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.
Riot has updated their website once or twice over the last decade, and the current description, available here, is as follows:
What is League of Legends?
League of Legends is a team-based strategy game where two teams of five powerful champions face off to destroy the other’s base. Choose from over 140 champions to make epic plays, secure kills, and take down towers as you battle your way to victory.
Bolded emphasis mine.
According to Riot's official description of League of Legends, available on their website:
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.
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".
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.
By default all Multiplayer Online Battle Arena are Real Time Strategy games as well, so calling them MOBA instead of RTS is just more specific.
RPG is just plain wrong because we do not get to do role playing, the characters are fixed.
First:
Both ARTS and MOBA are weak names for the genre.
But at the moment ARTS makes more sense then MOBA and therefore should be the official name.
MOBA means Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Multiplayer and Online are two features of most games and only defined one genre, namely MMORPG because it was the key feature of that new genre.
Why would it be necessary to call those two features for LoL,HoN or DotA? We do not call Counter Strike a MOFPS right?
Then there is Battle Arena in MOBA. Those two words a pretty generic and could mean Angel Arena too (a mod for Warcraft III in which you would select a Hero and fight against other Heroes, sometimes with static creeps to slay for money). Those words could mean any game that has team-deathmatch.
So why ARTS?
It stands for Action Real Time Strategy. Let's start with RTS since it is an old well defined genre. It mainly contains ressourcemanagement combined with an amount of units that you would build and control. Furthermore RTS are played from topview. Ressourcemanagement and topview fit most ARTS/MOBA at the moment. Units not so much. There may be around 6-7 units you can control but those moments are rare.
Strategy is generic. CS has strategy too, no one can deny that. But DotA,HoN,LoL do contain several layers of that. It starts with picking, goes on with itembuilds, early movement strats and timings for important events (Rosh,Kongor,Baron) + roles of each player. Plus you need to adapt your strategy quickly to the enemies behavior.
So strategy fits in my opinion rather well.
And now the icing on top: Action. Most generic word there can be right? It accounts for the fact that RTS have a tendency to be rather unpersonal at the start because player need to build and send scouts first while in ARTS/MOBA player do have only one real unit that gets close and personal early on and need full attention. Making it a mexican standoff from the get go with high tension. Even zergrushes do not last long and can decide the game while in MOBA/DOTA there are towers to explicitly make an early win impossible. Juking is another point why the term action is right in my opinion. Every click must be thought through and enemies must be read.
I do think both terms are not ideally for the genre but i believe ARTS is a better one even if Riot managed to popularize MOBA as their marketing term.
