I was searching some maps for Warcraft III: Frozen Throne and I found a term I hadn't heard before: AoS map.
I've searched for a meaning, however I haven't been able to find a concrete definition, yet. So:
UzumakiArtanis
UzumakiArtanisUzumakiArtanis
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2 Answers
It stands for 'Aeon of Strife', which was a really popular map from Starcraft. It had a mission where you rescue someone using only heroes, which was the idea that gave birth to DotA (Defence of the Ancients, A popular Warcraft 3 total modification, which has spawned an entire new multiplayer genre) and similar maps.
An AoS map in Warcraft 3 is a map which is set up in a similar way. You rescue someone using only heroes, combatting both AI and Player Controlled characters. Source
Иво НедевИво Недев
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Иво Недев's answer is plain wrong in the context of Warcraft 3's online custom maps scene. The sourced Yahoo Answer is misinformed. tl;dr 'AoS' or 'AoS map' is what we called MOBAs before that term existed; an AoS map is symmetrical head-to-head; co-op maps where you adventure towards some end goal like rescuing someone are called other things.
The map/game 'Aeon of Strife' in particular did indeed involve a team of players against waves of AI enemies. It's reasonably well-documented elsewhere, though there's a lot of misinformation that implies that the earliest versions were competitive - not the case. Probably nobody has the original anymore, but this one is an almost exact match - a 4 player co-op vs. AI. However, 'AoS map' in Warcraft 3 was generally understood to mean only 'Aeon of Strife-style maps', a wholly separate concept and kind of a misnomer. Aeon of Strife itself, confusingly, would not be considered an 'AoS map'.
If you look under the 'AoS' category in Epicwar, Hive Workshop(+), WC3 Campaigns (registration required for search, but see example), or Nibbits, some of the major portals of WC3 modding, you'll find that in the era of Warcraft 3, the acronym was commonly used to mean the type of game described below - which you'll see is almost exactly identical to 'MOBA'.
There's general agreement that a set of maps (primarily inspired by Aeon of Strife) with 'Defense of the Ancients' in their name first made the small step of replacing the co-op format with symmetrical player teams, and managed to achieve a following sometime around 2003. (There must have been one single earliest 'Defense of the Ancients', but it never won dominance and copycats appeared so soon that it doesn't mean much to call special attention to it.) Later on DotA Allstars was created as a collection of the best hero ideas from the wider set of DotA maps. The rest of DotA's story should be rather familiar.
In the time between the first DotA and the first standalone MOBAs (led by Heroes of Newerth), there emerged a vast profusion of maps which coalesced into a recognizable formula early on. There's a huge amount of fascinating, undocumented, and now lost history about these developments, and I recommend https://lanepushinggames.com/ for some insights. Though there was a lot of diversity in the details, they all shared roughly these characteristics:
In short, ”AoS' specifically indicated games where opposing teams use heroes to fight each other with creep support on similar footing to achieve their side of a mirrored primary objective. These are generally called 'MOBAs' nowadays.
'DotA-like' never gained much traction because it couldn't be shortened without being conflated with DotA Allstars itself, many players held great disdain for DotA for its relative lack of technical sophistication and innovation, and there was no single dominant progenitor of the head-to-head iteration of the genre, so a more exact term never appeared, leaving 'AoS-style map' as the de facto name for the archetype. In time this was shortened to just 'AoS', and people who wanted to talk about the original Aeon of Strife used the full name. It was common to see game lobbies marked with “AoS” to attract players of the genre who were unfamiliar with the specific map being hosted. The new standalone games following this format understandably didn't want to self-identify their genre with a term so specifically tied to WC3, and so 'MOBA' replaced 'AoS' in wider usage.
A game like Starcraft's Aeon of Strife in which 'you rescue someone using only heroes, combatting both AI and Player Controlled characters' (i.e. a goal-oriented co-op game) in that time would usually have been agreed to fall under one of the following categories:
One piece episodi streeming 734 3. The various copies of the Starcraft version of Aeon of Strife that made their way into WC3 were considered hero defense maps. The boundaries of the Hero (X) category were generally pretty clear, but Dungeon Crawler and especially RPG leaked all over each other and into other genres.
However, the common point was that these were primarily cooperative, asymmetrical games, with a team of many players against AI. Though somewhat rare, there were examples of each genre where a player, not an AI, controlled all or part of the asymmetric opposing forces.
(It's interesting to note that unlike in Starcraft, Aeon of Strife itself never had a 'canonical' iteration in the Warcraft 3 custom maps scene - i.e. there was no single map in the set of those with 'Aeon of Strife' in the name that was clearly more popular or considered a progenitor to the others. Though the vast majority of these maps are lost to time, you can get a cursory sample of the survivors with a search through Epicwar. The perception from the earliest days that 'AoS' was a category containing considerably different games rather than one game might have contributed to the community's willingness to use it to name a whole genre.)
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