Dual-citizenship: It's OK to like more than one MOBA

DotA 2 (left) and League of Legends (right) finally duke it out.

Happy New Year, everyone.  Hope you all had a good holiday and wishing you all well for 2015.  For my last post of 2014, I thought I'd tackle possibly one of the most defining, but definitely the ugliest, aspects of the MOBA genre.  And maybe, just maybe, help bring about a change for the new year.

The vitriol between the various game communities is legendary, especially within the same genre.  You don't have to look far in the comments section of a League or DotA video to find the inevitable assertions of how one game is so unbelievably better than the other and it's a wonder that anyone ever plays it.  I'm sure this is the case for all games but MOBAs seem to have made trashing other games as much a part of the experience as actually playing the game.

Like all deeply held feuds, if you want to understand it, you have to start from the beginning.

The thing about being a history buff is that you start to see everything in historical terms. Even your video games. Example - I've always considered DotA's runaway popularity and the subsequent rise of the MOBA genre to be a lot like the breakup of a major empire. After reaching a certain point in its success, competing ideas and creative differences cause the empire to split up into various warring factions, each believing they're the best ones to carry on the legacy of the original. The successful ones eventually carve out their own identity and the unsuccessful, or even just mediocre, fade away.

Empires, like today's game companies, are viciously competitive.  Unlike the old days though, it's okay to play both sides.

It's funny how easy it is to forget that sometimes.  The empires of old were separated by different ways of life that were incompatible.  Games have no such restriction, let alone MOBAs.  Like something about Heroes of the Storm?  Play it.  Like something about League of Legends?  Play that too.  As the genre evolves, games will be able to follow the core concept while each scratching a particular itch or fulfilling a certain fantasy.

For example, Heroes of the Storm isn't simply a "hero brawler" as Blizzard calls it.  It's also a way for those who grew up on Blizzard games to take 20 minute action-packed stroll down memory lane with their favorite characters like Thrall, Jaina, Raynor and Diablo.  

 
Granted, some might find this "live and let play" approach won't quite work with some of the earlier games, that are just too similar to co-exist on your computer.  Most people know that League of Legends was created by former DotA developers at Riot Games and the original developer, Icefrog, (still no one knows who he is, apparently) is behind Valve's DotA 2.  Obviously this won't be a perfect comparison, but I'd liken this situation to Alexander the Great's empire being carved up by his generals, who in turn went on to form their own dynasties.  League of Legends has is own legacy now with the recently released Vainglory making a selling point of the fact that former members of Riot as well as Blizzard were on its development team.

A teamfight in Vainglory.

My father would probably go with the more classic example of the fall of the Roman empire.  I suppose some die-hard DotA fans would consider the wave of simplified or "casual" MOBAs, such as Strife, Vainglory and Heroes of the Storm, to be the horde of invading barbarians.

While you definitely couldn't be part of the Roman as well as the Parthian Empire, you can certainly play both League and DotA without anyone trying to chop off your head for treason.  The worst you might get is a headache.