This is the worst Moba for new players I have ever played.

[Magikabula]

I have played Smite, Dota, LoL, and Awesomenauts. For various reasons, I have left those games, come back to them a few times, and left again. I started Awesomenauts a month or two ago, and found the different format refreshing.

I expected some amount of learning curve just like in any moba, but there are a few things that really bother me about this game and make me not want to devote time to it.

The Bots
In college, I played a lot of Dota because it had offline support, and my college had very limited internet access to the point of flat out banning the use of internet for gaming. I played bot matches all the time. This habit carried through to League of Legends because it was the easiest way to get the first win of the day IP bonus. That principle also pushes me to bot matches in Awesomenauts. Unfortunately, bot matches are terrible in this game.

I'm not saying they're too easy; on the contrary, the hardest bots have an embarressingly good record against me. The problem is, whether I win or lose to the hardest bots depends on 2 things: my team, and my choice of naut. If I play Derpl, I can almost guarantee a win, no matter how bad my team is. If I want to practice with another naut, I have to rely on my team to carry me sometimes. This wouldn't be a big deal if not for these two problems:
If my team is too good, as they often are, they will push one lane and win in 5 minutes or less, leaving me not much time to practice. On the other hand, if my team isn't good enough to carry me, and we end up losing, YOU GET NOTHING for losing to bots. No exp, no awesome points, no naut level points, zilch.

Even nauts that I'm reasonably confident with, like Ayla will get SCREWED if my team leaves and get replaced with bots. I guess my ayla needs work, but still, where else to practice if not with bots? If I go down a level to medium bots, then it's the former problem all over again with 5 minute victories that leave you no time to practice with builds test your mettle. The points you get for those matches are miniscule.

So I guess the answer is not to play Bots. The worst that can happen is you get rekt by a better team and it's over really quickly, right? Well...

The Community
I don't want to say that this is the worst community in a moba I've ever seen, but it's pretty bad. I had hoped that the length of the average game would be a boon towards losing teams who could just wait for the next one, something you couldn't really do in Dota(no surrender option, REALLY long games) or LoL(somewhat better, but no surrender before 20 min), but some of these guys are just Aholes! You'd think that in a more mechanicallly intensive Moba, people wouldn't have time to check the scoreboard, since death times are shorter and lanes are shorter, but nope, people will still find the time to check the score to find someone to blame for their loss. There isn't much to say here, and again, it's not uniquely a problem with this game, but it's been more noticeable of a problem for me. Why?

The Matchmaking
I'm not good at this game. So why am I expected to compete with people who are good at this game, and if I fail to adequately compete with them, I get flamed by my team? My winrate is terrible. I lose 6 out of ten games. As frustrating as this is for me, it's gotta be even worse for my teams who have to put up with my incompetence. There are a number of reasons for my subpar performance, including the fact that I have under 300 PvP matches under my belt, my computer sucks and when I run the game, my mouse has a half-second delay, and my connection is frequently terrible resulting in the kinds of deaths people make gifs about because I reconnect while burning to death in the incinerator.

Still, how am I going to explain all this to my team to get them off my case? They don't care that I'm new, or my computer is bad, or that I got hard countered by a Reylin Ayla combo when playing Clunk. They just care that they're losing, and the enemy is fed. I'm not giving them a pass, here. I think that they foster their own misery by scaring away new players who might have improved in skill enough to be an asset rather than a liability. Still, if I were already playing with people of the same skill, it wouldn't be as big of an issue. Those games, unfortunately, are in the minority. If I were to ballpark it, I'd say 20% of games are evenly matched, 20% are mismatched in our favor, and the rest are mismatched in the opponent's favor. That's some pretty bad matchmaking.

The Summary
So Matchmaking is terrible, the community is terrible, and the bots are terrible, making this a very bad game for newbies. For the sake of comparison, the other 3 mobas I played had significant advantages. Dota had every piece of gameplay content unlocked from day one, meaning the only reason you were playing with bots was for the fun of it, NOT to grind. Yes, they did make me want to smash my computer on the ground sometimes, but they still let me practice the mechanics of whatever hero I wanted, as much as I wanted, at the skill level I wanted, and the unpredictable variables were more or less in my control, and not dependant on my team. League of Legends has pretty bad bots, but the matches at least last long enough for you to practice before PvP. Smite didn't really have very good bots, but it had more casual game modes that you could sink your teeth into before trying out the hard core Conquest mode. Even noobs can have a good time playing and learning those games.

I was worried that I wouldn't have any solution to propose to answer these problems, but I actually do. I would suggest that they allow losses in bot matches to still award Awesomepoints and experience to players so that they don't feel like they just wasted 15 minutes trying to learn a character they decidedly don't enjoy playing. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, let me tell you it is a HUGE slap in the face when I lose to bots. I get that the devs want to encourage people to play PvP instead of bots. It's not working. All it's doing is pushing new players away.

So that's my rant. Feel free to mock, critique, troll, etcetera. There's a lot about this game that I do really like, but losing isn't one of them. I'm not saying I'll ever like losing, but for a game that I lose a lot, I don't think I should be hating it quite this much either.

[kyasarintsu]

add valentina

[「Kida」]

Well, you're comparing 3 high budget games to an indie developer. It ain't gonna be better than them unless they have incredibly talented people across the team (which they do have some amazing artists and animators).

