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How long does it take to reach that point for Dota? I really tried to like SCII, I watched the first hybrid proleague and some initial tournaments. I was bored out of my mind. League, even though I didn't play it and wasn't even that interested in (kind of like with SC) just grabbed my eye immediately. I wouldn't downplay viewer experience just like that. There's something to be said about the aesthetic enjoyment of something that you can't put your finger on. It doesn't need to be strategic depth or big plays, it needs to be nice to look at. Or perhaps that's my individual approach to how I spectate a game. It's a blend of understanding, but also the superficial notion of how pleasing it is to my eye. Personally, Dota and SCII are fundametally ugly games to look at. The color scheme they use has very little pop and it makes it feel like everything blends together (too little contrasts or saturation or w/e it's called?). If Dota had the same color schemes like LoL I'd might like it more. So yeah maybe it is all (or mostly) a consequence of the economic aspects of it, but who knows to what extent each factor impacts the popularity of one game over the other.
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On June 15 2018 18:07 Embir wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2018 08:04 Slusher wrote: More likely just lucky timing by Riot, game came out while sc2 was not as popular and blizz was still blocking be from being broadcast. Not luck, LoL is just a really good game with enormous casual appeal. And casual appeal is one of the most important things if you want to have succesfull e-sport title. People like to watch games that they play themselves - that is the thing Blizzard never understood with SC2. Blizzard, instead of balancing SC2 around majority of players, focused on group of several Korean pros, and the results are clearly visible - LoL is one of the biggest e-sport brands, meanwhile major tournaments of SC2 can't even garner a fraction of LoL streamers viewership. I tried DotA and hated it, despite the fact that I stopped playing SC2 and was searching for new game to focus. On the contrary LoL caught my attention instantly - there is something magical in this game that makes you want to play it and play it even after all those years. league feels responsive and good to both play & control a character in a way other mobas don't.
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On June 15 2018 18:07 Embir wrote: Not luck, LoL is just a really good game with enormous casual appeal. And casual appeal is one of the most important things if you want to have succesfull e-sport title. People like to watch games that they play themselves - that is the thing Blizzard never understood with SC2. Blizzard, instead of balancing SC2 around majority of players, focused on group of several Korean pros, and the results are clearly visible - LoL is one of the biggest e-sport brands, meanwhile major tournaments of SC2 can't even garner a fraction of LoL streamers viewership.
This is so true. When SC2 Wings of Liberty came out I played that game a lot, and once the initial tiny maps left the map pool and it got to larger maps the game was really fun. But every change blizzard made to it made it less fun, especially the big changes like heart of the swarm and the Protoss expansion. Blizzard was designing what the highlight reel film clips looked like rather than designing what gameplay experience felt like. Battles were one of the more fun parts of the game, but blizzard kept adding “highlight reel” units that’s would blow up a whole army in under a second like widow mines and those Protoss things. Those were simply not fun to play against, they made most games end in anti climax instead of epic battles.
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Casual appeal is the #1 way to drive an esport to success in the West. This isn't BW in Korea where kids would grind for hours on end so they could get into Courage, or whatever. This is reflected in how even at the top of the ladder in NA or EU the gameplay is less advanced. In esports, people are far more likely to watch games they play as opposed to traditional sports where I've never played a game of organized (American)football in my life but watch my NFL team play.
It's why League has remained on top of MOBAs despite all other games it's had to compete with and why Fortnite has taken the crown from PUBG as the premier Battle Royal.
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On June 15 2018 21:22 Gahlo wrote: Casual appeal is the #1 way to drive an esport to success in the West. This isn't BW in Korea where kids would grind for hours on end so they could get into Courage, or whatever. This is reflected in how even at the top of the ladder in NA or EU the gameplay is less advanced. In esports, people are far more likely to watch games they play as opposed to traditional sports where I've never played a game of organized (American)football in my life but watch my NFL team play.
