Do MOBAs have to be so mechanically limited?

They can, do, and will evolve with new mechanics and influences, but what you seem to want isn't that.

Think about those games. Imagine a 1v1 scenario, with no creep, no other influence, and the exact same value of items on both sides. Just the 2 players.

Is this an interesting fight? Of course not. The best player vs an average one would only slightly improve the potential of his character, but there is no action game here, there is next to no potential for mechanical outplays, and it bores me to tears.

This is essentially removing everything that makes the game unique and asking why it's not interesting. Would Starcraft be good if it was 1v1 without resource collecting, base building, unit compositions, etc? Would an FPS be fun if there were no walls and everyone had to use the exact same hitscan weapon?

And, point of fact, people DO play 1v1 DotA and have for going on a decade. And it is interesting and it is a test of skill.

You look at the game and see all the things its not without recognizing what it is. It seems guaranteed and with little opportunity to outplay an opponent because you don't know the actual mechanics and how they interact. In DotA there are a dozen ways to outplay someone just when it comes to last hits and denies, from positioning and AI manipulation, on to animation cancelling, faints, and baits. These are mind games and systems that are completely unique to the genre (and even to DotA specifically). Similarly, there are a dozen ways to negate something that seems guaranteed on the surface, and always with another series of mind games and mechanics that are unique.

There are forms of hitstun, there are forms of blocking, and there are even uses of the 3D plane. You just don't see them because you expect them to be, ironically, like other games instead of allowing them to evolve into something else.

Sometimes you do have to allow a game to be different. Otherwise you end up complaining about Counter-Strike because it doesn't have meter management.

You should play Ullr in Smite. He's basically the king of outplays. If you're a great Ullr player, you can survive nearly anything and kill anyone. Smite also has different modes which focus more on fighting than objectives. Duel is a 1v1 game where there can be a lot of fighting, Arena is a 5v5 almost all fighting, Joust is a 3v3 with balance but more fighting, and Clash is a 5v5 with tons of fights. Smite also uses WASD + Mouse, and every skill is a skillshot. Juking enemies by strafing and avoiding their shots is a big part of the game.

There has never been a MOBA with hitstun

Every MOBA has stuns. Having a stun on every auto-attack would upset the mechanics and design of MOBAs just as having a creep wave in SSB would upset that game. SSB is primarily a fighting game, while a MOBA is a more tactical game.

blocking

Many MOBAs have heroes with blocking skills.

use of the 3d plane

Paragon uses 3d environments.

A Moba's core mechanic is to push lanes in order to destroy the enemies core.

All "evolution" should ideally come in the form of supporting that core mechanism, not adding other cores in the form of combat simulation.

there is next to no potential for mechanical outplays, and it bores me to tears.

The problem with "mechanical outplays" in a strategy game, is that the physical execution can often overpower the strategy. You can recover from a bad decision just because you can press buttons faster and more accurately than your opponent.

In a genre of game that is about decision making, there shouldn't be anything that undermines that decision making.

One of my favorite parts about Dota or League, for example, is the fact that you can't just out execute someone if you're caught in a bad situations. It makes the game much more cerebral, if you are caught in a bad situation, then that's that.

In a First Person Shooter you can recover from mistakes just by being really good. In a Moba you have to not make mistakes in the first place.

In dota you can disjoin a projectile or ability in many ways. It requires good timing to pull off, which almost every pro knows how to. Armlet toggles are also a great mechanic of how careful timing can lead to huge outplays. Then you have skillshots like shackle, toss, hooks, and a whole lot others. 3d planes? Uphill misses, and items that you can buy to mitigate that. Vision that is separated into ground and flying vision. Items that give you remote vision on the map, and items that circumvent this.

There is way more complexity in dota than your post seem to indicate, which answers all your questions if you had accumulated some hundred of hours in dota.

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Personally, I think that the MOBA genre has kind of lost sight of what it was and why it was good to begin with. It's essentially about being part of an army, helping support and push your minions, taking out major enemy threats and slowly gaining ground to destroy your opponent's base.

Its very core sits at the heart of RTS. Of course with more recent evolutions it's become more about hero combat and hero vs hero action. Of course this has been driven by the fact that sitting behind a tower and waves of minions and farming for last-hits isn't particularly compelling to watch or play.

