This Site Sucks (rant) - Page 14

On November 20 2014 14:50 Acritter wrote:
Speaking for a moment about strategy. News is a different subject.

DOTA2 is a pretty godawful topic to write strategy guides on. No matter how good you are at writing it up, you've got to expect all your hard work to be invalidated one patch later. Oh, you want to write a section on how to deal with your build's counterpicks? Three months later you'll seem quaint at best and clueless at worst. It isn't the same way for SC2 or Hearthstone. The Blizzard balancing model has its flaws, but it does allow for a lot more stability. As a total scrub, you can take an old SC2 build or Hearthstone netdeck and expect it to perform decently well for you. Hell, for anyone trying to learn Protoss, I still start off teaching them the 4gate as a manageable introduction to the game, and that's been a joke for years. The closest thing we have to something eternal is that "Art of Support" thing. That was fairly solid, and it was solid because it deliberately avoided saying anything specific apart from pull times and the like. But let's be honest. It's almost never by means of learning grand notions of theory and practicing last-hitting ad nauseum that you get good at this game. It's by finding out little tricks to the game and drilling them into muscle memory that you improve.

The only time I can remember seeing a glut of guides for this game was the DotA Allstars days, back on Pendragon's forums before he shut it down in favor of League. And guess what? Most of those guides were terrible! There was no community to speak of, there was no matchmaking, and chances are that outside of inhouse leagues you'd be playing with scrubs and leavers every game. So Merlini's guide to Zeus that taught a bunch of stuff that should be obvious (seriously, by modern standards it was pretty basic) was revelatory in that light. Hell, just reading that stupid-simple guide to Zeus got me to the point where he was my best hero. But those days are gone, because everyone can just subscribe to Torte's builds instead. There's no room for that kind of guide any longer, where the content is basically just skill build and item build with some extra words tossed in. For fairness, though, I will note that the old Warding guide was pretty damn excellent.

So what do we have left? Basically, the tips and tricks. You can't write the kind of detailed guides that we expect out of, say, SC2 build orders for those. It's a totally different field, but it's still really important. Some of them are even impossible to describe. How do you actually know when you have potentially lethal damage, and when do you hold back and run? You can do the math, but generally on the spot you just have a sense for it, and that can't be taught. You might be expecting I have a proper answer for this, after typing it all out, but I don't. It's not an easy problem to solve, not in any way that will get a new audience showing up. Hell, I half expect I'm wrong about all of this, and the real problem is nobody giving a shit.

Whatever. Game is hard.