It's why League has remained on top of MOBAs despite all other games it's had to compete with and why Fortnite has taken the crown from PUBG as the premier Battle Royal. i think the main reason fortnite succeeded is because they actually fixed and improved the game over time where bluehole got complacent
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On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: clearly you dont understand the point of this discussion. there is a difference between wanting your game to appeal to casuals, and wanting your game to be taken seriously as a sport. there is a distinction between the two and although riot would claim credit for both, they only succeeded with the former and they lucked out on the latter. If people watch a competitive game it is being taken serious as a sport and here we are with League having some of if not the most viewed tournaments. Not even to mention how popular it is in Korea the country where eSports is being taken the most serious.
On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: lols success in the competitive scene comes from the korean market. do you think koreans know that lol had a predecessor? do you think koreans even know dota exists? the answer is only very few. koreans didnt choose lol because it was better than dota, they chose lol because it was the first game available of the 2. Yes. The koreans didn't know of a game based on the engine from a company that had made the most succesful game in their country and it's not like they had Warcraft 3 tournaments either. Totally. Come on.
Dota didn't appeal to the koreans for what ever reason we can only speculate about until someone makes a scientific study.
On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: if we assume that dota was a major title in korea alongside lol, do you really think lol would survive? whether casuals care or not, these games are only able to maintain their positions in e-sports as behemoths if they are viable in the competitive scene and generate revenue for interested parties. if you compare the state of both scenes, assuming korean infrastructure could support both, dota would definitely be the more interesting game for any team sponsor or player. dota fulfils its role as an esport title far better than lol does, therefore the game can be seen as more stable and attractive from the perspective of sponsors and pros. riot would have lost that competition against valve unless they changed their entire design and balance philosophy to match valve's and develop the game with a more competitive focus. You are so biased it's not even fun, "dota is better because I think it is".
The only sensible metric for how "good" a game is would be it's succes and clearly League have had a better run than Dota. How good you and I think game X is would be our personal opinion and while we could make our arguements all day numbers doesn't lie.
This whole discussion is one probably the most silly one I've seen on the forum for ages.
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On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: i think comparing spectator experiences is overrated. the truth is, people prefer to spectate whatever game they play or have more interest in. naturally a league player will say that league is better to watch, whilst dota players will argue that dota is better. i personally play (or played. havent played dota a long time) both games, and dota is by far more interesting to watch because the quality of the games at pro level is better. by quality i dont mean faker outplay-esque hype moments, i mean the strategic depth that is on display. when you reach a point where you understand the balance of the games and you can appreciate what the pros are doing, visual aesthetics dont mean anything for me.
I actually think ability to watch and casual appeal are connected in this respect. Dota 2 and SCII are both very visually dense in a way that makes what a player is doing often hard to perceive. The higher difficulty is IMO secondary. WOW war released with pretty insane difficulty for even mid-level raiding shit, and it wasn't until significantly through its first expansion and basically the 2 year mark that average joes could clear most of the 5 man dungeons.
Dota's problem was timing + visuals. If it came out first, and looked like WOW the same "League newbs" would have been praising the merits of denies, "fun" supports like Bounty, and calling LOL stupid with lame supports ("lol they basically play KOTL and Earthshaker every game how lame!").
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On June 15 2018 21:28 Frolossus wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 21:22 Gahlo wrote: Casual appeal is the #1 way to drive an esport to success in the West. This isn't BW in Korea where kids would grind for hours on end so they could get into Courage, or whatever. This is reflected in how even at the top of the ladder in NA or EU the gameplay is less advanced. In esports, people are far more likely to watch games they play as opposed to traditional sports where I've never played a game of organized (American)football in my life but watch my NFL team play.
It's why League has remained on top of MOBAs despite all other games it's had to compete with and why Fortnite has taken the crown from PUBG as the premier Battle Royal. i think the main reason fortnite succeeded is because they actually fixed and improved the game over time where bluehole got complacent They also started with a proper game engine and netcode already in place, so a lot of the fps and lag problems which are still an issue in pubg today they sidestepped entirely.
That + being f2p + being a little more kid friendly combined with the fact 10-15 year olds can spend a fuckton of their time playing games/watching streams made the game explode through twitch/youtube/word of mouth.
