Demystifying MOBAs - A Charming Stroll Through Flatland’s Battlefield

In DotA2, the map is rather massive and is significantly asymmetrical (both functionally and aesthetically) between the two opposing sides with three lanes running top, middle, and bottom with jungle interspersed between them and a river bisecting the whole to delineate sides. One side is called Dire, and has a diabolical and burnt-out look, while the other is termed Radiant and has the look of an elvish forest. The entire DotA2 map even has day and night cycles which affects how far characters can see at any given moment, with some characters like elves and demons having better night vision, or even additional powers once the sun sets. The sides are asymmetrical particularly when it comes to access to the various jungle camps and the routes that lead from the sides into the lanes. Radiant’s mid-lane is vastly more protected while Dire’s side has far more open space that enemy players can access. The layout of each side’s jungle is different and favors different characters and strategies.

Significantly, Dire has vastly faster access to the biggest and most critical NPC monster, Roshan, which is one of the core objectives in the later parts of a match. One of the ways these differences affect high level play is that in pro matches, teams start by flipping a coin and the winner gets to pick if they want to choose their side or to pick the first character, so the best teams have worked out strategies for either outcome.

LoL has a very similar map to DotA2, which is to be expected given its history as a DotA clone, but while the LoL map is still fairly large it is more compact than DotA2’s sprawling map. Additionally, Riot has over the years made changes to the map in LoL to make it more symmetrical so there are not as many differences between the two sides. There are still a few differences, primarily in access to the two large NPC monsters located by the river, but for instance the jungle layouts are almost a mirror of each other. There is no day/night cycle in LoL so character vision remains consistent throughout the match. Rather than having one evil and one good side, the only visual differences between the two sides in LoL are the glow-colors in the depths of the jungle (which given the type and density of plants resembles more of a well-manicured park than a jungle).

As with DotA2, teams get to select between picking sides or picking characters fist in professional matches. With both games there is a statistically significant difference in win-rates between the two sides, with DotA2’s difference mostly explained by Dire side’s easier access to Roshan. But in LoL the side advantage in pro matches can shift depending on the patch (basically depending on how valuable first pick is versus access to the big NPCs). Some top teams have figured out excellent strategies for playing the less advantageous side and can gain a large perk from being able to cede picking sides and get the first pick of characters or vice versa. That said, in amateur level play the side differences in LoL feel mostly negligible. As anyone who has tried to jump over a wall that they have jumped over for a hundred games and randomly failed has found out, it’s important to note Riot regularly makes changes to both the cosmetics of the map as well as the individual placement and size of terrain in their quest to make the two sides more equal.

HotS breaks with the long MOBA tradition of utilizing a single map and instead has some similarity to Super Smash Brothers or World Of Warcraft Player Vs. Player Arena combat with a rotating map pool, currently made of nine different maps (called “battlegrounds”) with more promised to come. In StarCraft 2, Blizzard’s first successful esport, the Korean professional scene started rotating maps at the start of each different season as a way to keep strategies, metagames, and play styles fresh. One change that tends to disorient new players to HotS is that both LoL and DotA2 both are oriented diagonally from lower left to upper right while HotS is played left to right. Every map in HotS has been highly symmetrical, with a few occasional changes in placement of NPCs to make sure that they don’t counter each other by being in the same lane. Most maps in HotS have three lanes, though not all of them. With the need to farm resources removed, each map additionally offers different objectives or mechanics that assist teams in winning, such as collecting resources from certain events that allows NPCs to fire artillery on enemy structures, or to work to raise a giant golem to fight for your team.

Some maps are massive, others are tiny. Some are focused around a single objective, others require the team to split into groups. Some are open, other have twisty little passages. Some almost always have really short games, others almost always require very long games. In this way, each team has to come up with strategies specific to the map, rather than one master plan. Similarly, character selection becomes even more dynamic, since some characters excel on certain maps while being virtually useless on others. In basic casual play, this aspect is one of the most frustrating for new players, since the map is randomly determined after you pick your characters.

Though lacking in destructible trees, one addition that both LoL and HotS use to make the map more interesting is that there are swaths of high grass (usually called “bushes” by players) that a character can stand in to hide. While in these bushes, the other team is totally unable to see the character unless they too are standing in the bushes. These are, of course, utilized quite extensively for surprise attacks, retreats, and fancy footwork plays since both top and bottom lanes have sections of bushes readily accessible in the sides of the lane. In both games, one amusing play that tends to happen even at the pro level is to have the whole team hide in a single shrub and all leap out at an unsuspecting passing enemy. In LoL they colloquially call this a “death bush” while in HotS they call it a “party bush.” Because of this, players will often call out a number of “Potential Dudes In Bush” to teammates who are wandering around. For instance, if no one on a team has vision of where four of the enemy team are, the team has to play as though any given bush could have four people in it, waiting to pounce.

