4Game

To me, not a huge fan.

I feel like my main critique is that it encourages much less direct enemy interaction. It's still obviously pitting players and their skill against each other, but it feels more like pitting each player against neutrals and towers and you win if you played better than the enemy at fighting those non player entities. Obviously that's hyperbole but it's that direction things moved.

A lot of my favourite heroes dropped off the map, for example, Ursa, he farms creeps decently but doesn't hit towers and relies on kills, kills are much harder to get if the enemy plays cleanly because the map is larger with deep untakeable outposts and gates to stay away. you're much less incentivised to hunt and steal deep farm by force because hunting takes longer and there are so many camps to farm and it's much easier to surround you.

I think BSJ said it recently but sometimes both pos1 and 3 are going radiance in the same game and it's not even a grief, there's just that much farm around that it really seems optimal to have a soft carry as offlane like CK or WK and mid is also about dodging the enemy mid too as well it seems.

Idk, I don't fancy it, I went 17/0/7 on weaver the other day, and yeah in a way it felt good, but it was mostly just hitting towers and melting them so fast the enemy felt a need to respond quickly and that hastiness cost them their lives, it felt less rewarding and more just a 20 minute long outcome after a decent lane with a meta hero pick. "but stomps aren't fun" I used to enjoy stomps a lot more when it was about killing the enemy players rather than just killing a tower.

I'm one of the lowest fight highest farm players I know, I use a data tracking tool and my hero damage percentile for almost every hero I play is very low despite a decent winrate, and even I think this meta has gone too far in that direction.

As for fixing it… not many ideas, I'd be fine with a map reversion but I know there's less than 1% chance of that lol

another option is more movement speed for all units, further range blink dagger, etc. things to pseudo shrink the map. they did a little of this with the 30ms extra at night disabled by hero damage but still not nearly enough.

nerf wave creep killing spells so heroes actually have to show on lane for more than 0.5 seconds and can't all flash farm and actually need to buy items to do that (looking at earth spirit, primal beast, kunkka, WD cask, WK skeletons, etc)

any other suggestions if you feel the same way?