User:Path411/Multiplayer Online Battle Arena

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) is quickly growing genre of video games that focus on team skill. Aeon of Strife is arguably the first game to create this genre, with games like Defense of the Ancients further popularizing it. Both of these games were developed as maps, Aeon of Strife using Starcraft, and Defense of the Ancients using Warcraft III.

Gameplay
In a MOBA, often there are simply 2 teams with a handful of players (typically 1-5 on each team). Each player controls a specific unit or Hero. Control of your Hero is similar to control of a unit in any basic RTS. In each match, a player's hero starts at level 1 and gains experience and gold as the game progresses through either killing enemy heroes, or from killing Creeps.

Heroes and Abilities
While each player must choose a Hero, typically there are a large number of different Heroes to choose from. Each Hero has unique abilities and skills. Typical Hero types are Tank, Support, Carry, and Gank/Assassin.

Tank
Often a team only has 1 tank. Though often limited in number on a team, a tank is by no means limited in usefulness. A tank is often responsible for taking the brute force of the enemy team's damage and negative effects. A Hero that is a good Tank often has several of these abilities:
 * Initiators- Abilities that lets a tank quickly approach the players on the other team.
 * AOE stun/disables - Abilities that cause several enemy players negative effects including limited/no use of abilities, movement, standard attacks and/or these abilities can increase the effect of allied abilities on an enemy.
 * Defensive Mechanisms- Abilities that can help prevent damage, increase health points, or any number of unique effects that prolong a Tank's time to live.

Support
The number of support heroes on a team often depends on the team's composition. Some can have several, or other teams can have very few. Support Hero abilities are broken up into a few catagories with a support character being able to pull from all categories or some filling a niche to only pull from a few.
 * Disables - Much like the tank abilities, disables are abilities that prevents enemies from doing actions or increasing the effect of allied abilities on the target. However, while some strong disables can encompass several enemies, most focus on one target.
 * Healing - Healing abilities typically focus on increasing an allied Hero's current health to help counter a burst of damage.
 * Support - 'Support' abilities are generally close to the opposite of disable abilities. Support abilities can increase movement, damage caused, ability effects, etc of an ally. The main focus of Support abilities is to help teammates.

Carry
Carries are simply damage dealers. When both teams fight together, often the carries are the main focus of the battle. Carries bring the most to the fight by causing a lot of damage fast to either a single target, or a group of targets. The important part of a carry is that they typically improve as they level and with items, making them extremely important in late-game. Carries can be broken down further into categories but the main two are:
 * Caster Carry- Caster carries are Heroes that focus on abilities to do a lot of damage(Sometimes called 'Nukers'). Much like a typical mage, where they focus on increasing their spell damage to kill enemies rather quickly in burst. Another focus of Caster Carries are that in most MOBA games they increase significantly in power until they hit a type of glass ceiling. This causes most caster carries to scale incredibly strong up through mid-game but die down due to poor end-game scaling in late game. Some MOBA have tried to remedy this, like League of Legends by creating a stat found on items that directly scales spell damage.
 * Physical Carry- Physical carries in comparison to caster carries focus on doing the core of their damage through their standard auto attack physical damage. This in general only scales with items or a few Hero abilities. However due to the carry's base stats, they often scale very well, and almost infinitely (at least until all of their item slots are full).

Gank
Ganks are sometimes confused with carries. Ganks are characters that often have either a combined arsenal of the other 3 previous types, or unique abilities that don't fall under any others. In general, these Heroes are only average while working with a team to kill multiple enemies, but excel at taking out an enemy player by its self.

Creeps
A very important part of a MOBA is the creeps. Creeps is a term coined to name basically all NPC unites that are killable.
 * Team Creeps are Creeps that are spawned, generally from each team's base and steadily advanced towards the opposing team's base. These are generally spawned in waves, left a lone they typically don't advance far as each team's creeps start out at the same strength.

Resources
Resources in a MOBA are typically only a monetary value or unit. This money is obtained either from killing NPC army units, or enemy players.

Victory
The concept to winning a MOBA is very simple but unique, defeat a certain building/structure that the opposing team is guarding. Unlike a RTS, to be able to attack this structure, you often have to destroy a series of smaller ones before hand, however most often, not all enemy structures need to be eliminated to achieve victory.

Meta-Game
Most MOBA do not feature any sort of Meta-game characteristics. However, League of Legends has incorporated a large Meta-Game aspect to their game to help keep a persistent online feel throughout each game.

Controversy
The name "MOBA" has some controversy about it. While AoS and DOTA have been around for a long time, they never defined a new genre as they were the only games of their genre. However, with the rise of more games to the genre, it seems like they each want to fit themselves in a different label. While traditionally games were called AoS or Dota - like games, MOBA has recently been used by several games to distinguish them from the original games of the genre.