But it's in its nature of RTS and hyper-balance that I think they've missed a trick. The Map. It's easily the most important part of the game as anything else. And yet, no matter which MOBA you go to (no, I'm not going to count Heroes here, it really doesn't fit with the other MOBAs) the map is (in 5v5s) a 3-lane symmetrical map (for balance) it has a jungle where you can kill small things for xp, medium things for buffs and large things for money or a team-wide buff.

There's so many changes they could make to change the game up map-wise.

• Fighting over resources
• Things that actually change the shape of the map
• Being able to recruit extra Heroes to your side
• Upgrading/evolving/changing minions
• Evolving/Modifying Heroes to change how they behave entirely
• Swapping control of Heroes

There's so many things they can do, but they don't because:

• Balance - no one wants a MOBA that doesn't -look- fair
• Skill ceiling/Complexity - there's already too many skills the player needs to learn

Evolution is happening, but it's slow and only happening one game at a time. The problem with that is that when a company makes a MOBA they have no incentive to iterate and make a new one, only to add content to their current. They won't go back and massively change systems and add things to how the game works.

And lastly those that play MOBAs tend to have the one MOBA they play at the moment. With every new MOBA it splits the pool of people interested in them down further. Generally this ends up in the game just failing to attract enough players. It's hard enough to attract player to a game with already such complex strategies and high skill-ceiling.

Others have noted that, simply, MOBAs aren't about player vs player combat, they're about placement, strategy, tactics, organisation. Watch some professional games, watch how it's about awareness, safe movement, zoning, warding off, poking, committing, punishing. It's more about controlling your opponent and the flow of the long battle than most anything else.

But I feel some recent MOBAs are starting to lose sight of the tactics in favour of a hero-vs-hero combat focus.

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Think about those games. Imagine a 1v1 scenario, with no creep, no other influence, and the exact same value of items on both sides. Just the 2 players.

There is a game somewhat like this called Bloodline Champions. It plays like a minion-less, lane-less moba in terms of mechanics. It's much more teamfighty and feels kind of like a moba crossed with a twin stick shooter.

Your problem is that you aren't playing Dota. Most if not ALL other MOBAs are incredibly shallow and are catered to a casual audience... Dota is the only one that has the depth and mechanics that will appeal to a more hardcore audience.

You could ask the same thing about the core examples of any genre, from 1v1 fighters to chess. The MOBA is one of the youngest genres to establish itself in recent years and it takes massive amounts of balancing. Give it time, it will evolve, it is already happening.

Fighting games have extremely low player pools compared to MOBAS for good reason. Imagine if people had to learn frame data, time their inputs for combos instead of just waiting on cooldowns, and hit confirm just to even start doing damage. These are people that think Starcraft 2 is too hard, so they play a game that limits your control from 150 units + Base management, to just 1 character.

It's no secret casual games brings a bigger audience. Nobody wants to admit it, but that is exactly why Smash Brothers and Overwatch are some of the most popular games of all time. Guilty Gear and Killer Instinct aren't bringing in viewers in the millions because they are substantially more mechanically involved. Why learn inputs when you can hold a direction and press a button? Why resource manage when you can just shoot infinitely? MOBAs are the same way in that they give you high rewards for low amounts of effort. A single button, the "ultimate" button, can kill an entire team and there's usually little counterplay by the receiving end. You never hear about some LoL character parrying an Ult on pixel health for a legendary comeback. If someone has a blocking mechanic, it's automated and put on a cooldown.

So any developer making the new MOBA instantly thinks "I'm not going to have success unless I simplify the mechanics". The biggest and most lucrative audience are casuals, because the market for hardcore gamers isn't worth catering to in a genre so saturated.

Casuals are happy when simple things like "Getting a kill" or "opening a loot crate". They get feedback saying they are doing good for doing a simple task. It tricks them into thinking they have skill.

But Hardcore players are only happy when they are shown the raw data telling them they are better than other people. They don't care about cosmetics or commendations. They need the validation of real people. This is much harder to design a game around because you're also telling a large portion of your player base that they suck.

Unless the genre revels in skill like Fighting games and RTS, there is no room for a high skill ceiling MOBA, MMORPG, or any genre that consistently caters to casual players. FPS used to be mostly hardcore players, but after COD the fair and balanced arena shooter genre was replaced by level up loadout shooters, and more recently hero shooters. MOBAs literally started as a sub-genre of RTS, and it has built up an audience from day 1 that prefer to play this simplified version. So convincing a large enough portion of that userbase that "this harder to control version of the current game you're playing is actually fun" can be pretty difficult.