Mobile Mobas

[Unassuming Local Guy]

Having just recently got into the world of Mobile MOBAs, I thought I'd write a short review of the few I've played and see what everyone else thinks.

Wild Rift

Easily the most polished of the lot, and has the most QOL stuff. It's just better made than anything else, and that makes sense given its background. It has a lot of funding behind it and it shows.

It's also definitely the least set up like an operant conditioning chamber. Still wants your money, but is less scummy about it than the rest.

Gameplay-wise, it's the slowest, most methodical, most tactical. Even though it's faster than most if not all PC MOBAs, this isn't a "spend a quick ten minutes getting pentakills" game like the rest of the mobile MOBA scene. You'll want to clear 20 minutes out of your schedule minimum per match.

Miscellaneous activities - as in, what there is to do aside from the classic 3 lane mode - are pretty limited. It has All Random All Mid which is fun, but otherwise not a lot aside from the odd limited time only event mode. Riot has a tendency to eschew fun in favor of catering to eSports tryhards, and the game often suffers for it. Oh well.

Arena of Valor

Take Wild Rift, make the map smaller (or make the heroes move faster, it's hard to say), and you have AoV. It's a much faster game with a heavier focus on roaming and teamfights. It may seem identical to WR, and in almost every way that matters it is, but the overall feel of the game is much more frantic and arcade-y.

It's also significantly greedier. It has all the red flags like daily logins and 500 different "click this button for a cool explosion of colors and one cent worth of currency" mechanics designed to get you hooked. If you're the addictive personality type, beware. Otherwise it's really not a big deal.

The game itself feels cheaper and just all around not as nice as WR. It's hard to describe, it's just not quite right. It's like when you eat slightly stale food. It's not bad per se, it's just not correct. That's how AoV feels.

It does have some extracurricular modes like auto chess, which is stupid as fuck but people seem to like it. It's less HARDCORE ESPORTS GAME so it's more willing to be fun, which is nice.

Overall it's fun and worth your time if you're looking for a quick brawl or two. But if you're looking to sink your life into a mobile MOBA, pick WR.

Mobile Legends

Take AoV, make it even greedier, even jankier, less balanced, and just kind of not good in general. It's the Made In China knockoff of the MOBA world. Literally. They actually got sued by Riot for millions of dollars because it was such a blatant ripoff, and that's tough to do in Chinese court. Unless you're Tencent.

If AoV didn't exist and WR didn't exist, I'd say play it just because even though it's not nearly as good as either, it's still better than nothing. It's still fun enough, but at this point why bother? Play a better game.

Onmyoji Arena

Has a unique Japanese setting, but honestly that's all it has going for it. It feels even cheaper than Mobile Legends. It's too bad, because with some polish it could have been really cool. I had high hopes for this one, but it's unfortunately not worth your time unless you're a massive weeb. But even then, AoV has a bunch of anime crossover characters. Play as Anime Guy from That One Anime! Wow!

 

[737 MAX Stan Account]

Vainglory was probably the best one I played, just a shame that they stopped working on it. That's the fate of all MOBAs not named Dota 2 or League, I suppose.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Vainglory was probably the best one I played, just a shame that they stopped working on it. That's the fate of all MOBAs not named Dota 2 or League, I suppose.

Also, IIRC, Smite is still somehow going, given that it's Hi-Rez's biggest cash cow, I think. Paladins is still pretty irrelevant in the class-base FPS genre, Realm Royale killed itself off with just one patch in the Alpha, Hand of the Gods (the Smite card game) has been killed off, and I don't know how well Rogue Company is doing right now, compared to the likes of CSGO and VALORANT.

I do wonder what caused Vainglory to fall off hard though.

 

[737 MAX Stan Account]

Also, IIRC, Smite is still somehow going, given that it's Hi-Rez's biggest cash cow, I think. Paladins is still pretty irrelevant in the class-base FPS genre, Realm Royale killed itself off with just one patch in the Alpha, Hand of the Gods (the Smite card game) has been killed off, and I don't know how well Rogue Company is doing right now, compared to the likes of CSGO and VALORANT.

I do wonder what caused Vainglory to fall off hard though.

It was high server costs that did Vainglory in, along with the fact that they were wanting to go ahead with a new project and simply lacked the manpower and/or couldn't find enough investors to support two games at once. I've heard murmurs of a "community version" (Similar to what Solforge tried when server costs made the game financially unviable) but I'm not sure if anything has come of it.

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

I do wonder what caused Vainglory to fall off hard though.

Mismanagement and greed, to put it bluntly.

SEMC, the developers, were making good bank off of the game, so they decided to lean into the esports side and host a live tournament with a fat prize pool. This was successful, but it lost them money.

To recoup the money they started doing things such as making cash-only skins and so forth. They did also improve the game by by adding a 5v5 map and different control options.

If they had just stuck with this they would probably have been OK, but the company's founder then decided to sell the game to some Korean company to maintain, while the developers worked on another game (some trend-chasing thing called Catalyst Black) which would restore their financial success.

The caretaker company decided that Vainglory would never be a cash cow, so they decided to shut down the servers and hand it back to SEMC.

What happened next was a shitshow. SEMC "provisionally" restored one server, but only hosted games without tracking wins and losses or allocating ELO. (They had the idea of making server software public and renouncing their rights to the IP, permitting further development as an open-source project. This failed because of "internal disagreement" and refusal to take more than one developer off the Catalyst Black team.)

Then the expected cash cow game tanked. There was almost no interest in Catalyst Black, which is presently a dead game.

Vainglory was also taken off the Steam storefront, so if you want to play the PC version you have to pirate it.

At present Vainglory is pretty much dead. The company has a discord server where you basically have to find other players if you want to 5v5. You can find a 3v3 in-game but will get matched with all sorts of players of disparate skill and ability because ELO isn't tracked. The last update was making all skins and heroes free, and it's still a single-dev game.

I don't recommend it in its current state.

As for the other games mentioned:

Mobile Legends: The problem with this game is the retarded way in which they handle reports. In short, if you get reported for something they decide that you probably did it. This leads to idiots gaming the system by mass-reporting anyone who plays a character they don't like because that character upsets the meta.

Wild Rift: One of the better ones, except that it's full of League of Legends fanatics doing dumb League of Legends shit (blatant feeding and raging if the other players do something they don't like).

Arena of Valour: This game is basically a reskin of Honour of Kings, a very popular Chinese MOBA. (The reason it had to be made was that Riot Games objected to the release of HoK outside China.) The average player of Arena of Valor is retarded, though, so you won't see good play until you get quite high up on the leaderboard.

Honor of Kings has now been released outside China in some regions and is a better game in general, so I'd suggest playing this instead if you have decent ping to South America or South East Asia (If the game is "unavailable in your region" on the Google storefront you can download and install the APK yourself). This has a far better level of play than AoV, in my experience.

I've never tried Onmyoji Arena because I heard it had a low player count and didn't feel like having another Vainglory experience.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

Wild Rift ARAM feels like mini Ultra Rapid Fire. 11 golds per second, alot of mana to spam even with the clarity spell, also the games are only going up to 15 minutes which is great.