Chapter 345: Ancient Era Has Gone Cold
Without the last-hitting and equipment systems, players did find laning easier—they only needed to constantly chip away at their opponent's health. But this also made laning completely meaningless.
At the same skill level, you couldn't build an advantage in lane. You could wear your opponent down every time, but it was never enough to snowball, and you couldn't gain any last-hit advantage either.
Maybe after your opponent reached a certain level, they'd suddenly kill you.
You'd been dominating them for the first ten minutes, but after ten minutes, you suddenly couldn't beat them anymore. This situation was incredibly frustrating.
The design of the map objective mechanics was also a failure.
While this design made the game very easy for newcomers to pick up—just follow the map objectives—it also stripped the game of strategic choice.
In "League of Legends," when you're behind, you can set up ambushes to force team fights, you can split-push to apply pressure, or you can turtle up and defend. These choices themselves are a form of strategy, a source of enjoyment.
But in "Ancient Cataclysm," the respawn of map objectives put the losing team in an awkward spot. Ignore them? That meant handing over the objectives for free, making the disadvantage even worse. Go for them? You couldn't win the fight, which was basically just feeding kills.
Moreover, whenever a map objective spawned, all five players had to go for it together. If you sent four while the enemy sent five, and you ended up trading one for four, you could imagine how badly that one player who didn't go would get flamed.
Of course, this mainly described the experience for low-tier players. In high-tier games, everyone knew what they were doing, so this situation happened much less.
But for a game, the experience of low-tier players determined the depth of the fish pond, and the depth of the fish pond determined the game's popularity.
The hidden stats were another aspect that players tore apart mercilessly.
Because everyone felt pretty good about themselves. "My stats look great, so I'm definitely playing well. If we lost, whose fault is it?"
Obviously, it was the fault of my four teammates who were too trash.
In MOBA games, everyone has a different understanding of the game. In the same situation, some people think it's time to start a team fight, while others think they should just farm quietly.
Many times, these ideas aren't clearly right or wrong. The ones who want to farm think starting a fight is just feeding, while the ones who want to fight think continuing to farm is a slow death.
In this situation, everyone believes their own idea is correct and everyone else is an idiot, which easily leads to arguments and insults.
"Why didn't you come? If you had come, we would have won!"
"Starting that fight was just feeding!"
This kind of argument was everywhere.
Of course, this situation was also common in "League of Legends," but "League of Legends" could rely on mechanics and game sense to establish an economic advantage and pull off a one-vs-five carry. After forcibly unifying the MOBA genre, "League of Legends" had established absolute dominance in the MOBA field, and the next step was to challenge for the status of a "hall-of-fame PC game."
Of course, this would be a very long process.
For Chen Mo, the most critical development and promotion period was already over. Although "League of Legends" tournaments hadn't been set up yet, they would soon be on the right track.
As long as they kept releasing new heroes and continuously building the esports atmosphere, "League of Legends'" popularity would be maintained for at least five years without any issues.
In just over half a year, the sudden emergence of "League of Legends" shocked the global gaming industry, and the concept of the MOBA game began to sweep the world.
Many overseas gaming media outlets conducted in-depth follow-up reports on "League of Legends," and analysis of this new game genre became a required course for designers worldwide.