, the actual gameplay is, because of the WC3 engine, a little slower and more deliberate, so even though they play the same a player will get used to the one over the other.
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http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/16/dota-developers-voice-concern-over-valves-dota-trademark/
Which, to me, is a bit silly concern. Seems like they think Valve is just going to usurp the entire genre or something. I could understand it if they just came out and said "I don't like what they're doing because I was involved in making DotA", but this whole "it belongs to the people" aspect of it is just moronic, mostly because people are idiots and will immediately ruin anything that is given to them.
/Sarcasm
I agree with one of the comments in the article -
Yes LoL is free, but there are paid benefits type things.
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I mean lets be honest here, Team Fortress classic was darn near inscrutable to outsiders on a lot of levels, it was pretty niche and the community was frequently hostile. A bit like DoTA.
Valve managed to take that (admittedly after about 10 freaking years of iteration), and:
1) Make it easily accessible to new people
2) Make it popular
3) Keep the core gameplay and depth whilst still managing to streamline it.
I mean there was a the big uproar over the removal of grenades from the game for example, but that decision was pretty much proven to be the right one with time.
Now throw in the fact that they also have a tendency to update their games for free, and well, if it takes off, it's probably going to sap a few players from titles like LoL.
Who knows. Though Alien Swarm was a project done in the off hours by two guys Valve hired and had working on other projects. Whereas they've seem to have specifically hired Icefrog to make a new dota, which I don't think implies they plan on making it free.
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And good luck trying to orb walk or animation cancel.
But that's if the game is still dota. If things get changed enough who knows? Though Valve doesn't seem so big on consoles, and consoles don't seem so big on constant, free, content updates.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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Reminds me of all the tourney players rage when Sakurai took out [strike]exploits[/strike] 'skill manoeuvres' out of Super Smash Bros Melee when he released Brawl.
You can be pretty goddamn sure all of those 'non intuitive' exploits will be viled away if valve is releasing a game. They don't cater to a niche.
always thought it was a shame that the less creative of the AoS became the biggest hit
I wonder what Valve will do with it
The only semi-decent guide I could find
This is something present in all Blizzard RTSes because of how they do attack animations, namely, they have a 'swing' where your character is 'winding up' for the attack, and a 'backswing' which is the part of the animation that plays after the damage is dealt. You can cancel the either phase of the attack animation by giving another command, so the idea behind animation canceling/orb walking is to cancel right after the damage is dealt, so you get none of the backswing.
Exploit, see?
LoL - Free to play, more noob friendly, less rage playing the game
DemiGods - You can upgrade towers and creeps
Heroes of Newearth - Tons of rage, very Elitetist due to stats, not recommanded for new players without a mentor
So you'd have no problems with it if the game had an ingame tutorial explicitly telling people about it?
There's been a bunch of stuff that would be considered exploits in fighting games that didn't get removed in later games, showing that the developers 'approve' of them. Perhaps this could be considered something similar.
I'd call it an exploit. Part of the cost of doing an attack is that you have to wait for the animations to complete. Otherwise, why have them at all? Unless you just want to make arbitrary skill mechanics, just to really stick it to new people.
Was the point of my post. I.e. don't expect the unintuitive hidden exploits to stay that way in that form. Valve tends to cater to the whole playerbase and make the games accessible.
Choosing is losing. Attacking leaves you open, a window of opportunity for your opponent. Etc.
Whether it was meant to be there in the beginning is irrelevant. It's in the game, most people who play know about it, the devs know about it and even encourage it. In fact, without animation cancelling and orb walking half the heroes in the game would be totally useless.
How deep are you willing to go with this? You want to take out blocking, where a person deliberately moves their hero into the pathing of another unit or hero to keep them from moving? Because that's pretty unintuitive as well, but also really, really important to the game. Are all the juke spots added to the map to manipulate how line of sight works also exploits? Putting wards in the creep camps to stop them from spawning; spawning illusions to remove debuffs and abuse the invulnerability window; using orb attacks to avoid creep aggro; using spells that break magic immunity against heroes with it; getting melee bonuses on ranged attacks with heroes that can switch between the two; or pretty much anything else that allows for creative and interesting play.
Icefrog knows about all this stuff and he encourages it. If Valve wants to make a dota clone there's a million other kids that would do it faster than Icefrog. Why would they hire him if they were just going to make him dumb the game down, and why would he agree to it with the knowledge that he'll be alienating a dedicated fanbase that he clearly values.
Or is it more likely they'll just add some tutorials to explain the mechanics that make the game fun for everyone else?
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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Enemy hits you with splash damage = knocks you into the air
Hit yourself with splash damage = ?
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If you want to complain about FPS non-intuitive exploits, complain about strafe jumping.
If you were to say that triple clicking on the fat unit in the animation frame where he places his right froot in front of the left foot to cause a small extra knockback - no.
Rocket jumping is streamlined and promoted as a feature.
Another example close at home: scout pistol firing. Or where using scripts or rapidly clicking made you able to shoot the pistol faster than simply holding it down. Didn't stay that way when Valve found out. They like their shit accessible.
