One thing Frag touched on is that your online ranking inevitably adjusts based on how awful you are. In HoN, you start out at 1500 PSR (which is essentially your skill level). No legit newbie would ever be that high, and they would be better fitted at the ~1000 range. One solution I could think of is that before you play online, the game could offer an optional "placement test" against the AI and depending on how well you perform, your skill rank is adjusted. I could think of several ways this wouldn't work (the AI could be busted, the grading criteria could be wrong, and so forth), but it could at least put the legitimately awful players in the same pool and have them avoid the frustration of getting stomped for the first 20 games.
Interesting show -- the end really caught me off guard. I wish I could at least hear the conclusion to the conversation.
Even though I'm pretty awful at playing RTS games, the DoTA talk was interesting. In five years, is the 1v1 RTS going to be in the same place that FPS deathmatch finds itself today? Largely shunned, mostly limited to a handful of tweaking nutballs with incredible skill?
I think FPS games were at more of a disadvantage, since in a 12-player Deathmatch you can only have 1 winner and 11 pissed off people. Proportionally, the game style pissed off a far larger portion of the player base than a 1v1 RTS duel. At the same time, an RTS defeat is a great deal more crushing and demoralizing than losing a 10 minute deathmatch. I suppose you can argue that matchmaking services mitigate player discontent, but it's probably too little too late for those styles of play.
You bring up some good points. I was reading the HoN thread at SA and a poster brought up a good point that explains why people rage and why the community is so harsh. Competitive RTS games are a much longer time investment than a fighting game or FPS. A match in Street Fighter can last 5 minutes at most, whereas your typical DotA/HoN game is generally 30 minutes minimum.
League of Legends has a matchmaking system and I personally think it works out fairly well. In the ~22 games I played I never felt like the tables were so stacked that winning was impossible. I actually like LoL quite a bit, but it feels like Babby's First DotA (also, I'm not a fan of the microtransaction model). That is not a bad thing, but if you start to enjoy the gameplay you will eventually want something more in depth which is why I drifted towards HoN.
