Resolution: Dota 2 is a better game than League of Legends

I believe that League of Legends is a better game than Dota2 for a very simple reason. The community of League of Legends is bigger and better than the one of Dota2. It is also going to get bigger and better at a proportional rate to Dota2 over time, which means that Dota2 will never catch up on League of Legends if the current state of affairs will not be severely unbalanced. The huge difference between the two communities can be seen in the information about the record of peak concurrent players for the respective game, 5 million for League of Legends and 330000 for Dota2. This is an order of magnitude larger for League of Legends [LoL_now,Dota2_now]. I would liken the similarity of the mechanics of League of Legends and Dota2 to that between the popular board game chess and the myriad of variants of it in existence[chess_variants]. You have five heroes, lanes with minions, towers, a final area to destroy, items, roleplaying game like progression of all the heroes as they kill opponent minions and heroes. The two games are occupying the exact same niche and only one can succeed in time, as opposed to games that are significantly different like chess and go[go], or chess and bridge[bridge]. In basketball or in soccer there is no basketball left and right and soccer up and down. Hoops and minisoccer don't register on the scale with Kobe Bryant and Messi. In the board game of chess there are heroes of long ago that made the game what it is now[chess_heroes]. The same cannot be said about any of the chess variants. League of Legends and Dota2 being variants of each other cannot be hugely popular at the same time and spawn heroes for fans to cheer for. Since the more popular game is League of Legends by far, so it is the better of the two games now regardless of game design, art style or personal preference of fans of any of the two games. League of Legends will grow faster to a bigger fanbase with many heroes of the professional leagues it has already created, and Dota2 cannot do anything about that by continuing to add content in the way it has up to now. It will just tag along being a little brother until it will fade into non-significance by spectator driven esport standards. For a video game example of the same situation there is the venerable mmo game World of Warcraft. It launched with a mirriad of issues that continue to plagues mmo game launches to this day[wow_issues]. But in time it built a following that is moving the game forward as the number one mmo for a long time now despite a myriad of competitors coveting to build a game that would give them mmo market share that would put a dent in World of Warcraft, including Star wars the Old Republic[wow_variant]. In this case it was the first big game that went home with the cake and the others left with scraps. A situation very similar to the one between chess and it's variants. I for one would not like to play a game where there are no heroes to cheer for when esports come to a TV set near me. That would be a very bad game. This is why League of Legends has got a big claim on the big cake, Dota2 will eat some scraps over time as the little brother, and we may or may not have a Blizzard All Stars to come and steal the show later. Because in a spectator sport or esport popularity makes the game and all else follows behind it. [wow_issues] http://www.tentonhammer.com... [chess_variants] https://en.wikipedia.org... [go] https://en.wikipedia.org... [bridge] https://en.wikipedia.org... [LoL_now] https://majorleagueoflegends.s3.amazonaws.com... [Dota2_now] http://www.gamespot.com... [chess_heroes] https://en.wikipedia.org... [wow_variant] http://www.forbes.com...