The Perfect AoS

Well I'm starting to kinda get sick of DotA being so popular, so I decided to write this completely random rant. DotA has gotten so popular that noobs are starting to take it over and it's not fun at all anymore. I checked out a couple of other AoS games, so I decided to make a little chart to show the pros and cons of each. Here goes...


DotA
Pros:
Very popular (duh!)
Lots of heroes and items to choose from
Great terrain (especially for ganking)
Cons:
Not very many creative spells or ideas
A little laggy
Too item dependant
Maybe too many heores?
Comments: With so many heroes, I like how every game is different. However, that's about the only good thing about the game (besides popularity). What I hate most is the fact that you are so item dependant that it doesn't even take that much skill to play, as long as you know what items to get. Also, all damage spells in the game suck just because they can't do anything late game.


Eve of the Apocalypes
Pros:
Very creative ideas
Unique levelling and upgrading systems
Spell damage increases when your stats increase
3 maps to choose from
Flashy (maybe a little too flashy?)
Cons:
VERY laggy
Alternate victory methods detract from the point of the game
Way too many creeps
The maps are too big
A little too fast-paced...hard to keep up
Comments: This my favorite AoS to play, and I think the only reason I never play it online is because of lag. Honestly, the fact that it's 3 maps put into one makes it extremely laggy and almost impossible to play. Also, I hate how there are so many creeps in each wave. I would rather have them be a little stronger, but half the amount per wave. Actually, that's another reason for the lag, because with all these little critters running around, it's hard for your computer to keep up! Nonetheless, I really like the creative ideas such as the levelling system and the crystals, very nice and unique ideas. Also, I think the items in the game are perfect, because you aren't so item-dependant like in DotA, but at the same time, the items are enough to help you win. Finally, I really like how damage spells don't get useless later on in the game, like in DotA and most AoS-type games.


Advent of the Zenith
Pros:
Great hero ideas
Very nice-looking
Perfect creeps, not too many, not too strong
Creative story (Bane vs Hallowed Order, nice idea)
Cons:
Items...enough said
Not really as PvP oriented as it claims to be
Bad terrain
Comments: I think this game has about the best heroes I have ever seen. All the spells seem to synergize with each other like no other AoS I have ever played. Also, this game does not use any abilities found in the WC3 ladder. The creeps are also perfect; not incredibly strong, not too many, and at the same time you can't kill a whole wave with one spell. However, items are a problem... There is basically no use for gold except to buy hired creeps. Honestly, Dusk, make more items! =D


Tides of Blood
Pros:
Very balanced
Nice creeps
Great skins
Cons:
Not very creative abilities
Items are worse than AotZ's! =O (no offense Dusk)
Heroes are a little too big (just my opinion...)
Slow-paced
Comments: I can see why ToB was popular back in the day, but I can also see why it died. There hasn't been a new version in a few years. I really like the balance, but I don't like the lack of creativity. A lot of the heroes use abilities already available in ladder play, and there are only a couple triggered ones. Also, the towers are too weak in my opinion. And items...what is with all these AoS's with no items? Although I like the ideas of the items that it does have, that's not saying much, considering there are only about 10 in the whole game.


So basically, the prefect AoS would have AotZ's heroes, AotZ's creeps, EotA's systems (levelling, upgrading, etc), EotA's flashiness, EotA's items, ToB's textures, and, of course, DotA's popuarity. Hmm...if I had time I would have made that by now. But sadly I don't. ='[

So post a reply and tell me what you think. This took me like 20 minutes to type, so you better have something to say. =P If you disagree with me, tell me why. If you agree with me, GREAT! Reply anyway.



EDIT: I understand that there is no "perfect" AoS, because, like people have said, everyone has different tastes, and ideas that appeal to some may not appeal to others. I'm just saying what I like and don't like about each game. Cheers.

I agree with all of your thoughts on each AoS.

However, I don't think there ever should be a "perfect" AoS. The best part of everything is that they are imperfect. I know that people say they want things to be perfect, but that's not exactly possible unless the person chooses the limits of perfect, which the word isn't supposed to have.

Anyways, I think it's just better to hope for an AoS that has a little bit of everything, but not too much of everything. Besides, B.net maps have to limited to 4 MB. You can't do too much with that. Plus loading time is intimidating.

You have to many opinion-orientated arguments here. "To item dependant", "Maybe to many heroes" and "not very creative spell ideas" are all based on opinions that are obviously fueled by wc3c's obvious dislike of DotA.

