DotA Allstars was the worst and was the thing that made me initially not get into MOBAs. I always used to nickname that game Defense of the Assholes because of how toxic the player base was. My teens were otherwise spent playing Footman Frenzy, BattleTanks, WW2/WW1 Battle for Europe, Run Kitty Run and other maps.
Best memory was sixteen years ago being labelled a feeder, kicked from an -apem game on Bnet mid-match, added to a global banlist, and told by the game host to hang myself when I asked him what his fucking problem was.
What was the cardinal sin I committed which led to such a heavy-handed and toxic response, you may ask? I bought Mekanism while playing Dragon Knight. Apparently without any tutorials and in a casual pub match on Blizzard’s own servers, I should have known that players needed to buy Buriza and not a healing/buffing item.
League of Legends has a very unique account selling problem that Riot have proven outright fucking incompetent in addressing.
You need to hit level 30 on your account to start playing Ranked, which can take about 112 hours of cumulative play time to achieve. This has created a black market for fresh League accounts that have been pushed to Level 30 and are ready to be played in Ranked.
Unranked League accounts that are level 30 fetch about $1 - $10 on illicit websites because there are whole industries of Chinese gold farming firms and bots infiltrating the game. If you want an account that’s in Iron 3 or Iron 4 (the two lowest divisions in Ranked), it can fetch a few hundred dollars at bare minimum, at least if DongHuaP is to be believed. Iron accounts are so expensive because of how hard they are to actually get into Iron in the first place without tripping Riot’s automated reporting systems and getting banned, but also they’re lucrative for YouTube content creators because they use them to do ‘Iron to Grandmaster’ series.
I’m somebody who peaked at Archon rank in DOTA 2 (LoL equivalent would be Platinum) and used to play StarCraft II at Master level (second highest league in the game, Grandmaster is top-200 in the region), so I’m not exactly incompetent at RTS or MOBA games. But in League my account is borked and I’m in literal elo hell. I have found it impossible to climb above Iron 2 because of smurfs, bots and powerlevellers inting their accounts deliberately so that they can resell them.
Smurfing is when you play Ranked ladder on an alt-account in a much lower skill bracket with the intention to curb stomp lesser-skilled players.
It’s a very big issue in any competitive multiplayer game, especially direct competitors of DOTA 2 like League of Legends and SMITE. Valve may just be the first company to start actively banning smurfs.
Frontiers was honestly the biggest disappointment I had with a 3D Sonic game since '06 (I thankfully didn’t play Rise of Lyric despite owning a Wii U.)
Making an open world zone Sonic game is all well and good, but the world just feels so lifeless. Not to mention that the mini-stages are literally regurgitated from other 3D Boost era Sonic games.
There’s a reason I’m not looking forward to Grand Theft Auto VI.
GTA5 has been out for an entire decade now and has been re-released across three generations of systems. The only post-release content released for it has been to the online mode, and GTA Online is about as pay-to-win as it gets.
Bethesda have pulled similar shit over the years with Skyrim, but the difference is that Skyrim is a largely single player experience without pay-to-win DLC. Also, Bethesda have overwhelmingly embraced the modding community whereas Rockstar and Take Two Interactive have sicced their lawyers and private investigators upon any third-party mod creator in a litigious dick-waving contest that would even put the likes of Nintendo and Disney to shame.
Rockstar have also proven themselves incapable of releasing new games, with the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2, which also never saw any further DLC updates and tried to have its microtransaction-heavy online multiplayer pushed in similar fashion.
The only reason Grand Theft Auto has seen a meteoric level of success is because a lot of people (especially in Britain and the USA) have incredibly poor taste in video games and only care if their console can play the latest FIFA/Madden, Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto.