When comparing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive vs Dota 2, the Slant community recommends Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for most people. In the question“What are the best LAN party PC games?” Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is ranked 15th while Dota 2 is ranked 71st. The most important reason people chose Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is:
Each round of CS feels more like a game driven more by careful tactics than a frivolous fast-paced and lethal paintball arena of which too many modern First-Person Shooters are guilty of. Positioning, timing and thinking are key ingredients of a successful game and cooperation is crucial if you want to win.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Driven by tactics and cooperation
Each round of CS feels more like a game driven more by careful tactics than a frivolous fast-paced and lethal paintball arena of which too many modern First-Person Shooters are guilty of.
Positioning, timing and thinking are key ingredients of a successful game and cooperation is crucial if you want to win.
Pro Runs well on most hardware and even on older hardware
It's a very optimized game and runs smoothly on even outdated hardware.
Pro Carefully-executed changes to existing maps
The updates and improvements made to existing maps have been pretty clever and useful.
For example, cracked glass is more opaque, making it harder to go on a sniping rampage. Or the stairway which was added to the bottom of de_dust made the route more viable for the Terrorists, while keeping the original purpose of that area serving as a bottleneck.
Pro Will be familiar to CS 1.6 and CS: Source players
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive builds on the strengths of its predecessors, even though those predecessors have been constantly improving for over a decade now.
Nonetheless, Counter-Strike veterans will feel right at home in Global Offensive, albeit with some minor differences. The MP5 is now the MP7, The TMP has left its place to the MP9 and you can't attach a suppressor to the M4.
Pro Fair free-to-play business model
Microtransactions involve only cosmetic items such as custom weapon designs or clothing colors and tickets to view live events.
Pro Start with all heroes
You don't need to unlock or purchase characters.
Pro Incredibly deep gameplay
For players who put the time into Dota 2 to get past the early beginner phase, Dota 2 can become an extremely satisfying game. There's a reason it's one of the most popular eSports titles in the world. The amount of strategy, skill, and variables involved make it a very deep game where anything could happen.
Pro A very diverse MOBA
This game has a steep learning curve, but it's well worth it. The games that came after Dota like League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Smite, and other lookalikes don't even compare to the complexity of Dota 2.
Every hero is unique and valuable in one team composition or another. The amount of versatility of each hero is amazing as well. The mechanics by far destroy any other Dota style game (MOBA) and that's what makes this game top tier in its genre. This game is the highest grossing eSport game in the world and will probably continue to be for a long time.
Pro It's very well-balanced
Gameplay is balanced in the sense that while other MOBAs would have only around 30-60 viable picks for the competitive scene, Dota 2 has heroes and strategies in the game that are more varied, which enables more heroes to be picked in the competitive scene.
Number of Heroes Picked in Dota 2's Recent Major Tournament in the past 4 months (as of July 2016) is 86/111 heroes picked and 100 out of 111 heroes picked.
To compare between Dota 2 and LoL pick diversity, LoL has 64 out of 131 champions picked for LCS.
There are also factors such as the ban/pick phase difference and the more rigid positions in LoL that may limit the viability for different playstyles and hero picks (typically it is 2 (AD, Support Bot) -1 (AP mid) -1 (Tank Off) - 1 (Jungler), with a possibility of double junglers in LoL).
On the other hand in Dota 2, there are a lot more different positions compared to Lol/Smite such as Duo Mid (1-2-2), Traditional (2-1-2), One Jungler (1-2-1-1, most similar to league), One Roamer (1-2-1-1 as well with the difference being the hero roams the map for kills to create space for the mid and safelane rather than farm the jungle which can weaken a lane), Duo Roamer (1-1-1-2, all lanes are weaker in lane presence with the tradeoff being they get solo experience with two aggressive supports roaming), Trilane (1-1-3, Aggressive or Passive Trilane) and Abandoned Offlane (0-1-3-1 where the offlane is completely left empty due to a strong duo or trilane on the opposing team).
More heroes are viable and balanced in Dota 2 partly due to the greater flexibility in laning. This can be attributed the mechanics such as creep pulling and creep stacking which allows the team doing trilane to make up for the shared experience between three heroes. Besides that, the existence of teleport scrolls that allow you to defend your towers or punish a tower dive also allows you to react and assist other lanes.
In pub games, any hero/lane/lineup can work, and it is more about your individual mechanical skills (understanding of hero, combo execution, map awareness, last hitting, timings, item builds, flow) over the lack of coordination and teamwork (on both teams).
Pro Has user-created custom games
Dota 2 includes Workshop Tools that allow users to create custom games as well as other play them.
Pro Moba-leading graphics
When compared to other leading MOBAs, Dota2 has some of the best graphics to be found.
Pro In-game mic
Has in-game mic so you can get toxic with voice chat.
Pro Cross-platform
Available on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Pro Very active professional scene
Dota 2 has one of the most active professional scenes in eSports today. If it's not the most active, it's certainly got the largest prize pools, coming in at over $20 million in 2016.
Pro Players can trade self-made cosmetic items
The game includes a system for players to create, buy, and sell cosmetic items.
Pro Dota 2 has the world's biggest e-sports tournament
At The International 7 in summer 2017, players raised the prize pool to more than $23 million, one of the largest prize pools in sSports history.
Pro Can be played online and offline
However, you will need to be logged in to Steam either way.
Pro Good for brain
Trains brain hard.
Pro Regularly updated
Dota 2 is regularly patched and changed with new characters being introduced and balance changes made. This can prevent the game from becoming too stale as the tactics utilized by players changes often.
Cons
Con Has a large skill gap
Since it's a pretty old game, most players are veterans at this point and have been playing for a long time. This may make it hard for newer players to jump in and play.
Con Can have a bad community
As it is a large game, it should come as no surprise that the community just won't be up to par. You may be kicked for strange reasons (like bottom scoring or the all too common random hacking accusation) and many could give you a 7 day ban. It can be very frustrating as missions in the mission system require you to play certain things while crossing your fingers.
Con New maps and modes feel pretty mediocre
Even though old maps have been revisited and improved by a wide margin, new maps and modes released with CS:GO are pretty mediocre.
Half of the maps available are locked under Arms Race (which is a re-imagining of the original community-created GunGame) and Demolition (GunGame without insta-respawn and bomb defusal) modes.
These game modes feel pretty safe and unimaginative, especially for veterans who have played their predecessor.
Some of the new maps are pretty compact and designed to act as instant-action meat-grinders akin to modern FPS (like Call of Duty) instead of requiring any tactics to win.
Con Hard to see if you are hitting someone
One of the things that were changed in CS:GO is firing feedback.
When someone is shot in GO, they don't wince, there's only a small amount of blood and audio that conveys the information that you are actually hitting someone. But omitting wince animation from character models makes it harder to see if you are actually hitting another player, especially at distance.
Con Less time spent playing a game
This is a feature that makes kills and hits (no health regeneration) more impactful, but also a lot less time is spent playing the game, especially if you die early to a sniper peek. Newbies will be playing a lot less of the game than more experienced players.
Con It's got a huge learning curve
Dota 2 has 111 heroes, all of which are unique from each other. It will take time and effort to learn which heroes you like to play, and become skilled with them.
Con Rude, toxic community
Many players feel free to flame and insult, especially in the lower ranks and from non-English speaking countries.
Con You can be put into a low priority mode for being bad at the game
Con Matches are too long
The game is great but even just a single match can take a lot of time. And when you get to mid game and realize you already lost, you have no option but to keep dying and literally wait for the game to end.
Con Zero merit goes to good players
If you score, say, a 20 kills 0 deaths but your team loses because 4 people are noobs, you lose -26 personal rank.
Con Miserable community
Takes 100s of hours not to suck, and even then, you're still not going to be good.
Con No SURRENDER option
As ridiculous as it may sound, you are a slave, once you start a game.
You may suffer, you may cry, but you can't concede.
Very much influences an overall toxic atmosphere of game.
Con It's a slow and repetitive game
This might be the most repetitive MOBA game.
Con The controls are terrible
It feels more like SC as a MOBA than an actual MOBA.
Con Waste of time
Con It has voice chat
It boosts rage and toxicity so much it has to be removed.
Con Valve doesn't care about their players
No surrender option and bad teamate can influence your personal mmr even if you perform good. Plus the company seems way too big and the services start to lack and suffer.
Con You love and hate the game
While infuriating at times the addictiveness of the game keeps the players coming back.