-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Dota 2 hit lowest average player count since January 2013 last month
- Thread starter texhnolyze
- Start date
I dont think dota 2 is the only one losing alot of players, if we had the league stats it would probably look the same. I just think Mobas is starting to die out abit, kinda like Battle Royale and mmos have lost alot of players, people just move on at some point to newer games.
No, look at my post earlier in the thread. League is insanely big still. It might have plateau'd, but it doesn't show signs of losing players.
The numbers RIOT shows I genuinely don't believe. Or are skewed.
DOTA is real numbers but LoL you have to take riots word for it.
Haven't played in a bit and I wanna play again but I feel like they've changed so much it's gonna be a bitch to re-learn and I don't wanna go through that again with such a shit player base.
That's on you. I don't think there's any particular reason to doubt them. The numbers they showed were not vague in any way.
Dota 2 is just a much less popular game.
Relatively new player here (less than 200 games).
Only play turbo because I'm an adult with a job and a family and all that jazz.
It's definitely a combo - and in order (from most impactful to least impactful):
1) MOBAs are falling out of favor, somewhat, for games with shorter game 'time' (CS:GO, Fortnite, etc.).
2) The DOTA new player experience is GOD-AWFUL. Flamed by people. Hardly anything explained. Hell, even the main menu was daunting for me. Luckily, I had a friend helping my brother and me the whole time. Most people don't have that. They post questions on Reddit and get shit on by the community.
3) There's a 'feature' that requires 100 hours of playtime before getting into ranked. This is not good. It means I'm playing unranked games against players with thousands of games played and getting rolled JUST to play the 10 games to get me into a relevant low rank.
The game itself is incredible, I'm having SO MUCH FUN, but there are lots of problems.
ALSO - viewership numbers haven't gone down. So, yes, less people may play it but the same (if not more...?) people are watching it.
Only play turbo because I'm an adult with a job and a family and all that jazz.
It's definitely a combo - and in order (from most impactful to least impactful):
1) MOBAs are falling out of favor, somewhat, for games with shorter game 'time' (CS:GO, Fortnite, etc.).
2) The DOTA new player experience is GOD-AWFUL. Flamed by people. Hardly anything explained. Hell, even the main menu was daunting for me. Luckily, I had a friend helping my brother and me the whole time. Most people don't have that. They post questions on Reddit and get shit on by the community.
3) There's a 'feature' that requires 100 hours of playtime before getting into ranked. This is not good. It means I'm playing unranked games against players with thousands of games played and getting rolled JUST to play the 10 games to get me into a relevant low rank.
The game itself is incredible, I'm having SO MUCH FUN, but there are lots of problems.
ALSO - viewership numbers haven't gone down. So, yes, less people may play it but the same (if not more...?) people are watching it.
I'd tend to believe Riot on this one. My guess is it is seeing some decline, but not as precipitous as Dota 2.
Dota 2 has had the same problem since it officially released: a lack of ambition when it comes to new hero releases. When it was still in Beta, they were releasing heroes into the pool at a pace of a couple every 2 or 3 months. Boy did that change. New stuff is what keeps these games fresh for casual players, and casual players are the lifeblood of any multiplayer community game. League of Legends gets a new character every few months like clockwork, and they are usually marginally interesting. Dota 2 gets really unique and innovative characters, but for the last few years the game only gets those releases once a year at this point. MAYBE twice a year. That's just too slow a pace.
Further, Dota 2 has had a pattern over the last couple of years of introducing sweeping changes with huge change logs that have a major impact on how the game or its characters are played. Big map changes, big skill changes, new trees, and so on. This forces a major re-learning period that some people just don't want to engage in. Not after spending hundreds of hours just getting comfortable with how things were to start with. League tends to pump out a lot of small changes on a regular basis that are easier to digest and keep up with. It keeps players from feeling overwhelmed. The hat economy and trading changes also hurt the game.
That said, it is good that Valve is dropping more frequent patch updates, as there was a time when we'd go several months without any meaningful balance changes. A better release schedule and pace for new heroes would be wise, but I'm not sure if it can stem the trend of slowing player engagement unless they do something really interesting with the lore or some sort of event.
We don't know actual numbers for this tho. Since it's on mobile and I don't think Valve has a way to show those either?
