My son asked me if I would play league of legends with him, so tried it for the first time. So much going on!
Firstly, how does anyone zero in on what hero they want to play, there are so many of them! I feel like it would take a year just to play enough to decide.
Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?
Anyway, 2 defeats from 2 games so far, I write to you from the lobby waiting for the third!
The MOBA genre is based off a mod for Warcraft 3 called Defense of the Ancients. DotA, being a mod, had lots of “quirks” (aka bugs) in the game play that kind of just became part of the flavor of the game. LoL was the first standalone MOBA, based off DotA and (iirc) developed by some of the people who worked on the original mod. LoL was designed as a standalone game but it recreated all the quirks of the mod because they were believed to be so important to the game.
Blizzard, when they made HotS, looked at some of the wonky, quirky things and said “This is dumb, let’s strip that out and make it simpler.” The result is a MOBA that’s just as fun but less complex. I really enjoyed it a lot for that reason.