DotA's Inferno: I'm happy staying down here, don't take me to Purgatorio

 Maybe I should change the title of this blog to DotA's Inferno, it has a nicer ring to it...

So apparently my last article generated quite a bit of feedback, both private and public, ranging from people I'd never heard of to a member of joinDotA. Most of it was interesting, if a bit depressing, however there was one comment that really, really bugged me:

"Why would you want the DotA 2 Community to become the Starcraft 2 community?"

The intent of this comment is quite different from the reality, and I'll be dealing the former first. What they were implying was that, sort of like the fighting game community, the DotA community is much more 'raw' than most online gaming communities. Quite simply what this means is that the community is giving itself a free pass to be more liberal with their usage of words, unlike the much more sanitized and civilized Starcraft community. Said commentor wishes to carry on this way and exclude anyone who is uncomfortable with the language and attitude espoused by the community, with their main fear being that their words are censored or subjected to much closer scrutiny than they normally are on the internet.

However, the reality of it is much less benign. Largely due to KeSPA helping to legitimize and popularize e-Sports in South Korea, allowing companies to pump money into the game, Starcraft achieved the status of a national sport (factors such as the recession, ease of play, balance and gameplay helped to make the game popular and to ease the process of legitimization). Going on from this, Starcraft had the backing of powerhouses like Samsung, South Korea Telecom, WEMADE Entertainment, two television channels and three major tournaments, the best players were on the status of well-loved celebrities and won enormous amounts of money. Even though the match-fixing scandal did shake the community to its core, it persisted and survived, at least until Starcraft 2.

On the release of this game, the non-Korena community began to integrate, with tournaments such as GSL (based in Korea but with dedicated English casters and foreign players), IPL, MLG, Dreamhack and TSL, allowing players from all over the world to enter and have a chance at winning vast amounts of money, barcrafts (an event where people go to a bar and watch Starcraft tournaments) are going strong and finally there are a vast amount of celebrities, commentators, teachers in the community, and Starcraft media to consume. If you'd like another comparison, League of Legends, a game that is the same genre at DotA and HoN enjoys a massive level of popularity, has high paying tournaments at Dreamhack and MLG, is making inroads in Korea and has an increasing amount of commentators, streamers and celebrities, and unlike Starcraft, this game was built up from nothing.

The idea of DotA 2 having any of this, would be, quite simply, fantastic, and thinking about it, there are only two reasons DotA and DotA 2 have not been receiving the backing of companies and the community thus far. Firstly is the current state of the games and the barriers to entry, DotA was a custom map for Warcraft 3's expansion, adding two barriers to entry almost instantly, and DotA 2 is still in a beta, greatly limiting the influx of new players. Heroes of Newerth had a barrier to entry as well, the initial price, something that League of Legends lacked. Secondly, rather regrettably is the community, Starcraft is largely policed by itself outside of tournament games, though at tournament games, there are officials, rules and rulings (though thankfully, or not, depending on your viewpoint, these are more lax than KeSPA's are), and players and commentators are generally civil outside of trash talking and ceremonies, and if they aren't, the community and tournament organizers react, and they react hard.

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Case Study #1: Orb

Orb was picked up by Evil Geniuses (now referred to as EG), a team who are seen as the 'bad boys' of Starcraft 2 and DotA 2 (not so much fighting games though) so that he could commentate some games for them. At some point prior to being asked by EG, he said some racist stuff in a private game, while he was inebriated and angry and later made an apology, he still made the statements, and EG wasted absolutely no time in dismissing him from their team.

Orb's racist statements in game: http://imgur.com/a/aYs3n

Alex Garfield, the CEO of Evil Geniuses makes an absolutely fantastic statement on it here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=319018

Case study #2: Destiny

Destiny is famous for being at one point a semi-decent American Zerg with good Infestor play, and using bigoted terms a whole bunch.

I could go on about this for ages but I'm going to let two pictures, a caption, and a line of text speak for themselves.

Destiny's reply to Alex Garfield's post

All I've learned from this is that emailing sponsors is a good idea.

Case Study #3: Naniwa

This one is actually interesting because no one was technically in the wrong (though Nestea was completely in the right), it was just an unfortunate clash of gaming culture and values between Koreans and non-Koreans.

At the Blizzard Cup in 2011, Naniwa and Nestea were both in the same group. However, due to both of them going 0-3 in the group, they were joint last and their game would have no bearing in anything outside in one of them finishing 4th and one of them finishing 5th, they would not be able to qualify for the next round short of two of the top three being struck by lightning.

Realizing just how unlikely lightning strikes would be, and hence just how pointless the game would be; Naniwa proceeded to send his six starting Probes to Nestea's base (a move that would only succeed if the enemy player was doing a very, very, very specific opening), take his hands off the keyboard and then typed "gg" as soon as the Probes inevitably died. Quite a lot of players and people on the internet condemned Naniwa for a lack of professionalism, and for not wanting to give the audience a good match, most of this was based on the idea of etiquette that exists in Starcraft. On the other side, Naniwa's actions were defended due to just how little bearing the match had on anything at all, and that Naniwa was just giving it the respect it deserved.

GOM ruled in favour of the former, Naniwa lost out on a guaranteed spot in the GSL reserved for foreigners. Quantic, his team, retain him and support him, though they do apologize for his conduct.

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On the other hand, League of Legends has the Tribunal and an active moderation community, which helps everyone who uses the game outside of tournament play to essentially police the community. Since what I don't know about the higher levels of League of Legends can fill a warehouse, I asked noted up and commentator Studio what he knew about it.

Chucat: Are there any instances in LoL of high level players being either bigoted and getting shut down for it?
Chucat: Like Destiny I guess.
Studio: Dyrus said rape once and apologized.

That was pretty much the worst and only instance, though I did get told the community can still be hostile.

This article was low on pictures so I googled Californian Dog and this came up.

But I'm digressing, the only major difference between DotA 2 upon release and assuming a robust tutorial and being free to play, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, ignoring the quality of the game (and Starcraft 2's entry fee, which is a non-factor at this point), will be the community. In order to achieve the status of a 'legitimate e-Sport', the community would have to be changed to be more palatable and accommodating, legitimizing it properly to outsiders, investors and the public in general. Quite clearly, it has to be changed, so now we have to look at how.

How can the DotA community be changed?

1) From the top down

The top down implies that high-level players, namely those in professional teams, commentators, and Valve themselves work to improve the community. Valve, because they have made the game, are able to directly and actively work on improving the community, commentators and players are able to passively and indirectly improve the community.

- Direct improvement.