It has gotten significantly better over the years. The amount of times I encounter someone actually toxic is like every 20 games or so.
It's definitely better than it used to be. In-game pings alone changed the game. Now you can just mute all and still ping your plans
It was unranked, she had a brand new account and as you said she couldn't play ranked and she was only playing support roles, still got flamed and quit. Now I am playing with another friend and you won't believe how many smurf accounts we meet on unranked. You say people don't care what will happen on unranked but the flaming and toxicity is still legendary.
I've been playing since beta, I get significantly fewer afkers/ragers than I used to. Playing with friends helps as it drastically reduces the chance of someone on your team being one (normally).
I mostly just hear shit like "mid diff" now as a way of complaining about stuff in ranked. I'm not at a high level anymore and I play a lot of ARAM which people don't take as seriously.
Essentially this.
Honestly maybe I'm just immune to it, but I can't remember the last time I met someone toxic in League. But it's probably biased by the fact I haven't played ranked in years. I stick to normals/arams/rotating game mode. Ironically I've been playing HotS and have met insanely toxic people in the handful of games I've played, including people dropping racial slurs. It took me by surprise.
I used to love this game so much. Every couple of months I try to play a game with a friend but within a couple of minutes I remember why I stopped in the first place. The community is just too toxic. I'm not the best player in the first place, but coming back after a couple of months and patches I might as well be completely new to the game. I'm trying my best but if you get shit on in lane by the other team and verbally abused by your own team it just sucks the fun out of the game. At this point I don't care how good the game is, if the community is this shitty it's not worth my time.
I gave up on DOTA 2 for a few reasons that I'm sure are the same reason a lot of other people have too, toxic community and the games just go on for a bit too long.
Never before have I been insulted as much as the two years I played DOTA, all it can take is one minor mistake and that means for the next hour you've got to put up with some absolute donkey slinging the worst insults they can come up with at you.
Sometimes I do miss it though. No game has ever quite grabbed my attention as much, I played it for 2000 hours which is an insane amount of hours for me compared to any other game I've played.
Never before have I been insulted as much as the two years I played DOTA, all it can take is one minor mistake and that means for the next hour you've got to put up with some absolute donkey slinging the worst insults they can come up with at you.
Sometimes I do miss it though. No game has ever quite grabbed my attention as much, I played it for 2000 hours which is an insane amount of hours for me compared to any other game I've played.
Yeah same. There's a very specific window at night where I might be able to fit a game in, but it's harder to justify wasting an hour of my day on what might be an amazing competitive experience but can just as easily be a wash due to feeders/tilters/afk's.
I used to think this was a no-brainer as well; however, whenever Valve has attempted to do a dungeon-crawl style event within Dota2, it has always been pretty lackluster and doesn't give me much faith that they could produce a great Warcraft 3 style RTS/RPG.
Anecdotal but in the last year or so, I've noticed a lot more pleasant people on both teams in the majority of my Dota matches. It's significantly better than years past, at least for me.
On the other hand, I played Overwatch a few weeks ago for the first time in a while to do some placement matches and the amount of mean people I encountered caused me to stop playing after a few matches and put the game back down. At least the matches are a lot shorter in OW so you're not being held captive for 1 hour+ like you can in Dota.
On the other hand, I played Overwatch a few weeks ago for the first time in a while to do some placement matches and the amount of mean people I encountered caused me to stop playing after a few matches and put the game back down. At least the matches are a lot shorter in OW so you're not being held captive for 1 hour+ like you can in Dota.
I guess Dota 2 has lost most of the Autochess crowd by now that was inflating the player counts somewhat.
I love watching Dota 2 Majors from time to time, but I couldn't get back in the game. It just takes too much time - and too much has changed since I last played. It might not be the biggest hurdle but I believe that LoL players can get back in the game way easier while I would have to learn over 60 new items, the new towers and I didn't even have skill trees when I left so all of that too. Every character I played back then is probably way different now.
And on top of that there's the extremely toxic crowd.
It's a great game and it's interesting to see what Valve will do about it. They know how to keep a game alive and re-invent itself. They shown it before with TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2 itself. Hopefully they can do it, it would be a pity to see this cornerstone of an eSports game have less and less players.
