I Hate League of Legends

I hate Lol

Not in the abstract sense everyone does for the community or whatever. I have good reasons:

So from the start Lol came stealing gameplay loop from DOTA which was a mod for Warcraft made in 2003 that is almost as old as Twokinds. DOTA was basically the original MOBA, and personally have no problem with that on principle it was clearly a passion project and people liked it. It was an alternative to standard Warcraft.

And then it became the only option.

You see Warcraft was an RTS like its sci-fi bro Starcraft and better games like AoE and command and conquer. In RTSes you have something called macro: Economy buildings that stuff and micro how you moved units in the field to defeat the enemy.

Starcraft was the most micro dominant of those out there so was Warcraft total annihilation was a very macro focused game. AoE, my jam had a decent macro you had to take care of for the game but micro was not ignored either. You can dodge catapult fight in that game!

MOBA results when you remove all the macro from the game and then remove a great deal of the micro and then replace it with ’teamwork’ resulting in a very diminished experience.

All that is well and good but by the release of AoE 3 on 2005 the genre was already slowing down and by the time Starcraft 2 released on 2010 most people already considered RTSes as a dead genre and Starcraft 2, although commercially successful failed to revive it.

Reasons for this are varied and consensus has not been reached. Personally i think it started with AoE3 not selling as well as AoE2 and executives decided that meant the genre was done and began pivoting to other genres like FPS. I mean CoD 4 advanced warfare came out in 2007 and then the whole gaming industry tried to make military shooters. Plus RTSes were a thought sell due to the high skill floor.

So people stopped making RTS games and thus people interest on the genre began to dwindle. AoE was kept alive on voobly and Starcraft retreated to Korea. But do you know what executives decided was a good thing to sell? MOBAs, mostly due to the low skill floor the simplified gameplay required. Lol came out in 2009 and DOTA 2 on 2013 trying to modernize the game to compete against lol.

And honestly that would have been fine if that was the only thing MOBAs would have been forgotten as well but there was a problem. Riot figured out you could print money by selling cosmetics and heroes. Game was simple enough some maintenance was minimal, making new skins was and is a rounding error on accounting but boy do those sold. I think Lol and similar games have only stayed relevant for so long because they have a consistent revenue stream not because they have any interesting gameplay. Does not help Lol also pioneered other stuff like loot boxes and i think it has a battle pass now too.

This also explains the world building and lore they add to their characters. Again minimal investment and is a very cheap way to make you care about the newest champion or the newest skin that recolors the dryad into a mecha or whatever they do. But this is also why it feels so disjointed these are little blurb to make you care not something you are gonna try to pull from the gacha machine. Not for some overarching story. And if that happens is almost accidental.

And thus a whole genre was deemed unprofitable mostly by decree and abandoned and a minimal facsimile of it was raised in its place simply cause someone figure a cheap way to sell you recolors of your favorite characters. And eventually we got gachas to complete the circle.

Art by Tom Fischbach