What would happen if tower gold was removed

If bounty gold for structure is removed, it will severely hinder any early-middle game pushing strategies - and they are already hard to achieve and rarely executed at competitive level.

But keep in mind that killing one strategy will make it's usual 'counter' strategy also disappear and then you will have stagnation of the meta.

The bounty was already reduced and towers strengthened, pushing made harder overall in comparison to previous versions, additional reductions are not necessary.

On the other hand, bounty is too little to have big impact on the game outside of those early game strategies, because your supports having 100 additional gold every 6-8 minutes is nothing big.

 

@b1ock:
Indeed, you are right - that's the reason balancing a game for the competitive level while keeping it interesting for the viewers is such a hard job and if you read suggestions here and at reddit you can find obviously stupid proposition which will doom the game just to make handful of (stupid)people happy.

So while strategies are regulating to some extend each other, the game developers should still consider helping the balance to some extend. Otherwise a strategy naturally 'countered' by another may still give better results than expected due to bad balance from the game rules.

As an example - if we remove Glyph, revert the tower EHP to their levels before the armor changes (from static to reactive to the number of enemy heroes nearby) and increase the tower bounty to a high number - such as 250-300 gold per player for each outer tower. Then pushing strategy will be so prevailing that even 4/1 strategy, which is the natural counter will be nearly powerless to stop it, while right now it would be considerably easy to execute it and the win-chance is naturally higher for 4/1 against dedicated early-middle pushing strategy.

 

The entire competitive meta is currently pushing strategies.

DK, TB, DP, Viper, Tiny, Luna, Lifestealer. These are all heroes that just run up to your highground and kill your shit.

Towers should not even give gold. They already give map control. Map control can be directly translated to a form of gold or income advantage because of the vision they give that makes your farming patterns feel more safe.

Gold has become way too accessible to everyone in the game, its just dumb right now. Bounty runes are basically a creep wave in gold. Experience is extremely inaccessible at early levels especially for supports. Its very possible to not even be level 6 at 15 minutes in the game if you didn't get the exp tome. By that time many cores can have counters to your ultimate.

 

Remove tower gold entirely is stupid idea imho. Of course the worst consequence from that will be considerably longer games. People will get discouraged from pushing and will resort to dumb shit 24/7 gankfest deathball strats for the whole match because ganking is fun, it ruins the enemy's economy and of top of that will be the ONLY way to boost your own incomes. Completely retarded idea.

 

Here comes Leadblast with his Normal Skill opinion.

 

Of course, but going to the other extreme and not give any rewards whatsoever to pushing is not the correct answer to that. The whole long term goal of pushing lanes, destroying towers, barracks and finally the ancient itself is the only thing preventing a MOBA like Dota from becoming an eternal, pointless hero deathmatch.

More than that, it's the only way to END the game, otherwise it could go on for hours and hours before a clear victor is seen. How many times have I seen games that overextend pointlessly beyond an hour because one of the teams is too good at ganking and successfully keeps the other team shut down but is "strangely" unable to translate this kind of momentum into a definitive push for the victory? Countless times. This is where those comebacks occur. This is where it becomes a "ping pong game" as you called it. This game is already centered in ganking as it stands. The 4 bounty rune points, the jungle shrines, the various tweaks to Roshan, the multiple neutral camps and yet the fact that jungling has become harder, you have to stack them, etc. All of that has been implemented solely for the sake of making the game more spectator-friendly, all in the name of "e-sports". You aim to make it worse by removing the one things that give a PURPOSE to all of that.

 

It would make 5 man pushes worth it for map control, but it would make the 5 man deathball more committing since while you're 5 man deathballing you would be getting ratted and outfarmed. Probably a pretty static meta where you don't try anything until you're able to control map with things like blink