Why didn't you take Terrain as a big plus? I find DotA's terrain to be perfect. It lay the foundation for many other AoS terrain out there, including Tob's.

You should try and figure out WHY DotA is so populair. And no, being populair does not make something populair. Get it?


Ugh, I hate EotA. Firstly, the mapsize is WAY to big. I cant believe you didn't take that in to account. Secondly, the perspective is screwed up. Whenever I'm playing a action-orienatated game I dont want to have a super-high bird perspective, I want to be close to the action. Fighting ants with antlions doesn't really make me excited or feel any connection with my character at all.

Thirdly, its pace is to slow.



I honoustly cant see why you find Aotz's heroes the best out of these maps. They dont have any strong charismatics and theming Tides of Blood has. Their abilities alienate way to much from ladder wc3c to be picked up by new players. I also cant see why you find the story a plus; its just as shallow as any story. Maybe if you found some buried background of DotA, you could see the original version had something way more eleborate than this.



Not very creative abilities? Are you kidding me? I thought we where comparing this to DotA and EotA also. Out of these four maps, ToB definatly has the best heroes with the most creative ideas, while not pushing it over the edge to being to hard to understand for fresh players. ToB's heroes have the best itemization

10 items in the whole game? I think you must have missed a shop or two.

Overall, the only valid negative point on ToB I can find in here, is the pace.



Fixed.

Have you tried Final Fantasy Tactics? That's always been my favorite AoS, mainly because the ability to change classes keeps the game from getting stale.

Also, there's a Bleach AoS floating around that has neutral creeps spawning around the map in addition to the team spawns. It's a fun addition.

Dude, ToB > all

Nothing's ever going to change that. Cassiel went for hero strategy not item strategy like in DotA. Same with AotZ, it is practically ToB Jr., I also hate Eve of the Twilight Apocalypse, or whatever name it was.

DotA has only become so popular because gamers from all of the world nowadays are 'hardcore', which is why DotA is suited for them, hardcore wtfpwnage.

Can't wait for O.

To be fair, Vigor's post was more biased and opinionated than the original one. :P
Seriously though, I can't even comment on Vig's post, it's riddled with so much opinion that it's not worth it. >_>

You (Original poster) put some thought into this, but you also need to factor everything while still maintaining a neutral stance on all of them.
That's the real challenge behind doing an "analysis" of AoS maps.
Obviously EACH of them has to be doing SOMETHING right, because they all have communities with good followings.
And the fact you don't agree with what they do right should have no bearing on your "analysis."

Oh, and --
I laughed. Hard.

Yes some people here are such tob fanboys..Even if you think it`s the best AoS (I think so too) not everything about it has to be the best.
Storywise and character wise AotZ is just the best.
Dusk created an awesome map with some new ideas and it`s own style, honor that.

Nevertheless ToB heroes have the better (gameplay) design, the terrain rocks, the gameplay overall is awesome, it`s mostly balanced (even if Jew and especially Maiden in general are imba).


Just wait if O can bring back the old ToB popularity.

Now flame me and make your so cool "fixed" posts =)

Shall i do my cup of tea then? I'll try to be neutral about things.
I'll be honest, a lot of what i say will be laced with opinion.-


I have never played any of the recent allstar versions. So i basically dont know what dota is really like these days. I do know from older versions of allstars, that i did not like those, and that there where some severe coding bugs and even missing tooltips. I'm assuming those things are fixed these days :P

I think dota is probubly a fine game actually. It is exactly the kind of game that comforts the less intelligent gamers out there, becouse there are always some "tricks" or "exploits" you can learn (in dota this being what items to get and in what order) wich will make you win 90% of the time. Dota's snowballing structure becouse of punishing deaths and greatly rewarding kills, only amplifies this effect. However, it does give you a thrill for making that "TRIPPLE KIILLLLL!!"

I remember dota in the old days on roc when it was the top of its game, and when i played it a lot. The terrain was good. The heros lacked character by todays standard yes, but back then they where amazing! custom abilities! Awesome. I loved that game to bits, i cant explain the thrills from scoring killls at level 1 with the troll my taking berserk right off the bat... Good times.

Vig, you forgot that todays dota terrain is not the same as the old one, lots of cliffs and tree paths and stuff have been made way more open, its not as cool anymore.