I've already touched on in an earlier article how newbies and leavers can be dealt with, through tutorials and minor punishments (respectively), however, I barely touched on ragers, quite simply suggesting they get punished and that would be that. However, I think I should go over the specifics now.

a) Moderation

DotA 2 already has a robust and simple to use report system, at least once you know how. However, there are some problems. Knowing how to use it at first is a bit counter-intuitive and there is little to no feedback on if your report actually did anything at all. The solutions to this are quite simple: Send an email or steam notification to any player that reports someone and has it yield results, make sure to also include the name of the offending player and the exact details of how they broke the rules. Additionally, more staff could be hired so that reports can be processed faster and people will be more confident in the system.

b) Filters

I'm not a fan of this because of the potential for abuse and how people are liable to attempt to be zany and hilarious and attempt to circumvent any sort of filter by using words like "sniggers" and "naggers". While it would be useful for children and people who don't want to be exposed to language at all, it won't serve to improve the community on its own.

c) Guidance

While I'm not quite advocating Valve directly sitting down and engaging every person one on one and giving them sensitivity and political correctness training (though I would be completely for that), I just mean general things like the notice already given at the start of a game that players can and should be reported for being unpleasant, as well as Valve frequently making it known that they are ready, willing, and have already banned people for these things. However, I am against the idea of incentives being given for being a nice person, since such a thing could quite simply function as just that, a temporary incentive, where people act nice for just long enough to get their goodie bag and then instantly go back to their old, unpleasant ways.

- Passively

This one is a bit more tricky, but it largely hinges on the fact that the commentators and players in the game set a positive example, and then it slowly but surely begins to trickle down to lower level players. The prime example of this is in  Starcraft: Brood War and is the general concept of "manner". High level players, especially those shown at tournament play were generally quiet in games (though this was a KeSPA enforced rule to prevent mindgames being employed by players) except for usage of the terms "glhf", which means "good luck have fun" and "gg", which means "good game" and is said by the losing player as a way to admit defeat. This eventually became common in even basic ladder games, in Starcraft and Warcraft 3, and the omission of saying "gg", or saying it to a losing opponent before they say it is seen as something extremely bad mannered and rude.

Outside of the game though, anything goes, especially with the concept of ceremonies and celebrations that winning players tend to carry out, as well as methods they employ to humiliate their opponents, though it needs to be heavily stressed that these are in good spirits and are not meant to hurt or offend anyone at all.

In the case of commentators, their role is much more simple but powerful, they are the main voices of the community and any trends or ideas they put forward will generally be latched onto and accepted by the community. While this can be a force for good, such as in the case of the GSL commentator Nicolas "Tasteless" Plott managing to partially succeed in taking back the word "nerd" and making it a compliment. It also can serve to cause problems if they engage in behaviour that isn't as socially acceptable, such as Destiny's usage of racial slurs, and several commentators using sexually charged terms such as "rape".

All in all, I suppose I'm suggesting that high level players and commentators need to quite simply watch themselves and their usage of language in order to provide a good influence to players and put on a good face for sponsors and the general public. While I do have the basic faith in humanity that such a thing can be done, a KeSPA like organization could always be formed in order to properly police the community.

2) From the bottom up

This is the other way in which the community can be changed, with players seeking to better the community and players and commentators as a whole. If you agree with the idea of being 'politically correct' then just stop reading, this isn't for you and you'll already know the gist of this, if you're not sure what to do, just follow these simple instructions:

a) Act nice to people (I'm not going to explain why I'm just going to hope you have a shred of empathy in your body), if you wish to criticise their play, use constructive criticism, tell them why what they are doing is not the correct way to do things, make sure to cite guides, sources and present your case convincingly. If you cannot do this, then just bite your tongue and deal with it. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by bringing their race, gender, orientation or anything else into it. A newbie can always improve, someone who leaves the community due to disgust isn't going to come back.

b) If another player is being offensive to you or anyone else in a way that suggests discrimination, just tell them that their words are being offensive and see if they apologize. If they don't, report them, ignore them and carry on playing. Don't let them get you down while you're doing an activity that is meant to be fun, and just be confident that Valve will deal with it.

c) If a commentator or a player in a professional team says words that you are offended by, don't hesitate to let the team or organization as a whole, or if the case is extremely severe, their sponsors, know what happened. Large companies as a whole are concerned about their self-image and the people representing them, especially those they invest money in, and if they reflect unfavourably on them, they will let them know.

d) Again, just be a nice person, more people will want to play with you and your games will be a lot more fun!

DotA's Inferno: A followup, racism right near the top.

Dealing with civil rights and issues of equality, racism and sexism is something I don't normally do, but this is about something I care a lot about, so here goes...

Valve have repeatedly stated that they want to make DotA 2 as accommodating as possible and to get rid of the 'toxic culture' that surrounds the game and prevents newcomers from enjoying the actual game.

However, this morning, Valve's official English commentator, Tobi Wan, who has commentated countless events for DotA 2 already (including the International), and will more than likely be commentating The International 2 queued in a public game with professional player mouz.SingSing.

In said game, Tobi proceeded to use racist language as outlined in the picture below, if you don't want to look at that, the language in question was "have you heard the expression...lame as a nigger's baby?"

Picture in question

Frankly, I believe that such conduct, even in a public matchmaking game, over text, and apparently said in a moment of rage, is completely unacceptable, and was bad enough to even make SingSing, a very, very rowdy player ask him why he said that.

In addition to this, I believe that Valve should know what happened and that any gamers who care about the reputation of DotA 2, lest it become another HoN, should tell Valve that they should, at the very least, reprimand Tobi for this. While such a goal might seem lofty, it's important to keep in mind that Evil Geniuses, one of the largest American teams, recently fired Orb from their staff because of racist language he used, and if the matter is scaled up, Tobi could be similarly reprimanded.

If you don't want to go through the time in writing your own email to Valve, feel free to send the following open letter by clicking on:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/email.php

Set it as being sent to either DotA 2 Team or Gabe Newell, use your own email address, set the subject to "Racism in DotA 2: Tobi Wan", and hopefully something will come of this.


Open letter:

Dear Valve,

I strongly feel it should be brought to your attention that recently your current official English commentator Tobi Wan, used unnecessary racist language in a public game that popular and high level player Singsing was streaming. The phrase in question can be seen in this picture: http://i.imgur.com/pdche.jpg and game ID is 15842488.

While I do appreciate Tobi as a caster and enjoy the work he has done for the community so far, I believe that the use of such language in a public medium, and by such a prominent member of the community is completely unacceptable and should be dealt with in some way. An event like this by such a leading member may hinder the ongoing work on Dota2 and its ever-expanding community.

Skullgirls Week Two Review

Skullgirls came out around two weeks ago on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN, I'm just going to talk about my thoughts on it and what I liked and what would need improvement, if you just want a summary, scroll to the bottom.

My favourite fighting game is Marvel vs Capcom 2. A small part of this is down to the sheer level of absolutely insane hype that is tied to the game, as well as the fact that pretty much every good character is from the Marvel universe, but most of it is down to two things:

- The lack of comeback mechanics
- The sheer variety of playstyles

With regard to comeback mechanics, I'm not a fan of them in general, even as someone who they will directly benefit. I don't like being actively rewarded for doing badly, whether it's through major damage boosts at low health or when I'm down to a limited number of options, or the more overt huge bar that fills up as my health bar goes down that lets me attempt some sort of Hail Mary play that may or may not win me the game. Ironically, I feel that the inclusion of comeback mechanics such as X-Factor and Ultra Combos actually diminishes from the excitement felt from a real comeback, such as one seen in something like Starcraft or Marvel vs Capcom 2, where any disadvantage can quickly snowball out of control and comeback mechanics are completely non-existent.

