Is Dota becoming to commercial?
Hello everyone
I haven't shown myself anymore for a long time mostly because I stopped playing Dota. However I think that the following topic is a pretty interesting one and one of the few not trending about the in game mechanics but actually about exterior game mechanics. I will be discussing how Dota, and a lot of Valve their games doing the same thing, are becomming pure commercial.
Some of us are already playing for a while now. I started some years ago, so I'm not the oldest player in any means but yet I can call myself decently experienced with the game evolution. Also I do have a decent knowledge of Dota since I did watch a lot of the ti1, ti2 and of course the ti3 games. ti4 was the first international I watched and followed intensively, while not having a compendium. Since I did watch the ti 4 that intensive I decided to buy a compendium for the ti5 but that compendium was almost garbage in comparison with the ti4 one. Especially since you could not gain tradeable or marketable items. After the frankfurt major I sleightly lost my interest in competitive dota, so don't ask me anyting about that :)
The Internationals
An amateuristic start
With the international events we can clearly see an evolution. Ti 1 and ti 2 were a bit amateuristic, but yet really enjoyable. In ti 3 we see a big change into that and dota became more professional. It was nice to see and I think most people, and me too, consider this as the best ti. The finals from that ti are I think one of the best known by every dota player. Even one who does barely follow competitive dota knows that Na'Vi is an agressive but also a throw team, Alliance a ratting team, with Bulldog on the
Nature's Prophet and S4 with his game winning tp cancels as 
Puck. At ti 4 Valve really did his best to be as professional as possible for than. The compendium got a lot of nice features and most people who purchased a compendium back then were really sold about it. The meta however was not the crowd it's favorite with a deathpush strat where games would barely last longer than 20 minutes. The meta was pretty boring and there were no big plays at all. The winning team was Newbee. I actually had to go to Liquipedia to remember who actually one that ti. Newbee is an almost unrecognizable team, with just a ti win. They won not by individual skill and teamwork but by just understanding the meta better than the other teams, and the older ,and considered better teams, being to conservative to change strats. It's than when we see the "Fall of Na'Vi" where they would change from a tir 1 to a tir 3 team. Of course this brought us the "Navi is back" memes when they did won one game, but they never returned to their former glory.Meta for pro
It's than we see the creation of a new team, "team secret" formed out of former na'vi members Puppey and Kuroky. They where joined by other top players who failed to achieve properly. It is after that ti, the forth one, that everyting about dota did was at an eye for the pro scene. We get a meta change, which is normal, but every meta change was to make the competitive scene better. Every change made by valve was for the top 1-5% playing the game.
It's also in this inter-international that we get those crazy support patches 6.82, and than directly after that the crazy carry patch, 6.83, followed by a crazy mid patch 6.84. Dota was trying to become as balanced as possible, which is a good thing, but balanced for the pro scene and the plus 5k mmr scene. This however is a really small majority of the dota players. The meta changed more into fighting and team coordination, with a little bit of splitpushing for the good old barracks rat hype.
The international 5
We see during ti 5 that dota is not the same game anymore as during ti 1. Everything was professional, with the exception of the ending ceremony by deadmau5. We gain a very professional casting, professional interviews and even a twitch channel to stay entertaining people during the whole ti upcoming and main events. During this ti however valve gave a very ****ty compendium. The compendium only made you get untradeable and unmarketable items. This was for me a big disapointment. My armory is than also filled with trash. The treasures it came with had really nice sets and items but even from some treasures the items where untradable or marketable. Only from the real valve treasurs, with a really rare golden item in it too gave tradable items. So if you wanted a lot of tradeable items you had to spend tons of money at valve.
The Majors
After ti 5 valve also started with the organisation of majors. This are small internationals, every season one. When valve started organising this I started disliking the pro scene more and more. Every thing valve did was about the proscene. Not knowing RTZ, Dendi or EE is considered as an utmost crime. Pubstomping heroes as
Phantom Assassin, 
Riki and 
Sniper gained changes so they would be more balanced in the pro scene but gained significant nerfs for people playing in the sub 4k bracket.Pro before casual
Now Dota is purely a competitive game. Every patch, every change, every evenement is for competitive. Dota is purely commerce focussed on making as much profit as possible. I'm fine with a game aiming to make profit but with dota it is becoming to focussed on making that profit. The quality of the games are even getting worse and worse for an individual person. There are problems still not fixed in the game which are just horrific they are still in this game, which makes so many pure cash a day. I'm talking about for instance the start lag, false abandons when someone abandoned before you, someone who was inactive for 5 minutes, getting an abandon in dota but not in the game itself so you can't leave withou risking an abandon yourself, and many many more. While as one pro player comes in contact with a problem, which will almost never occur another time, it is immediatly fixed.
It's this what made me, and many other players too, disliking dota. The fact that every thing is just to make profit and that the player himself is second degree. Why don't we get tradeable items? Why do they have to **** over nice heroes? Why don't they fix problems that are easily fixed but already several years in the game.
