Echo's Estate

ECHO RANTS!

Competition. Competition has existed for as long as we care to think. One of the biggest places where we have seen competition over the many many years of human civilization is sport. Sport was created on the fundamental idea of competition. One person or group vies for supremacy over the other. They work to improve themselves, to better their skill at the sport and then test that skill in some kind of tournament. Sports are and have always been about competition.

So lets fast forward a much more modern era, my childhood to be exact. I was not a person who was about sport. I cared little for competition. What I liked doing was playing video games. I remember playing a lot of Super Mario. I remember going to arcades and seeing all the cool arcade games. The ones where you had a physical gun and you shot AI enemies was always amazing because I never had one of those guns at home.

Time progressed and new games came out. I remember the ad on TV for Super Smash Bros. It was hilarious. All these big name Nintendo characters skipping along all friendly and then they suddenly turn on each other and start wailing on everyone. It was a funny commercial and it gave off a sense of just being a fun game to hang out with friends and mess around. I believe it was actually marketed as a party game for just that reason.

I played it when it came out and it was very fun. The items that dropped were often some of the funniest parts to the game that and the ridiculous map mechanics that got you killed more often then the players did.

It was years after that when I noticed a change in the gaming community. Or it could be that this was always there and had not seen it. For the moment I'll continue to use Smash Bros as my example since it fits in well with this progression. It was maybe 3 or 4 years ago that I remember seeing people in the student center at my college playing Smash Bros. At first I thought it was a good idea since the game is good for just messing around with a lot of people. I watched them from time to time and eventually as time passed and they kept playing every week I began to wonder.

Why haven't I seen any items? Why are they only playing on the Final Destination map, which is by far the most boring map. I spoke to the people playing but it didn't really hit me until later when I heard there was a Smash Bros tournament. I have to say that again just to let it sink in. A party game literally made just to mess around has a tournament. These people were looking at this game in a seriously competitive light. This game was never ever meant to be competitive but they forced competition upon it.

And this change just got even worse. Games these days have changed from fun hobby, to
"E-Sport". A sport, a event made to be competition. This mindset, this desire to be the best, most efficient player in all of video games spread like wildfire. Tournaments popping up all over the place. People start getting really serious about games and that leads to people getting really upset about mistakes made in games. The idea of E-Sports and "going pro" has completely changed the landscape of gaming. And what better genre to personify this new mind set then the MOBA.

I actually have more to write on the topic of MOBA's but I will end this rant here for now. Let me know if you guys are interested in hearing the continuation. And as always comments and conversation is welcome. Thanks

Legend has it that once you master that technique, you will always have loads of buckets ready to shoot out!


Echo: I have heard about how the Smash fans aren't even welcome in the EVO tournament. They were welcomed reluctantly, but supposedly they've just been pure ass to the other communities that no one wants to be with them if they're from another fighting game.

That sounds very draining..

@ Echo

Hahaha I remember that commercial so funny...


Call of Duty has a big pro circuit.

Thoughts on adding the moba rant?

glad to hear you like them! Have you read the ones I did in the past?

Draining? No, you become more powerful and less tired!


Echo: First time reading your rants and I found your Asagi one also thanks to your sig. Mind spoiling me the ending of TA3? I liked that rant too lol.

Well in the beginning it would be draining but the more you do the more you adjust to it.

Then you become an unstoppable sleeping fapping machine!

I wonder if that would disrupt my sleep quality or make it better.

If you do it in your sleep, it shouldn't count against it lol. But I never tried it... it might be untamable!

Well I haven't had the chance to do it while sleeping, I get ready for it but I just pass out and wake up thinking "Fuck I messed up" Oh well I'll figure it out eventually.

E-Sports ruin games in my opinion because the competition is really just games trying to cater to that market for more sales when games can be unbalanced. I hate seeing games focus more on supporting E-Sports rather than their actual game....

I tend not to play against online players. They take it too seriously whilst I'd just do it for a few achievements lol

MORE ECHO RANTS!!!!