[Doppelganger]

Originally posted by kathy:

add owls

[Uncle Nastyfingers]

Are you serious? You have just under a 50 percent win rate, I imagine Ronimo would be very happy to hear that. Having a player of moderate skill, i.e you, hover around a 1/2 win rate is pretty ideal I think. Keeps them from getting too discouraged and let's them build skill to move into the better leagues as they can manage.

Fair warning, I skimmed your post and didn't pick up on all the points you made.

[Magikabula]

Originally posted by Anton Jackson:

Are you serious? You have just under a 50 percent win rate, I imagine Ronimo would be very happy to hear that. Having a player of moderate skill, i.e you, hover around a 1/2 win rate is pretty ideal I think. Keeps them from getting too discouraged and let's them build skill to move into the better leagues as they can manage.

Fair warning, I skimmed your post and didn't pick up on all the points you made.

I suppose it could be worse, but let me emphasize 2 points:
40% is ten whole percentiles lower than 50% At a sample size of 300ish games, I'd consider 45% reasonable and 40% a little low. You can reduce any fraction to a number just below 50%, but having actually punched the numbers into a calculator, and got .401ish, I don't think it reasonable to round 0.4 to 0.5 and call it square.

Secondly, this was a downward trend. Back at around 150 games, I actually had a slightly higher win rate, maybe 45%, but I can't remember. The impression that this gives is that the match making system weighs those wins higher than they should, and/or apparently ignores some of the losses for the purposes of calibrating my skill level. The result is that my opponents are far better than me more often than not, and if my team is better than me as well, then they are disadvantaged, and if they are at my level, the game is even more one sided.

[Meow]

Dead game indeed

[Arti_Sel]

Originally posted by Magikabula:

The Matchmaking

Not enough players causes matchmaking to suck.

There are a number of reasons for my subpar performance, including the fact that I have under 300 PvP matches under my belt, my computer sucks and when I run the game, my mouse has a half-second delay, and my connection is frequently terrible resulting in the kinds of deaths people make gifs about because I reconnect while burning to death in the incinerator.

You will never become an asset if you play under these conditions.

Still, how am I going to explain all this to my team to get them off my case? They don't care that I'm new, or my computer is bad, or that I got hard countered by a Reylin Ayla combo when playing Clunk. They just care that they're losing, and the enemy is fed. I'm not giving them a pass, here.

You are expecting your teammates to play with a sever handicap. Nauts is highpaced, playing with a noob is hard enough, but a noob with aim delay AND random free deaths. There is no reason for anyone to accept that. The problem is you, get your hardware fixed it will eliminate 90 percent of your frustration. Start with fixing your mouse.

I'm pretty much in the same position currently except I'm great at this game, but haven't played in like 2 months cause my workstation can't be setup properly were I am at.

[CR48]

Originally posted by kathy:

add valentina

you should stop, Ronimo won't work on a character out of pity for the autistic, your meme was never funny and your presence only servers as the act of charity of the day for the rest of us that may or may not decide to ignore you and let you be

[「Kida」]

Originally posted by Griffith_98:

they are trying to milk the cash cow

lol

[Misaky]

You're over exagerating a bit with your statements.
Most of the community is actually quite nice around my rank. Not sure about the other ranks thou.

Not exactly the machmaking but i think theres a problem with the personal rating. It doesnt go as down as it should when we lsoe a game.

I just checked the leaderboard, and theres a guy a few positions above me also in L4, it says he played over 300 games already this seasson but got only 36% win rate. If his with such low win rate why is he still at L4? -.-'
Over a year ago something similar happened to me, i somehow got slingshotted into L2, and then i got myself 33% win rate with 139 games played. It made me quit the game for so long, and i only came back a few weeks ago.

[Doppelganger]

It's not "I think there's a problem with the personal rating", The rating given by the entire elo system is completely flawed, resulting in literal player's boost in term of elo/capability.
That's also one of the main reason you can easily reach L2 if you get couple of lucky matches and such, where then, the rating won't decrease as fast as you got the rating.

[notsure]

You consider win rate of 4/10 games "pretty bad?"
my friend, you didn't play enough, more you play and worst it will get
consider the matchmaking IS SUPPOSED to give you a 50-50 win rate, which by it self, an a.i. deciding how many times you're supposed to win lose is a scam imo,
but it's not even close to the real numbers.
What they've found is that if you lose more than you win, you get addicted and keep playing cause you'll endlessly think you need to improve, especially when more often than not you see a guy super strong in the enemy team so you wonder well if he can win it's my bad, but I have bad news for ya even in that case. That's what they call a "smurf", players who do it professionally to boost/sell accounts and who use all sort of tricks (even hacks) to win.

Just consider the last ban wave they banned 40k+ accounts (so pump the number up a bit even) and consider the playerbase now is about 300k, do your math it's like 1 using hacks every game on average

About the community, can't really tell, since I have about 3k hrs in the game so I deactivated all chats and set to full anonymous long ago, to avoid insulting people more than anything, but also improved concentration during games by a lot, not that it matters anyway, the 10k+ things I've learned and improved during the years, allowed me to pass from dying a lot to carry every single game, or in turn mmr wise to pass from guardian to herald.. :')

[Felky]

Holy necroposting we have a 7 years over there

[Doppelganger]

AHAHAHAHAH man what a throwback, goated necro

[caaARRroOLL]

seriously...this game is THE worst. anyone who plays this MUST have brain damage.