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The free to play MOBA called 'Strife' is now on Steam, so hopefully this will solve their player count issue. It's really worth checking out if you're looking for a more relaxed experience.

I actually really like Strife, and it has fixed a lot of issues I had with Dota 2, so I look forward to seeing if this has boosted their player numbers.

I especially enjoy having my own personal courier, I honestly have lost count at the amount of times some angry dude kept insisting they needed the courier more in Dota 2, or griefers doing annoying things with it like getting it killed. Thankfully, Strife has none of that bollacks!

The game is 100% free, and has completely optional purchases that don't affect gameplay.

About the game (Official)
Enter the Hero
In Strife®, you will assume control of a powerful hero. Each hero is uniquely designed to embody a play-style or idea, and heroes are by far the most important aspect of any game of Strife. As a hero, you will decide how the game flows, how quickly it progresses, and whether the outcome is favourable for your team. All Strife heroes are freely available from your very first match

Community First
How your fellow players behave matters a lot in online multiplayer games. Strife is designed from the ground up to encourage cooperation and reduce toxic conflicts.

Check out Strife on Steam, or download it from the official site. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Free Game, MOBA, Steam
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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14 comments

fredrikfritte Apr 9, 2015
Oh, looks ncie
Really want some game like this without all the hate, remember when playing LOL, damn i was hated =D

Grabbed this torrent for my Mint laptop aswell on STeam on the Win7 lappie.
Kurremkarmerruk Apr 9, 2015
I'll be giving this a go tonight. I just hope that the match times are shorter than Dota 2. Seems that way from the things I've read. Saw somewhere that Strife matches are about 20 - 30 mins compared to 40 - 60 mins for Dota 2 (Haven't played much Dota 2 actually, so not sure if that's at all accurate).
FutureSuture Apr 9, 2015
I'll be giving this a go tonight. I just hope that the match times are shorter than Dota 2. Seems that way from the things I've read. Saw somewhere that Strife matches are about 20 - 30 mins compared to 40 - 60 mins for Dota 2 (Haven't played much Dota 2 actually, so not sure if that's at all accurate).
In my experience and from what I remember, DOTA2 matches ranged from 25 to 70 minutes for me. Most matches were about 35 minutes from what I recall.
kalin Apr 9, 2015
I don't know why people think that dota players are angry. I play dota a lot and very rarely find angry people.
Most of them speak russian,turkish,polish and english but its happen rarly and they are probaly child.
May be in begining your rang is low and game matchmaking you with complete noobs(angry child).
Sory for my english :)
Keizgon Apr 9, 2015
Strife is a pretty good MOBA, at least it was for me when I played it a year ago (only played Linux version, seemed really optimized on my laptop if you turn down the settings). I'm really bad at DOTA 2 (too much going on) and was a League of Legends fanboy once upon a time. Like LoL, it's pretty easy to pick up and play, and like DOTA 2, you get all characters off the bat.

There was a community driven competitive scene when I was playing, can't remember if it still is going on.

Toxicity is always going to be a problem in any MOBA, no matter how far you try to restrain / encourage people though. It would be nice if this became the shining exception, but I can't say toxicity would keep me from playing anyway (thick skin is mandatory for a MOBA).

However, I stopped playing it about a year ago, after I was tired of all MOBAs and became burnt out, but it felt like a great alternative. Also, can't say League will ever make its debut to Linux, since Riot appear to be unclear of the process and are jumping on the Windows 10 store front. I would also note that their Mac port is pretty terrible and quite unsupported from what I hear, so even if they did port it, it would be probably like that.
Noven Apr 9, 2015
I played Strife when it first went into alpha and it was pretty neat. I stopped playing because I was afraid it would turn into Heroes of Newerth with all the rage and hate.
amonobeax Apr 10, 2015
Strife is going down since it had it's beta released.

S2 did it. It was one of the first companies which had its games worling on linux (HoN and Tortured Soul 2), but I don't like them at all.
They way they treat their community is unacceptable IMO. Region banning/locking communities never carying about the quality of the service other partners delivered to these locked/banned ppl.

And there's much much more.

I hope they change their policies, otherwise Strife will fail just like HoN did (Yeh, I consider that a game that once competed with DOTA and LOL in the early days has failed badly if you see how everything worked out in the end). And Strife had a much worse start tbh, much worse.
morbius Apr 10, 2015
We'll see if joining Steam will help with player count, right now it's the biggest problem the game has. That and Russians, of course.