67 Million. Think about how big that number is for a second. Its enormous. Well that is the number of people that play League of Legends every month. It is by far the most popular video game in the entire world. Compare that to a game like World of Warcraft, which many mistakenly think of as the most popular online game. The last time Blizzard reported WoW sub numbers it was 5.6 million. That is a major gap.

But why? why is it such a gap? Well it could be said that its WoWs fault for sucking lately but WoW isn't even the number 2 game. I can't find concrete evidence for sure but fps games like CS:GO and Crossfire are always ranked higher then WoW and even they aren't even close to League's numbers.

Other mobas like DOTA 2 are also doing very well. DOTA 2 is always the number one played Steam game. So what is it about the moba that just really gets to people? I think, after many hours of moba playing, I have found some answers

Some of you may know of my storied past with online games. Ive bounced around from mmo to mmo over and over and never really committed to playing any of them long term. Probably about a month ago I was thinking on this very subject when I realized that there was a game I have regularly played for over a year. That game is Smite. Now, I will say this, Smite is pretty unique in its design and control aspects, and certainly the way I play it is not the standard way one plays such games. Even so, Smite, at its core, is a moba.

Im going to move to a side topic for a second to briefly describe what a moba is to those who have been living under a rock may not be familiar with the genre.

**Realizes what a long and painful process explaining what a moba is would be**

actually fuck that just go read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena

Are you done? Good, moving on then.

So why have I kept playing Smite instead of the tons of other games I had tried to stick with? Well one reason, just for me personally though, I really like ancient mythology. I find it incredibly fascinating. The fact that there is a game where you play as gods and legends sounds mega awesome. The mythology thing is just a personal preference though, why does the moba in general manage to be so popular and hold so many people into playing them regularly.

If I had to sum it up in just one word I would probably use the word "Convenience" Ok, now lets expand on this so you can see what the hell I'm talking about. To do that lets look at mmorpgs, another huge genre of online gaming. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14, Blade & Soul, Black Desert, and many many others like it all fit this. When you play these games what you are really doing is making a commitment. You are devoting this huge amount of mental effort in getting invested into this game.

You start the game up, then you have to create a character. You have to invent this character from nothing. Then when you get into the game you have to mentally place your character into this world, into this lore. Just that is already a fair amount of effort and you haven't even started playing.

Remember when I said commitment? Ya, be prepared to commit a lot of time. Reading quests, doing quests, grinding mobs, queueing for dungeons, running dungeons, raiding, All of these things take a insane amount of time. I know that I started to become incredibly discouraged at the idea of logging onto a mmorpg beacuse doing so meant I would have to devote a lot of time to actually get anything of note accomplished. It was a pretty substantial deterrent to playing the game.

I want to say that it always feels like a pain to try and meet people in mmorpgs. First off there is always the possibility that they are a bot. Then there is just you literally searching for people in the world to talk to. Dungeon queuing lets you meet others but its often not really the focus of the game till after you hit max level. So if you want to meet and play with more people you have to get to max level.

You can just try and speed grind all the way, skipping quest text and doing whatever tricks and exploits you can. If you do that though, its like you are not really playing the game. It sounds odd but what this really is is you not playing the game in order to play the game. The grind to max level is something that so few people actually care about (I always did though Q_Q) They are not experiencing the game as a whole as it was intended because of this obsession with "End Game"

Honestly I could do a whole other rant on how much nonsense this "End game" is but I wont.
The just of the whole end game obsession is that players want new experiences. They want to log on to the game and have something new to do. Today's mmorpgs have become mutated into some kind of grotesque monster because of things like the end game obsession. The original form of such games was just simply the role playing game. In the world of video games, rpgs have basically always been a single player experience. The taking of this experience and making it a multilayer one was innovative but ultimately just mutated the idea of a rpg into what it is now. A endgame obsessed grind, where you pay people to power level you while the casual player can't enjoy leveling and finding easy access to other players.

