etofok Profile Joined March 2012 37 Posts Last Edited: 2015-04-09 16:47:03 #1







Here is the imaginary scrollbar that any developer at pretty much any strategy game have to somehow balance:









If you allow



For a long time, IceFrog's had the intention to speed up the game - which he still does with a great success, unfortunately it led to this:





State of the game at TI4







And shortly after TI4 IceFrog adjusted the bar. Slightly.







I mean he had to: if you remember how huge was the outcry of the community about early push starts a.k.a. “Pick early game heroes and roll through your opponents” it can persuade any person that something is indeed wrong with the game.





So here it comes: 6.82 - the patch where you get a radiance on Spectre at 40 mins and win the game become you won a skirmish that made 25k gold swing. That was adjusted rather quickly because the issue was as apparent as mud on one’s brand new white shoes.







in other words









The Comeback Mechanic is aimed to provide to the losing side a much better chance to catch-up, providing a "clutch" game as the result. Along with other changes like glyph replenishment and flat-out nerfs, it prevents snowballiness (to an extent) meaning you play a more "even" match throughout the game.





After several tweaks of TCM everyone finally became quite content with the results of it: after all the logic behind it is actually okay and makes total sense. It hasn't been apparent how the change might still negatively affect the game after all those number tweaks, however today we can easily see the issue(s) that emerged with the advent of such mechanic: the ability to endlessly defend a high-ground because you can’t get as ahead as it is required to being able to break the high-ground and to finally make usage of your advantage.







representation of my thesis





High-ground is notably hard to push onto - that’s the defender’s advantage right there. It is kind of supposed to be like that, because this is the barracks or even the throne we are talking about.

The advantage is actually so drastic it might sometimes be bigger than, let’s say for our imaginary situation - 30k gold. Due to several reasons it is almost impossible to exceed beyond a certain amount of “advantage” as the winner side and thus that advantage is practically negated as you ascend onto enemy’s HG.







well memed my friend





In terms of difficulty the fight will be “equal” meaning you are supposed to trade “evenly”.

However when you trade 5 heroes for 5 heroes, the defender gets way more gold out of it due to rubber band, and pushing into the defender becomes nearly impossible, therefore teams avoid this situation in the first place by farming instead and not actually pushing / trying to end the game because the risk is not worth the effort.





Sometimes you can't push even if you want. The real flaw is when your enemies can't push either.



This is not because of The Comeback Mechanic alone.

The problem is that the losing side still gets "enough" gold and experience from lane creeps pushing into them to be able continue their item progression, while abandoning all the map control whatsoever.







when map control look like this the game is close to be done







This is the most important part of a strategy game - map control. In Starcraft when a player gets contained he is going to lose the game eventually, because he’ll run out of resources. If you've ever played TvT you should know what I mean. Check out



However because in Dota there are lane creeps that give gold every 30 seconds regardless where they are killed - be it at their spawn point or at your barracks line - this situation is weird to say the least: there can’t be enough contain to actually contain.





After a certain point the winning side’s cores reach their maximum potential - farming don’t make them stronger anymore, whilst enemy still has a room to grow. Therefore the “real” Networth of the winning team stops being relevant to the items they have, because that gold stops being put into items.



With time, that gap between teams only shrinks even if the gold/exp discrepancy increases on the graphs. Add to this the fact that the defender’s advantage is still there AND the risk of a fail push skyrockets due to potentially disastrous rubberband gold/exp transfers.







I'm honestly so proud of these pictures





It all comes down to map control, or rather how pointless it might be in some specific situations.





Let’s list what does having full map control provide:

1) Roshan - aegis, cheese.

2) Access to both jungles and ancients.

3) Runes.



If I were to suggest something in hopes to avoid the main problem [that is giving up on map control and still getting resources]:





1) Jungle creeps give more gold with time / with Roshan kills / as you sacrifice your aegis or cheese to the shopkeeper / whatever reason.



Point is, with the entire map control should come bigger dominance than it is right now to exceed “the gap” [that consists of the risk of rubber band + defender’s advantage + actual networth difference] allowing your support heroes to acquire late-game items for themselves which ultimately will lead to victory faster than 2 hours of resets. “Useless gold” is no longer present, but being transferred straight into support slots such as hex, bkb, halberd, diffusal(!) or even damage items.