As for the variety of playstyles. Despite the vitriol poured on Marvel vs Capcom 2 by people who have not played the game widely, running up to someone and forcing them into an infinite combo for ten hours is not the be all end all strategy in the game. While rushdown is powerful and a dominating strategy, there is also zoning from characters such as Cable, Spiral, Blackheart and Dhalsim, who all play in vastly different ways, one hit kill team hyper combos such as Juggernaut/BBHood/Iron Man, chip damage trap teams such as Strider/Doom. Players could use whatever they liked (within reason) and more of it came down to player skill than anything else.

I suppose what I'm getting at here is that I haven't been happy with Capcom's recent offerings, part of this was down to the poor netcode and real life issues making it hard for me to go to tournaments, another part of this was down to the aforementioned comeback mechanics, and rushdown being king in Marvel vs Capcom 3. So when I heard that MikeZ, a pro fighting game player was planning to make a fighting game that was a 'spiritual successor' to Marvel vs Capcom 2, I was interested enough to consider buying it on release, but not enough to read up on any of the hype or pre-release details, though there was enough good will from somewhere to make me buy the game close to the release date. After trying out the game for a couple of days, I'm very, very happy indeed with it, and I'll just take the good points in the order that I encountered them.

The art style is the first thing that I laid my eyes on. I'm not an art expert so anything I say about it will make me sound like an absolute imbecile, but it looks clean, unique and extremely interesting. The characters look like they've been cribbed from other sources rather than created from whole cloth. It's quite simply one of the nicest 2D games I've seen in ages, and unlike some of the others, I don't feel like I've been put on some sort of police list by playing this, at least not yet anyway.

Next up was how the game designers were clearly catering to high level players, as well attempting to get low level players who wished to improve to a higher level. The most clear sign of the first was how this game uses what is known as "the good type" of button configuration. A player just has to press the button they want to bind a move to, and that's it, no more individually selecting buttons from a list, or cycling through configurations, or tedious button checks. Another example of this is an extremely small, but major gesture, in order to pause in a versus match, the player has to hold down the button for a longer than normal period of time. This prevents unnecessary pauses during tournament games, something which is sometimes punished with forfeits or even disqualification.

With regard to the latter, an extremely robust tutorial system has been put into place, teaching players the basics such as moving, how to execute moves, throws and how to block, before moving onto more advanced concepts such as airdashing, combos, stagger and wakeup attacks, and then, finally, and most importantly of all, teaching players those important concepts, such as hitconfirming and mixups. it does this in an intuitive and simple way, just telling them to watch the opponent and react to what they do. While I'm very, very happy with the system put in, there is one very major problem, it's quite simply unfinished, some of the important and high-level concepts are left out, which is a shame, since I'd love to see how they'd be taught and to actually learn something from it.

At this point I actually began to play the game, and while I was initially taken aback by the low number of characters available, I quickly found one that fit my playstyle. For the record, my playstyle involves standing as far back as possible and making the opponent navigate some sort of obstacle course made up of fireballs, shields, powerful ranged normals and summoned abilities, if I get some sort of teleport so I can make them do it all over again when they get close to me, then that's a bonus. Needless to say, Peacock fit me perfectly. On the other hand, one of my friends enjoys playing characters that spend time and using their abilities getting close to you and nullifying your attacks, and then making you suffer with throws, mixups and extremely damaging moves, which meant that Cerebella suited him. Other players were fans of rushdown, harassing their opponents, or something more versatile, and there were characters for them as well.

Actually playing a game with him was easy enough, we just invited each other to play, set a frame delay based on our current ping, picked our characters, and started to play. After each round we could choose to begin another one instantly and just carry on without interruption. There were no noticeable problems with the netcode, which would be surprising since it was GGPO style netcode, something that a large number of players have been asking for in almost every fighting game with online since the inception of GGPO.

Once we actually got to play though and I was able to use the extremely versatile assist system (which allows you to use any move short of a Blockbuster/Super Combo as an assist) to find essentially another projectile that Peacock could throw out to cover an angle that she was susceptible to attack from, I was able to have a series of very fun, rather close matches, where we both used our different playstyles to try to win, and since there weren't any sort of major comeback mechanics, or anything especially janky, we never really felt cheated or annoyed outside of the opposing character/team playing to their strengths and having to find ways to deal with it. Needless to say, it was very fun indeed.

Peacock has six projectiles that fly across the screen at different trajectories and speeds and hit the opponent. All of the coloured areas on here represent a different projectile that will be thrown out as part of the 'obstacle course'. Being hit by any of them causes you to eat a super which throws you back into the corner to begin the obstacle course all over again.

While mentioning this is a formality, the controls were completely fine, I never unintentionally did a move and most of the times I failed to pull of a move or do a combo I knew this was down to my own shoddy execution than anything else.

While I am happy with almost everything in Skullgirls, there is one major problem, namely that the game is unfinished, posssibly due to it being rushed out. There are several examples of this, which I'll talk about in increasing order of severity: Firstly, an extremely minor gripe, you're unable to see the movelists for your characters without going online to the official website and downloading a .pdf file to look at, while this could be slightly more convenient if you're the type of person who has their computer and television right next to each other, or if you don't mind printing off the .pdf and just popping it next to you, it'd be slightly annoying if you want to know how to do certain moves, or how certain moves even work (Peacock's level 3 Blockbuster beginning from her throw and her Shadow of Impending Doom increasing in power if you hold it down). As I said though, it's not major, but the annoyance is still there.

Secondly is the problem that bugs me the most. Quite simply, the tutorial system is incomplete. I talked about this earlier, but it's still something I'm not happy with, largely because I'd love to see how they planned to handle teaching some of the more difficult concepts in place in fighting games.

Finally is the online play. While I've mentioned already that I'm happy with the netcode used and the ability to choose your own delay, there are slight problems. The most important of these is the lack of any sort of lobby system in place at all, and if you've read what I've talked about before, you'll know how much I care about this. You're limited to one on one fights which no one else is able to watch or interact with. It's rare that a game has a worse version of spectator mode than Marvel vs Capcom 3, but here it is. Additionally, joining a ranked game is slightly annoying due to having to constantly requeue if someone disconnects before the game begins. To solve this problem though, the player could quite simply opt into an automatic match finding system while in training mode or arcade mode, similar to Arcade Edition or Marvel 3.

While the problems do seem rather major, there are two things that have to be kept in mind, that also serve to diminish the severity of them. They don't affect general offline play (including tournaments), and they can all be fixed via patching or free DLC. Their website does claim that there will be free updates, and I don't think it'll be too much to ask for that a lobby system, ingame movelists and a completed tutorial system will be among them.

In conclusion, this game is absolutely fantastic, but quite simply unfinished in the learning resources and online play department, if you don't mind doing just online 1v1s or play a ton offline and are looking for a nice change from Capcom/Namco/SNK/Arcsys/Netherealm fighters, this is a definite buy.

Summary

Pros:

+ Variety of characters and flexibility of assists allow several different playstyles, allowing almost any player to find their niche.
+ Interesting art style that manages to carry its own unique style, as well as looking very nice indeed.
+ Inclusion of GGPO netcode allows online games with a minimum of complaint.
+ Gameplay is extremely solid and tournament players were kept in mind from things to button configuration to comeback mechanics.

