LoL vs. Dota - A Balancing Act

Hey everyone, and welcome back to yet another exciting (and slightly late) installment of The Makings of a Nerd!

Now, I've been playing League of Legends (hereafter referred to as LoL to spare my poor typing fingers) for nearly five years. It's a great game, in my opinion, full of variety and fun experiences and is just generally a great way to spend 45 minutes... or 5 hours. Depending on how much you enjoy avoiding responsibilities, really. As such, I have a lot to say on the subject, and obviously, it's not going to fit in one blog post unless I don't want to sleep for four nights straight. That being said, I figure I'd focus in on one small point of the game - balance.

(A quick aside, for those who may be unfamiliar - LoL is a MOBA game, or a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. There are two teams, each with a base on opposite corners of the map, and each of the five players on the teams play as a "champion," one of many fantasy or sci-fi characters with a unique skillset and varying strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to work with your four teammates, along with waves of non-player "minions," to destroy the enemy base while simultaneously defending yours.)

Balancing a game can be tough work. Not that I've tried, personally - I've never made a game - but I imagine that when you've got a load of moving pieces, it'll be tough to make it really seem like every option available to you is as effective as the others. Even games like Smash Bros, which only have upwards of a few dozen available characters, can feel like one option is completely dominant over the others.

So who here had this guy perma-banned in their friend group in Brawl?

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

So now you look at LoL, which has easily over 120 different playable characters, and you think to yourself, "How can this game possibly be balanced?" And frankly, I'd argue that with constant updates and balance tweaks, Riot Games (developer of LoL) does a pretty damn good job of keeping up with it all. But more on that in a moment - let's get to the other game in the title first.

Dota 2 is another very popular MOBA game, with a very similar map layout and general playstyle to LoL - I'm not sure of the numbers, but I think Dota 2 is the second most popular MOBA, after LoL. (I feel I should mention here that the original DotA, which stands for Defense of the Ancients, was a Warcraft 3 mod that essentially kickstarted the creation of the MOBA genre. LoL was heavily based on DotA.) I haven't played much Dota 2, admittedly, and when I did play, it was essentially because I wanted to see how it stacked up against LoL. And some of that game didn't sit right with me. The heroes didn't have nearly as much personality as the champions of LoL, it seemed to have a higher skill floor and a lower skill ceiling than LoL, and a few other things. But that's not what I'm here to talk about (well, today, at least). I want to talk about the different philosophies of balancing the two games.

Before I continue, as a disclaimer, I think that both games are balanced pretty well, all things considered.

Here's the biggest difference I notice between the two games. LoL seems to be balanced with the thought that every champion should be equally viable, and there shouldn't be anything overwhelmingly powerful or overwhelmingly frustrating within the game. Dota 2 seems to be balanced with the idea of "if everything is overpowered, nothing is." Heroes can have ridiculous abilities, like extra-long stuns or silences, or RNG-based effects, with the intent that other heroes have equally-ridiculous abilities to keep you in check.

Again, I haven't played much Dota 2, but this guy's name is Silencer.

In a surprising turn of events, he silences enemies. And by that I mean

that he silences every enemy on the map for 6 seconds. Which is kinda

what I'm talking about when I talk about Dota's heroes.

In case you couldn't tell by the fact that I've played easily over 2000 LoL games and maybe a dozen games of Dota 2, I vastly prefer LoL's balancing system. While I think both are valid for various reasons, I feel like LoL's makes for more interesting gameplay. Essentially, you'll rarely feel like the game itself is screwing you over when you play LoL (I mean, unless servers decide to drop, or some such). But when it comes down to it, single champions rarely feel like they are exceedingly frustrating to play against. It happens, certainly, but it's relatively uncommon, in my opinion. Plus, whenever there is a champion that feels like that, they often get reined in within a patch or two. With Dota, however, I feel like that system of balancing breeds frustration rather than prevents it. Again, it's a system of "That ability is frustrating as hell to play against... but I, too, have a frustrating ability to use." You see what I mean? To sum up broadly, LoL feels like it's striving for equally fair play amongst all its champions, while Dota feels like it's striving for equally unfair play that just sorts itself out.

That's pretty much all I have to say on the topic, really. Does LoL do a perfect job of balancing? No, of course not. Right now, for instance, a fed Vladimir can demolish an entire enemy team by himself, while even a fed Elise might feel like she's bringing a wet noodle to a swordfight. (I have serious problems with Vlad's design, by the way, so don't crucify me just yet - wait 'til I make an entire post about why I don't like him. Then you can do it.) And does Dota 2 feel horrifically unbalanced? No, because frankly, there's always that feeling of "Oh, just you wait until I get you back for that one!" when something frustrating happens to you in the game. Like I said earlier, I think both systems are pretty much equally valid, and obviously, there's no one perfect system. I just feel like LoL's balancing system (well, the philosophy behind it - say what you will about their actual attempts at balancing) promotes a healthier game in the long run.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. See you next week!

The Magic Color Series - Blue Bloods

Hey everyone! I apologize for the hiatus last week - as of now, my plan for this blog is to update every Friday. But I was visiting a friend for the weekend and didn't have the time to put together this post, so it's going up this Friday instead. In any case, welcome back!

