International Battle Pass + Compendium

I'm not saying that it'll change MMR. And if it does, it'll only be in a good way : people getting the MMR that corresponds to their skill level faster.

The impact of that feature can only be positive. I have no doubt about that.

My only issue is, you have to pay for it.

I'm just saying, that's a freemium feature if I ever saw any. "Are you feeling frustrated that you have to grind MMR for weeks? Just pay us money and you can reach the MMR that corresponds to your real skill faster". I wouldn't be surprised if Dota transitionned to a LoL style business model in the near future.

I agree with Hamster here. Might be a sad sign of times to come, since they are basically profiting from the fact that almost everyone wants recalibration to make money out of it. They are probably gonna transition more and more indeed...

There's no way in hell we'd get a LoL style business model. The player base would, pardon the term, riot. Especially since DOTA recently has prided itself on the whole 'free mod tools' in addition to the free base content. Changing that would probably kill the game. And it seems like a hell of a leap to make off of this.


This might be the first instance of gameplay being affected (In an obvious way as opposed to cosmetic stuff like the Summon Treant bugs or the Tinker March immortal, or the new Void one making it stupidly hard to see into Chrono), but it's still not making base content something you have to pay for which is the big difference between DOTA and the other MOBA's.

If Valve tried to do something like that, the playerbase crumbles and leaves, they revert it quickly and have to spend a long *** time rebuilding faith.

Not so certain the playerbase crumbles and leaves. It is a pretty addictive game, and one in which most of us spent so many hours/money that leaving if for some subtle pay to win seems radical compared to "riot" on reddit for a few days and continue to pay and play (this is how people behave for almost everything, including against stuff like that James incident that so many people were mad about during what, one week?)

If they gate heroes behind a paywall I think it would cause that to happen. That's the main difference between our system and LoL's. Well, that and like runes. It would be incredibly hard for Valve to slowly introduce gating heroes behind a paywall without people cottoning on to what's happening. And rapid change like that would probably get opposed by us.

I understand the fear, I just think an isolated incident is not enough to call for the sky to be falling as such. If another instance of it is brought in in the next patch, or the next compendium, then I am happy to worry. Because it's indication of a trend.

Till then I don't think it actually changes things or acts especially pay to win. Because it's not much different to just playing 40 games on a fresh account and then calibrating, because both will put you fairly close to your skill level.

That's not going to happen like this.

Freemium games are insidious.

They are officially free, but offer optional paid content.

The game is made grindy and tedious on purpose, and has waiting built-in.

And then they sell a way to reduce the grind.

Nobody forces you to buy anything. It's just coercion.

Yea, exactly. That's just the smart way to sell things. *Capitalism* (Tera, why aren't you more mad)

I know how freemium games work. But I was working on the example you took as to a LoL style method. The most notable difference between LoL and DOTA's styles being the fact LoL gates heroes behind IP (Which is the case with a lot of freemium games where base content is locked behind paywalls, but an in game currency system exists to unlock them slowly, like in LoL, and HotS and Hearthstone). These are the obvious models to compare to right now.

But no MOBA currently on the market (That I am aware of), not even HotS, offers an MMR booster, which is what you are suggesting. The boosters are for stuff like Gold/IP. The 'MMR grind' in those games does not have boosters or accelerators beyond getting access to heroes earlier.

What I am saying, is that there is no way that Valve can slowly implement heroes behind 'a grind' like in those games. Implementing a freemium way to lessen the MMR grind is really hard, because after a point in time your MMR, unlike Gold or IP, will stagnate. Which makes boosters for it significantly less coercive as a thing.

Like technically we've had freemium content in the game already for Battle-passes and compendiums where you can buy points instead of grinding for them. So technically we share that aspect with other games.

But I assume you suggesting they offer stuff that has a direct in game advantage over people who don't have, because that's the only way I see a freemium set-up working for DOTA. Because we don't gate gameplay content like Heroes.

They can't make people pay for heroes, that's true. But they can introduce a completely new system, similar to the summoner spells in LoL, and make it grind/freemium based.

I'm asking you honestly : would you be that surprised if you saw that kind of thing in an update? I wouldn't.

There's already been a lot of copying of LoL's concepts in dota : ability power, octarine core, iron talon, small utility items...

It would just be another patch, with another new feature added to the game.

Freemium is the natural evolution of free games. The new stuff is optional, but there's a coercion to buy it if it affects gameplay.

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw something like Summoner Spells. I'd be massively disapointed, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Again I would still be surprised if it were locked behind a grind. DOTA has still never locked any core content of the game behind a wall of any kind, beyond like ranked level restrictions. It's never happened yet, and I don't see this as a herald of it till it's a recurring event. I just ain't feeling the doom.

Because again, in part of the community backlash that would be attached to it. If that happened, it would probably get changed. We know that Valve does look to community feedback and immediate reactions. It's the reason you see bugs put on reddit fixed quickly, reason why say Nahaz got taken off of the panel at TI, we got a Spring cleaning patch over it, we got the Minefield Sign added to basic Techies as opposed to being Arcana specific, got improvements made to the Battle Passes. Hell, when Valve were doing damage control Gaben reached out to the reddit community, so you know in part they care about the will of their consumer.

And if our will is that we don't want **** to become freemium, odds are kinda on our sides for that to happen.