You'll communicate more comfortably and effectively, know how to work with one another's playstyles, and cut down on the possibility of working with dead weight or outright unfriendly partners. As a bonus, you can plan out your squad composition to maximize each squadmate's potential. Besides, nothing's more frustrating than winding up with a random teammate that thinks they're better off playing as a one-man a

Blizzard would have much greater success in Overwatch , a first-person shooter version of the MOBA. Others wouldn’t be nearly as lucky. Paragon , Dawngate , Infinite Crisis , Arena of Fate , and Battleborn all came around the same time and all failed to live up to expectations. Many of them simply failed altogether with servers shutting down a few short years la

Long-standing G2 Esports mid laner Luka "PerkZ" Perković took the _ League of Legends _ world by storm in 2019. Prior to this year's season, G2 announced their addition of former Fnatic mid laner Rasmus "Caps" Winther. As a result, PerkZ moved to the AD carry position. The risky move left many wondering where the team was headed, though G2 came out the other side even stronger than before. With PerkZ as their carry, G2 won LEC Spring after topping the regular season’s leaderboard. They next attended the Mid-Season Invitational, where they took down Korean powerhouse SK Telecom T1 and destroyed North American side Team Liquid to take the cr

With success comes imitation. Many game developers saw the incredible financial success of both LoL and Dota2 and thought they could change the classic MOBA formula just enough to stand out. Titan Forge Games released Smite , a mythologically-themed third-person battle arena, in March of 2014. Although certainly popular by most standards and also featuring a world championship with a $1 million top prize, Smite never quite gained the rampant popularity of either LoL or Dot

Support Heroes - This last category can also be considered simply to play at first, in the right circumstances. As the name implies, these heroes have abilities that are meant to support teammates, either through preventing damage, providing CC, and m

Blizzard Entertainment, once the birthplace of the modern MOBA thanks to Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients , tried their hand at creating a MOBA with Heroes of the Storm . Released in June of 2015 at the very height of MOBA popularity, HotS struggled to gain the same kind of following as its larger brethren. Although innovative and containing many changes to the core gameplay that made it both easier to learn and more "fun", HotS was plagued with poor Zeri playstyle monetization as well as technical and hero balance issues. Blizzard finally admitted defeat in December of 2018 by moving developers to other projects and canceling the game’s official tourname

Both LoL and Dota2 would arrive in open beta roughly around the same time, but Riot got the jump on Valve by releasing League of Legends in October 2009. Since then, LoL 's popularity has simply exploded. By 2012, LoL was the most popular game in the world and by Jan of 2014 the game had 67 million people playing it every month. LoL was easily the most popular game viewed on either YouTube or Twitch, and with that many eyeballs came an exploding eSports scene. Professional tournaments began in 2011 with the League of Legends World Championships providing the best team in the world a top prize of $1 mill

San Francisco Shock star Jay "sinatraa" Won took over the _ Overwatch _ League in 2019. Remaining consistent through meta and rule changes, the 19-year-old damage player earned his spot on everyone’s _ Overwatch _ radar. The San Francisco Shock reached the Grand Final of each Overwatch League stage in Season 2, and won stage 2 over the Vancouver Titans. Once in the postseason play-offs, the Shock suffered an unexpected early loss to Atlanta Reign. Led by sinatraa, the team went on an incredible lower bracket run to the Grand Final. Their dominance continued in the Final, where Shock came out victorious with a 4-0 scoreline. Along with the _ Overwatch _ League, sinatraa aided Team USA in a victory at the _ Overwatch _ World Cup. Sinatraa was named the MVP of both the _ Overwatch _ League and the _ Overwatch _ World Cup. The standards the 19-year-old set this year will live on in _ Overwatch _ ’s esports hist

So what happened? The same thing that’s happened with almost every big innovation in gaming: it arrived, it peaked, it got iterated to death, and then it finally died. Or it’s at least in the process of dy

MOBAs arrived as a popular genre back in 2011, but their origins can be traced back to the late ‘90s. A popular StarCraft map called Aeon of Strife is often quoted as the original MOBA. Instead of players controlling multiple units and the structures with which to build more, players controlled just a single hero unit and fought alongside a number of lesser AI-controlled units. The map is just three lanes, with the AI-controlled units battling in each one to a standstill (usually). It's up to the player-controlled heroes to turn the tide and ultimately destroy the enemy's b