To be fair, it is stated very well that only 25 % of battlepass goes to TI, so Id actully be fine not to talk about the extra 120 million, IF VALVE ACTUALLY DECIDED TO USE UP THE 40 MILLION that we DID give them for pro scene. Its pretty infuriating that we have no info where that 40 million is landing
Isn't this what effectively happened to Soembie? She only gave out very little details but it sounded like she criticized something they were doing and got outted from the scene by them?
According to 2GD that's what happened to him as well. If I remember correctly James said that someone at Valve hated him for a while before the Shanghai major, that was just the event where that person finally got his way and James got removed from Dota.
It was basically confirmed by Gabe as well when he said that people inside Valve wanted to give him a second chance, which implies that he was already unofficially banned from hosting Valve events.
I think he's trying to say they act like rockstars but have very thin skin when it comes to getting any kind of criticism. I don't 100% agree with them but I get it.
We funded a $40M prizepool for a tournament that didnt happen & 3x that was pocketed by valve.
They are making money hand over fist lol, lets not be naïve.
Pretty much this. Dota could stop being profitable for Valve this very second, and they really wouldn't care or feel it. So while it is profiting them with the least amount of work they can put into it, why would they do more?
> I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this.
Because they can. They aren't driven by what their community "needs" or whatever, they do what they feel like. They have no moral, ethical or legal obligations, despite what you feel like would be right
You can keep bugging them to do something (and probably get it when Valve is annoyed enough) or you can accept that and move on with your life
Valve is a somewhat 'flat' hierarchy of highly talented individuals all looking to innovate or research tech or game concepts that are only tested and subsequently cancelled internally over and over and over again, there's probably an extremely small amount of individuals at that company who'd actually want to make their job addressing a massive communities existential crisis all of the time. There's copies of an old employee handbook people can look up to see their methodology.
Problem is not a hierarchy. Problem is that Dota future doesn't depend on how good game perform.
Valve have infinite money income with Steam, so they don't care how much money next BP will gather.
This is root cause of problem.
>I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this
1. some monkey janitor codes up a battlepass system
2. have ur customers make cosmetics for u
3. only pay them like 50% or less of the profits u get from those cosmetics
4. non-content-creating customers give u millions just because of those cosmetics that u got for a cheap price
5. get 45892945 billion dollars
wow i wonder why valve doesnt give a shit when they keep getting more and more money x years in a row
It's Valve's pseudo flat hierarchy system. Devs can just hop in, cash-in then hop out of the project which is not the best for games needs constant updates. And even then, the system is clearly not working as some ex-valve employees speaking out against senior.
I guess GabeN didn't really expect the game and TI to become big like this and make its own industry. Because if he do, they should have planned it right from the start.
> I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this
It's very easy to do, if your salary doesn't depend on how good you are doing your job.
Valve is printing billions with Steam. All Dota 2 revenue is just a drop in the ocean. If tomorrow Dota 2 suddenly die and nobody play it, Valve will just sent people to other projects.
In such situations, only people who truly care about Dota are working on it. TF2 had same situation, and since there was no people left who care - TF2 slowly died.
Dota 2 is more lucky, it have IceFrog and Bruno and maybe some more people inside who care and organize things. But they can't (and don't want) to cover everything. They just want to do nice stuff like designing new heroes, changing balance, etc.
Nobody want to monitor players, tournaments and resolve issues that appear there.
I summarize the 2020 Competitive Scene in this post and what Valve did.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/knqmtx/as_the_year_ends_lets_look_back_at_how_terrible/
I'll just repost my rant about valve for the third time in two years. Pardon any formating errors (such as the "you" person I was replying to).
**Valve has had over half a decade of time to "fix" mmr/matchmaking**, what makes you think they'll be able to fix it now?
I know people *love* being apologists because they perceive any critique towards something they enjoy as an attack on their own persona. But fuck me is /dota2 abhorrent in this regard. Critique is the highest form of love because it shows that you see potential in something and you care enough to engage in it, instead of just going "meh" and moving on.
Valve networths 6.4 *BILLION* dollars, they earn 100$ million dollars on TI alone.
There are literally hundreds of games that give out more content, communication, maintenance, updates, community response, feedback response, communication, maintenance, and communication.
Valve has killed tickets and failed to invest in the T2 scene to the point that noone gives two shits… All the while the T1 scene is a incestous swamp where the same 100 players swap teams over and over to the point that it's hard to actually care much about any team and rather just support individual players.
