Originally Posted by
Yvaelle
I play both of them pretty well, I'm also a former semi-pro FPS player, and I used to compete in a lot of the LAN RTS tourneys in my region (I'd never win because my RL BF / former roommate is strictly an RTS player, and a world class one - but with his tutelage I often came 2nd). So I like to think I have a pretty good understanding of high end competition in a huge variety of competitive video gaming. Let me break down how I see it down into two components, the physical act - and the mental game:
Physical:
WoW - it requires some of the highest manual dexterity of all of them, playing my spriest (83 keybinds) and warlock (68 keybinds) in high end pvp is comparable to playing a piano concerto - it's ludicrous how many abilities we juggle, macros and targetting keys we cycle through: in terms of manual dexterity the only thing close is FPS - and that's mouse-twitch, not key control.
FPS - this is the extremity of mouse-twitch targetting, it requires only a handful of keys (AWSD, Q, E, Z, X, C, V, 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5 - for even the most complex FPS, many are simpler, so 15 keys at the most) - the emphasis on any FPS is more on your mouse control, it juxtaposes very rapid twitch with precise target acquisition, and heavily penalizes failure of any kind relating to them (by contrast, I don't have to click anything with my mouse in WoW - I just hold right mouse the whole time, and use it to pan around and view the battle).
RTS - this frequently has higher keybinds than FPS, and makes greater usage of them - but still pales next to the keybinding concertos of WoW - competitive RTS usually involves 20 to 30 keybinds at the very most, which puts it at like a third to a quarter that of my Spriest. RTS does however make greater use of the mouse than WoW, so it's more of a balance between MMO/FPS competition, at least physically.
MOBA - LoL has 4 keybinds for any character, in terms of manual dexterity in your left hand, it's the simplest of them all by a mile. LoL makes more use of the mouse than I do in WoW, but it's simply nothing compared to what it takes to compete in FPS, or even what it requires to have a high APM in any RTS (a lot of map scanning and targeting via mouseclicks). In terms of the physicality of the contest, MOBA's, and LoL in particular - is trivial in complexity when compared to any other modern competitive genre.
The mental competition:
WoW - In WoW Arenas, a Lot is going on - and there is never any time for reprieve for strategy - it would be akin to an FPS where 3v3 people are in a firefight that doesn't end for 15 minutes, while also trying to do objectives (but being shot and having to cover/shoot the whole time). Or it would be like playing Starcraft or Dawn of War while being constantly engaged in a 3v3 battle, and having to manage your macro without ever being able to disengage your fronts temporarily to spend resources or juggle your resources/upgrade chains. In this sense, WoW is extremely complex mentally - people hate on GladiatorLoSSa - but just listen to how much stuff it's calling, and that's just the enemy teams cooldowns, it's not telling you their strategies or common tricks (interrupts, stuns, CCs, etc), it's not telling you any of the same stuff for your own team. At very high rating, no comp is faceroll - it might be straightforward to win it, but to get to very high ratings - you put the same level of thought into it whether you're playing Thugcleave or RPS (you just don't necessarily need to change your course of action as Thugcleave as often, but you have to be thinking about it constantly). The sheer amount of simultaneous information we need to process to understand WoW mentally, is very very high - but the strategy of it probably suffers for that, WoW is therefore tactically complex - but lacks strategic (long-term) plays, at least in modern PvP - in TBC strategies could play out over a 40 minute match, while tactics were almost immaterial.
FPS - High end FPS is interesting in that it is actually an extremely strategic game, with FPS economy systems (Quake, Counter-strikes), as well as establishing false predictability in your behaviour - and then changing it once you believe the enemy expects it (ie. Long A, Long A, Split B (something completely different), Fake Long A - when they expect it to be the same Long A), or in Quake the strategy of map control was often a bigger determining factor than the twitch itself (at least between top end players, where twitch varies - but not very significantly). FPS mixes this long-term strategy, with a tactical complexity that parallels WoW's - but what's nice about FPS is it gives you lots of non-firefight time to discuss your strategy, and then drops you into a firefight, and then gives you more time for strategics - WoW expects you to do both simultaneously, albeit to a potentially less tactically complex degree.
