League of Legends has become one of the most successful video games in history. With more than a decade of work and collections that exceed the one billion euros in an annual way, it has been studied until satiety which have been the keys to Riot Games’s success. We have talked about its launch free of charge, of the lucky moment in which its premiere or the key role of content creators took place. However, all the keys to which we usually pay attention neglect a fundamental aspect that the developers only took into account.

The declaration of independence of Defense of the Ancients

The most widespread belief in the community says that League of Legends is a copy of Defense of the Ancients. However, This approach is wrong . It is true that both video games were very similar, but this is because it was the creators of the original endow who decided to become independent of Warcraft III to create their own independent title. Riot Games signed Steve Feak, nicknamed as Guinso or Steve Macon, known as Pendragon, among other developers who contributed to the explosion in popularity of the most famous mod in history.

Being the genre of Battle Royale much more recent, it is easy to establish a comparison. Brendan Greene (Player Unknown) originally created the Battle Royale mode as a mod that was part of weapon 2 and Dayz, then deciding to make its own video game (Pubg). The story that involves Riot Games, Blizzard and League of Legends has more intermediaries; although parallels are evident . The great keys to success are in the declaration of dependence on a mod that became greater and decided to explore as far as it could get if he worked independently.

The big problems of being only a mod

Still in 2009 and with the launch of League of Legends just around the corner, an employee of Riot Games published an article in Gamasutra (current Game Developer) who explained some interesting aspects of Dota’s development and in which, in which, Above all, he claimed the decision made by what was now his company. He assured that there was a limit on what could be achieved with Defense of the Ancients while linked to Warcraft III. It is true that Blizzard’s game had allowed the creation of the Moba, but now left a roof that was too small .

The aforementioned Steve Mescon, known as Pendragon , explained that the small development team with which he had the game due to the lack of resources prevented bugs from correcting or introducing changes and counted how, on some occasions, the equivalent of the equivalent of the Current PBE was a game among developers in which all heroes were tested at the same time for just a few minutes. There were also limitations in what could be done and what did not, since the memory to which they had access was very limited. In fact, the map and its elements could not exceed 4MB.

Playing Defense of the Ancients was also difficult and not only for its mechanics. The players had to have a copy of Warcraft III that included the expansion The Frozen Throne, get the latest version of the map of Dota being attentive to the website of the creators-that was not easy to continue-and join a game. All this without tutorials or matchmaking tools. In this way, the only efficient way that new players arrive was that someone helped them to cope with this whole process.

These were not even all Dota’s weaknesses. The games had an average duration of 60 minutes, but could be extended until two hours . There were also no elements of progression as there were no statistical records within the game. The developers of Defense of the Ancients simply knew that they had something gigantic in hand that was being held artificially because of what it meant not having their own platform or the fact of not having a work team that could develop the video game in A professional environment.

The key to League of Legends success

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Returning to the element that we promised to solve, the keys to League of Legends can be summarized in the phrase Every the good of being a mod without everything bad of being a mod . The founding title of Riot Games was born after having learned for more than four years of everything that was wrong in Defense of the Ancients. When Guinso or Pendragon began working at Moba, they had an enviable experience that allowed them solve them.

League of Legends created his own universe, included very interesting progression systems through the unlocking of characters or the qualifying modes and won in creativity when he separated from Warcraft III. He introduced tutorials, could be downloaded from a website and had a client that was updated automatically and added goals everywhere to not being limited to the 4MB of those available by the Blizzard game . He also established his own life duration and accumulated a much higher amount of data. While now even users can know everything in the game thanks to different platforms, in dumbs the developers balanced everything depending on the opinion of the players.

To this situation it should still be added that the game came just in time to take advantage of all the other factors that allowed it to grow. A lesson that also learned Activision Blizzard that, included a antilol clause with the launch of Warcraft III Reforged . It established that any game mode created by the community in the maps editor would belong to them forever. Excessive, unpopular and motivated by the robbery suffered at the hands of Riot Games (League of Legends) and Valve (Dota2).