I love watching Dota 2 Majors from time to time, but I couldn't get back in the game. It just takes too much time - and too much has changed since I last played. It might not be the biggest hurdle but I believe that LoL players can get back in the game way easier while I would have to learn over 60 new items, the new towers and I didn't even have skill trees when I left so all of that too. Every character I played back then is probably way different now.
And on top of that there's the extremely toxic crowd.
It's a great game and it's interesting to see what Valve will do about it. They know how to keep a game alive and re-invent itself. They shown it before with TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2 itself. Hopefully they can do it, it would be a pity to see this cornerstone of an eSports game have less and less players.
I don't think anyone playing dota wants or needs regular hero releases. I also think people love the multi-month metas as long as there isn't an annoying hero in every game and huge patches are looked upon pretty favourably. It just changes what strategies are strong for the next while (but all strategies still work which is the beauty of dota).
I think the issue is mostly new/returning player experience and prominence of smurfs.
The big drop after 2017 makes me wonder if Talents were a bust and shouldn't have been added
That's when they lost me. Made an already complicated game even more complicated and I just didn't feel it was worth the effort to essentially relearn every hero. Combined with the updated HUD, I just felt like it wasn't the same Dota 2 anymore and I ducked out.
That's when they lost me. Made an already complicated game even more complicated and I just didn't feel it was worth the effort to essentially relearn every hero. Combined with the updated HUD, I just felt like it wasn't the same Dota 2 anymore and I ducked out.
The playerbase kinda did this to themselves. Even the subreddit is extremely newcomer unfriendly when I looked into the game a couple of months ago.
Well in the sense that you can mute people, sure. The culture and community around the game have not changed. At all.
Yes, they do. Frequent updates and care are the lifeblood of GAAS games. Without them they become stale and you begin to bleed off casual players. *gasp* that's exactly what's happening to Dota 2.
If you look at its history, you see player spikes around new hero releases. Because new blood in the game matters and impacts interest in the game. Funny that, isn't it.
Nah. The issues are, as others have clearly stated, (1) game length, (2) toxicity, (3) fatigue, (4) economy changes, and (5) limited delivery of new content.
Last edited:
Nah. There are 6 new heroes that got introduced to Dota since 2017 (well, technically they are the first 6 new heros that got added to the pool since 2005 or something). Most of the Dota players prefer to have a good balance and just 1 or 2 new heroes a year instead of the constant new OP champion spam that happens in League with ~7 releases a year. If you look at at the Dota pro scene then you'll see that usually around 95% of the hero pool is either getting picked or banned during tournaments because every hero has its place. In League people don't really care about half of the champion pool because they are too same'ish.
Yeah Dreams, this. Me and my friends that are playing since the beta are way more hyped about rebalancing patches than new heroes.
I still play multiple games per week with friends. We'll get a 3-5 stack going, and it's fairly rare that we come across toxic people in games. They're definitely there, but it's easily mitigated just by muting people - I have no idea why folks don't just immediately mute, it doesn't affect pings.
I really don't solo queue at all any more so I can't speak to that, but personally I think the game is in a fantastic place right now. The recent patch that fine-tuned neutral items really fixed a lot of my complaints, and overall I think the meta is fantastic.
It may be decreasing in player count, but my enjoyment per game is much higher.
Oh, and don't play Turbo, people. Those games really aren't much shorter on average than a normal game any more, and it's a completely unbalanced mess of a mode that I find to be full of many more toxic folks. My average Turbo game is usually around 25-30 minutes, whereas I find my average regular game is 35-40.
I really don't solo queue at all any more so I can't speak to that, but personally I think the game is in a fantastic place right now. The recent patch that fine-tuned neutral items really fixed a lot of my complaints, and overall I think the meta is fantastic.
It may be decreasing in player count, but my enjoyment per game is much higher.
Oh, and don't play Turbo, people. Those games really aren't much shorter on average than a normal game any more, and it's a completely unbalanced mess of a mode that I find to be full of many more toxic folks. My average Turbo game is usually around 25-30 minutes, whereas I find my average regular game is 35-40.
Yeah, you may be right. The SteamDB folks suspect mobile players are included, since said version also requires a Steam account to play and the game supports cross-play, but I don't think we have hard confirmation on that.
