Reddit

One of the most notorious open forums live is Reddit. The name "Reddit" comes from "read it". It is an entertainment, social network service and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts and direct links. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits". 

            The website is known for its open nature and diverse user community that generate its content. The unique possibilities that subreddits provide create new opportunities for raising attention and fostering discussion across many areas. In gaining popularity in terms of unique users per day, Reddit has been a platform for many to raise publicity for a number of causes. And with that increased ability to garner attention and large scale audiences, users can use one of the largest communities on the internet for new, revolutionary and influential purposes.

            It's popularity has enabled users to take unprecedented advantage of such a large community. Its innovative socially ranked rating and sorting system drives a method that is useful for fulfilling certain goals of viewership or simply finding answers to interesting questions. User sentiments about the websites function and structure include feelings about the breadth and depth of the discussions on Reddit and how the site makes it easy to discover new and interesting items. One of the projects which I myself have used is University of Reddit, a subreddit that exists to communally teach, emerged from the ability to enter and leave the online forum, the "classroom," at will, and classes ranging from computer science to music, to fine art theory exist. The "teachers" are plain ordinary people who tend to have time for teaching others. There are such subjects as "Introduction to C++: A video guided tutorial" or "Wetshaving 101 - Learning the Art of Shaving Properly".

            As you can see Reddit has gone far away from being just an open forum to a platform where people learn, work and entertain eachother.

For more information, please be my guest: Reddit, Wiki, University of Reddit.

ˇThe rise and fall of MOBAs

For those of you who are rarely involved in gaming whatsoever and for those luckers who really have a life. MOBA(Multiplayer online battle arena) is currently one of the most popular(if not the most popular) gaming genre of video games. That involve mostly 2 teams with 5 players on each team. 

            Although the roots of the genre can be traced back to the 1989, I myself consider the rise of the genre with the release of the Warcraft III engine, which allowed a certain modder known as Aeon64 make a custom map named  Aeon of Strife (AoS). The aforementioned map was then used to create DotA(Defence of the Ancients). Since its original release, DotA has become a feature at several worldwide tournaments. Despite low graphic settings the game is still played. 

            With the rise of a new gamemode, ideas arose and in the year of 2006 an American video game publisher Riot Games was established, it has produced only one game. On the 27 of October, 2009 LoL(League of Legends) was released. It's a free-to-play game that is supported by micro-transactions and inspired by the DotA mod. According to SuperData, LoL generated $946 million via in-game spending between january and september of 2014 and it is more money than World of Tanks, Counter-Strike:GO, Dota 2 and Heartstone make combined. 

At this moment i'd like to point out that game is FREE-TO-PLAY and in game purchases do not affect gaming experience. Each year is held a World Championship which is broadcasted via Twitch.tv, Esl.tv, Youtube.com and many other e-sports broadcasting websites. According to RiotGames.com the 2014 world championship, which was held in Taipei, Singapore and final in Seoul(at Sangam Stadium), the peak for concurrent viewers(the highest number of fans watching at once) was 11.2 million and overall total unique viewer count for the finals came at 27 million. The prize pool for 2014 CS was $2,130,000.

Now don't get it wrong. LoL is not the only MOBA currently live. There are many others, some are even good but not so popular.

The biggest rival of LoL is indisputably DotA 2. Development of DotA 2 began in 2009, when the developer of the DotA mod, IceFrog, was hired by Valve corporation as lead designer. DotA 2 was the long-awaited sequel to DotA and was praised by critics for its gameplay, production quality and faithfulness to its predecessor. However, the game was criticized for its steep learning curve and inhospitable community. Finally in the summer of 2013 DotA 2 was officially released. Valve did not want to waste any time so althought the game was still in the beta testing the first International tournament was held allready in 2011. Later on the tournament became annual world championship with prizepool getting bigger each year and peaking at $10.9 million during the 2014 championship, which is the largest prizepool in the history of electronic sports. 

            Many players prefer Dota 2 over Lol and vice-versa. Both games are free-to-play. Dota 2 has slightly better graphical settings and requires more time to get used to it. League of legends imho is slightly easier and therefore requires less time for learning.

Another possibly promising game would be Smite,  it's a third person action multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Hi-Rez Studios. It's a quite a fresh game since it's released on the 25, March 2014. I personally haven't played it but what makes it interesting is that although it's a MOBA, the player controls the god in a third person perspective, which is a unique characteristic of this multiplayer online battle arena game, as other games of this genre are typically played from a top-down perspective.  According to Hi-Rez Studios COO Todd Harris 

 "At the game's release in late March, we were at three million players, and we are now well over four million."

 compared to 27 million active daily players of LoL, Smite has a long way to go before it can become more of a threat to Riot Games.

Although these examples are quite promising not allways developers come out with ideas that are led till the victory.  A good example would be Dawngate, it's a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed by Waystone Games and published by Electronic Arts. It was meant to be a free-to-play game, likely to be supported by micro-transactions. Unfortunately due to slow progress that the game had during its beta testing it was shut down and taken off the development.

            Dawngate aimed to separate itself from LoL and Dota 2 by implementing new game style. Although there are different variations to playing a match, in MOBA genre the meta rarely changes and Dawngate wanted to introduce a new way.  At the start of the game you would chooce a role and your playstyle was defined by your personal choice, not the champion you picked. While in Dota 2 and LoL your role is mostly defined by the champion you pick. Other than that Dawngate brought some interesting ideas about improvement of ingame player behaviour. By the end of each match all players would have to vote for the so called "MVP"(most valuable player) which, in turn led to postgame bonuses(ingame currency, bonus exp, unlocked champions).

           

            I believe that despite the failure of the game leading MOBAs have something to learn from Dawngate and from each other.