Details of a MOBA game flow
The genre is largely defined by its setup: each team (typically consisting of 3 or 5 players) has a single base which they must protect at all costs. If their base is destroyed, they instantly lose. This base also serves as a center of operations, containing a shop, a "safe zone"note , a rapid healing location for heroes and the point of return for "recall" spells. This base is protected by a series of "towers", defensive buildings set out in lines radiating away from the base. These towers deal considerable damage to any enemy which comes within range and grant allied players vision over that portion of the battlefield. In most games, there are 2-4 rows of these "towers" protecting each base, resulting in the towers gradually moving closer together the nearer they are to the base note .As the game progresses, AI-controlled minions (sometimes called "lane creeps" or just "creeps") spawn at each team's base and proceed along pre-programmed paths ("lanes"), traveling from allied tower to allied tower before assaulting the enemy towers. These minions will attack any enemy they come across such as opposing minions, opposing towers and opposing players. There are almost always fewer lanes than there are players - maps with three players per team typically have two lanes, while five-player teams typically brawl over three lanes.
In-between these lanes is a region known as "the jungle", containing un-allied units (referred to as "neutral creeps" or "monsters") more powerful than minions which attack any unit from either team they come across - however, as these units remain in the jungle, they almost only ever encounter the playersnote .
Many games also include several powerful monsters in the jungle, weaker than a player character but dangerous to a badly wounded hero. Killing these monsters give some bonus for a short amount of time. One or two monsters in the jungle are considerably more powerful than any hero, requiring coordination from the entire team to take down but grant large team-wide awards for killing them.
Each player controls a single "hero" character unit. This character is considerably more powerful than any minion and the normal creeps in the jungle but less powerful than any tower, meaning it is easy for them to kill minions but assaulting a tower on their own is suicidal. Every hero unit has a unique set of abilities and statistics. A team is usually only allowed a single copy of any given hero. As a result, teams have a diverse membership of heroes, each filling different roles.
Hero units in the game grow inherently more powerful over time. Towers are either exempted from this or grow at a slower rate, meaning that the towers will inevitably be brought down by damage from both the minions and heroes. Player heroes gain power by killing enemy minions, neutral creeps, towers and enemy heroes. In many games, merely being around a killed enemy unit gives a hero Experience Points and/or money, but directly killing a creep will either give them a resource they don't gain passively (usually a Status Buff) or more of that resource - usually money. This mechanic makes up the core of the gameplay. The opposing heroes want to do the same thing, trying to kill the allied units in order to accumulate experience and moneynote . Due to the lanes, allied minions will always go directly into contact with enemy minions and there are only a limited number of neutral monsters in the jungle to kill, forcing players to inevitably come into conflict with each other.
This conflict is accentuated by three additional factors. First, killing an enemy hero provides large amounts of money and experience. In the original DotA, this is doubly harmful as the hero who is killed outright loses money, though many other games have dropped this penalty because it's too harsh. Secondly, if an enemy hero is killed or forced to retreat, there is no opposition while you kill enemy minions, racking up money and experience. This also denies the enemy hero the opportunity to do the same, damaging their ability to accumulate power and resources. Thirdly, if a lane is left undefended, it is easier to "push" the lane: leading allied minions in an attack on an enemy tower, which is typically programmed to prioritize killing minions, allowing you to damage it in relative impunity.
As a result, a great deal of the interplay between the players and the teams comes from risk and reward; being more aggressive may make it easier to kill lots of enemy units, drive off enemy heroes, accumulate money more quickly, and damage enemy towers, but it also may leave you more vulnerable to counterattacks from enemy heroes, whether they be in the lane with you or ambushing you from the jungle (or both!). It should also be pointed out that the Instant-Win Condition involves demolishing the enemy's central building; killing enemy heroes will help you do this by giving you EXP, Gold and the freedom to roam around the map in safety (at least, until those enemies respawn), but that's all it does. These games subvert "Murder Is the Best Solution", which can lure enemy players into a false sense of complacency and Blood Knight-itis. Sure, killing the enemy players is fun... But is it necessary? It's entirely possible to "backdoor" a base by dodging the enemy team entirely and going straight to their core; likewise, it's possible to "team-wipe" the opposition, killing all five of them with no losses to your own side, but then not accomplish anything useful while they're dead.
As heroes accumulate experience, they typically passively gain extra Hit Points and Mana, as well as deal additional damage, but also usually gain other benefits as well, such as gaining access to new abilities or more powerful versions of the abilities they already possess; in many games, the player gets to choose which ability to make stronger at each level. However, the really critical resource tends to be money; while levels are very important, money allows a hero to buy items or other upgrades, which make them more powerful and sometimes grant them additional speed or special abilities they would otherwise lack. Unlike experience, money can only be spent when the hero returns to base (or respawns at base after their death), meaning that heroes must periodically retreat from the front lines in order to buy items or upgrades at their base, leaving temporary holes in their teams' defenses, but making them more powerful and better able to kill enemy minions and fight off enemy heroes.