DotA2’s map has no bushes, but offers one more mechanic, terrain level, that helps make it feel more like a real space than a flat chess board. In HotS and LoL the maps are exclusively two-dimensional maps (any visual elevation or recess is absolutely inaccessible or merely cosmetic) but DotA2’s map has what amounts to three or four levels of terrain in the game, with players on a level below having a chance for their attacks to randomly miss and lacking complete vision to the spaces above. Coupled with its radically more complex destructible tree-terrain and significantly larger size, DotA2’s map can often seem to be as much of an obstacle as the characters.

HotS has a much simplified version of these systems. All characters travel at the same speed on foot (with one exception) and most have a mount they can get on and off at will (with a short 4 second cooldown) which increases their speed but which instantly goes away if hit by any attack. A couple characters transform into their mounts, and the shapeshifter Rengar is even allowed to switch in combat to his wolf form. Like LoL, all characters can recall to their fountain at any point.

With DotA2, there isn’t any equivalent ability selection like LoL’s Summoner Spells, but you can trade in-match resources for a Blink Dagger, which you can activate every 20 seconds to instantly warp to a spot near you. The reach is much further than Flash but because a Blink Dagger requires quite a bit of resources to get, takes up one of the only six inventory slots, and provides no additional combat benefits usually only characters who can utilize it directly build one. In LoL you can see the other side’s summoner spells at the beginning of a match, but in DotA2 items are hidden until the other team is physically close enough to click on the opposing character. Since Blink Dagger is an item, this can lead to very dramatic and tactical reveals where a dangerous character suddenly warps into the middle of a seemingly safe team and casts a massive spell that decimates the unsuspecting team.

Characters with spells that are centered around the character but do massive AOE damage and stuns, like Tidehunter’s “Ravage” which throws all enemies up in the air cancelling whatever they were doing, or Earthshaker’s “Echo Slam” which causes a shockwave all around himself that stuns and then does compounding additional damage for every enemy player it hits, basically rely on the Blink Dagger to be relevant. This highlights how, though they seem like separate systems, the characters and the items are actually two sides of the same coin, and are intimately interrelated.

Despite their rather small footprint, there are additional structures on the field that delineate the lines and zones of battle. The primary form of structures on the map are called towers in both DotA2 and LoL. They are a solitary structure jutting out of the landscape that automatically attacks enemy characters (both players and NPC) that come within its range, effectively creating a safe zone for friendly characters. There are three towers in each of the three lane in both games and the towers in front (called “outer”) that must be destroyed before the towers nearer the home base are vulnerable (called “inner”).

HotS, as befitting its interest in creating interesting spaces for team fighting with its maps, has a more architecturally complex system for most of its maps in which instead of a tower, each safe zone is a small encampment with a variety of destructible towers, walls, a gate, and other buildings, which protects a main “keep” and a healing fountain which can help regenerate hurt allies. The destructible walls are an interesting element to HotS because they can cut off vision or block manoeuvres around the tower zones, yet do not respawn after being destroyed. The gate automatically falls when the two font towers on either side of it fall.

In LoL, the attacks from the tower actually do progressively more damage to a character the more hits a target takes within a short period making towers quite deadly early in the game but slowly becoming less effective since beefier characters get items like armor that inevitably make the towers do less damage. In DotA2, towers are quite comparably weak per hit, but they have a longer range and attack much faster, which makes it harder to dodge the damage but easier to predict how much damage you might take if you are targeted. By the end of a game, tower attacks are barely dangerous at all. The tower attacks in HotS are actually quite mild and easily ignorable in the short term after a few minutes of levelling up.

Most interestingly HotS has added a new feature, which is that towers, forts, and keeps have limited ammo which means they can run out of attacks become merely giant brick-and-mortar punching bags so even though last hitting minions is pointless, there is a very real consequence of being undefended by letting the other team push wave after wave of minions against your towers soaking up tower hits. Both DotA2 and HotS have characters with abilities to heal towers, but in LoL there is no way to gain HP back on towers though a handful of abilities can shield towers briefly. In all three games, killing a tower gives everyone on a team, not just the player who killed it, experience points and in LoL and DotA2, a significant amount of gold.

