The Magic Man wrote:

man, MOBA is such a terrible term

It only exists because developers, for whatever reason, don't like referring to their games as "Dota clones". Even though that's exactly what they are, and the people who made Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends were former Dota players, which is where they got the inspiration from.

I don't know why but nowadays it's taboo to admit you got inspiration from something. The same way people making block games don't want to be associated with Minecraft, even though their games play almost exactly the same, and they hadn't made the game or had the idea prior to the existence of Minecraft.

If you really did apply that logic to all jargon though, then the whole of western culture would fall into disrepair. RPG would only indicate a game where you play some form of role, which could mean almost anything.

That being said though, I think they should be called DWISMGs, which would mean Dynasty Warriors Inspired Streamlined Multiplayer Game. Even rolls off the tongue.

The Magic Man wrote:

RPG is also a terrible name for a genre.

But FPS is a perfectly fine description. First person shooter, thus implying it's played from a first person perspective and you shoot things. Fighting game implies you fight. Racing game implies you race.

But that would make Skyrim a FPS, because you can play in first-person and shoot stuff with fireballs, lightning, arrows, and whatever else you can fire off in that game.

But MOBA (and RPG) don't really imply much, and can be applied to many vastly different games.

I prefer "Dota clone" or, for the people who get too butt hurt over calling it that, "ARTS" ( action real time strategy ). I feel like ARTS is a good name for them, since they originated in RTS games, and the fact that they are still strategy games, but with the mechanics changed to where only one unit is controlled with multiple abilities gives it the action-game feel. Action real-time strategy game is fine.

But our community is argumentative and toxic, so we'll never all agree on one term. There will always be those saying "Dota clone", or "MOBA". Honestly I don't really care because the genre is at the point where you know exactly what types of games someone is referring to when they say "MOBA", so the term is serving it's purpose as a genre title even though technically it's not a good one. I've never seen someone bring up CoD, WoW or Street Fighter in a MOBA discussion, so people are aware of what the term means and what things constitutes a MOBA and what doesn't.

Deep philosophy coming from Fugsnarf, except it's all wrong.

Lugia319 wrote:

Deep philosophy coming from Fugsnarf, except it's all wrong.

Please, go on.

I didn't say that the words have no meaning, I said that their meanings are not always clear and are merely understood, depending on what's being talked about. There's no scientific way to define why we draw the continent lines where we do. We cannot say what a continent is, only how many they are and what their names are. Sure, they may differ in some places such as North and South America combining to be America, but that's beside the point. The point is that RPG, MOBA, and whatever other acronyms there are don't rigidly need to be defined by what their letters mean, rather they are understood by most gamers to mean something relatively undefinable but understandable, just like continents and planets.

No, what he's saying is that language is entirely arbitrary when it's not. It does no good for a word to exist (such as apple) when it's only used by one person. That is, language as a means of communication requires two people to agree that apple means apple. It's not arbitrary because arbitrary would imply that someone could call something an apple and everyone would just have to deal with it.

Language is a two way road and to say that "It's completely ambiguous and arbitrary" is flat out wrong. Language exists not at the whims of some individual but because communication is a necessity. And it's not unique to humans either. Wolves have their own language, insects have their own language. Is it because these species decided "oh, let's call this this and let it go"? Or is it because communication is an intrinsic property of language and it relies heavily on both parties agreeing that X is X.

Also, while the definition of planet is still being debated (hence the "agreement" portion of language) the definition of continent is well-defined (through tectonic plates). That's why the Middle East isn't a continent.

Vrocaan wrote:

"Multiplayer Online Battle Arena" is totally not ambiguous. Not one bit. Nope.

It's not.
Multiplayer - More than 1 player
Online - Requires an internet connection
Battle Arena - Places where fights go down

However, you're forgetting that MOBA covers an entire set of games, when people think of MOBA (like DotA or HoN) they're thinking of a specific subset of MOBA. That's the distinction that isn't made through MOBA alone.

For example, the following games are MOBAs but they're not DotA clones:
1. Dungeon Fighter Online
2. Free Allegiance

Shoot, if you want to be so picky about MOBA being "ambiguous", why don't you complain that book genres are also ambiguous? Why has society not collapsed because darned if we can't figure out whether or not Game of Thrones is fantasy or not?

Nix wrote:

lugia please leave this website

I'll leave only by force. Though overall I've probably done more for this website than you ever have.

Didn't realize calling people out on philosophical bull$#@! was "being an ***". My bad. Or was my completely coherent response to why it was philosophical bull$#@! the "being an ***" part. Or was my explanation of why MOBA isn't ambiguous at all? You tell me.

To be completely fair, the genres and subgenres aren't the ambiguous terms. It's the games that are an ambiguous mix of several genres that's the problem. It's not that the games we consider MOBAs are inconsistent, therefore MOBA as a term is inconsistent. It's that people can't decide which shelf to put games in that is inconsistent.