Late in the game, after heroes have accumulated significant amounts of experience and money, they will typically take a more aggressive stance and start actively trying to destroy enemy towers, as well as try and gang up and destroy the special, more powerful monsters in the jungle to gain team-wide bonuses (or looking for an enemy hero that goes out of position and therefore easier to kill while doing all of the above); frequently, this forces the enemy team to deploy against them in response. These situations where whole teams come into conflict are known as "team fights", and can frequently vastly shift the balance of power as multiple heroes from one team might be killed and forced to wait to respawn at base; a decisive team fight, where an entire team is trapped and eliminated, can frequently cost the eliminated team the game. Typically, respawn timers also get longer as the later in the game it is, making such losses even more painful and decisive near the end of the game.
While enemy heroes may have their own Hit Points, the health of your team as a whole is measured in its buildings. The core building, remember, is the Instant-Win Condition, and destroying it by any means, at any time, results in victory. With very few exceptions, damaged buildings are not repaired and destroyed buildings are not replaced, meaning that each lost building is a step towards defeat. Additionally, as you lose your outer towers, you lose map control; the Fog of War spreads, giving the enemy team more opportunities to ambush you. Finally, within your base are typically important buildings which, if destroyed, actually unlock extra mooks for the enemy team, tilting the game further in their favor.
MOBAs typically provide modes in which each player selects a specific character they want to play, one at a time, alternating between teams; this is referred to the Drafting phase. The goal here is for your team to pick characters that will work together as a team, as team synergy is critical in higher-level gameplay. For example, a team of all Glass Cannons and Squishy Wizards may be able to do a large amount of damage, but without a Stone Wall to pin an enemy, thereby allowing said characters to actually land their manually-targeted skills, they could end up looking like Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy graduates; in general, a more well-rounded team will emerge victorious. Counter-picking, IE intentionally picking a character whose skillset works well against someone the enemy has already picked, is another important part of drafting a team. It's entirely possible for a team to be doomed from the start if they do not draft wisely and cannot deal with or disrupt whatever their enemy does. In games that offer the ability to select the hero you want to play blindly, before being automatically added to a team, there is always a danger of the automatically-created team lacking synergy and struggling to work well together, despite most games placing having internal rules in the matchmaker intending to ensure a team be somewhat viable.
Factors of a MOBA's toxic environment
Unstable Equilibrium is a big factor in MOBAs. Early-game mistakes can result in one team or another gaining an early advantage, which makes it easier for them to win later confrontations, giving them a larger advantage with every victory. There are plenty of ways to hand your opponent advantages too, from starting a fight you can't win to failing to show up at a fight you could've won, from being at the wrong place at the wrong time to being at the right place at the wrong time. The end result is that matches can often be decided long before either base is in even remote danger of destruction. Numbers are also critically important; at competitive levels of play, teams will often disengage after losing only one of their members, because their absence is already enough to virtually guarantee victory to the enemy team. Never Split the Party in a MOBA, unless you all agreed to execute the strategy of 'split push'note , and even that can be easily screwed upnote . Finally, because hero characters are (deliberately) limited in what they can bring to the table, a lack of teamwork can spell disaster. You might play a perfect game, execute everything correctly, avoid needless damage, get a ton of kills... and still lose, because someone on your team dropped their responsibilities. Even worse, if your team doesn’t plan to do what you want them to, you might not be able to play your game at all; you may be forced to use your character to do things s/he isn’t good at or even is designed to be bad at, leaving a sour taste in one’s mouth—even if said non-cooperative teammates go on to win the game (especially if).
The end result is that people can get really angry when playing a MOBA. Their communities are infamously toxic; they Suffer Newbies Poorly and blast weak team players. Many of these games have devoted communities who treat play as Serious Business, and due to the inherent difficulties in measuring the contribution of individual players on teams, matchmaking between individual players for pick-up games tends to lead to much more varied skill levels of players on a given team than for games with more individually-tailored rating systems, especially in games with five or more players on a side. This, plus the basics of human psychology, results in a recipe for G.I.F.T and Griefing, and all of the DOTA clones, due to the relatively long matches and teamwork-centric game design, suffer from this to a great extent.
To mitigate the problem of having highly competitive people of variable skill levels, some of the newer MOBAs have tried to adopt different systems with varying levels of success, either by making it easier for the losing team to catch up or by making it so that matches end more quickly when one team gains a large advantage; both solutions are intended to give players less time to be unhappy with each other and to spend less time playing games where the outcome is already clear. In addition, most if not all the current MOBAs have some sort of player score-based matchmaking system, where all players have a personal score — usually known as "Elo
" from the old days of League of Legends or "matchmaking ranking" (MMR) from present day Dota 2 — and joining the matchmaking queue will theoretically match you only with players with a score similar to yours, in order to guarantee that teams have a roughly even chance of winning.