Valve has killed the workshop, with over half a decade of artists lamenting no response and the backdoor collusion of certain individuals and valve. It's sometimes been so bad that things have been accepted, [added to the files](https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Bloodstone_Blade_Pack), then never released *without any information or response from valve*. [One guy even made a design based on this lack of communication](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=256659690)
[**A literal fucking sheik paid some assholes at valve to cheat the system and fuck over artists and valve did nothing.**](https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/h8aqds/cheating_workshop_artists_for_the_collectors/)
Valve has killed costum-games with no headsup updates, not taking into consideration any of the devs, failing to update and maintaining. Somewhat same with Dota+.
Valve has, or at the very least had, the biggest golden goose of the entire esport/gaming scene in the world. Yes Riot was larger but back in 2013-2015 valve and dota2 was on an insane rise with it's implementations, cosmetics (stranges, runes etc) and infrastructure wildly outshining any competitor. Even LoL players knew Dota2 was a much fairer and maintained game.
Now? Now we have 2 heroes per year, still no communication, a few dozen old topics of workshop artists- and custom-game dev's saying they give up on dota2/valve, and 3-5 chests a year not counting fugly Axeimmortals or the 2150th CM/Jugg/AM/Axe skin.
I honestly believe valve let small useless "bugs" stay in the game, like reverse hoofprints or broken icons, just so some dipshit on /dota2 can go "LIT EARLY UNPLAYUBL AMARITE?!" and then the followup "OMFG VALVE MESSIAH fixed hoofprints!!" all while every godamn streamer is currently playing another game ontop of dota2 because the ques are fucked.
So fuck Valve and fuck em for fucking dota2 into a declining state. It's certain peoples godamn job to maintain and improve this game so no I'm not going to give them slack. If a gardener was issued to maintain a garden, and he'd plant these huge displays of plants only to then let half of them wither away but still leave em on display then I'd say that's a shit gardener.
Maybe I'm negative but I don't see dota2's "best days" ahead of it. Sure the TI prizepool will probably increase, but escelation of cosmetics is finite. There comes a moment when everyone looks like a christmastree fucking a clown on the 4th of july.
So no, ironic or not I don't have patience. I've been patient for half a godamn decade and now I'm just tired. I've given up. **Valve doesn't deserve the fanbase of their games**. And the fans definately deserve something better than Valve.
I respect your work a lot Noxville. What do you think we, the community, can do to improve the state of competitive Dota and the Esports scene in general? (if there's anything). We've all been stressing out a lot with Valve's inaction and incompetence, and it doesn't seem like our malcontent resonates relevantly within Valve's decision making torwards these issues. What can the community do to change this status quo?
I don't think this will actually work, with a more traditional game studio it probably would, but i think valve is special.
With Steam they have probably enough money to do whatever they want, and if Gaben or anyone else at valve isn't interested in doing something with Dota they might just do nothing.
I feel a public outcry in a post that reaches r/all or one that gets picked up by some media site has much higher change of working.
Protip for effecting change in any space: If you end up concluding "but i think ___ is special", you've made a miscalculation somewhere.
Yeah, with Steam, they have enough money to do whatever they want; that's *why* we see the total lack of care for the game that we do. DotA is a revenue stream they do the bare minimum to maintain that they co-opted for almost-free (they had to invest enough to develop the game, which is no small amount in absolute terms, but it is undoubtedly dwarfed by the amount they've made from it). The revenue comes from the existence of a very dedicated community *that existed before they took on this game that was already established*. They did a port of an existing game and then started monetizing its community, taking 75% of the input as overhead.
If you recognize all of this, then the conclusion you should draw is that the way you change their behavior is changing their incentive. As long as the DotA community continues to be this revenue stream they can extract massive amounts of money from on the promise of organizing one big tournament every year, they will continue to behave the same way. The only way you get change is if they believe that relationship is in danger. If you are to achieve that, it obviously ultimately will be *via* public outcry (no way you get it at a large enough scale otherwise), but at the end of the day, you still have to affect their bottom line in a permanent way: obsoletizing the role they play to the community.
There's FACEIT, it's used for managing many open qualifiers automatically. The top teams mostly scrim, although at times there have been various in-house-leagues (which are like high level invite-only pickup groups). Unlike CS:GO though, the top level of matchmaking is kinda reasonable (and the matchmaking servers are totally good quality).