Cons:

- Clearly unfinished content, namely tutorials and offline movelists
- Lack of online lobby system.

Verdict: 

 The game is just shy of being a perfect fighting game with what is currently there, with the added changes, both casual and tournament players will be very, very happy indeed.

A retrospective of DotA heroes 5: Carries with fittingly named ultimates

I haven't talked about DotA recently, let alone done one of these, so I figured I'd do three at once, about everyone's favorite type of hero, the carry.

Kardel Sharpeye, the Sniper

I hated this guy in Warcraft 3 and I hate him now

 

Heading to your lane, and upon looking getting a good look at Sniper, you're not really that impressed. He just seems to be a slightly slow, low health midget, albeit one that's packing some serious heat with that gun of his. So you run forward to try and deny one of your creeps...you wind up to hit it, and it just explodes in a bloody mist. Slightly baffled, you try to last hit an enemy creep, and the same thing happens again. You figure your partner in lane, the one with a ranged attack might have a better chance at taking a last hit or a deny, so he aims at a creep with low health, the projectile is in the air, about to hit the enemy...and once again Sniper seems to get it first.

Meet the first perk of Sniper, the fact his projectile has THREE THOUSAND speed, in comparison, most other projectile speeds are a number between 900 and 1500. What this means, is that for all intents and purposes, Sniper is effectively wielding a hitscan weapon, only one other ranged her holds this honour, and that's Gyrocopter, but he has less base range than Sniper, notice how I said 'base range'? That's because one of Sniper's skills is called Take Aim, and it's just a simple little passive that...boosts his attack range by +65 per level, up to a maximum of +260. What this means is that once he finishes levelling up this spell, he'll have 810 range.

While certain things do outrange this, there are several major things that don't, like the physical attack of every single hero in the game, and much more disturbingly, towers. What this means is that Sniper can just stand there, far beyond the range of a tower and just constantly plink at it. Of course, it could be worse, he could be hitting you instead, especially due to his second passive, named Headshot. Quite simply this gives a 40% chance to deal 50 extra damage on a physical attack, and stun for 0.2 seconds, what this means is that Sniper manages to get the drop on you, you're going to find it very, very difficult to run away from him, especially as he ministuns you constantly and you have to get over 800 units away from him, and keep in mind he is using a gun, and they hurt, so he's not going to take several hundred hits to kill you.

Let's say you do run away from him though, and you're lucky and do so with 400 health, a stray creep or tower shot won't kill you, though Sniper doesn't seem to want to chase. And then you notice the crosshairs above your head, and the rather ominous looking debuff in your bar. Then you proceed to hear a gunshot and just fall over dead. Sniper's ultimate, named Assassinate does up to 655 damage at max rank, maxes out at 2500 range, tying it with Heat Seeking Missiles for the longest ranged non-global targeted nuke in the game, and best of all, it has a 10 second cooldown, however, the mana cost is rather large. But if Sniper happens to be best friends with Harbinger or Keeper of the Light, enjoy eating huge amounts of distant damage every 10 seconds.

Shrapnel is an aoe that does 432 damage total over 8 seconds in an area, it works on towers but only does 33% of the damage, also it slows heroes. If you can think of any way to make this skill sound interesting you deserve some letters after your name and a lucrative series of book deals.

Balanar, the Night Stalker

Best server in WoW

To be honest, Sniper isn't that exciting, and as the first day begins, and you move to begin laning against Nightstalker, you think this guy will be much of the same, stale, tired, boring melee hero. He runs forward, tries to take a last hit and takes some damage for his trouble. You begin thinking this'll be quite easy despite his respectable health. His movement speed seems slower than average, you swear he can't see as far as you and strangest of all, he seems to have a buff called Hunter in the Night, that doesn't do anything at all, besides mentioning he's apparently better in the night, well, he'll need all the help he can get, especially with how he's progressing so far.

You still bully him, and he doesn't even seem to be fighting back, and you feel quite bad, though due to his cautious play, you're not quite able to kill him, and he is getting quite a few last hits, partially due to his relatively decent autoattack, and also since he seems to be using a nuke every so often on a creep, it seems to be doing respectable damage, but he seems to want to remain close to full mana, so it's not really being used that much.

Three things then happen at six minutes: Nightstalker hitting level 7, the end of daytime, and all hell breaking loose.

Unless you're one of a few heroes in the game, your vision range becomes less than half of what it normally is, conversely, Nightstalker then proceeds to see as far as you could during the day and he instantly makes a beeline to you and casts a max level Void on you. Void does around 300 damage at maximum level, which is already pretty bad (for you), but then, since it's night, it proceeds to make you half as fast for four seconds. You decide to turn around and fight him with your physical attack and the help of the tower, but your attack speed is lowered by around a third.

To make matters worse for you, his 'useless' passive now seems to actually be operational, causing him to, at level 2, be hitting you 45% more often. In your crippled state, he mops the floor with you and then proceeds to run off to another lane, revealing the second half of that passive, a 30% movement speed buff. Moving towards top, you see him begin to make a move on a stunner and a carry. He can't have a chance against them, you think, at least until he reveals his second active spell, Crippling Fear. This thing silences for 5 seconds AT LEVEL ONE, upon dropping this on the stunner and casting a Void on them, he proceeds to shred them to pieces in a few seconds before 'retreating' into the forest for a few moments.

He emerges once again and drops Crippling Fear on the carry and starts to hit them as well. Apparently undaunted, the carry begins to hit him back. However, you seem to be noticing that while your teammate's health is dropping like a stone, Nightstalker's health odesn't seem to be moving as often, you then realize that Crippling Fear isn't just a silence, but also seems to cause a major reduction in hit chance, which, coupled with Void causes your carry teammate to be hitting successfully around one third as often as normal. Rather unsurprisingly, they also die.

Running back to your lane, Nightstalker drops a Void on you, doing that 300 damage, and then shows you the new toy he bought, Urn of Shadows, this gives him some mana regeneration, health, health regeneration and damage. However, it also places a 150 HP damage over time spell on you. He proceeds to chase you and hit you until his Void comes off of its relatively short cooldown, only 8 seconds, and then proceeds to hit you again with it, leading you to take 750 damage in spells alone, as well as the numerous physical attacks from him hitting you. Once again, you rather obviously die.

Realizing that Nightstalker's power might be a bit more limited if you travel as a group, you decide to do just that, heading around in groups of 3 or more, the second day rolls around and he seems to be a bit more subdued, his Void and Crippling Fear don't seem to debilitate as long, he moves and attacks slower, meaning he's also staying with his team, especially since he doesn't seem to be using his ultimate at all, teamfights are relatively equal.

However, the second night finally, inevitably comes and once again your entire team returns to being rather easy pickings for Nightstalker. He silences and kills your stunner, and then methodically works through everyone else, able to employ his movement speed to get in and out of combat quickly. He also buys another item, Aghanim's Scepter. While this has nothing to do with his ultimate, which I haven't even got to yet, it means that at night time, his sight radius is no longer blocked by such things as trees or cliffs. Nightstalker demonstrates this by firing a Void UP a cliff and killing one of your teammates, if he buys a gem he can then see anything within his sight radius at night, so well...