So lets recap. mmorpgs are a major time investment. You have to commit a lot of your own imagination and mental effort to fully enjoy them. Despite that, most people decide not to fully immerse themselves in all the content but rather skip to the all powerful end game, essentially not playing the game in the process. Another thing I want to point out real quick is mmorpgs don't do well with being a "E-Sport" and serious competition in in video games is what has been growing like crazy. Despite my dislike of that trend (see previous rant).

Mmorpgs whether people like to believe it or not, are built on the base ideas of a single player game. This is where we come back to mobas (I know it took forever sorry). When you look at all the things I just spoke about and then you think about mobas it almost feels like mobas were made specifically to kill the mmorpg market. And I can tell you this, even though there are more mmorpgs then mobas if you combined the player base of every mmorpg and compared it to every moba, the mobas would win by a landslide.

Mobas attract not just mmorpg players though, but all people who are interested in games. And they do it by giving players what they want. We just went over what players do not want. So showing what they do want is going to be much faster. You don't make a character in a moba. The game already has all these premade pre imagined characters. No investment is made in crafting your character identity since its already done for you.

I know a major reason I have been playing only mobas recently (League as well as Smite) Is because of the speed at which you can start the game play a match have an amazing experience and be done in an hour or less. Its a fast, streamlined way to play a game. There is no huge time commitment you need to make every time you want to log on.

Mobas are made to be multiplayer. Instead of being based on singleplayer games the idea of a moba was crafted from the start to focus on playing with others. I know many gamers who only play games when they play with their friends. I think its so much easier to find people to play with in a moba. I started playing league like 2 weeks ago (after basically a year long hiatus) and I went into a AI match and started chatting with the random people I found. I still play with those guys, and it was that simple to find them.

In a moba there is no need for a end game beacuse there is no questing/mob grinding stuff. Every match is a self contained game. You progress, you level up, you fight, you win or lose and then its reset for the next match. I remember when I heard this the first time I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. But like I said, what this does is eliminate the obssesion with endgame. Every match is a brand new game so every time you play you get a new experience. This is honestly another major attracting factor for me personally. I am so tired of leveling alts on a mmorpg and going through the exact same thing again and again.

In a moba even if you pick the same role and the same character the game is going to be a new experience. You aren't going to be fighting the same enemy characters (most likely) and you aren't going to have the same fights. The convenience of being given all the different characters instead of making them. The fact that there isn't a major time commitment needed to fully enjoy a play session. And every match being a fully new experience. Just these things are enough to attract a massive player base. But there is still one other major aspect of mobas that has really tapped into what the people want.

Now I can't say for sure if this is the case but as far as I recall no one much cared about E-sports before the moba existed. In essence the moba genre created E-sports. And as I pointed out in my last rant, people have been dying to turn video games into competitive sports. Mobas are the perfect game to become a E-Sport. Its like they were made for it, and maybe they were.

But maybe you are like me. Maybe you don't give a dam about E-Sports, can you still enjoy mobas? Yes, you can. Somehow most mobas have managed to make it where you can get as hardcore balls deep in the technical math, meta, and efficiency you want. Or you can just be like me and only play with sexy women. Either way, whether you want to try and shoot to be a pro player or just troll players while laugh spamming all the time. You can enjoy mobas no matter the level of commitment you want to put into it. It accepts all levels of tryhard.

With that I think I have shown what makes mobas so popular and likely the future of gaming as we know it. Be sure to join me next time as I go into part 3 about mobas, "Meta, what it is, and why I hate it."

Thank you all very much for reading this giant wall of text and as always comments and conversation is welcome.

I dont play mmos or mobas either unless Starcraft becomes like WoW.

But I plan to retire from gaming next year so I guess it doesn't matter.

There is no such thing as retiring, you just take a break... AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh no I'm retiring for good if Sorny wants to jack up prices then screw it I'm done.

What you gonna do for fun then?

Probably nothing.