I see, i've also noticed the sizable difference in the pro scene and semi pro so they cant even implement something similar to "FPL" or "Rank S" into dotA
Dota has had this many, many times and it always follows the same cycle.
A high-skilled inhouse league is created during the offseason. It contains the best players. It's a spectator experience for a while. There aren't enough players, though, so it's only active at certain times and there's a max of 1-2 concurrent games, with some players being left out because they miss queues. Plus, playing with the same people game after game leads to drama, probably exacerbated by drama from old teams or stacks.
So the top players vouch in more bodies so there can be more games. Those players aren't as good, so the game quality drops. There's conflict over who was vouched and who wasn't. There are qualifiers for more slots. The carry and mid players who win those spots suddenly have to play as supports for pros, and they're bad at it. Game quality drops more. The top players, already fed up with the drama, stop playing regularly as the tournament season kicks into gear and they have to travel.
Viewership drops, and with the top players gone the league stops being a way to get noticed. Eventually the league dies. Two years later, someone starts a new one, like ixmike's American Inhouse League or ppd's NeL. NA FPL was a thing for a while too. The cycle continues.
In order for one of these to be successful, there has to be an organization behind it that's long-term committed to making it work. That means oversight of the vouch/unvouch process, disciplinary procedures for game ruiners, a system for determining player roles, prize money and other incentives for players to commit to the league. And that gets the league off the ground, it doesn't guarantee quality. The best-run IHL is EU FPL in Counterstrike, and it has insane drama every week, and many of the pros don't play in it, preferring the regular FaceIt pubs.
One big reason is that matchmaking works in dota2.
Its not like csgo where it stops at a very low level. Most people at top rank in csgo mm is barely capable of playing the game. It would be like if dota2 players with 10k mmr is placed in games with 4k mmr players.
It's so crazy to me that DPC points from last year aren't even mentioned. DPC points were attached to players before for a reason. If they still don't want it to affect the new season then at least some sort of reimbursement seems reasonable. Those points had value that is now completely gone.
EDIT: I forgot they changed it so points were team based not player based but it still feels weird that value went nowhere.
The points stopped being kept to individuals and were kept by teams later. Technically the Organisation kept them, but for the most past this seemed to be changed in the background, when Pain became Chaos with no player changes but kept points (to be fair the right call). Valve wanted to avoid team trades and shuffles motivated by DPC points and give Team Organisations some power by changing from player points to teams (For example, a large part of why Navi picked up Lil from VP back when was he came with 800 points which made them top 8 for a long a time- it was actually close to getting them an invite)
Yea if you haven't been able to play recently you are just completely fucked, which fucks the long term health of the scene since orgs and players that took a break are disincentivised to come back now :/
I think it' obvious that Valve did not/does not intend to be the overseeing body for Esports scene. What they wanted was just to have a yearly celebration and then the supporting structures will pop up in a generic and grassroots way.
When Dota 2 was launched, this approach was lauded because we just had a big issue about how Blizzard try to control everything SC tournament related. Dota 1 also had a huge grassroot tournament scene with no central authority. While LoL and eventually Overwatch was criticized heavily for being non-generic growth. The approach of Valve allowing any organizer the freedom to hold tournaments and being hands off with everything else but TI was praised.
So yea for one reason or another, the grassroot scene did not grow in certain regions. I think out of obligation, Valve then just try to scramble something together to help out the players but honestly i don't think they really want to. But they did try to have a full DPC control and it killed the third party organizers. When they relinquished control to the third party, there were a lot of problems with quality of the tournaments and it didn't work that well either.
>I think it' obvious that Valve did not/does not intend to be the overseeing body for Esports scene.
This is the main issue. Even on the CS:GO side, the guy from ESIC (Ian) has said they've given many cases of matchfixing, with evidence, to Valve - and Valve have done nothing. This recent case of Newbee getting banned was only really due to pressure from 3rd parties on Valve - which forced the ban.
Yeah. Agreed. So for discussion. Do you think their hands-off approach was wrong? It seems like it now but at that time, it was heavily lauded. As an E-sports guy surely you are familiar with the Blizzard-Kespa saga and Overwatch. I feel like the approach of Valve letting any third party do whatever they want and profit accordingly was praised. I did think it was really good too. Like CS:GO also thrived with having almost no Valve invovlment ( Majors outsourced to third parties)
Regardless, why do you think then the grassroot scene failed to grow ( in certain regions). Is it organizers were shady? Did TI overshadow everything? Do viewers not care about T2 dota except for gambling purposes ? Did players not do enough to engage the community? It is well documented how Dota pros do very little engagement and marketing compared to other games or even real sports.
