This is true of DotA and LoL, but not really Starcraft. Starcraft is fairly easy to pick up and almost all the relevant information to understand who is ahead, who is behind, and how the game is going is easily visible on the screen.
Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.
Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.
The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.
The problem with games like League & DotA is they're nearly impossible to understand what's going on as a spectator unless you already play the games. They're a victim of their own complexity - over 100 characters each with a minimum of 4 unique abilities. It makes major fights practically impossible to follow as a person who doesn't play the game.
SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts.
League & Dota get far more viewers because the games are far more popular, however, as a spectator sport, they fall short because of their complexity.
Agreed. Starcraft in particular is fun to watch because you can see some longer term strategies at work.
Compare to CSGO or COD. I have no idea what's going on, only that one side has better mechanics than the other. I know these games have strategies / formations as well. But they're a lot less apparent to me, and engagements are so quick I can't grok what's happening.
My cousins like to play and watch League, but I never did. That said, we did an impromptu road trip to LA awhile back to watch some professional games live. As someone who never played and only watched a handful of games, it was really a ton of fun and not that difficult to follow. Though they're far from perfect, the announcers do a pretty good job of explaining the action. From a layperson point of view, I really only needed to know whatever the super attacks were for the characters and could figure that out pretty quickly with the help of the announcers.
Really, I think what helps League over StarCraft is that it's pretty clear who's winning and who's losing since there's a relatively easy to follow flow across the map. When one team loses their towers, which are clearly denoted, they're probably behind. Further, gold and experience also give a pretty good indication of who's winning and losing. With StarCraft, which I've also never played, but have watched a handful of games, I find it difficult to follow on a macro scale. Certainly, it's easy to see when one battle is won or lost, but then suddenly one player will concede and I'm left wondering why. I think that rapid nature of forfeiting and loss of the game hurts its spectator appeal.
I think it’s more about being player-friendly than being spectator-friendly. Starcraft is just a far more difficult game to play at even a modest level of competence than a MOBA or even an FPS, and it seems to be very difficult to establish a big esports following without a big player community.
MOBAs are a bit more dynamic I find that most RTSs, and simple for audiences to understand - starcraft in particular ended up playing much more like chess, with a fairly established early/midgame going towards an endgame, assuming no major mistakes were made. MOBAs just have a lot more variables not only in the team composition but also communication and teamplay - combined they make for a lot more dynamic strategies (closer to basketball than chess).
Starcraft is an incredibly complex game. 10^26 possible moves at any point (you can click/drag anywhere on the screen, pressing a keyboard button as you do so), imperfect information, real-time constraints, etc.
That was one of starcraft 2's game and graphic design criteria: it should be obvious to the viewer even if they don't have the game knowledge. Unfortunately the game flopped fairly hard in term of esport (relatively to expectation) along with the decline of RTS.
Early league of legends's character designs somewhat aims to achieve this as well, it only lasted for a couple of years though. Basically the issue is that when you keep adding content (characters, maps), the complexity just grew too much. Not quite exponentially, but definitely some kind of super-linear.
I think this is one advantage of traditional board games (chess, go) and sports in comparison to Esports. If I spend a couple years of my life learning the basics of Go, 10 years from now on, I will still be able to appreciate the game all the same. Can't say the same for any kind of esports -- and I did spend thousand of hours in a couple of them.
It's too hard for most players. Dota and LoL have similarity in being real time, but you get the comfort to blame teammates for your loss and it's much slower paced. In starcraft, you are literally playing by yourself as fast as possible for the entire match, win or lose, no breaks for respawns or waiting, and you can lose in some spectacularly frustrating ways. Ever move command your army into theirs and lose it all? Ever hit yourself with a spell? Find their hidden tech or hidden base way too late? I love it but it's seriously a masochistic genre of gaming.
And the lack of production tab and even sometimes supply counts. I'm a serious StarCraft 2 player and trying to watch Brood War games is still immensely confusing.
Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch.