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On June 16 2018 00:37 killerdog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 21:28 Frolossus wrote:On June 15 2018 21:22 Gahlo wrote: Casual appeal is the #1 way to drive an esport to success in the West. This isn't BW in Korea where kids would grind for hours on end so they could get into Courage, or whatever. This is reflected in how even at the top of the ladder in NA or EU the gameplay is less advanced. In esports, people are far more likely to watch games they play as opposed to traditional sports where I've never played a game of organized (American)football in my life but watch my NFL team play.
It's why League has remained on top of MOBAs despite all other games it's had to compete with and why Fortnite has taken the crown from PUBG as the premier Battle Royal. i think the main reason fortnite succeeded is because they actually fixed and improved the game over time where bluehole got complacent They also started with a proper game engine and netcode already in place, so a lot of the fps and lag problems which are still an issue in pubg today they sidestepped entirely. That + being f2p + being a little more kid friendly combined with the fact 10-15 year olds can spend a fuckton of their time playing games/watching streams made the game explode through twitch/youtube/word of mouth. They both use Unreal4.
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This conversation reminds me of the time I asked Madlife what he thought about league being called a casual game by western gamers and he straight up ignored the question lol
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On June 16 2018 00:28 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: i think comparing spectator experiences is overrated. the truth is, people prefer to spectate whatever game they play or have more interest in. naturally a league player will say that league is better to watch, whilst dota players will argue that dota is better. i personally play (or played. havent played dota a long time) both games, and dota is by far more interesting to watch because the quality of the games at pro level is better. by quality i dont mean faker outplay-esque hype moments, i mean the strategic depth that is on display. when you reach a point where you understand the balance of the games and you can appreciate what the pros are doing, visual aesthetics dont mean anything for me. I actually think ability to watch and casual appeal are connected in this respect. Dota 2 and SCII are both very visually dense in a way that makes what a player is doing often hard to perceive. The higher difficulty is IMO secondary. WOW war released with pretty insane difficulty for even mid-level raiding shit, and it wasn't until significantly through its first expansion and basically the 2 year mark that average joes could clear most of the 5 man dungeons. Dota's problem was timing + visuals. If it came out first, and looked like WOW the same "League newbs" would have been praising the merits of denies, "fun" supports like Bounty, and calling LOL stupid with lame supports ("lol they basically play KOTL and Earthshaker every game how lame!").
Ability to watch is primary. After having a working, fun game to begin with, the spectator experience is paramount to whether or not a game can succeed as an ESport.
First, the viewer has to be able to follow the action. Traditional sports have a ball to follow, and a singular objective to score (a net, goal line, home plate). It's why FPS games like CS:GO and Overwatch will never really grow any bigger than they already are. The games are a giant clusterfuck of action that the viewer can't properly follow. It's also why LoL took off while SC2 stagnated. Again, LoL has objectives that can be focused on, while SC2 is a clusterfuck of action until both players 1a at the end of the game.
Secondly, the viewer has to be able to tell what is what, and who is who. Again, CS:GO and Overwatch fail miserably with the casual viewer. All the character portraits look very similar and with the camera flashing around all the action, the viewer can't easily relate to what is happening on screen. In SC2 the colour-scheme makes everything bland and dull (compared to the bright and colourful visuals of BW), making it hard to follow everything that's happening. DOTA has the same problem, I'm a pretty hardcore gamer and I can't easily tell the difference between the actual player-controlled units, and the minions that act as fodder for them to progress through the game... That is a HUGE problem.
The spectator experience is why my wife became a fan of LoL, even though she's never played the game before in her life (that, and a crush on Darius). And she's not the only one. I don't know the actual statistics, but I would wager that a pretty large percentage of the viewerbase for League are people that have either never played the game, or only played a few times. But it's bright visuals, and objective-based gameplay, combined with a professional production-value (Remember in the SC2 days when nerds insisted that announcers didn't need to wear suits and could use words like "Rape" during the broadcast?) make it easy for them to follow along.
I think Fortnite is taking off for a similar reason. Although it is still pretty difficult to follow the action at the beginning of a round, the bright visuals and the end-game make it easy for spectators to follow along with what is happening. And watching really good players build as they move around is really, really cool.