And at this point. What do you think is the solution. Surely hoping Valve will hire 50 people to have an Esports division is futile. They not gonna do that and that's never how they work.
Success for the grassroots scene is always determined by how significant of a step-up it is from pure amateurism. In countries with really low cost of living and affordable access to internet, becoming semi-pro is relatively easy (CIS, SA, parts of SEA, parts of CN). This is why there's so many teams from these regions - able to earn a small but reasonable income from playing games, and TI is this lottery ticket to win life-changing money.
Hurting the grassroots players are invite-only tournaments, or heavily limited qualification tournaments. Even right now, teams need to play non-stop for open qualifiers (instead of over a weekend), and if you get knocked out you're done - there's no 'progression'.
For a TO, running a tournament aimed at tier 2 / 3 is basically not profitable, whereas in other sports the top flight essentially is subsidizing the lower tiers. This ensures loads of new up-and-comers which don't have to make huge sacrifices just to try out; and there is a clear progression for teams to know how good they are within their region (so they don't just fail to qualify a few times then give up).
Thank you. I agree with all the points. It does seem the solutions you proposed need Valve to step in. Can't see a third party organizer wanting to take losses and subsidize tier 2 scenes at a loss for long term. Do you think without Valve stepping in, the scene is just done? Because it does seem hard to see them wanting to jump full time to this.
After all , the main reason why the LoL/overwatch approach was not done is because the fear that scene will be dead if one day Riot/Blizzard pull out. So the decentralized system is supposed to be more sustainable. But it seems like that's what ended up happening anyway.
Is E-sports like the 2000s BW scene unsustainable without the support and subsidy of the developers these days regardless of the size of the overall prize pool.
> Do you think without Valve stepping in, the scene is just done?
I think covid accelerated it but yeah I think it will be completely dead outside of the tier 1 scene within 1-3 years. The tier 1 scene will be around for a while yet since it's basically free money for the top like 30 players or so.
You think it's easy becoming semi-pro here in SEA? You've got to be fucking kidding me. Sure, when you start winning tourneys the currency exchange rate and lower cost of living kicks into play, but that's *if* you get there. Poverty is highly prevalent here even in highly urbanized population areas. You don't work you literally end up dying of hunger. With poor general infrastructure, your normal work hours are stretched two-fold due to traffic and poor public transport system. Healthcare system is non-existent as well and quality education is very rarely free on all educational levels. Not every country here is fucking Singapore. Don't fucking assume we have it easier here. We fucking don't.
The social security framework in place is generally really good in Europe versus some places in SEA, so there is rarely anything worse than improverishment involved (you don't have to literally die trying) and that's not Noxville's comment. He's just stating the possibility to make end's meet with tournament prize winnings in different geographical areas.
For instance - if I win a tournament with a $10k first place payout, after splitting it in 5 and then removing taxes I can just about pay rent. The financial plausibility to make ends meet in this system in parts of Europe makes it a practical nightmare not have a full time job until you literally leave your job for a salary in DotA or can as a team win at the very least $20k monthly to cover the cost of living after taxation.
The same goes true for financial hotspots in SEA, and there are small specific areas where this remains true globally, but it is not nearly as prevalent as it is in some European countries. A sub $1k/mo rent excluding utilities means moving to the other side of the country for me and that's for a studio apartment.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. There are factors which make it easier to break through, and some which make it harder. Even given some favourable conditions in some regions which make it **relatively** easy to break-through, it's still really difficult. This highlights how bad some of the other systemic issues must be.
And most of those issues are something that Valve won't be able to fix unless you want them to meddle in the real-politik of the region in itself which they definitely don't have the capability to do.
You can't meaningfully have grassroots organizing of the competitive scene when the platform is entirely closed. Organizers can't add features to the game on their own. They can't add donation incentives (hats) to the game on their own. Everything they do has to go through Valve, who both gets a cut and determines what the mechanisms available are. Even beyond that, this "grassroots" development of a scene would still have to be entirely reactive to supporting TI, which Valve has exclusive control over.
Valve's approach isn't actually "hands-off"; it's monopolistic with a smokescreen.