I have played my fais share of eota games, but they never really interested me that much. The map was so big that teamwork become totally irrelavant, everyone is just doing something somewhere without a real goal, of wich there where too many anyway. (like, 5 lanes and a cargo thing to protect? >_>) I also felt the scaling mana costs where not balanced right, i could spam a spell a lot when it was at level three, but at level 6 when my mana pool was at least three times the size it used to be, three castings of that spell drained my mana pool. That strikes me as a little odd.

Also, they did have the cool stat increasing spell damage thing, but they didnt do it with all spells as an underlying system, they only did it with some spells, wich kind of made it into a gimmick.


I find AotZ to be verry well made. The heros look good, they feel complete, they have character. I dont like the terrain setup that much myself, but its practical enough. What i dont like though, is tentacle towers. HIDE UR GURLS.

I find AotZ to be a completely diffrent story all together, more comparable with (the vastly inferior) Age of Myth and stuff like that. We're talking about a map here thats taking JASSES spells and the options of that to the extreme, trying to accomplish a vastly diffrent experience then wc3 spells could ever diliver.

However i see a problem with that, the wc3 engine simply isnt build to comfortably support such bending of the rules, it takes getting used to. This is why i, personally dont like AotZ at all. However, if it was a console game, or made in a diffrent engine, i would most likely love it.



what can i say, i'm a whore for tob. Version O is on its way and i'm excited like an early 90's schoolgirl waiting for the new spice girls album.

I'll try to be as un-biased as i can right now, but when it comes to tob, thats fairly impossible for me.

I dig tobs focus on teamwork and hero action reather then solo killing action. Usually you will find more situations in wich a team is battling another team over an base, reather then everyone running around everywhere trying to wtfpwn eachother.

I dig that the items are not imba. I can live with them perfectly well, but there are big changes up ahead, that will probubly be an improvement. It will also make items and decking your hero more important.

I dig dig dig dig diiiig tob's heros. Or at least most of them. Actually, i like to think of them more as "characters" then heros. Lots of clever references to all kinds of things in the abilities and characters as well, i like that.

And then theres ofcourse the art, wich really took my heart. The first time i played tob i got owned by a crimson wake, i was on the edge of my seat. It was unlike anything i had ever seen in a wc3 map. Allthough that has far been suppased since those days, that first impression toob my heart forever. I'm so goddamn shallow :P

What i dont always like is the slowness of games. Tob lasts forever. Also, the amount of pwn isnt dispersed amongst hero's equally. Some have unique abilities and art for every move, and some are raked together stock spells... But i believe, that too will change soon.

I hope i didnt end up ranting/propagandizing too much.

The perfect AoS for me? Anything thats as well-made and smoothly looking as AotZ or ToB.
Also, it has to have "characters" reather then "hero's", if you catch my drift.

I hate DotA because its impossible to get started well as a newbie. And at least 75% of the heroes are crappy melee wc3 heroes with slightly changed abilities. I'm sure actually that not all the heroes have abilities that no other has. Which is a horrible thing to do.

DotA has no charachter in their heroes, and its story is non-existant.

AotZ gets my vote for spells. The spells are the greatest I have ever seen. They all have synergy, they are all unique, they have EYE CANDY! However, some spells, like Scamp's are hard to learn to use correctly.
But the leviation guy... my fav. thowing units in the air and squashing them onto the ground is about as cool as it can get.

BUT, the terrain in the bases is disgusting, and the tentacle towers are also pretty ugly. Actually, the buildings and the terrain in the bases are both pretty bad for me.

ToB. Its just... slow.

Of all of the above, I find DotA to be the most appealing, but I should point out that I played it mostly in lan games with my friends (a lot) so those games were much more fun. From the point of complete suckage to complete ownage, the journey was fun. Nowadays, the online DotA community is crap, pure and unadulterated crap. The endless piles of leavers, retards, flammers, 14 year old testosterone jockeys and the like. But even in spite of that, I tend to have a good game, say, 1 out of 4 times.

All of the maps mentioned here are excellent, in the scope what they tried to achieve, and naturally, they appeal to different types of people. So there really isn't any point in talking about the perfect AoS; there can't be one.

I don't really have time for any proper commentary (if I ever want to do one). I just have this to say:
The reasons I first loved ToB, and still do, is that I found the balance of power to health almost perfect (ie. how fast heroes and bases die (ok bases possibly a bit slow, but I only see that happening with very balanced teams)) and the way teamwork is such a huge part.