RTS - RTS obviously has a greater emphasis on strategy, it's important in RTS to be able to juggle your macro (strategy) and micro (tactics) fluidly, but it goes at a much slower pace than FPS or RTS - this is both positive and negative in terms of overall complexity. Because RTS generally give you less tactically complex gameplay than WoW or FPS, it appears simpler - but because you have more time to reflect, the head game of competing and deceptive strategic play becomes increasingly important, and robust as a result. RTS share with WoW a more complex knowledge base than FPS, and to a small degree to MOBA's as well - since in RTS you need to know the ratios for how many of each type of unit win versus each other time, depending on the upgrades between them all - while in WoW you need to know all the abilities of all the classes to have any predictive power needed to win at high rating.
MOBA - LoL competition is mentally complex in terms of very fast paced tactics between 6-10 toons simultaneously, with everything occurring in split seconds - this sounds complex - compared to WoW - the GCD is lower in LoL and therefore more things appear to happen in the same timeframe, but what's different is that each of those 6-10 toons only has 4 abilities, some have even less - so the mental arithimetic of LoL is in some ways faster than WoW or RTS, but it's also much simpler to predict because there are fewer variables (3-4 abilities per toon, versus 20-50 abilities per toon in WoW). In LoL, you can size up both teams in the lane if you see all who are present - and a good player has a pretty solid idea of how the engagement will go down before the first poke is fired. This leads to the positional jousting you see in LoL a lot - because all of them are able to predict the outcome more or less if they engaged at any given moment/position, so they shuffle around until they have an advantage - and then they all leap essentially simultaneously, with little or no communication.
So, not to be mean to LoL (or MOBA's in general, but LoL is my favourite MOBA anyway) - but the real strength that LoL has compared to MMO's, FPS or RTS - is that pretty much *anybody* can watch a LoL match and have a pretty reasonable understanding of what's going on: that's not a bad thing, it's the best thing for getting competitive gaming to a wider audience - LoL will accomplish that long before an FPS, MMO or RTS does. By contrast, it takes 2200+ experience in WoW specifically (no other MMO will do) to have even a modicum of understanding of who is winning a Rank 1 vs Rank 1 WoW match, if you are a Rank 1 equivalent Rift or SWTOR player - you probably have no idea who is winning in WoW.
I have no idea who is winning in top end RTS, none - and I used to podium in RTS LAN's all the time. FPS appears easy to follow - but all lay-people see is the tactics - someone got shot, someone made a good shot - the strategy of it is completely lost on anyone who isn't Cal-M+ (thinking of CS1.6, but pick your equivalent) - people see Fatal1ty hop around with ~flawless twitch accuracy, but what they don't see is that everytime he wins, it's not a matter of twitch - but dominating strategic points and making his opponents come to him.
So to answer your question, LoL is less complex both physically and mentally than WoW(MMO's in general), RTS, or FPS - it's true - but it's also not a bad thing. LoL's simplicity is what makes it accessible - and that it can achieve the level of complexity that it does while being so physically and mentally simple means that it is elegant. If we said that LoL is mentally 70% as complex as WoW or something (the percent is arbitrary), what's beautiful about it is that I only need to know ~300-400 abilities to fully understand any encounter in LoL - but in WoW I need to know ~600-1000 - the second-order interactions of say, Ezrael's teleport to escape, versus Katarina's teleport to re-engage is much simpler than knowing that a Priest's Fear can be countered a dozen ways by an unholy death knight, but only a few by a feral druid - once the gap is opening, there is again a dozen ways to close it or prevent it from being closed. WoW is messy and therefore overly complex, it is definitely more complex - but complexity isn't the sole measure of whether a game is good or not.
Edit: ...in my head I was on like paragraph 3 or 4, how did this get so huge O.O
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