Update: The side with map control is going to farm both the jungles plus Roshan and thus farming 3-4 times as fast items that actually matter. Lane Creeps do scale, while Jungle Creeps do not, meaning support heroes are going to have much easier time farming them.



On average there are 533 gold in one Jungle (increasing with time and thus the amount of gold they give away. Therefore Jungles are worth less in comparison = controlling jungles worth less as the game progresses. I want to put higher emphasis on jungle creeps: that way in a 2 hour game the winner side with complete map control will get more gold out of the map so "the gap" will be increasing instead of shrinking.







2) Sellable cheese with increasing cost similar to bounty runes.



Same idea basically - to get additional items for the winning team to increase “the gap” and to finally break their defenses. I mean something really ridiculous like 4k for a cheese at 80 minutes might be actually a great thing for the game.





The Roshan, being a



The losing team knowing that will be drawn out of their base to contest this. As you might already understood - the change should lead to exactly this if you want to address the problem I'm stating.





Update - F.A.Q.



1) Make Aegis a buff/aura like in LoL

I had the same idea, but disregarded it almost instantaneously because I wanted to make support heroes stronger and more fun to play in such circumstances rather than buffing a 6 slotted Medusa.



2) Rubber band has to go!

Keep in mind, the rubber band doesn't come into play if nothing happens or the winning team finally wins



3) Lane creeps dying in proximity of their HG are worth less gold

This change essentially destroys their barracks once you get rid of tier 2s which can be done relatively early in the game. That said you remove half of the objectives from the game to contest for: Tier 3s, Tier 4s, 3 lanes of barracks and throne along with negating all the defender's advantage (you just don't push anymore) and making the game ridiculously boring to play.



4) Buyback to resurrect with 50% hp / mana

It also affects all the stages of the game and several heroes such as Spectre and Furion, while doesn't really address the problem of not pushing / pushing, only changing the dynamic of a fight. I would prefer asking a pro about this one.



5) Remove Cooldown on buyback

This encourages core heroes to endlessly farm while supports of both teams stay afk





Summary: If a team abandons all map control whatsoever for a long period of time their disadvantage should be increasing.





Thanks for reading.

[Dota 2] The Winner's Advantage by etofok



Correct my grammar and suggest better wording if you have time.