The speed heroes die is to do with the way that they always seem to die for the right reasons. If they make a mistake, or their enemies play it well with teamwork, stuff like that. It just never feels like "wtf how did I die omg nurf imbaz" (possible exception of boat :P).

The other thing is the teamwork aspect. In no other AoS I have ever played (ever), have I found that teamwork seems to come so naturally. Back when I played ToB a lot (and I never got to playing private games), it was very rare to even see public players not playing together as a team. Sure, degrees of teamwork-ed-ness varied (very good was when you could run around as a group killing at mid-game), but you would virtually always get people staying together (and even helping one another omg wtf?) in the expo wars (sieges).

Possibly not explained well, but it was always just the feel that I got from the map. Anyway.

That is probably the most true statement spoken in this entire topic thus far.

I will agree with you there.
It's really hard for me to speak unbiased about my own creation, but I feel if anyone has the best understanding of my intentions, it is well... Me.

I didn't make it to be flashy, I didn't make it to be crazy, break the WC engine, or any of that silly stuff.
They simply came with the territory.

AotZ has been a story for nearly 6 years now, when I started writing it in my mind when I was twelve.
Way back in the day I started AotZ to "Fight back against DotA yarr!" but since then my aim has taken a 360.
The skills are complicated when compared with ToB, no argument there.
But answer me this, if every AoS gave the same hero experience that ToB/DotA does, what would there be the point of making a new AoS in the first place?

My goal was to reinvent the way a hero is played in an AoS map.
Not to the point where 99% of players suck until they play the map hundreds of times, but to the point where a noob to the map with lots of ToB/AoS background has the potential to overtake veterens of AotZ simply by his own skills and abilities.
Heroes were designed to do their concept characters justice, while offering to the world a "new" hero style to play.
A hero style and feel they could have with no other AoS map. (Or map, period)
I aimed to create an AoS where your skill with the hero you are is what brings about victory, not your knowledge of item combinations, etc.
That was my goal, and if I had to analyze how well I succeeded I'd say pretty damned well.

ToB always has been, and always will be, my favorite AoS map.
Because it was what I "grew up on" in WC3.

But there were many things I didn't like about it.
Those including the AMPs/WoNs/Potions. It lost appeal to me when part of winning the map was knowing when to smash your AMP item to go immune to 90% of the spells in the map, and then knowing when to smash your WoN button to "lawl" at the people who used AMP.
That sort of dynamic was counterproductive to both the teamwork, the hero design, and the map itself.

The terrain was properly sized, and though not very well-made it served its purpose.
An AoS map should have terrain that gets the job done, not terrain that outdoes the job.
And ToB succeeded in that regard.

It's tough for me to say which I think is a better made map of AotZ or ToB.
They were both constructed with different ideas in mind, and it is because of that key difference that I feel they can coexist.
They do not "rival" eachother, but supplement the other's existence.
One can enjoy AotZ and ToB games because they are so different.

Sure, AotZ has assistances and 6v6 gameplay and so on.
Yes, ToB was the first, no that doesn't mean they were "stolen" or "ripped".
They are systems that functionally speaking should be necessary in all AoS maps.
There is no downside to either, and they serve only to further enhance teamwork and gameplay.
So while yes, there are similarities between ToB and AotZ, their differences far outweigh them.

This is not a competition to create the best map.
This is an attempt to create yet another unique alternative to the maps already strewn across BNet.
And that my friends, is what mapmaking is all about.

amen

My advice:

Cut leveling. Cut all becoming more powerful. It serves very little gameplay purpose other than to cause a snowball.

Make towers less powerful. This will encourage offensive play and bring down game times.

Base it around gameplay and it being interactive - more spell casting rather than auto attacking, for example. Weaker spells that can be cast more often are more fun and less boring, in general, in my opinion.

Give heroes less skill points than is needed to max out. This will introduce variety. Also make it so that it can be reset easily at the base. This will allow counter tactics, and a bit of the psycology of rock-paper-scissors. Rock-paper-scissors balancing is not good in an AoS in my opinion, but having to predict what your opponent is going for at any one time could be good.

Seriously. What the hell is wrong with the snowball effect. Without a snowball effect, there is no such thing as a mutliplayer game.

Good, because you sound like you can use a good laugh or two.

If you cant even take the lightest critizism like that, you should get off the internet. Its not a nice place.