It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
I much prefer SC2, but I agree League of Legends is really designed to be watched in a way that StarCraft 2 is not.
A StarCraft 2 game can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 2+ hours. And they tend to stack so a series might take 20 minutes or 5 hours. Games often snowball from minor advantages so only a seconds of that may be really important.
League of Legends games on the other hand have some back a forth and are bound fairly closely to 25 minutes at top play. Allowing for more bite sized games, you can also jump into the middle of a match and understand what's going on more easily. Even better, lower level games tend to more closely match top play like other sports.
Starcraft is really heavy on twitch skills and multi-tasking, while Dota rewards knowledge.
Obviously you still need strong twitch/multitask skills to be really great at Dota, but you can go a surprising distance without them. I found that when picking up Dota I started to have fun and feel vaguely competent quicker - despite the fact that I didn't play for very long or get very good. I was aware that to progress far I'd need to pick up an enormous amount of information, but I could still feel good playing against other newbies.
With Starcraft (where I generally hovered between high gold and low platinum on EU), I always felt like I was doing really badly. I think this was probably due to the stress of the multitasking, at which I'm no natural :-).
SC2 has one huge advantage over MOBAs I've seen - it's interesting to watch when you don't play it. I've played original sc campaign for a few weeks when it was published, then had no contact with the game for several years, recently I've discovered sc2 tourneys streamed by ZeddSC (great Polish sc2 commentator) - I was hooked immediately, despite knowing next to nothing about the game, meta, players etc. It's just fun to see players microing 100+ units at the same time.
I've tried to watch lol and dota2 tourneys, but it's soo boring. I don't know what any of the skills does, nobody is explaining them, everybody assume I must play the game to watch this, I don't even know who's wining except if the frag difference is big.
Even CS streams are better than MOBAs.
I sincerly hope sc2 wil have some revival, it's great game, I started to play multiplayer because of watching it. The design decisions that people cry over - I don't think they matter that much for average Joe, games in silver or gold league aren't decided by balance.
This is a great point, and something that seems a bit lost in the discussion:
In StarCraft 2, the game IS the interface. That is to say, the developers have constructed the game in such a way as to be difficult to control; and human mastery of the interface is a large percentage of the game. Strategy in the game is important, of course -- but this is not chess, where human beings are not limited by the interface of the game. In StarCraft, you are intentionally given a limited interface to monitor and control a gigantic game while under incredibly tight time controls.
And I should also note that Blizzard is extremely reluctant to add features that make it easier to control the game. I have a friend who works on the StarCraft 2 team. We talked at length about this one feature that he designed and proposed for the team to make a specific aspect of the game friendlier towards players. It was turned down for exactly the reasoning above -- the game is the interface. By making the game easier to control, it disrupts the entire experience; an StarCraft 2 that is easier to control is no longer StarCraft 2.
Even so - to me this is kind of a big deal. Go is fully observable, there might be an intractable number of combinations, but the game is well defined and everything is out in the open.
In Starcraft you don't have full knowledge of the game (fog of war), there are infinitely more game paths , you have to scout, plan for the long term (macro), react tactically in the short-term, micromanage, etc. I'm actually shocked at it's performance.
Speaking as someone who used to watch SC2 and now mostly watch DOTA2 only, the reason I stopped was because it got so boring. Blizzard design choices made the games awfully predictable, to the point where I just lost interest. This is in contrast to DOTA2, which continues to be exciting and fresh, with exciting matches and constantly evolving new strategies (not all of them but enough to keep me interested)
Haven't WC3 and SC2 been RTS engines themselves? People used them to make DotA and other mini-games, not other RTS games even though they could've.
It just seems to me RTS games are like chess, not easy to get into, not easy to watch / understand unless you pour a lot of time into it. People would rather just play Catan or other not-so-try-hard social games.
I think DotA is the best example of this, it's still try-hard yet somehow it strikes the perfect balance of try-hard but still easy enough that the average player can understand it and follow it.
I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.
Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.
Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.
The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.
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