Sure, but even then, it's way better than back in season 2 and 3. I started in 2012, and that was the wild west. Nobody got banned for anything back then.
Now Riot basically always goes to the chat logs, which can't be disputed. So people have kept a lot of the slurs and stuff out now that it's bannable. Honestly you couldn't pay me to go back to 2013 LoL toxicity.
Pubs are a toxic mess and Valve does nothing to promote teamplay, clans, random stacks, whatever. At the same time also does nothing to prevent smurfing.
It's an amazing game but I'm simply too old and my time is too precious to be playing something where I don't know if I'll have a fun or horrible 45-60 minutes when I hit the seach button.
It's an amazing game but I'm simply too old and my time is too precious to be playing something where I don't know if I'll have a fun or horrible 45-60 minutes when I hit the seach button.
This depends as what you define toxicity as. If you mean someone spouting racist stuff then yeah, it's pretty rare nowadays, but if you mean people shit-talking other people for their bad gameplay, then that probably happens every other game.
There are less people straight up game ruining or shouting racist stuff, but even at 10k behaviour score the atmosphere is usually pretty aggressive.
I do and it's has also been the main complaint in my group for the past 4 years now.
It seemed like the community reacted pretty negatively to the changes with random item drops in Dota 2. Losing players has to be a huge problem in the genre due to the steep learning curve. I couldn't even imagine getting into a moba today. I started playing League before season 1 when there were about 40 champions. I also got into Dota 2 pretty early before all of the original heroes were ported so I had time to acclimate to new additions. I played most of the new games that came out during the wave following the rise of popularity too so I have seen a lot of variations on the format. Even if I take a full year off, I only have a handful of new characters and the big map/item changes get acquainted with.
Somebody starting today? Get used to the genre basics, figure out rules based on a legacy of being a 15 year old mod, learn 150 or so unique characters and how they all want to murder you, and deal with an angry teammates who have been playing for more than a decade and expect everybody to be at the same knowledge and skill level as them...Or just play Fortnite like all of your friends are.
There hasn't been a new significant moba even announced for PC or consoles in almost 5 years. The craze is over, nobody's deciding not to develop an RTS game because they are putting out a new moba instead.
Somebody starting today? Get used to the genre basics, figure out rules based on a legacy of being a 15 year old mod, learn 150 or so unique characters and how they all want to murder you, and deal with an angry teammates who have been playing for more than a decade and expect everybody to be at the same knowledge and skill level as them...Or just play Fortnite like all of your friends are.
There hasn't been a new significant moba even announced for PC or consoles in almost 5 years. The craze is over, nobody's deciding not to develop an RTS game because they are putting out a new moba instead.
I don't think mobas are going anywhere. League of Legends is still incredibly popular and mobile mobas are super popular. I do hope we see a bit of a resurgence of RTS games though. It seems like mobas ate up the RTS genre specifically, turn-based strategy games are still quite popular. The situation has become even worse since Starcraft seems all but dead.
I know a few people who quit due to the new updates totally changing the game. A shame though, I'm loving the changes and think the game is better than it ever was. Community is still toxic as hell though, as many are pointing out, even in Turbo mode.
Because it's fucking hard to add a lot of new heroes and keep all of the old ones relevant and make everyone feel unique.
This.
You can't just join a game a try and enjoy yourself. People always start drama.
I tried LoL for a bit after I quit, and the community is way more chill. I have since stopped playing LoL.
Last edited:
As someone who hasn't play for a number of years, this last big patch seems like there's simply too many changes happening all at once. I've always toyed with the idea of going back, but now it feels almost insurmountable to deal all every new things being thrown at the players.
I kinda see how it went there:
- Too much competition on PC not limited to LoL (Fortnite, Overwatch, etc.)
- Non-newbie friendly gameplay and community
- SEA players are more going into Mobile Moba (Mobile Legends, Marvel, and LoL Wildrift soon)
- Too much competition on PC not limited to LoL (Fortnite, Overwatch, etc.)
- Non-newbie friendly gameplay and community
- SEA players are more going into Mobile Moba (Mobile Legends, Marvel, and LoL Wildrift soon)
My gosh, I needed to think for a minute and then understood. I lol'd.