How to Make MOBAs Newbie-Friendly

Multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA, is a term created by Riot games in an attempt to get people to stop referring to League of Legends as a " DOTA clone" (which is totally what it is). They can be best defined as real-time strategy games where you control a single unit as part of a team of other human-controlled units. The genre exploded in popularity after League of Legends somehow became huge (perhaps it filled the need for a Defense of the Ancients type game that wasn’t using the Warcraft III engine, despite not being the first to do so). But despite the genre’s heavily crowd-pleasing nature, MOBAs are difficult to get into. They present thousands of options to the new player: countless arrays of characters, skills, items, builds, and tactics. MOBAs generally have poor tutorials and some don’t even have an option to play against bots. Add in the fact that people have been fighting hard to win at them since like 2005 and are openly hostile to new players and you have one confusing mess that drives away just as many who get into them.

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