I've been a fan of S2 games, Savage 2 was great and HoN kept me playing for years as well. Strife is a nice game and although I don't really like the changes they made recently, I'd say it's worth playing if you're a MOBA fan. I've mostly lost interest in Strife when number of players has dwindled so low that you could hardly find a fair game any more. S2 is also still resisting IP locking Russian players to Russian servers, so over half the players on EU servers are Russian, those who play MOBAs know what that means.
DamonLinuxPL Apr 10, 2015
Strife is one of my favorite games. I also like another S2 game - Heroes of Newerth. In both games i spend many hours but still can't find any Linux team :/
amonobeax Apr 10, 2015
We'll see if joining Steam will help with player count, right now it's the biggest problem the game has. That and Russians, of course.

I've been a fan of S2 games, Savage 2 was great and HoN kept me playing for years as well. Strife is a nice game and although I don't really like the changes they made recently, I'd say it's worth playing if you're a MOBA fan. I've mostly lost interest in Strife when number of players has dwindled so low that you could hardly find a fair game any more. S2 is also still resisting IP locking Russian players to Russian servers, so over half the players on EU servers are Russian, those who play MOBAs know what that means.

One worries about the player base and asks for region locking?

I'm Brazilian and S2 block my region 2 years ago. HoN was still available back then provided by a S2 partner "axeso5".
It was a chaos. Patches comming like months later than the NA servers. Pricing completely arbitrary on axeso5's store.
NO LOCAL SERVERS (yes region locking but still using NA server how cool is that). It was a bloody mess.

And S2 did nothing to it's brazilian players. Unlike most of latin americans brazilians on average know more english (enough to play a MOBA at least). Region locking left us with Spanish which nobody knows in Brazil.

The outcome was obvious: everybody left HoN to DOTA2 or LoL. Axeso5 failed and so did S2.


Region locking is a bad idea per se. It's unpopular and it doesn't solve the problem.
In DOTA2 even if I'm able to communicate with English I'll rather play in brazilian servers with ppl speaking portuguese, that's natural.
morbius Apr 10, 2015
I remember that there were Brazilian servers for a while in HoN, don't know what was happening after I've quit the game. The problem with South America was that the countries were not interconnected, all the internet traffic was routed through the USA anyway, providing the local servers with lower ping was impossible.

And as long as so many of Brazilian players are HUEHUEHUEHUE trolls, Brazil needs to stay IP blocked from the rest of the world. I'm am sorry for the good honest players from Brazil that get shafted that way, but things being as they are, I don't want to play with Brazilians.

Now in Europe, we've got Russians. It's not that Russians are totally incompetent by nature, it's that MOBAs are insanely popular in Russia and everyone plays them, even people who are horrendously bad in them and would usually quit in other countries. Add to that that a lot of Russian players won't communicate in English and that they like playing drunk or stoned.

So I tried Strife today again to check the game out and I find out they've merged EU and Russia servers, apparently the game is doing even worse than before. I played 3 rounds, almost all the players were Russian. A guy is blaming me for loss, after the game I see he hasn't bought boots. This game is going nowhere fast. Such a shame, I was quite into it before.
amonobeax Apr 10, 2015
Region locking is a bad idea per se. It's unpopular and it doesn't solve the problem.
In DOTA2 even if I'm able to communicate with English I'll rather play in brazilian servers with ppl speaking portuguese, that's natural.

That's all I have to say about this matter. Let's disagree.
I'll rather fight ppl's attitude than their nationality. I've managed to play fun games without 100% communication with some Argentinians and struggled playing the game with my countrymen.
Kurremkarmerruk Apr 11, 2015
Had a couple matches last night and the first one actually crashed on me but the second match went really well!

As far as game length, unfortunately the one that finished was about 45 minutes! Thought it was really tense, at one point I swore we were going to lose, even wrote 'gg' in the chat. But then they just had like two hits left but lost all of their mobs so they ran off! So our team respawned and actually made it all the way into their base but we didn't get nearly as far through their center thing (I don't recall the name) and then on the enemy's next push we lost, but it was still quite tense!

A few glitches I noticed: the out-of-game menu is black when I start and I just have to click something else and then click back onto it and the color returns! The in-game menus sometimes are unresponsive and again this is solved by just changing window focus and then returning. I had a lot of screen tearing, but I didn't look to see if vsync was on. Some lag in the game but overall it was a really smooth experience!

The pets are a cool idea, the different characters are really cool looking and the two I've tried were interesting and easy to get into. I noticed that most characters can fill really any role which makes the game a lot more versatile and a huge amount easier to get into (no need to coordinate roles or lanes, everyone just winged it and it turned out fine!)
Zelox Apr 13, 2015
Iv tryed strife, sadly its not my thing. Lol is still the one and only moba I can play and probably will stay with.
Luckly it works under linux with wine, almost perfect.

Strife is also a moba that aims for the none hardcore players, just like blizzards heros of the storm.
So if your in to mobas or want to learn to play mobas, strife is a great start.
And Lol atleast dont got that negativity that mobas are known for. They made some great stuff to it,
and you build your own little "community" with nice people.

Add me if u like, Zälox euwest :).
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