           

You then look at the clock and you realize that it's just...not moving, in fact it seems to be stuck. Welcome to Nightstalker's ultimate, quite helpfully called Darkness. What it does is stops time and causes, at max rank, 80 seconds of night time. With a 120 second cooldown at max rank. To put this into simple terms, it is able to convert a 6 minute night, into an 18 minute night.

The rest of the game could best be described as 'Blair Witch Project' meets 'Predator 1'.

 Lucifer, the Doombringer

Don't worry he's cooler than he looks

 Doombringer is big, red and angry and he quite clearly gives no fucks about anything at all, he gives so few that he just instantly walks up to your creep wave and eats one of your creeps. The reason why he gives no fucks is due to his Strength, which is pretty much if Dazzle spent all the time he spent reading up on his nerd priest lessons going to the gym and getting buff as hell. It's high, really, really high, highest in the game high, he has a lot of health, but no armor, as in, literally zero points of armor. In comparison, Obsidian Destroyer, WHO IS LITERALLY MADE OUT OF GLASS, has five points of armor, but this tangent about Doom being a big bag of unarmoured meat that can be solved by him buying a cheap ring that gives him 2 armor has gone on long enough.

The reason Doombringer ate a creep was due to his first skill, quite simply called Devour. Right now the only bit of it we're focusing on is the gold gain he gets from eating a creep. Maybe the gold fairy is so impressed by him unhinging his jaw she just throws gold at him, I don't know, he just gets it. At max rank though, this skill could just be called "Increases Doom's Gold per minute by 133", right now, at rank 1, it increases it by the much less exciting 40 gold per minute. It does have another use though, which we'll get to shortly.

Early on, at least until level 5, Doom seems quite content to just eat creeps, maybe hit you if you get too close, and by 'too close' I mean 'literally right on top of him' and just last hit and deny with his enormous bulk and pretty respectable base damage. Once you both hit level 5 though, he instantly nukes you for around 400 damage. That's not a typo, his main nuke, interesting called Lvl? Death because someone just happens to be a fan of Final Fantasy, does 100/150/200/250 damage depending on its rank, and then bonus damage if you level is a multiple of a certain number based on the rank of the spell. At level 2 of Lvl? Death, this number happens to be 5, which is what you are, it also has an 8 second cooldown, and since you're not big into that entire dying thing, you limp home while Doom drinks his Bottle and takes a rune because he's an asshole.

Returning to the lane, Doom has secured quite a major level advantage, being at least level 6, while you're still level 5. He instantly nukes you again for 400 damage, but right after it lands, you hit level 6. Thinking you're safe, you become just a bit more aggressive, and then Doom hits level 7, nukes you for 500 damage and you explode into a fine mist. The final rank of Lvl? Death can be taken at level 7, the number is 3, 6 is a multiple of 3. Do the math........heh.

Playing cautiously, you hit level 7 which thankfully is a prime number so you know he can't pull any maths based shenanigans on you this time, except that time when you were level 5 but let's not talk about that again. However Doom is now outlevelling you and his rather fun active that is partially a gold increase passive is now beginning to kick in. This means that not only can Doom buy a suit of armour, he can make it a solid gold suit of armour.

Deciding he might as well active the second part of Devour now, Doom heads into the jungle and looks for a sufficiently powerful neutral enemy, at least one that is strong enough to have an ability outside of mindlessly hitting their target, his choices are between a series of active and passive abilities, he can pick one from the following list:

Active

- A 2 second area of effect stun.

- A buff that grants a large armour of armor and causes anyone hitting the target to be slowed

- A minor, spammable heal.

- A 100 damage straight line AoE

- A controllable tornado that slows and deals damage.

- A buff remover that also grants massive movement speed reduction

- A 1.5 second immobilize

Passive Auras

- 20% chance to do 2x damage

- 30% extra damage

- 3 Armor

- 3 health per second regeneration

- 15% increased attack speed

Passives

- Slowing attack

- Mana regeneration

What this means for you is that Doom Bringer can buff his team in a variety of fun ways, or cause one or several of you to be slowed, damaged, stunned or immobilized. All while nuking for 500 damage whose level is divisible by 3. He can already turn the tide of a teamfight and we've only talked about two of his skills. Doombringer's third spell is called Scorched Earth and is a 600 radius AoE that follows Doombringer around, healing him for 24 health per second and damaging enemies for the same amount, leading to him being even more of a bother in team fights. It also makes him move faster because, you know, why not.

Finally, there is Doombringer's trump card, his ultimate, called, quite simply, Doom. It's a fitting name, at max rank and boosted by Aghanim's Scepter it deals 110 damage per second for 14 seconds, causing it to do somewhere in the region of 1450 damage. However, this isn't the worst bit of the spell, it's also a silence, but instead of locking out just spells, it prevents the usage of items and passives as well. If Doom decides to cast this on a spellcaster on your team, enjoy having a mobile paperweight for the next 14 seconds, though, on the bright side, at least you can deny them and not let him get the gold, making those teamfights you lose just a bit less painful...

DotA's Inferno and the Vicious Circle

Introduction
Since my write-ups regarding the heroes in DotA led me to receive a beta key from a Valve employee, I decided I might as well write something about DotA 2, hopefully something positive, largely focusing on ways that the original game can be improved upon.

As a quick disclaimer though, this does not include issues such as balance, hero design, or the general metagame, it's more focused on getting people to play the game, and much more importantly, especially if Valve are going to adopt the TF2 method of making money, retaining those players.

Having played DotA in its original incarnation for at least 5 years, there's only a few problems I've really had with the game that aren't directly related to balance, and these are:

Out of game

• The lobby system

In a game

• Disconnecting
• The Community

The Lobby System

Finding a game in the original version of DotA was not a fun task at all. Firstly it would involve you loading up your copy of Warcraft 3, going to Battle.net, logging into a realm and then clicking on custom game, you'd then be met with this.

This assumes you've set up the correct filters, you did do that, right?

Roughly 3/4 of the games on the list are not even DotA, and of the ones that are, not a single one is quite simply -all pick, the closest choices are -all pick easy mode or -single draft. What this means is that you're going to have to constantly refresh this list to hope to see a mode corresponding to the one that you want. Once you do this though, you might think you're done, but it's just beginning.

Attempting to join a game has around a 20% chance of success, with most games already being full or having you just being unable to connect at all, the latter of which causes Battle.net to think about it for 30 seconds before informing you of the connection problem. Upon entering the game though, said game might be completely deserted, meaning you will have to wait for several minutes for the game to fill up, or it will be a completely full game.

As the game fills up though, there is a good chance that the host might kick you due to your previous record in DotA games, your country of origin or even just your ping, or some completely random reason on their banlist (you beat them one time),

All of this assumes you're just playing alone, if you're playing with friends. Then you have to make the game yourself, tell them the name beforehand, and then wait for pubbies to join. However, if none of you can make a game, then you'll have to do all of the aforementioned stuff, and then call the game that you're going to pile into and hope that you can all get onto the same team and that none of you get kicked. Keep in mind you can't highlight text in the chat window in Battle.net so you'll have to manually type the thing you want to copy beforehand, just for that added inconvenience. While third party programs do exist, they just add an extra layer onto things you have to do to find/make a game, in exchange for some convenience.