I only found out what strafe jumping is a couple of days ago and it's pretty stupid. Quake Live has a tutorial and traning level to teach you how to do it, so I guess the developers encourage it, but I still think it's pretty dumb.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/17/riot-games-dev-counter-files-dota-trademark/
What about it strikes you as dumb? It's been around since Quake 1, so I'm surprised you didn't know about it. It's also one of the main features that makes Quake unique, so of course the devs are going to stick with it. It's unintuitive at first, but it's very easy to learn.
Rocket jumping isn't streamlined -- I'd say in TF2 it's less streamlined than in most other games -- but it had to be added to the game just because it's a bug that's been around since Quake 1, and the original Team Fortress, so everyone knows about it.
Even if the rockets don't kill you in one hit, the logic is not quite sound. There are games where the rockets or whatever don't kill you in one hit, but you still can't rocket jump. It was an exploit left over in Quake 1, and ever since then devs have had to make a conscious choice to add it to their games.
Blocking units is more than just who's fat and who isn't, and is not just a thing you do. It has to be carried out with deliberation and skill, and is intuitive only to people who know about it. Besides that, it was only one point out of many that I can continue to bring up.
There comes a point where the removal of everything and everything that has to be taught or learnt starts to remove what is unique about the game.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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It's different from seeing someone slashing at you with twice the speed you can or using scripts to remove the heavy's minigun winddown time in TF2.
Rocket jumping I can totally understand.
Blocking and killing your own units in DotA and HoN aren't things I would ever have thought about on my own, but when being told about it, they both immeadiately make sense.
I was aware that units in WC3 (and HoN) have swing speeds, and while I knew you could move away as soon as attacking, I wasn't aware that there was a backswing.
Or how attack animations work in general.
You can't actually attack faster, just more often, and it isn't nearly as unintuitive as it seems. They're not scripts, and even those are tolerated to a point.
For instance, Quake allows most scripts, and up until someone figured out a perfect forward rocket jump script those were allowed as well. That was the point where the game started to break, because anyone who had the script could instantly achieve the maximum speed for the minimum damage with a single button press, after which rocket jump scripts were disabled even though they just simplified things that people could already do. There are dozens of other scripts that give players advantage but aren't disabled because they don't break the game at any level.
If you go back and watch the video on orb walking you'll see that the purpose of it is to keep the opponent in range, not to attack faster. Keeping them in range lets you land more attacks, obviously, but for different reasons than it just breaks the game open. Same with animation cancelling. You're just taking over where the auto-attack AI fails.
It may not be intuitive in an obvious sense, but that doesn't make it hard. It's just nearly impossible to describe with words, which is why there are demos and videos to watch.
Rocket jumping wouldn't be any more intuitive if every game hadn't copied it. It's just that none of them copied strafe jumping as well, so it's had less exposure.
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I disagree. As other people said, I can understand the logic of why rocket jumping works. I read the wiki article on strafe jumping and while it has detailed instructions on how to do it, I don't understand at all why you have to press strafe and jump at the same time, what turning does, or where the added velocity is coming from.
They can blather on about the community all they want, I still think they're more worried about their bottom line than anything.
Edit: Reading further -
Thats just bullshit. Icefrog is still updating the WC3 DotA, despite being a fucking valve employee.
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It was not very effective
If that was true, you'd think they would have trademarked DotA to begin with and just named their retail game after it, instead of making something new.
You understand the logic because it's ingrained.
Rocket jumping was an exploit in Quake 1, left over because they made self-damage less than real damage and it was the first 3D fps that offered mouselook options. Before Quake 1 it wasn't even possible to rocket jump -- the best you could do was run into a wall and blow yourself up. Anecdotally, this is how rocket jumping was discovered, with one of the devs finding himself cornered during a in-house test of the multiplayer and deciding he'd rather take himself out than let the others kill him. So he pointed his rocket launcher at the floor and was surprised as everyone else when instead of dying he flew over everyone's heads and escaped. They thought it was cool enough to keep, and that's why we have it today.
Most other fps don't make such huge distinctions between self damage and normal damage, so if you hit yourself with rocket splash you'll take as much damage as everyone else and just die. That's why devs have to go out of their way and make rockets (and some grenades) do less self damage, adding rocket jumping as a "feature" where it shouldn't actually be possible. The in-game logic dictates that even if you did get some extra height or speed by shooting yourself with rockets, you'd lose so much life that it wouldn't be practical.
Strafe jumping is just as much of an artifact of early game engines, but it doesn't translate to consoles and has died because of that. If you ever SAW it you'd get an understanding. It's like trichording in Descent, but probably easier to understand on a practical level. There's actually solid math behind both systems.
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I think if you can't explain strafe jumping in words, it's obviously less intuitive than rocket jumping. I've never successfully rocket jumped in my life, and until your post I didn't even know you took less damage. Quake and other competitive FPSes have never been my thing. But at some point I read the description and it made sense (and again, up until this point I thought you were just riding the blast and eating the damage, staying far enough from the impact point to avoid dying).
And on the other hand you have strafe jumping, where neither wikipedia nor you explain why it works, other than that there's some solid math behind it. I did watch it and I might be able to replicate it, but I don't see how that makes it any more intuitive. If the math is so hard that it's almost impossible to describe with words, that seems nonintuitive.