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You are so wrong it hurts
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On June 16 2018 01:27 Slusher wrote: This conversation reminds me of the time I asked Madlife what he thought about league being called a casual game by western gamers and he straight up ignored the question lol what do we consider hardcore these days besides melee and EVE online?
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On the subject of, "visual readability" LoL does it better than Dota, and that's because of three main things: larger/brighter color palette used, few lingering particle effects from abilities, and fewer customization options for characters.
If you look at the color palette used in Dota, a lot of the map tones are a muted, more realistic hue. There's also a dedicated day/night cycle to play with vision radius for players, which is a thing that LoL simply doesn't do. By in large, if you look at fights that take place in Dota during the day things tend to be a bit more visually appealing and easier to track. Where-as at night your eyes are drawn to the effect of the spells being cast, letting a person lose track of the heroes on screen.
Second, by in large most of the particle effects in LoL only stay on the screen for a few seconds before fading, with minor exceptions (Aurelion Sol's stars being the biggest one). Compare that to Dota, where heroes can throw out a huge particle effect to administer a large debuff on the enemy team for a long time. In addition, even "short" spells like Lina's Q tend to last longer on-screen than Annie's W (probably the closest comparison I can make based on what those spells do).
Third, while LoL has a ton of skins for their champions, the portraits displayed for them in-game don't change unless it's a unique skin (usually the Ultimate or Legendary skins). And the champions models in-game stay the same relative size and shape as their base version. Compare that to Dota, where not only can you mix and match skins based on the equipment that hero uses, but the portraits themselves are rather small for the in-client spectator mode. And then they have the same thing with LoL where certain skins will change the portraits (their Arcana skins). I can't tell you the number of times I've looked at a Dota stream, saw the portraits and had to do a double-take to make sure one team was running a hero that was "out-of-meta," only for it to be a meta hero with the Arcana skin.
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On June 16 2018 00:00 Jek wrote:Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: clearly you dont understand the point of this discussion. there is a difference between wanting your game to appeal to casuals, and wanting your game to be taken seriously as a sport. there is a distinction between the two and although riot would claim credit for both, they only succeeded with the former and they lucked out on the latter. If people watch a competitive game it is being taken serious as a sport and here we are with League having some of if not the most viewed tournaments. Not even to mention how popular it is in Korea the country where eSports is being taken the most serious. Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: lols success in the competitive scene comes from the korean market. do you think koreans know that lol had a predecessor? do you think koreans even know dota exists? the answer is only very few. koreans didnt choose lol because it was better than dota, they chose lol because it was the first game available of the 2. Yes. The koreans didn't know of a game based on the engine from a company that had made the most succesful game in their country and it's not like they had Warcraft 3 tournaments either. Totally. Come on. Dota didn't appeal to the koreans for what ever reason we can only speculate about until someone makes a scientific study. Show nested quote +On June 15 2018 19:57 evilfatsh1t wrote: if we assume that dota was a major title in korea alongside lol, do you really think lol would survive? whether casuals care or not, these games are only able to maintain their positions in e-sports as behemoths if they are viable in the competitive scene and generate revenue for interested parties. if you compare the state of both scenes, assuming korean infrastructure could support both, dota would definitely be the more interesting game for any team sponsor or player. dota fulfils its role as an esport title far better than lol does, therefore the game can be seen as more stable and attractive from the perspective of sponsors and pros. riot would have lost that competition against valve unless they changed their entire design and balance philosophy to match valve's and develop the game with a more competitive focus. You are so biased it's not even fun, "dota is better because I think it is". The only sensible metric for how "good" a game is would be it's succes and clearly League have had a better run than Dota. How good you and I think game X is would be our personal opinion and while we could make our arguements all day numbers doesn't lie. This whole discussion is one probably the most silly one I've seen on the forum for ages. viewership is a bad way to determine whether the game is actually well designed at a competitive level. the viewership numbers for league are inflated because of its massive playerbase that, statistically speaking, arent skilled enough to even make a determination on whether the game has design flaws or not.