Dota is for the player himself a struggle about mmr and getting better while for some it is making cash. Dota is not really a game anymore to enjoy, while you can have a good time definitly, it is mostly about getting angry and frustrated on teammates and mmr. While watching pro's who are much better having a good time and you spending more and more money on the game so it can make more profit but not fix those well known problems!
Dota is one Black Hole
Dota consumes time just as
Enigma his 
Black Hole. Since I stopped following competitive dota I was less familiar with the switching meta's. I used dotafire to process new dota information and to get known with the meta. However I didn't like the fact anymore that I still spend so much time in dota, and also the fact that even than I wasn't able to hold on with the ever changing meta. Since I wans't willing to restart following pro players or to go fully into dota, trying to get to know as much as possible, I played less and less competitive and meta focussed. However because of that I just became a worse player in general and my knowledge of dota, which had been always fully up to date, is totally outdated in just 1-3 months time. I was writing a 
Vengeful Spirit guide but I think it will never be completed because of the ever changing meta and I don't want to give false and outdated information.Don't get discouraged by me
I don't want to discourage people at any means with playing dota but I did want to talk about how dota became a full commercial game focussed on making profit by selling hats and couriers, giving compendiums (with all non tradeable stuff!) and by focussing on the competitive world. While I'm at this moment an inactive dota player, and totally not following the competitive scene anymore I think I still want to visit a dota tournament one day since it seems a lot of fun.
I hope you guys enjoyed and are maybe willing to discuss if this is actually a bad or a good thing. Thank you for reading and know that dota is one of the nicest games I ever played.
Greetings and have a nice day
The Frosto
But can't you realize that the problem is the fact that you bought useless things just to "support" the game in the first place? If Icefrog's project was accepted by Valve, don't you think that this was because they were pretty sure that it would be financially successful *without* the need for your charity?
Seriously, is it really so hard to make the difference between an indie game studio or an independent developer, and a large for-profit company?
If you're a freaking communist, then why aren't you supporting *actual* indie games, instead of donating your money to large for-profit corporations?
Why are you giving your money to Valve, and not to independent projects or one-man developer teams on Kickstarter or something?
You are absolutely right in what you say about Valve and Dota as a commercial game. What I don't understand, however, is: how can you expect it to be different? Reading your text I get the feeling that it could be said in a sentence "I don't like the actual capitalist world to be a reality even in the gaming industry". Because ofc it comes down to that, there's not a single company that exists that is not trying to make as much profit as possible. Customer happiness is a thing only and foremost to ensure that the customer doesn't stop buying; besides that, companies don't really care about preferences. And in the gaming world this becomes more evident, as most of the people that complain about some things about the game (for instance those changes that go towards more money involved) still don't stop playing. So as long as the faithful player basis, however mildly discontent (reddit I'm looking at you) doesn't stop playing, they will not stop making the game more and more commercial with the purpose of getting more profit out of it.
Do you think they shouldn't? That's a very interesting "company's moral" question, but in that case, for the sake of coherence, you need to apply it to every other company alive, and don't you like, for instance, to have a supermarket with very cheap products? That is only possible because of the way our capitalism system works, etc. And I'm not exaggerating here, the gaming industry doesn't exist in a vacuum and I don't think it is possible to try to change it to our conveniences disregarding what happens to the other industries.
All of this said: one of my nicknames is communist so yea I would love to see some changes on the "money is all" current live meta, but you know, how viable/probable is that :)
Edit: Just read Michi's comment and he says all of this in less sentences, as it always happens to me someone can be more synthetic XD
You need to take a break like i do. Dota is evolving everyday and it will continue to evolve. I can perform entroopy and negative entropy as many times as i need, to make the system work.
Dont know why we are complaining about patches, when many mechanics related issues are being addressed in this patch. We need a clean slate. We need everything back at square zero before i can introduce you to further complexity and new interactions in the game. Just stick with it for the time being.
Of course this could change at any moment and if hats become premium features with game impact then you should start a riot...but thankfully we're not there yet.
About the changing meta and
(I mean sure
About meta, I talked to friends who played dota and they were really talking about a meta swing and that some stuff I said was totally out dated. As apperently pa got played as a roamer now while I used to did this a 1-2 months ago and people would simply report me. Maybe this is also an influence of competitive in pub dota, the fact that something is stupid until a big pro player does it and than it is the one and only way of playing the hero.
This is what frustrates me, the fact that the whole game is about the competitive scene. I know it is a competitive game but even than I think the game should not be 100% focussed on the pro-scene.
It's also kinda funny that you say that the meta changes to often while we have the patch that exists (will exist) for the longest period of time a patch ever existed in dota.
But srsly. You can just play dota without looking for information and you are still able to play at a decent level (looking at you slacks).
And yeah. The commercial aspect can be seen as bothersome. If there was an option to disable it I would click on it instead of being spammed by the compendium.
But...everything in our world exists for profit and while I don't like that philosophy it's just a fact. If they can get away with shoving tons of things in our face and wanting us to buy everything without loosing customers they are gonna do it. It's just common sense.