I personally think MOBA should be used to broadly describe a style of game rather than what’s done while playing it. I know that when Riot coined the term, they were referring to games like DotA, LoL, etc.; to me the whole approach to a match’s flow is echoed similarly enough throughout multiple games, that applying the term MOBA to other games is a logical extension.

To me a game is a MOBA if:

• The way to interact with it is primarily designed around playing with other players online (the M and O of MOBA.)
• The goals of the players are against the goals of other players — ie. it’s competitive rather than cooperative (the B of MOBA.)
• Any player at the beginning of a match has access to all the same options as any other player. This one is a little more vague, but as the A in MOBA stands for arena, I imagine it like a group of gladiators standing before a communal weapon rack that they’ll all pick from; no one has any options that the others don’t have access to.

Following these criteria, something like Overwatch is a MOBA, as is DotA, and ironically LoL isn’t as you have to unlock options meaning you don’t satisfy the arena condition. To differentiate games like DotA, Smite, Awesomenauts, Deadlock, etc., I prefer the term lane-pusher as that’s a lot more specific and understandable.

Does it really matter what it’s called? Not really. I mostly just do it so I can feel superior to Riot for coming up with a vague term that is applied, how I deem, incorrectly, while also excluding their own game from the term that they made to describe it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/7haqnQvrYfI

I feel like I’m the only one who prefers the original, gamecube controls. Playing through the switch remake, I played with the new controls for, like, 10 minutes before switching to the original control scheme and playing the rest of the game with it.

Google en passant

A lot of the complexity came from around various scenarios you could be in; my goto whenever people would ask me “Why can’t someone just make printer firmware simple?” is that you could, if you only wanted to copy in one size with one paper type, no margin changes, and never do anything else.

There’s just so many different control paths that need to act differently; many of the bugs I worked on involved scaling and margins. Trying to make sure the image ended up in a proper form before it made it to hardware (which as more complexity, ran on a different processor and OS than the backend so that it could run realtime) when dealing with different input types (flatbed scanner vs a document feeder, which could be a everyday size, or like 3 feet long) different paper sizes, scaling, and output paper. I mainly worked on the copy pipeline, but that also was very complex, involving up to, something like, 7 different pieces in the pipe to transform the image.

Each piece in the pipeline was decently complex, with a few having their own team dedicated to them. In theory, any piece that wasn’t an image provider or consumer could go in any order — although in practice that didn’t happen — so it had to be designed around different types of image containers that could come in.

All of that was also working alongside the job framework, which communicated with the hardware, and made sure what state jobs were in, when different pieces of the pipeline could be available to different jobs, locking out jobs when someone is using the UI in certain states so that they don’t think what’s printing is their job, and handling jobs through any of other interface (like network or web.)

That’s the big stuff that I touched; but there was also localization; the UI and web interfaces as a whole; the more OS side of the printer like logging in, networking, or configuration; and internal pages — any page that the printer generates itself, like a report or test page. I’m sure there’s a lot more than that, and this is just what I’m aware of.

Just what was in the main repo (at least one other repo was used for the more secure parts of the code) was a little over 4 million lines. But yeah there’s a lot of complexity behind printers that I didn’t think about until I had worked on them. Of course that doesn’t mean they have to be terrible, it’s just easier to fall into without a good plan (spoiler alert: the specific firmware I was working in didn’t have a good plan)

I used to work on printer firmware; we were implementing a feature for a text box for if you scanned a certain number of pages on a collated, multi-page copy job. The text box told you it would print the pages it had stored to free up memory for more pages; after those pages had printed, another text box would come up asking if you wanted to keep scanning pages, or just finish the job.
The consensus was that it would be a relatively simple change; 3 months and 80 files changed — with somewhere in the ballpark of 10000-20000 lines changed, — proved that wrong.

Awesomenauts

It’s a 3v3 2D platformer lane-pusher with an art style reminiscent of a saturday-morning cartoon. The upgrade system is very simple compared to other lane-pushers, and the games tend to go a lot quicker (15-25 minutes.) It’s very intuitive to get into, but still has room for a lot of expression of skill.

Unfortunately Ronimo (the company who made it) went bankrupt in late August, so the matchmaking server went down in September; but recently Atari bought the rights to the IP, so it’s possible it will come back soon.

Purge (https://youtube.com/@PurgeGamers) is pretty good. He typically posts full, un-cut dota games, and is lower energy throughout. There’s not big volume or tone changes, and they’re long enough that you should always be able to fall asleep during them.