Three weeks ago, I wrote the first article in this series, on the color white. As I mentioned then, I would like to devote one article to each color in the Magic: the Gathering "color pie," so today, I want to talk about the second color in our sequence - blue!

You can see the color pie on the back of any Magic card,

 by the way. We started at the top with white, and we're

going clockwise from there.

So just as a refresher, in Magic, cards are assigned one of five colors - white, blue, black, red, or green. Each color represents mana, the magical power used in the game to cast spells, and corresponds to a certain type of land - so plains provide white mana, islands provide blue, swamps provide black, mountains provide red, and forests provide green. But what I really like about the color pie is that each color represents certain values and principles, which tend to be reflected in the cards themselves. (This also makes Magic colors a pretty decent personality test - my friends and I have often sat around assigning people colors for fun.) Plus, the system is really what makes Magic, Magic. By mixing and matching which colors you use, you can create a huge variety of deck styles and gameplay patterns.

Alright, let's dive into blue!

What does blue represent?

Blue is, generally speaking, the color of logic and knowledge and reason. That being said, it's also the color of manipulation and control, in several different ways. Oftentimes, it feels like knowledge in an arrogant sense - like, "I'm smarter than you, so watch as I manipulate you to my heart's content." But that's not really the core of blue. If white is concerned with the greater good (between order, and purity, and morality, and all that fun stuff), then blue is just concerned with omniscience. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Colors in Magic don't strictly correspond with the four classical elements - air, earth, fire, and water - but there are definitely trends here. Blue (as the symbol suggests) is mostly closely related to water, as well as air in many cases. White, by contrast, doesn't really have an element to correspond to. There's some overlap between white and blue for air, but other than that, white is more often related to light (yes, I know that's not one of the four elements, but you'll have to bear with me on that one.)

What does this mean for gameplay?

As the color of knowledge and reason, blue is where you find most of the artificers and scientists and wizards in Magic, as well as their constructs (like illusions and artifact-related effects). If there's a blue creature that's just a typical animal, it tends to be something like a bird or an aquatic animal, and these creatures often have bonus effects that help manipulate the battlefield in some way, shape, or form. Usually, blue creatures are fairly weak, especially offensively, but they often have other effects or abilities that make them useful.

"Usually" being the key word in that last sentence.

One idea that was presented to me a while ago (I don't remember where I read this) was the idea that, in Magic, your deck of cards represents all the different things that you know, whereas your current hand of cards represents what you are currently thinking. For those who are unaware, in Magic, the player is an entity within the game (a type of wizard called a planeswalker, to be more specific), so this kinda makes sense - you're currently thinking of the spells you have in your hand, and thus those are the ones you can cast. Given this framework, it's pretty easy to see why blue, as the color of knowledge, would be the color that most often draws cards for the sake of drawing cards, as well as manipulating the deck in other ways. Blue is going to be the color that says "hey, let's just take a look at the top four cards of the deck, rearrange them as we see fit, and then draw two of them!" Or something like that. I don't know if that's an actual card; I made that up on the spot.

The other thing with blue, though, is that since blue tries to be clever and manipulative, very rarely will you see any cards that say "destroy target creature." More often than not, you will be returning things to their owners' hands, tapping creatures (essentially making them useless for a turn, for those who don't know what it means to tap something), or countering spells (which you can think of as "I know more about magic than you, so I'm just going to prevent you from casting that spell"). Blue will almost always rely more on trickery and outthinking an opponent, rather than brute force solutions.

Or, you know, you can just turn their creatures into frogs. 

That works too.

My opinions on the color:

Blue is an interesting color, because it can be both very interesting and very bland, depending on how it is played. In many ways, it can be considered the most powerful color, since you'll often have more cards than your opponents - a huge advantage that sometimes goes overlooked. The green player can drop all of her big stompy creatures onto the field, but then she's got no cards in hand and is playing with the one card she draws each turn; meanwhile, you'll be sitting pretty with six cards in your hand and three more coming each turn, giggling at the fact that you'll be turning the tides soon enough.

However, to me, blue is most boring when played on its own. A mono-blue deck just sits back and draws cards, counters spells, and is often more of a nuisance - a very frustrating nuisance - than any real threat. I find that blue often lacks teeth, so to speak. It can be tough to balance out the need for card advantage and control with the need to, you know, actually drop the other player's life total to zero. (Yes, I know mill decks are a thing, but we're going to ignore that on sheer principle for now.)

That being said, blue is absolutely my favorite color to splash into multicolored decks, my favorite color combination being green/blue. You'll be hearing more about green when I get to that article, but basically green just plays a lot of very large, very scary creatures, like bears and hydras and the occasional unusually-large lizard. But again, green can be boring on its own, so when you combine green's stampede tactics with blue's manipulation, you often end up with a very interesting deck that can adapt to different situations pretty decently while still having the means to actually finish off an opponent.

Plus, when you combine green and blue, you get cool stuff

like human insect wizards. How very exciting!

So to sum up, I think blue can be a really cool color, and it's often great to throw into a deck to add some flair and to keep opponents on their toes. But it does suffer a bit when used on its own, at least in my opinion.

Stay tuned - in two weeks, I will be posting up the next article in this series! To read more about blue's place in the color pie, a series of articles was written by Mark Rosewater, Magic's current head designer, on the subject of the color pie. Which is really where I got a lot of my information about the colors anyway. You can find his article about blue by clicking here.