That’s some good data! I’m mostly interested in filtering by Linux support and latency/accuracy measurements. Some of them are very helpful, thank you!
If you want to try a simpler MOBA, try Heroes of the Storm. The game does not get any love from Blizzard anymore, but out of all the MOBA’s I know, it has the least minimal knowledge required to play.
MOBA as a genre didn’t come from WC3. There were quite a lot of predecessors to DotA, both in WC3 itself and in first StarCraft, namely Aeon of Strife is believed to be the first popular MOBA custom map out there.
Blizzard didn’t decide that quirks of WC3 engine are dumb. Yes, they wanted to make a simpler MOBA, but the main reason for lack of funny stuff from WC3 is that they used Galaxy engine for the game, the same one StarCraft 2 was built upon.
And HotS feels less complex not because of Galaxy’s vs WC3’s quirks (the former has plenty, too), but because of lack of gold and shop, shared experience and an actual tutorial at the beginning of the game.
I assume it creates some sort of save file in the current working directory?
You may try changing the working directory via batch script, if you’re on Windows.
Make a text file, name it something like launch.bat (the actual name may be whatever you want, just make sure you leave the extention .bat) Paste this there:
Be sure to replace game.exe with your game’s .exe filename. Don’t delete any double quotes, they are important.
Put this text file near .exe file of your game, and make a shortcut of it to your desktop. You may rename a shortcut and choose an icon from your game’s .exe file to make it pretty.
After that just launch the shortcut as you normally would. If I’m correct, the game should create it’s .bin file in the script directory and not in your desktop.