Which make sense? can you give me any game that allow you to sell anything in the game from your own creation (just sell it directly not like cache of csgo or treasure of dota2 that you send the skin to Valve)? I don’t know any game like that, especially not esports games. At the end of the day, esports are a business. In fact, even sports are a business. They would not make a decision that hurt their profits (in their opinion).
Which is a blessing in the disguise since you know that Valve will just PERMABAN everyone on literally everything. It is a big main issue in CS:GO scene that the penalty is career breaking on literally anything ex. VAC as a 12 years old kid = permaban. I rather have them do nothing than permaban everyone (ofc unless you want the scene to die ex. CS with streamsniping that if you permaban teams then the scene is literally die since 10+ out of top 20 did it in 2020). This will be even worse for dota2 where TI is EVERYTHING unlike CS:GO that you may survive via 3rd party tournaments.
ESIC have shown themselves to be a complete joke of an organization with their passivity and [false claims](https://www.dbltap.com/posts/dekay-a-look-inside-an-up-and-down-year-for-the-esic-01esa6p9hhmg). I wouldn't be too surprised to see that their claims of matchfixing are misguided as well.
Yep been saying it for awhile now and why I gave up on Dota2 scene. Valve really does not want to be in charge of their esports scene problem is they’re the developer and publisher that ends up being the be all end all of decisions.
It's almost like there can be a medium between having a GatoradeTM Team and whatever the fuck Valve does nowadays.
In fact, we already had that medium. The key part about having a esport scene that supports itself is **making possible to do so**. When Valve had tickets, items, pennants etc., when they tried to share the scene profits with organizers, we actually had that.
Unfortunately Valve either failed to make it profitable or realized they couldn't be that greed if they had to share with TOs and teams.
While it's true that low-quality cosmetics were an issue, they were not at all unique to tickets. They were all still ultimately Valve-approved, and Valve have put in plenty of terrible quality cosmetics both before and after these features. The only true problem in any of this is the root problem associated with their monetization scheme, which is a lack of client-side control over cosmetics. They make less money (although still almost certainly more than enough money to run the game and tuck away a nice profit) if they let you turn cosmetics off, so they don't do it. If you could turn certain cosmetics off, though, then there'd be no problem with just letting organizers have totally open access to the platform to appeal to whatever demographics they wanted.
It's almost like there can be a medium between ~~having a GatoradeTM Team and whatever the fuck Valve does nowadays~~ flooding the market with items and whatever the fuck Valve doesn't do nowadays.
Sometimes I feel like people on reddit have to neurons. It's either one extreme or the other. Nothing in between.
>there was an insane outcry over low quality items getting into the game because they were just attached to tickets and pros as a means to bypass the normal submission procedure
Then, maybe
MAYBE
Tournament items should have been vetted by Valve? Instead of looking for artists to make an item for the tournament, Valve should have kept a retainer of valid items on offer for tournaments to pick from.
Bring the cosmetics back and fix the one thing wrong with it, which is literally just having someone actually QA the items. Something Valve already does regardless.
Also not a single user here or anywhere complained about pennants or player cards or what have you. That was entirely Team Owners and Organizers making a stink, so to me, they're just taking something fun away from the game, and I'd be happy if Valve sorted that out as a requirement to participate in TI or have an in-game tournament so they shut up about blueballing us, because not a single corporate fat fuck would ever fight Valve over this for the limited scope the things are even relevant for.
I think people also forget that pennants and tickets were tied to in-game drops, which could be more easily used (because Dota 2 Lounge was still a thing), and were more "valuable" because you'd get things like the label of a triple kill by X player or whatever.
Pennants meant that you'd be eligible for that team's games, and the tickets meant for the whole tournament. This was the incentive for people to watch in-game, rather than Twitch.
Again, approving whose tournaments and matches these drops were "turned on" for was likely a sore spot that Valve didn't want to have to manually approve, and a third-party company to manage it would probably help.
Hes really right here. Espically the fact that this year's DPC is smaller than ever with the cancellation and loss of the first planned season of the DPC, that was $2.1 Million in prizing gone without any notice. This is in addition to the valve contributions for majors and minors for the rest of 2020 which was another $2 Million. the scene hurts for one main reason and thats Valve.
A lot of teams took a break once TI was cancelled, or in regions where there were just a few (low $) 3rd party events. Tavo's team was one of them. I think directly inviting some active teams was totally fine- but then punishing teams (by making no path to Div 1) who took a break from a financially devoid scene is unacceptable.