im korean, ive lived in korea, have plenty of korean friends that play league and literally only 1 person i know had heard of dota. you think just because warcraft was big famous wc3 custom maps are suddenly common knowledge? koreans had their own moba equivalent from the wc3 custom map days, called chaos. they had little to no exposure to dota at all prior to league all the way up until the international started making headlines due to its ridiculous prize pools. even valve and nexons pathetic attempt to market the game in korea went mostly unnoticed. please dont attempt to dismiss what i say when youre clearly oblivious to what actually goes on in korea.
as for your argument that im biased, yes, i am. but my bias has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that league is a shit esport title and theyve only managed to succeed until now because they luckily monopolised the korean market in the moba genre. a good game only makes up for half of the requirements for a stable competitive scene. id concede that my bias would lead me to say dota has better game design in general (not referring to visual design), but tbh i dont even need to argue this point at all. completely ignoring the actual gameplay of both games, riots design and balance philosophy is the exact opposite of what investors would want in any game they choose to endorse. investors want to put their money in a place that they know will be stable and can survive long enough for them to see a return on investment. could you put money on riot to not one day destroy the game with some stupid patch that wasnt thought out properly? even the most popular league streamers openly bash riot and league for their incompetence in maintaining the game at a balanced state for players who actually care about high level play. then theres the cherry on top where riot has made it common knowledge that they are not interested in keeping their game stale, they want to change things up regularly. they even have a set number of patches that they must get through every season. when the developer of the game youre trying to endorse actively tries to bring volatility into the scene youre not going to be confident about your investment. what amateur would be confident about making a career jump to pro when you dont even know if riot decides to dumpster the game because an employee didnt like the way things were?
lucky for riot, korean investors (sponsors, teams, players, broadcast channels etc), dont have any other options in the moba category. riot literally has no other competition because valve completely fucked up in trying to get dota into that market. if dota had a foothold in korea, then the above points about riots irresponsibility as an esport developer becomes a major factor in deciding whether to choose lol or dota as a game to sponsor. valves method of balancing and patching the game would prove to be far more attractive and this would either kill lol or force riot to change their ways. also before anyone brings up another country as a rebuttle for this, the only country that would come close to korea in esports investments is china. you cant compare korea (a country whos investors dont have the sufficient funds to sponsor both) to china (where investors are literally swimming in money)
tldr; riot entered the korean market before valve and hit the jackpot. now they can do whatever the fk they want and not have to worry about losing to competition because they have the exclusive backing of an entire nation that also happens to be the biggest country in esports. their success isnt due to their game being superior in any way, its because riots business team was better than valves.
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On June 15 2018 20:29 Uldridge wrote: How long does it take to reach that point for Dota? I really tried to like SCII, I watched the first hybrid proleague and some initial tournaments. I was bored out of my mind. League, even though I didn't play it and wasn't even that interested in (kind of like with SC) just grabbed my eye immediately. I wouldn't downplay viewer experience just like that. There's something to be said about the aesthetic enjoyment of something that you can't put your finger on. It doesn't need to be strategic depth or big plays, it needs to be nice to look at. Or perhaps that's my individual approach to how I spectate a game. It's a blend of understanding, but also the superficial notion of how pleasing it is to my eye. Personally, Dota and SCII are fundametally ugly games to look at. The color scheme they use has very little pop and it makes it feel like everything blends together (too little contrasts or saturation or w/e it's called?). If Dota had the same color schemes like LoL I'd might like it more. So yeah maybe it is all (or mostly) a consequence of the economic aspects of it, but who knows to what extent each factor impacts the popularity of one game over the other. i played dota for 9 years before i quit at pro level. switched to lol to try something new and am on my 3rd year now. so its no surprise that im interested more in gameplay depth rather than visual appeal. ill accept that this is up to personal preference though lol is particularly popular with female gamers, so there is definitely visual appeal in lol that cannot be denied even by dota players. but i dont know how people can look at a vacuum/black hole/meteor+deafening blast wombo combo and say lols skills look better. wat
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On June 16 2018 00:40 Gahlo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 16 2018 00:37 killerdog wrote:On June 15 2018 21:28 Frolossus wrote:On June 15 2018 21:22 Gahlo wrote: Casual appeal is the #1 way to drive an esport to success in the West. This isn't BW in Korea where kids would grind for hours on end so they could get into Courage, or whatever. This is reflected in how even at the top of the ladder in NA or EU the gameplay is less advanced. In esports, people are far more likely to watch games they play as opposed to traditional sports where I've never played a game of organized (American)football in my life but watch my NFL team play.