The base, a space that starts at the final tower and extends to the nexus/core/ancient is separated out from the rest of the map by a series of permanent walls & fortifications and houses a series of other structures much like a medieval castle. In DotA2, the base features a bunch of cosmetic buildings and then the ranged and melee “racks,” short for barracks. Destroying these will permanently cause the team who successfully killed the barracks to spawn stronger minions in that lane thus giving them an advantage since their reinforced minions waves will constantly push the line of battle forward. HotS has a “keep” as its second set of structures in each lane which is similar in arrangement to the outer areas but if destroyed causes long-range catapults to be permanently spawned by the team who destroyed the keep. LoL is very similar, but has no cosmetic buildings and only one “inhibitor” (a giant gem structure) in each lane. Once an inhibitor is killed the team who successfully destroyed an enemy inhibitor gets an extra minion, called a super-minion, which is as its name implies, stronger than usual, which moves down the lane. Interestingly, the inhibitor respawns after a short time though not the tower that protects it. In all cases, killing one of these inner structures creates massive pressure in that lane since the extra strong NPCs that spawn force the team who lost it to be constantly and actively working to defend that lane against the increased NPC onslaught.

In all three games, getting an inner structure killed is usually the beginning of the end for a team. In DotA2, losing the first racks corresponds to a nearly 90% game loss rate in pro tournaments, and in fact is usually only attempted late in a game by a team who has accumulated an overwhelming advantage. Much like in professional chess, DotA2 games are rarely played to checkmate (the destruction of the Ancient), but end with the team who lost one or two racks accepting their nearly impossible position and surrendering. It is considered incredibly disrespectful for a pro team to refuse to surrender a clearly lost game (in StarCraft players have even been suspended for this sort of behavior). In LoL, the numbers aren’t quite so bleak, since the inhibitor respawns, and in fact there is a strange tendency for teams who take an inhibitor too early to lose because the waves of minions are mostly near the well defended sections of the enemy base, so the team with the inhibitor down is actually at an advantage to safely farm minions.

DotA2 has a pair of additional shops on each side of the map. One is a small side shop which has a limited selection of rudimentary items conveniently located near the battlefront, which is useful because unlike HotS and LoL, there is no spell to get you freely back to base. Additionally, DotA2 has a “secret” shop sequestered in each side of the jungle, which sells a small selection of exotic and expensive components that the main shop doesn’t have but which are required ingredients to assemble the most potent items in the game. One of the fascinating decisions in DotA2 was to allow players to buy from any shop they can physically access, not just their own team’s shops, so invading teams often make a quick purchase as they retreat out of the other side’s jungle. Though I don’t exactly know what to make of it, it seems worth noting that in both of these games, the safest, best defended place on the map, which is also where you return from the dead and where you heal your battle wounds, also is a store. Maybe that just shows good business sense from the vendors. In HotS there are no items and the only other benefit you get from the Fountain is that you can mount instantly, but while seemingly small, this is yet another place where Blizzard tries to remove some of the typical MOBA barriers, like DotA2’s extended walk to the outer tower which can take over a minute each way, which is almost 3% of the length of a match.

In this chapter hopefully I have been able to show how the various aspects of the games that seem unrelated (characters, maps, items, and structures) are actually critically related to each other in one organic system. If a change is made to any element, no matter how seemingly insignificant, there can be drastic effects on the perception and value of other elements in the system especially at the highest levels of play where fractions of a percent can be game-changing, finding, understanding, and utilizing information can define victory. In a basic way, things like the tower buffs in LoL or character movement ability cooldowns in DotA2 are why so much effort is spent scrutinizing patches from every angle.

Next week, we’ll look at how the inhabitants of these eternal battlefields are a form of resources and how the different ways each game distributes these resources are based on differing views of “balance.” Additionally, we will examine these three games’ use of “vision” as a game mechanic, rather than a simulation of optical vision, and how this mechanic is one of the most defining elements of the MOBA genre.

Part 1 - Demystifying MOBAs: An Introduction to an Introduction

Part 2 - Demystifying MOBAs: Characters - Representing A Digital Pantheon

Part 3 - Demystifying MOBAs: The Pantheon in Action

Part 5 - Demystifying MOBAs: PLAY - The Gory Farming of Glory

Part 6 - Demystifying MOBAs: A History of Speed

Part 7 - Demystifying MOBAs: The Grand Spectacle

Part 8 - Demystifying MOBAs: The Heralds of High Drama