At first, the queuing system put in place by games such as League of Legends and DotA 2 seem like the best idea, but it is important to make this not the sole way to find games, some level of default chatroom and socialization is needed, lest you end up with some like release StarCraft 2, an intensely lonely experience.

The other reasons why game lobbies are needed are for inhouses and tournament play, where both teams are fixed, as opposed to just one, and preparation time can be given. Finally, lobbies and private games are just needed for those fringe custom games like showing a newbie how to play and doing strange stuff like 5v5 -ARAM or Pudge/Techies Wars or -wtf mode and so on.

Disconnecting

Another relic of the Battle.net engine used in the original DotA led to disconnects being absolutely fatal in all but high-end arranged matches, due to the nature of the workarounds involved. If someone's connection hiccupped for just a moment, they were completely removed from the game, and, assuming everything else being equal, their team was forced to fight from a disadvantageous position, and the enemy was robbed of a decent match.

The fix for this is simple and S2, Riot Games and Valve have all implemented ways for people who have disconnected in order to get back into the game, albeit with differing amounts of leniency. I'll be getting into Valve's system a bit later on, though all of them are a definite improvement over the original DotA.

Community

This though, is where it begins to get really, really ugly indeed. The current word being thrown around to describe the community in DotAlikes is "toxic". However, it's not healthy or interesting to completely dismiss the entire community like this, and it is in these companies' best interest to deal with the problem areas of the community so that the general populace can enjoy the game and wish to continue playing. Before we can begin to solve it though, we have to work on identifying these areas.

Based on my anecdotal evidence of eight years of playing this game, things I've gleaned from people I play with as well as general trends I've noticed on forums, there are four 'problem groups' in the community for these types of games, these are:

• Foreigners
• Feeders
• Leavers
• Ragers

I'm going to tackle foreigners first since it largely exists outside of the other three (outside of some small interaction with ragers), and the problems/solutions can be dealt with separately.

Foreigners

Foreign Dog, unless you are Hungarian, then it is just a dog.

Talking about this one is an absolute minefield, but I'll try my absolute hardest to offer both sides of the argument, and what I think should be done about it. DotA is a worldwide game, played by many different nationalities, notably Brazil, China, Russia and Scandinavia. However, unlike a game like Starcraft which has much the same type of global reach, it presents one major problem in DotA.

The problem quite simply is that DotA is a team game, and hence relies largely on communication and teamwork, players need to communicate with each other to at least the extent of "Attack/Defend here" in public games, and much more involved and intricate details in higher level games. Having someone who cannot speak the language that everyone else is speaking serves to quickly throw a wrench into plans that are going to be had, causing one team to play at a lower level, as well as having one person who is completely and utterly unable to communicate with the other four.

While this sounds bad enough anyway, it is only augmented due to the nature of the internet itself, racial abuse is quickly hurled at foreign players, prejudice runs rife with players saying things like "gg we have a spic/chink/russian on our team." For a problem like this, there are two solutions that I can come up with; though to an extent they are mutually exclusive.

Segregation involves splitting players off by region based on language spoken, so Russian players would have their own queue and ladder, Chinese players would, Brazilian players would, English players would and so on and so forth. While this is an attractive solution on the face of it, there is the problem of fragmentation, with some countries having much smaller DotA scenes then other countries, as well as the hassle of making tens of separate queues for players who speak different languages, and then, there would also be the dreaded 'other' queue, filled with the players who speak languages that don't warrant their own queue.

Integration would involve splits only being carried out for the purposes of gaming infrastructure and to cause as little lag and delay as possible, language would never come into it. How the problem would be solved though would be through the use of macros, a list of prewritten phrases that could be used to cover most eventualities in public play, they would generally be context sensitive clicks and would appear in the chat screen in the following way:

<Player Name> - <Hero Name> wants you to attack <Player Name> - <Hero Name>!
<Player Name> - <Hero Name> wants you to attack <Location>!
<Player Name> - <Hero Name> wants you to defend <Location>!
<Player Name> - <Hero Name> is warning you that <Location> Lane is missing a hero, be careful!

and so on and so forth, everything apart from the Player Names would be translated into the speaker's native language and it would serve as a very useful way to have people of different nationalities play together without the problems caused by a lack of communication, meaning that any problems that would happen at this point would fall under the category of raging, which will be covered soon. The only problem with this solution would be making the system of using these macros intuitive and easy, as well as informing players of how they would work in the first place.

The Other Three

The position of the logos is just a coincidence, I am above such petty matters like DotAlike tribalism

This serves to show the three remaining types of problems in the community, and also how they interact with each other, albeit in a limited and slightly ham-fisted way, I'll begin with tackling Leavers, and then Feeders, and then Ragers.

Leavers

These are players who leave before a game is either completed, or before the result of the game is certain beyond any and all reasonable doubt. The reasons for leaving are varied and not limited to some of the following:

•  Exceptionally bad early game, quite simply does not wish to continue.
•  Presence of angry/bad players on team which cause an environment they don't wish to participate in.
•  Connection/Computer problems
•  Real Life issues, whether an emergency or mismanagement of time. (Oh shit my dead uncle who is on fire fell down the stairs)
•  Intentional griefing.

While almost all of these reasons can be solved through fixing the root of the cause, a system still has to be put into place to prevent leaving in the first place, as I mentioned before, one team having a leaver, and hence being a player down robs everyone in the game of having a good time. One team is forced to fight at a disadvantage while the other team is unable to have an equal, challenging game, turning it into a 'ruined game'.

The solution is two-fold and involves both punishing leavers and saving 'ruined games'.

Because almost every single player will experience one of these problems from time to time and feel forced to leave a game, the punishment cannot take place on the first leave, doing such a thing would cause annoyance at seemingly unfair punishment, or force people to suffer in real life due to the needs of a game. Beginning every player with 3 available leaves, and then increasing the number allowed for every 50 games played to completion would be fair. Once players pass this number though, punishments should begin to be put into place.

In all honestly, I feel the system that Valve put into the game involving a specific leaver queue is nothing short of fantastic, having to wait at least 30 minutes for a game is extremely frustrating and might help some players to achieve the epiphany that having their time be wasted is not a fun thing, and that they should be more careful about leaving in the future, the severity of the punishment should increase exponentially though for each leave accrued. However, I am torn on whether the duration of the punishment should involve being forced to queue for X number of games in the leaver queue, or whether it should last for a specific amount of time, and if the time should only expire when queuing or in an actual game.

On the other side though, the 'doomed games' have to be saved and the only way to do so would be through having players joining these games to take the place of leavers and playing them to completion. However, there would be the problem of incentive, since only a few players would be willing to join games in progress while playing as essentially a random hero and trying to win when at a massive disadvantage (they are generally either insane or badass). Players could receive perks and rewards for doing this, though exploiting the system would have to be heavily punished, and joining games involving leavers cannot be the sole way, or easiest way to get them, since the last thing we'd want is for leavers to be encouraged, which means another incentive has to be found.

There is one solution to this though, completely perfect in its simplicity and cunning.

