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Some people call it Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), Valve is calling the upcoming Dota 2 a Action RTS (Real Time Strategy) and I've seen some using Action RPG.

Has the community come to an understanding?

I do not play these games much (or well :P) so I don't know.

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MOBA is the official term, as Riot Games has referred to LoL as that themselves. I sort of wonder the point of this question, actually - what does it matter the genre a game has, as long as its fun? – Raven Dreamer♦ Aug 16 '11 at 17:43
That should be the answer Raven :) – Sorean Aug 16 '11 at 17:47
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Related: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/23572/… – FAE Aug 16 '11 at 17:53
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@Raven moba is not the official term. – hexa Aug 16 '11 at 18:00
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I'm torn on this question. On the one hand it represents a real problem: knowing if a game fits into this genre is dependent on what people are calling it. On the other hand it's asking what that community consensus is, which is a fairly subjective concept that shifts rapidly over time. Part of me wants to keep it open and part of me wants to close it... – tzenes Aug 17 '11 at 1:29
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

The name seems to be simply : DotA (Defense of the Ancients) since this is this mod who made this genre popular.

Wikipedia states that:

Alternative terminologies

Terms commonly used to refer to the Dota genre include but are not limited to "AoS style games" (Note "Aeon of Strife" a mod in StarCraft), "DotA style games", "DotA based games", "Dota games", "DotA clones", "DotA-Likes", "Action Real-time strategy games", and "Action RTS games". Dota games can also be simply referred to as DOTAs.[3] Riot Games has also been known to use the self-coined term, "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena".

MOBA terms seem not widely used and, for the records, is currently redirected to DotA genre on wikipedia.

I think a common agreement is not defined. And in my opinion, this is gonna end speaking of those games as "Dota-likes" as it was for Doom and its "Doom-likes".

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I had never heard MOBA before. AoS and DotA, on the other hand, are very clear. – user7220 Aug 16 '11 at 17:58
Wikipedia shouldn't be the premier source for questions about gaming genres. Furthermore, I've heard "DotA-Clone" much more often than I've heard "DotA-Likes", which reiterates the fact that the wikipedia entry leaves much to be desired. – Raven Dreamer♦ Aug 16 '11 at 17:59
@Raven I agree. But I can't find other sources for this. Google seems also to pull more results on "DotA-like" than "DotA-clone" but still this does not proves anything. But you're totally right, this is not an authoritative answer. Edited in consequence. – M'vy Aug 16 '11 at 18:04
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True, but doom-likes eventually became FPS, just like Rogue-likes became dungeon crawlers, or even Populous-like becoming God games. When a new game defines a new genre there's often a lag time before that new genre is properly defined, in this case the new genre is 'MOBA' (for now anyway). – Chris Rasys Aug 16 '11 at 18:23
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To call it a DotA style game would imply that we should name genres after the first popular game of that type which certainly isn't currently nor should it be the case. – Bravo840 Aug 16 '11 at 18:45
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up vote 10 down vote

According to Riot's official description of League of Legends, available here:

League of Legends is a session-based, Multiplayer Online Battle-Arena game where rival teams compete against one another for victory on highly stylized battlefields and landscapes. Built by a veteran development team and the original creators of Defense of the Ancients (one of the world'­s most popular player-made mods), League of Legends combines elements of the role-playing and strategy genres with addictive battle action. League of Legends brings accessible, replayable and endlessly competitive gameplay that deepens with the player's commitment.

Bolded emphasis mine.

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Riot Games DID NOT invent this type of game so they DO NOT hold the "rights" to simply say "this is the official name of the genre" – hexa Aug 16 '11 at 18:08
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@Hexa - It's their game, so I think they're well within their right to name the genre of their own product -- which was the point of the question, after all. I'm going to poke around and see if I can't find what HoN et al call their games. – Raven Dreamer♦ Aug 16 '11 at 18:24
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They can name the genre of the game all they want, it doesn't mean it will be the real name of the genre. – hexa Aug 16 '11 at 18:26
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It's worth noting that Monday Night Combat has also stated that they consider their genre a MOBA – tzenes Aug 16 '11 at 20:49
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@hexa: That reminds me of a comment I read somewhere saying something like "LoL/HoN/etc are NOT MOBAs, they're dota clones". So all FPS games are doom clones? :P – RCIX Aug 31 '11 at 14:59
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up vote 2 down vote

MOBA is the best suited genre of these games if we go by definition given in wiki

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), also known as lords management (LOMA) or action real-time strategy (ARTS), is a sub-genre of the real-time strategy (RTS) genre, in which often two teams of players compete with each other in discrete games, with each player controlling a single character through an RTS-style interface. It differs from traditional RTS games in that there is no unit construction and players control just one character. In this sense, it is a fusion of action games and real-time strategy games. The genre emphasizes cooperative team-play; players select and control one "hero", a powerful unit with various abilities and advantages to form a team's overall strategy. The objective is to destroy the opponents' main structure with the assistance of periodically spawned computer-controlled units that march towards the enemy's main structure via paths referred to as "lanes".

This definition clarifies lot of things. It explains the charecterists of a MOBA game which is matched with all the three games you listed and it also states that MOBA is sub-genre of RTS which valve wants to call its upcoming game, Dota2.

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Valve calls its game an Action-RTS, that itself being a subgenre of RTS. However, that doesn't work for other games that don't approach DotA-cloning in an RTS fashion like Smite and SMNC. – Decency Jan 3 at 14:51

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