Hero roles in a MOBA
Many MOBAs have a few well-defined roles for heroes:
- The Carry: A character, typically a Glass Cannon, who outputs a lot of damage through basic attacks. They are named after their responsibility for "carrying" their team to victory in the late game after their early-game frailty has been mitigated. By the end-game, these characters may be capable of killing multiple enemy heroes in a single fight or bringing down a tower quickly. Carries are typically balanced by the "Gathering Steam" trope, and if they're properly suppressed in the opening stages of a match, they may never reach their potential before the final hit is scored. Some carries are also considered "assassins", who are focused on killing off specific enemy targets. Most of the carry heroes are often ranged heroes, their skills buff their normal attacks and they build items to increase their normal attack power so this is often shortened as 'Marksman/Archer' role. However, there are some carries that deals in close range combat.
- The Caster: Frequently acts as a secondary carry of sorts. Where the Carry puts out Death of a Thousand Cuts via basic attacks, Casters are reliant on their abilities to do bursts of damage; they may also have the ability to place debilitating penalties upon enemy heroes or control the battlefield in such a way to make it harder for the enemy to bring their power to bear. Like the carry, these characters tend to start out weak but end the game with a great deal of power. Unlike carries, they may be poor at destroying towers: different games go back and forth on whether their main source of damage, abilities, can be used on buildings.
- The Tank, a character whose purpose is to draw enemy aggression. They're typically good at forcing enemies to fight with them, either stunning, immobilizing, trapping, pulling in, or taunting enemies into attacking them. This allows their teammates to kill them while they are otherwise occupied. Simultaneously, the Tank needs to be able to take a lot of punishment. Occasionally, there's also a sub-archetype of this known as the 'Fighter/Brawler', where they can end up being a semi-carry, trading some of their toughness for a direct close combat capabilities to kill their enemies while being tough enough to not become a Glass Cannon.
- The Support, a character whose job is to grant some sort of buff or healing ability to the rest of their team, keeping important characters (such as the caster and the carry) alive, helping characters stay "in-lane" longer despite taking damage, and otherwise boosting the abilities of their team. In five-player games, these players tend to be the one forced to double-up in a lane with one of their teammates and allow their teammate to accumulate the bulk of the money, forcing them to find other ways to be useful which don't involve them having high durability or damage. Dedicated support players are often called upon to master the largest variety of characters, as the "support" role can also involve offensive operations such as running interference for the damage-dealers or even setting up opportunities for them.
- The Jungler, a character whose job it is to wander around in the jungle killing neutral creeps. Unlike other heroes, these characters may fill any of the other roles on their team (though usually not support), and also are usually expected to act as assassins, trying to gang-kill ("gank") enemy heroes - not only the enemy jungler, but also the enemies in lanes. They also are usually expected to stand in for allied heroes when they're killed or forced to retreat from a lane in order to keep the lane covered at all times. In many games, the jungler is also expected to act as reconnaissance, either directly keeping an eye out for the enemy jungler to ensure that they don't ambush their allies, or leaving "wards" around, which are sentry-type units which may or may not be possible for the enemy to attack but which grant sight to allies, giving them warning if an enemy is trying to sneak up on them. The only MOBA that deviates from this is Dota 2: Jungler role used to be a thing and there were some heroes whose skills let them control creeps. However, with changes in the map in the latter updates, it drove away the role of Jungler, thus the role Jungler has been rendered useless (however, farming in a jungle is still a thing, especially for hard carries who feel unsafe to farm in the lane)
MOBA Archetypes
In addition to the normal roles as the above, there is a tendency that several MOBA just take inspiration from their predecessor and create a skill or character archetype similar to a previous game's hero, but mixes and matches it so it doesn't look like blatant copying, to the point that there are archetypical MOBA characters based on some Recurring Element happening throughout the whole genre. And with the Hero Shooter being based on this genre, they get their examples when they are based on a MOBA element.
It's massive enough that it has to be separated into three pages:
The archetypes are presented in table format for nownote , which is as follows:
| Archetype Name | |||||
| Description | |||||
| Dota 2 examples | League of Legends examples | Smite examples | Heroes of the Storm examplesnote | ||
| Arena of Valor examplesnote | Mobile Legends: Bang Bang examples | Marvel Super War examples | Pokémon Unite examples | ||
| Heroes of Newerth examples | Awesomenauts examples | Vainglory examples | Paragon (2016) examples | ||
| Other MOBA examples (if applicable) | |||||
| HERO SHOOTER EXAMPLES (If applicable) | |||||
| Team Fortress 2 examples | Valorant examples | Paladins examples | Overwatch examples | ||
| Other Hero Shooter examples (if applicable) | |||||
