DOTA 2 Will Be Free-to-Play With a Twist

[Hectic Glenn]

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Gabe Newell's appearance on the Seven Day Cooldown podcast this week revealed for the first time, confirmation that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play. Other popular MOBA titles generate revenue by selling points to buy heroes, alternate skins or experience boosters to level up more quickly. Valve are looking at a completely new approach.

"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

Apparently Gabe suggested contributions that players could add to the game that can be measured, recognised and reward them for it. Players who provide hero build guides, train and teach others or have a good teamwork ethic are possible reward-worthy actions.

Gabe even talked of this concept working across Steam titles but was keen to distinguish Steam apart from the 'social networking' label. See more at The Verge.

 

[Dinnesch]

Hopefully this means they won't be giving people who spend money on it in-game advantages.

I would like to see a teamplay rewarding system TF2(other than "useless" scoreboard points). There are just too many stupid, unhelpful players ruining the experience, especially since it went F2P.

 

[Omnomnick]

Well who saw this coming.

Just about everybody.

 

[ríomhaire]

I remember Gabe mentioning the idea of charging people who grief extra money somehow before in an interview.

 

[WildBeλ³st]

Are you sure that Dota 2 will be free2play game?

 

[bobtheskull]

I remember Gabe mentioning the idea of charging people who grief extra money somehow before in an interview.

How would that work, exactly? Strikes me as something that could be abused. Not saying its a bad idea or anything, just that it would be very difficult to police.

 

[Stigmata]

In the beta, you can report players in-match for bad conduct like text/voice abuse or intentional feeding. If you receive enough of these reports in a short enough timeframe (probably something like 2 in 2 hours), OR you leave a game and don't reconnect after 5 minutes, you get put in the "low priority queue" for 24 hours, where you play with other low priority players and it can take over half an hour to queue up a match. Once you're in the low priority queue, you'll be able to buy a single-use item in the game shop (currently evidenced through strings in the beta files) to bring you out of low priority, for a yet-unknown price, which it may or may not have a global cooldown which may or may not increase upon each use of that type of item.

To limit abuse, each player has only 10 positive and negative reports at a time to send out, though I believe they're resupplied slowly over time, and the max reports might change by release.

 

[Lobster]

It sounds to me like they are leaning towards denying the carrot rather than using the stick, but once again Gabe is the master of sounding insightful without actually saying anything remotely comprehensible!

 

[Robbo]

Anything they can do to reduce the amount of douchiness in these types of games can only be a good thing. I'm glad to hear that they're coming at it from that angle.

 

[ríomhaire]

I'm guessing they'll probably be making use of L4D's blocking feature too. Perhaps players with too many blacklistings could be made "low-priority" as well?

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Almost certainly. In MOBA / A-RTS games it's super important you've got people working together. So often you see someone get behind and throw in the towel or people get on that person's back as the lane snowballs and it ends in bad blood. Can't guarantee I'll be able to hold my patience in future Dota 2 games, especially based on how long they are

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Not surprised it's some kind of micro-trans. In fact, I would have been shocked if there was an entry fee--that would have been cause for folks to turn back to LoL.

On an entirely unrelated note: please, for the love of Freeman, change those emoticons. They are so, so stupid.

 

[Eejit]

Here's a bunch of datamined stuff from the micro-trans store.

http://www.cyborgmatt.com/2012/03/dota-2-item-schema-update/

Orca skin for Tidehunter looks badass.


Plus, Shitty Wizard.

 

[ríomhaire]

You can buy Dr Kleiner to be the game announcer? That is ****ing amazing. Does concern me though that you're paying for sound files that could previously just be modded in by the user by putting a couple of .wav files into the right folder.

 

[Eejit]

I think those are probably uniquely recorded Kleiner lines for dota2.
I don't recall the good Doctor ever talking about killing sprees or ones Ancient being under attack

 

[SpotEnemyBoats]

I'm surprised OP didn't mention that Gabe finally talked about 'Ricochet 2' *ahem*