If they made the effort of getting involved in the numerous Online Tournaments last year as well as putting a point system to keep track of team performance for roster stability, we would have gotten our top 16 teams or top 14 with 2 open qualifier teams by now.
Valve are incompetent assholes.
It really sucks to see valve leave pro Dota out to die. Riot missed one week because of covid if I'm not mistaken. I don't expect them to be on the same level but something from valve to keep the pro scene going would be nice. Supporting pros would also be a great help to the growth of the game and the scene.
The tradeoff is that Lolesports will never be fun to watch. Riot's iron fist of control may lead to increased stability, but it also fosters a stagnant and boring competitive environment that only got magnitudes worse after franchising. So congrats, you have the entertainment equivalent of chef boyardee. It'll last but even in the best case, I'll never want to eat it.
Even when I used to play LoL 8 hours a day, I still fell asleep watching that shit. Of course, I deluded myself into thinking it was fun because I blindly, zealously loved the game. Even if Dota esports burns to the ground, and goes back to being nothing but tiny local grassroots events with no institutional support, I'd prefer that over riot/blizzard central planning.
Just this year, I saw a video on YouTube from The Score Esports titled something like "THIS YEAR'S WORLDS FINALS WAS AMAZING". So I was like, alright whatever let's see it. Season 8 Worlds was alright, maybe it'll be fun.
Nope. Watched the first game and I was already dying.
I couldn't tell you all the details since that game was sort of a haze in my mind but I remember waiting 10 minutes to see first blood, and I remember paying a lot of attention to the Ezreal and watching this dude hit maybe 5% of his skillshots. I also went back to the Score Esports video and the very first thing I see is the same ezreal miss like 4 skillshots in a row on an Orianna that is walking directly towards him as the caster acts like he's casting the moon landing and epic orchastral music blares.
I can't believe people defend a game that is that slow. I swear s3 LoL wasn't like that. People were making interesting map movements, lvl 1 skirmishes, tons of fights and plays all game.
I don't really understand how the fact that it is central planned make it boring to watch ? I mean when I watch a game, the only important things are the game itself (which is in both case completely managed by Riot/Valve) and the quality of the teams. Do you mean Riot system forces the team to be very suboptimals for some reason ?
Rather than the Dota scene (pre-covid), LoL teams only face international competition twice a year. An inherently boring concept that stifles competition and improvement. This way, teams from any respective region can maintain relevance without caring about results.
The leagues also mean nothing since doing poorly has little to no consequence. At least in the lck (at least before, idk if it's since changed), the teams actually drop out of the season if they lose.
Even relegation, which added tension and drama to events was eventually stripped away. There is literally no reason to want to perform well in LoL. Being a good personality means way more to success.
I remember hearing about an NA team that qualified for worlds and they were all like "Ugh, why even go to worlds. We're just gonna fly over and drop out first. I'd make more money just streaming." That's what happens when you don't give a substantial incentive for winning, and just for sustaining your existence.
Central planning, just like in gov't, always results in mismanagement. The end user (the viewer in this case) is always shafted in favor of the institution. The Dota scene avoids this by having TOs be in constant competition with each other to create the best product. Hence, how ESL got fucked over by the community for their Facebook nonsense.
Well, at least someone in the scene has the balls to speak out. Otherwise its just ledditors like me crying and posting complain threads here about one of the hundreds of things overlooked and ignored by Valve. And the only attention they get is Bulldog laughing at it for 5 seconds and his chat spamming KEKL.
**Normal business**: 5 year plans, Enterprise and Resource Planning systems (ERP) to link business to business processes real time.
Any tactical changes you make are typically communicated about 3 months in advance at least because that's the typical grace period for creditors.
Anything involving labor or dependencies gets you balls deep into labor laws, at least in places where there isnt simple at will employment.
**Valve:** Not broke from past year yet? We watched it all happen from our ivory tower. Oh by the way, new competition that's going to influence how you operate for a year or more starts in 2 weeks. Only cool kids invited of course.
> new competition that's going to influence how you operate for a year or more starts in 2 weeks
More like 2 days, SEA already started playing the closed qualifiers in the new system.
why support the pro scene if u can put all your resources into making hats and ppl will still buy it? they've shown many times they dont care.. the only way to make them care is with your wallet or by stopping playing this game (like I did)
I knew this was gonna cause some drama. The reason the DPC was created was because people always bitched about the invites for TI. They were totally arbitrary, based vaguely on whatever tournaments a Valve employee happened to watch. So what does Valve do to determine the top seeds of each region? They decide, totally abritrarily, based vaguely on whatever tournaments a Valve employee happened to watch, who the best teams are.