It's why League has remained on top of MOBAs despite all other games it's had to compete with and why Fortnite has taken the crown from PUBG as the premier Battle Royal. i think the main reason fortnite succeeded is because they actually fixed and improved the game over time where bluehole got complacent They also started with a proper game engine and netcode already in place, so a lot of the fps and lag problems which are still an issue in pubg today they sidestepped entirely. That + being f2p + being a little more kid friendly combined with the fact 10-15 year olds can spend a fuckton of their time playing games/watching streams made the game explode through twitch/youtube/word of mouth. They both use Unreal4. There's more to a game than the underlying engine though. I could make snake which runs at 1fps on an i7/titan using unreal 4 if i wanted to. The codebase fortnite built ontop of the of the underlying engine was vastly superior and more stable than what bluehole bodged together for pubg.
It helps when the guys developing the game are the same people who developed the engine itself,
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Since other people shared their story, I'd also like to highlight why I picked up LoL and stuck with it. I started playing games on a Mac, which severely limited what I could play to begin with. I played a load of AoE III, up until my multiplayer broke. Around that time, SC II was announced, and reading the description as a kid, it seemed the perfect replacement for my needs, namely competing online. So I bought the game when it came out, and played it for a while. However, little me was always intimidated by the immense pressure of 1vs1, where every single mistake was punished incredibly hard, and getting to Diamond (after Masters was implemented) was so damn difficult, not to mention you'd get cheesed every 5th game at least, and it made my blood boil to no end. I ended up playing 3vs3 and 4vs4 all the way into Masters instead, spamming marines every single game.
Eventually I got my first Windows laptop, and became aware of a game called LoL by randomly browsing the games section on Twitch. I watched Froggen play and had no fucking clue what was going on. But the game looked entertaining, not least because it looked like it would fill my need for a mechanically intensive game. And once I made it out the hell hole that was sub lv 30 and got to ranked, I discovered that ignoring every other factor, I was enjoying the game simply because it was less competitive and demanded a lower margin of 'perfection'. I eventually settled for ADC, aka brain dead mechanics role, and have stuck with it since. Everytime I tried to play SC II again, I realized that the player base is just too hardcore, even making it into Platinum by the end of WoL was a slog, because the people who stuck around had all become veterans.
Point is, the lower competitiveness aspect of LoL is what makes it fun. If you want a hardcore game, go play Dota, or take a risk with trying out SC II again. But for 90% of all MOBA/RTS games, LoL is the right mix of tryhard to fun factor, and that's why you don't see the player base moving onto other games. Riot didn't just get lucky by being there first after BW, they're still around because they know how to cater to the larger audience, and other games either don't understand that, or purposely don't pursue this direction.
The codebase fortnite built ontop of the of the underlying engine was vastly superior and more stable than what bluehole bodged together for pubg.
Fortnite is developed by the company who makes the engine itself, ofc they have much better understanding of the code, in fact Epic Games have been adding features to meet to their own needs. That doesn't excuse the poor performance of PUBG, but they had quite an ambitious concept and just failed. Which they could do because everyone bought the game when it was still Early Access, so they'd already made their money.
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That's what i said in my last post :p
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I like dota 2, sc2, bw and league. Don't really get the hate for either of them, they all do some stuff well and others poorly. Think BW is prob the only one that stands out. Do miss days of Quake being the FPS game too far more fun than CS :D.
I do mostly play league though, find it's just the better easier solo game out of them all. RTS is too hard man.
edit: Freak how could I forget TF2. That game may be most fun I've had being semi-competitive.
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