Have leavers placed into the leaver queue, and said leaver queue places leavers into 'ruined games', which they have to play to completion or risk further punishment. It is entirely possible, once again, that they might have a realization that the early game isn't everything, or that leaving a game isn't something they should do in the first place.


Feeders

In the time he spent finding the M key in an attempt to move, he went 0-18-0 and was sent 25 computer viruses

(Disclaimer: This does not include intentional feeding, that goes under griefing and will be punished accordingly.)

Feeders are quite simply the weak link in the chain that comprises a team, they don't understand the intricacies of DotA and have not spent enough time learning everything there is to know about the game so that they are able to not die and play at an acceptable level. However, a feeder could also just be a player who is playing in a skill level vastly beyond the one he should be playing at (think reverse smurfing), while getting absolutely crushed by a better player works in 1v1 games and serves as a helpful learning experience, it falls flat in DotA due to the enemy team quite simply being able to feed off of you and get stronger, as well as the perception of every game of DotA being "serious business".

The idea of every game being serious business means that feeders are quite simply, not tolerated, which, to me, is an absolutely massive shame. Such an act and attitude makes the entire community even more insular and terrifying to newbies. However, there are solutions.

The first and most important thing that has to be put into place is a decent tutorial system, something that allows absolutely anyone to understand how the game works; these could even be placed into levels like the following.

Basic

• What a hero is
• How to move your hero
• How to use abilities
• Items
• Creeps and towers

Intermediate

• Hero Roles
• Enemy heroes
• Last Hitting
• Usable Items
• Secret Shop

Advanced

• Ganking and Team Fights
• Warding
• Juke Spots
• Runes
• Lane Control
• Roshan

If every player was functioning at the baseline of understanding how to ward, control their lane and what to do in a teamfight, I think most people would be very, very happy indeed. To add a reason to do these tutorials, give rewards for completing each one (Skins, Avatar etc), and maybe even make them mandatory. An option could be put in to make them skippable, but if a player proceeds to do very badly indeed, then quite simply force them to attempt the tutorials, while highlighting the things they can win. As well as this, other players can also function as teachers, however, both their advice has to be correct, and they have to explain things in a friendly way. If both of these conditions are met, then reward players who are willing to teach massively, whether through players commending them and giving them prizes for that, or quite simply giving them prizes straight up.

Despite this, there are some players who, quite simply, do not care about playing DotA at a high level and just want to mess around and have fun. Placing these players anywhere near even medium level games would be a mistake due to their attitude. For them, something slightly different would be put into place, a sort of 'newbie island' where the games are -em, players are able to queue up to fight bots and defeat AIs. The lack of seriousness and the zero effect it has on your ranking will have to be justified again and again. Players can elect to join Newbie Island straight away by choosing "Casual" as a skill setting. A player who loses excessive games could also be asked if they wish to play there instead

Finally, to fix the big fish in a little pond problem, as well as being completely out of your depth, a robust matchmaking system would have to be put into place to prevent one team having a feeder, or having 'that guy' who just destroys everybody (even though everyone really want to be 'that guy').

In conclusion, feeders would be dealt with by teaching them how to play, giving them options to have fun if they don't want to play the normal mode of the game, and by placing them with people at their skill level.

Ragers

Ragers are generally the reason why the DotA community has received the reputation it has, that of being a racist, sexist, ableist, and insular hellhole. A large proportion of this is down to the perception of DotA being serious business, something that I'll explain now.

Playing a game of DotA is a large time investment (generally 30-70 minutes), where you generally want to play at the best of your ability with 4 people you have never met before in your life, against 5 people you have never met before in your life. You are forced to rely on these people and if they don't play at a level that you consider good, then frustration begins to set in. Combine that with a healthy amount of the Dunning-Kruger effect and you have a pretty horrible thing bubbling underneath the surface.

This frustration will make itself known, rarely through calm, constructive criticism, but generally through anger, rudeness, and other unpleasantness. Someone who doesn't know not to overextend isn't a "new inexperienced player", instead they're "a godamned retard". Brazilians are called "taco eating spics" and so on and so forth. Part of this can be dealt with through the measures suggested earlier, in order to prevent feeders and foreign players from being as prevalent, however this isn't an attempt to kowtow to ragers

Most of the community doesn't enjoy text and verbal abuse, especially if they wish to play games to relax and to let off steam, not to be insulted and bullied among other things. Such actions would drive these people away from the game, and while the abusers would welcome that, players who tried to get friends into the game won't, people who enjoy newbies entering these games won't, and most importantly of all, the companies who rely upon and thrive on the revenue they get from a constant stream of new players won't.

Quite simply, ragers hurt Riot/Valve/S2's bottom line more than anything else in the game and they have to be dealt with to ensure a healthy community and a popular game. Early on, the number of reports would be very large indeed with quite a large amount of false reports for frivolous and unimportant reasons. In order to deal with this, a system like the Tribunal in League of Legends could be set up, where cases are judged by the majority of people, however, unlike the Tribunal, the system could be placed into the actual game client and the nature of the rewards would have to be different (Achievements, DotA-money etc). Reports that are positive, as in they recieve a majority of people saying they should be punished, are brought to the attention of moderators and GMs who can then take the necessary action.

This, this is good. Not the content, that is terrible, but the idea is good.

As for the idea of punishment, they would quickly increase in severity, beginning with being unable to type in game and being forced to use pings and the previously mentioned macros, next they'd lose the right to play games for periods of time, and then finally, they'd be banned, and if they wish to play again, they either have to pay a fine, or buy another copy of the game. However, after three instances of this, they'd be completely banned from the game, with no way of playing again.

The rager community has been largely ignored until the Tribunal in League of Legends and the reporting system in DotA 2, swift and decisive action would have to be taken to try and deal with the growing problem and help remove the stigma attached to the community as a whole.

Conclusion
While I do absolutely love DotA, I am aware there are major problems with the game, some of which prevented it from truly entering the mainstream, and some of which would drive away new blood. Riot Games did a good job dealing with a good deal of these in League of Legends, though they didn't go all the way, and I had other disagreements with the game. I can only hope that Valve are able to address and deal with these problems and make DotA 2 an excellent and inclusive game.

WoW General Forums Bingo

I need much better things to do with my time.

The problems with online gaming (notably in fighting games)

History

When I was but a mere child, I tended to play fighting games with my friends from school and my neighbours, however, there were somre problems. We were all into different types of games, I played a lot of Tekken and Soul Blade, one of my neighbours preferred some strange knockoff of Streets of Rage, people at school preferred Mortal Kombat (which scared me because of the first two minutes of the film and Fatalities in general). My only exposure to Street Fighter was playing it once at my neighbour's Khitan and that "the guy with the claw was cheap". Also I was really good at and enjoyed Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, but in this case, I could only really play against the CPU since I could beat anyone else.

When I entered secondary school (or High School), things quickly picked up as I found a bunch of gamers to play with, among them was a group of really good Super Smash Brothers Melee players, and while I disagreed with their game mode (almost always Final Destination) and I kept getting thrown out because it was technically a room I shouldn't have even been in, I had quite a lot of fun with it and we all somehow fed off each other and improved dramatically. On the other side of the coin was a more casual playing of Tekken 4 and then 5, and after the guy whose PS2 and game it was suggested I just sit there for an hour to get less bad at the game, I quickly learned some basic Asuka combos and became quite good, then arguments were had which quickly becmae racial in nature and resulted in PS2s being switched off in a way that could be called 'angry', eventually we just played Pro Evolution 5 or something and I had fun just watching and having a laugh.