You can read some other my posts



I'll start from far away to give you a better perspective.Here is the imaginary scrollbar that any developer at pretty much any strategy game have to somehow balance:If you allow early snowballs -> fast deathballs , the late-game part of your game becomes irrelevant, which is not what you want. And vice versa.For a long time, IceFrog's had the intention to speed up the game - which he still does with a great success, unfortunately it led to this:And shortly after TI4 IceFrog adjusted the bar. Slightly.I mean he had to: if you remember how huge was the outcry of the community about early push starts a.k.a. “Pick early game heroes and roll through your opponents” it can persuade any person that something is indeed wrong with the game.So here it comes:- the patch where you get a radiance on Spectre at 40 mins and win the game become you won a skirmish that made 25k gold swing. That was adjusted rather quickly because the issue was as apparent as mud on one’s brand new white shoes.The Comeback Mechanic is aimed to provide to the losing side a much better chance to catch-up, providing a "clutch" game as the result. Along with other changes like glyph replenishment and flat-out nerfs, it prevents snowballiness (to an extent) meaning you play a more "even" match throughout the game.After several tweaks of TCM everyone finally became quite content with the results of it: after all the logic behind it is actually okay and makes total sense. It hasn't been apparent how the change might still negatively affect the game after all those number tweaks, however today we can easily see the issue(s) that emerged with the advent of such mechanic: the ability to endlessly defend a high-ground becauseHigh-ground is notably hard to push onto - that’s the defender’s advantage right there. It is kind of supposed to be like that, because this is the barracks or even the throne we are talking about.The advantage is actually so drastic it might sometimes be bigger than, let’s say for our imaginary situation - 30k gold. Due to several reasons it is almost impossible to exceed beyond a certain amount of “advantage” as the winner side and thus thatIn terms of difficulty the fight will be “equal” meaning you are supposed to trade “evenly”.However when you trade 5 heroes for 5 heroes, the defender gets way more gold out of it due to rubber band, and pushing into the defender becomes nearly impossible, therefore teams avoid this situation in the first place by farming instead and not actually pushing / trying to end the game because the risk is not worth the effort.This is not because of The Comeback Mechanic alone.The problem is that the losing side still gets "enough" gold and experience from lane creeps pushing into them to be able continue their item progression,whatsoever.This is the most important part of a strategy game - map control. In Starcraft when a player gets contained he is going to lose the game eventually, because he’ll run out of resources. If you've ever played TvT you should know what I mean. Check out this wiki page to read some more if you aren't familiar with the concept.However because in Dota there are lane creeps that give gold every 30 seconds regardless where they are killed - be it at their spawn point or at your barracks line - this situation is weird to say the least:After a certain point the winning side’s cores reach their maximum potential - farming don’t make them stronger anymore, whilst enemy still has a room to grow. Therefore the “real” Networth of the winning team stops being relevant to the items they have, because that gold stops being put into items.With time, that gap between teams only shrinks even if the gold/exp discrepancy increases on the graphs. Add to this the fact that the defender’s advantage is still there AND the risk of a fail push skyrockets due to potentially disastrous rubberband gold/exp transfers.It all comes down to map control, or rather how pointless it might be in some specific situations.Let’s list what does having full map control provide:1) Roshan - aegis, cheese.2) Access to both jungles and ancients.3) Runes.If I were to suggest something in hopes to avoid the main problem [that is]:1)/ with Roshan kills / as you sacrifice your aegis or cheese to the shopkeeper / whatever reason.Point is, with the entire map control should come bigger dominance than it is right now to exceed “the gap” [] allowing your support heroes to acquire late-game items for themselves which ultimately will lead to victory faster than 2 hours of resets. “Useless gold” is no longer present, but being transferred straight into support slots such as hex, bkb, halberd, diffusal(!) or even damage items.The side with map control is going to farm both the jungles plus Roshan and thus farming 3-4 times as fast items that actually matter. Lane Creeps do scale, while Jungle Creeps do not, meaning support heroes are going to have much easier time farming them.On average there are 533 gold in one Jungle ( wiki ), so ideally ~1100 gold at the moment. However the amount of Lane Creeps iswith time and thus the amount of gold they give away. Therefore Jungles are worth less in comparison = controlling jungles worth less as the game progresses. I want to put higher emphasis on jungle creeps: that way in a 2 hour game the winner side with complete map control will get more gold out of the map so "the gap" will be increasing instead of shrinking.2)similar to bounty runes.Same idea basically - to get additional items for the winning team to increase “the gap” and to finally break their defenses. I mean something really ridiculous like 4k for a cheese at 80 minutes might be actually a great thing for the game.The Roshan, being a contesting point , gets way higher emphasis in the late-game where aegis and cheese value is usually goes down because your cores run out of slots.The losing team knowing that will bethis. As you might already understood - the change should lead to exactly this if you want to address the problem I'm stating.Update - F.A.Q.1)I had the same idea, but disregarded it almost instantaneously because I wanted to make support heroes stronger and more fun to play in such circumstances rather than buffing a 6 slotted Medusa.2)Keep in mind, the rubber band doesn't come into play if nothing happens or the winning team finally wins3)This change essentially destroys their barracks once you get rid of tier 2s which can be done relatively early in the game. That said you remove half of the objectives from the game to contest for: Tier 3s, Tier 4s, 3 lanes of barracks and throne along with negating all the defender's advantage (you just don't push anymore) and making the game ridiculously boring to play.4)It also affects all the stages of the game and several heroes such as Spectre and Furion, while doesn't really address the problem of not pushing / pushing, only changing the dynamic of a fight. I would prefer asking a pro about this one.5)This encourages core heroes to endlessly farm while supports of both teams stay afkSummary: If a team abandons all map control whatsoever for a long period of time their disadvantage should be increasing.Thanks for reading.[Dota 2] The Winner's Advantage byCorrect my grammar and suggest better wording if you have time.You can read some other my posts there if you're interested. The king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey?