Popularity of Vainglory

VG does have a little too high of a bar when it comes to understanding the game’s finer points. It’s not really a pick up & play in any context, even blitz. I think that’s one of the biggest factors in popularity. Well, that and advertising anyway.

Lets not overblow this… if someone had ever played any MOBA on his PC, he will not feel VG as a too hard of a game. Atleast I didn’t and while clearly saw the need to learn a few things, it was casual gamemode at the start and I didn’t care to be competative while checking the game/gameplay. For me it was deep for a mobile game, but for sure easier vs the PC mobas.

Bare in mind that I started when the game was released for android, so there was even less content (heroes).

That’s the point though: for someone who has never played a moba or isn’t a hard gamer yet, vainglory is difficult to pick up & understand. You see people in lower tiers just trying to kill other heroes like that’s the only thing that matters. I’ve been a gamer all my life so it wasn’t so difficult for me to pick up & I can appreciate the strategy options it provides, but it’s not a game I could recommend to friends without having to sit there & teach them every little thing, which is not a good thing when it comes to the mobile world because of attention span. On pc & home systems it’s different, but on mobile simpler is actually usually better.

Most people from 10 to 30 are “gamers generation” and I think you underestimate the number of gamers that tried atleast one MOBA. On a side note, if one didn’t try any MOBA on PC anyway, I hardly doubt it will search for such games on his phone.

I don’t say what I say for any of those reasons.Try to reimagine things as if it’s your first time playing the game. There’s so much stuff to understand when you actually get into a match that isn’t immediately clear, like minion wave patterns and how that matters, or the point of using your turret for protection, or jungle cycles and how that matters, or sharing healing treants with your team, or sharing money with your team vs not sharing, when to push for kills vs when to let an enemy go, when you can actually risk going under turrets vs when you can’t, when to push for an objective vs when not to, when to stay in bush cover vs when to leave to help a teamate; the list goes on.

These are all things that are not immediately clear & aren’t easy to explain, but have massive impact on winning or losing a match, and this doesn’t include understanding how items synergize, how heroes synergize, how hero abilities synergize. All these things have the biggest impact on matches but are hard to explain. The fact that SEMC struggles with the massive amounts of guides it has to make is a symptom of the complexity of the game, and that complexity, while ultimately rewarding most of the time, can be a large step for new players. The fact that they won’t understand that all these things are why they’re losing until after hours of tutorials is problematic.

I think Vainglory is a little too complex in some ways, especially the non-visual mechanics, and I think that holds the game back a bit in popularity because players have little indication of these things beyond going through guide after guide. It’s rough to learn it all just by playing and it shouldn’t be that way, because most people naturally don’t like studying usually. It makes for denser play, sure, but it limits the playerbase to those that will go through all that studying & all those grueling lessons in losses. That’s not fun for most players. Add to the fact that this is all happening on a mobile device, where you can probably expect some kind of interruption unless you’re homebound playing, and it’s that much worse. Unfortunately, besides a wholesale revamp of the game, I’m not sure there’s any way to address these issues. It’s a reflection of the PC game mindset and it doesn’t translate well to the bite-sized nature of mobile, as amazing of a game as vainglory is.

ALL of that said, maybe SEMC doesn’t need to worry about any of that stuff, because none of those things are the primary reasons why people quit the game, it’s other stuff, and the other stuff has been given renewed focus by the CEO it seems, so maybe there’ll be some brighter days for vainglory in the future. I just think it’s probably always going to be a bit more niche compared to other mobas because of these reasons, like Counterstrike compared to Call of Duty.

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