While this was going on, I was starting to play fighting games with a bunch of really good players in an IRC community, I only really joined for Super Puzzle Fighter, but I was quickly introduced to King of Fighters, Garou, Marvel vs Capcom, the first of which we played on something called Poporu. Poporu was a strange Korean client that pretty much tried to mimick an arcade down to the level of inserting coins and having winner stays on and a bunch of avatars, as well as a chat lobby, so you could talk while playing and so on. While I didn't realize it at the time, this was sort of the closest you could get to the arcade experience without actually being there (ignoring lag and lack of voice chat).

Eventually Poporu shut down, the dark age of Kalierra started and then eventually GGPO and 2DF came out and online fighting games were fun again, then the modern console stuff came out with its 'matchmaking' and 'lobbies' and 'ladders' and that's why I decided to write this. However, I suppose what I'm saying with this is that I realised that playing games with people who know the game and with a small crowd is fun and I subconsciously worked this out when I was 15, it doesn't have to be fighting games, I spent a lot of time at university just playing single-player games, or watching people play single-player games and just talking about whatever crossed our mind, whether it was the badness of the game, how fun it was, or anything 'fun' really.


Things that are important and suffer

Hype

Seeing cool shit going down in fighting games is really fun, but it sort of multiplies exponentially with the presence of commentators, other people, the right atmosphere and so on. It's sort of like a really, really positive version of the Two Minutes Hate from 1984. So you get stuff like streams where you're able to get really excited because of those factors, even if it is just listening to Jaha using the word "Swag" to describe literally everything going on and talking with a bunch of stream monsters in the chat.

When you go to an actual tournament, it's even better, even something as simple as pool play or even casuals can draw a crowd of at least 10 people. At the last tournament I went to, a simple winner stays on, pure casual series of matches taking place before registration even began had upwards of 30 people standing and sitting around, chatting, comparing sticks, getting excited over good plays and just generally feeding off the positive energy in the room, it's hard to explain, but the feeling is there. Even an expo I went to in October, where we had no idea there would be old fighting games, was able to get a rotating group of 10 people watching Super Street Fighter 4, not Arcade Edition, but Super. And once again, people were getting excited, comparing stuff.

Now, compare this to playing something online using your 360 or PS3, you're generally going to be by yourself, if you had a friend around, you'd be playing your friend and not some random faceless strange online. Any and all hype would just drain from the room since it's just you versus someone who could quite simply be a hyper intelligent computer, you're not able to feed off excitement or know there's an audience watching because there isn't any. I mean, once you're done, you could upload the replay online, but in all honesty, unless you're playing someone extremely famous or something extremely messed up happens no one is going to watch it, you're not able to draw excitement from the game through just the experience of playing it, which means it just turns into winning. The experience becomes completely binary, where you're either like "Cool I beat a faceless person online :|" or "Oh great I lost to a faceless person online :|" Starcraft 2 also suffers from the same problem, compare tournament hype to playing a ladder match, where when looking at the scoreboard you can't even tell if you won without seeing if your points have changed, and to make it worse, there's a much bigger time investment for what is simply Win/Lose.

A rough comparison between the number of people watching you offline and online (respectively), also the dog will never ever be this cool.

Learning

Most people do things to get better, fighting games aren't an exception, unless you're playing at such a low level or are completely and utterly uninvested in the game. While there is training mode and so on for practising the technical side of play (Execution, perfecting combos etc) you're not going to learn much about actual fundamentals and what to do in the right time and matchup information. So you play against better people, you'll learn what beats what, how to improve, the moves you should be using, different playstyles, and most importantly of all, you're able to actually talk to the person you're playing, get their opinions, and hopefully you go away having learned something, and maybe even directly improved as a player.
On the other hand, when you're playing ranked online, you'll just face someone, and they'll either be terrible and die, completely crush you, or you might, somehow, have a close and interesting match (but you'll still feel not as excited because of point 1), but you can't talk to them about it, because voice chat is bad and you both need it on and so on, you have to send them a message using the terrible service you're given, and even then you need to remember his gamertag and get down to it quickly and want to play more games with them and it's just a terrible, annoying mess, especially when compared to "talk to guy 2 feet away from you while still playing the game" And then to make matters even worse, unless you're quick on the ball, you'll never see this guy again.

Also, I know you're meant to play fighting games to win, this isn't some sort of scrub thing. But when you're playing online, winning is all you have (especially when you keep in mind you're not even able to get hype due to factor 1), whenever you lose it directly impacts your ranking, so you want to win every game, even the most casual ones. You can't lose 20 times in a row and at least learn something, because good luck playing the same person that many times in a row short of player matches, and even then you can't really talk to them.

The social paradox

The internet is a great place, it allows you to communicate with anyone else with just a few clicks of your mouse (hypothetically) and find anyone with similar interests with just a simple search on Google with the word 'forums' attached as well. You'd think that playing games would be intense, fun and extremely social, since after all, you could play with anyone in the world. However, what ends up happening is you end up treating it just as a minor hobby, you just log on, play a games or so, and then log off for days, if not weeks. There is no investment to make you carry on playing outside of the cost of buying the game.

Compare this once again, to a tournament ,you know that literally every single person at the venue cares about games, has an opinion one way or another, or is a friend or companion of someone who does. You can talk to anyone about video games, you can get to know people, you can constantly mingle. They've spent money getting to this place, entering, and while they do want to win, they also want to have as good of a time as possible.

What this essentially boils down to is that there is the paradox of when there's an increasing ease of finding people with similar interests, albeit with the penalty of anonymity, it's harder to actually form lasting relationships with them, leading you to feel even lonelier when you're literally surrounded by people.

How would I fix this?

When dealing with something as fundamentally flawed as online gaming for fighting games, I think that the best way to deal with it would be to try and have it replicate the arcade experience as much as possible, so I'd put in the following features:

1) Remove ranked 1v1 online play almost entirely, replace them with a series of "ranked lobbies" that contain 3-8 players using winner stays on format, with matchmaking creating the lobbies at first, have some level of unanimous voting put in so a higher level player can be 'promoted' if they win in excess of X matches, with the number of votes needed decreasing with the number of additional games they win. Have lower level players be able to demote themselves if they experience a massive losing streak. Think Starcraft 2 Divisions but with more leagues at the higher ends

2) Make voicechat always on, or at the very least, much easier to use, better hardware would probably be required than the joke of a headset you get. PC games would have the advantage of you being able to use text during downtime as well. Both ways would encourage the same sort of mingling that you experience in arcades, though to a much lesser degree, also obviously allow ignoring if someone abuses it, as well as cool titles/avatars if someone is helpful and kind.

3) Daily or weekly tournaments for each 8 or so brackets of ranked lobbies, winners get automatic promotion and a nice avatar or icon or something, allow observing, stagger the games so they can easily be watched and so on.

I know these would be really open to abuse, but I think it would be infinitely more fun than what is currently in place, and I'd love to hear what ideas you have!