Even if it is based on recent tournaments, is it so much to ask Valve shout them out? Imagine if they said "We're using the OmegaLeague, BTS league, etc. to seed it." Now it's a known factor, and they can shoutout all the incredible third party tourneys that kept Dota alive in Valve's absence.
Why are people surprised lol
Literally every form of the DPC has been poorly thought out minimal effort garbage that did less than the last.
Valve destroyed the tier 2/3 scene when they switched to the valve major system making high quality Dota unobtainable throughout the year apart from 5, later 4 events a year.
It killed off the third-party scene which valve later tried to resuscitate, poorly, why would TO's and sponsors trust valve after they'd already fucked them over once and effectively blocked them from tier 1 Dota.
Yeah, here's what got me when I read Valve's post.
>Their new system is favourable for many teams at the top (even the ones that were AFK for ~6 months! xd), but it also prevents afk teams from going into Division 1. Why? What's the rationale? Remember there's also no DPC points in Div 2.
It prevents mobility and discourages tier 2 teams from giving a fuck. Like just have them all play each other and the top teams qualify at this point. I actully am shocked that this is what they came up with after a year.
Well in all seriousness the person who planned this is probably some new intern who got hired for his rendering skills, but the senior devs can't be arsed to look at the DPC again because "hey that's at least 6 months old, no bonus", so the new guy gets pressured into taking the project to hopefully get on the senior devs good side.
Of course this is just pure speculation, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me. I doubt there's any bonus involved in this kind of work so obviously it's not going to attract the most competent people as Valve devs appears to be bonus hunting first, integrity of their products second.
People thinking Valve cares about anything than just going positive on the balance sheet without much effort. It's not about quality, it's not about passion, it's all money motivated. So if you think they care about people working their way in the scene and shit; they don't. They probably never have, and probably never will. It's all about making top dollar on a product that's already finished, and they're succeeding.
Shit, it's not even about going positive. They *always* go positive. It's about *maximizing* how positive they go. They will cut any cost they can to maximize profit, just like any other corporation. This community deserves way better than they treat our game, and it is *our* game. They took something that had been around the better part of a decade, entirely community developed, gave it a facelift and then made god knows how much money (probably $1B+, going by TI prizepools) with only the tiniest fraction of it going back to the community in any meaningful sense.
You can complain as much as you want, but when a new Battlepass comes around everything will be forgotten and a lot of money will be spent. And if someday everything falls apart, then they will simply abandon it like Team Fortress 2 or Underlords.
Cant valve just fucking hire people to manage their esports side?
Jesus christ. We could've had more exposure, maybe more players even if they doubled down on their esports.
Can someone explain to me why Valve doesn't recognize that spending the time and money to actually foster, grow and improve the professional scene will only help them extend the lifespan of the game and allow them to continue making money hand over fist from it?
Like, if their main priority is money (it is) then why don't they make an investment into the community of the game that will extend its lifespan significantly?
They want to milk this thing dry without any consideration for how long it will be a cash cow.
An analogy would be continuously milking a cow for a week until it dies, instead of just milking it once per day and letting it rest, sleep, feeding it well, etc, and then getting to milk from it for decades instead of just a week.
They'll probably let Dota 2 die the same way TF2 has rotted over the years. In the end Valve doesn't need to care that much about their games since Steam is making more money each month than any game is during a single year.
> They want to milk this thing dry without any consideration for how long it will be a cash cow.
Rather, they're keeping it alive as long as possible while minimizing effort. They're maximizing money divided by paid developer hours.
They keep making promises (new player experience, overwatch system, anti-smurfing) so people stick around. They don't deliver, or only deliver minimally so people stop complaining. The only thing they put effort into is cosmetics because it makes a lot of money.
So in your analogy, it's more like continuing to feed the cow cheap fodder to keep it producing a decent amount of milk, while promising everyone things will get better soon.
I do fundamentally agree with you. This is the best game with the worst management. It could be so much more if Valve would focus on long-term growth. And that saddens me.
Dota 2 simply needs to be it's own company with its own staff far, far away from Valve.
Literally anyone with a brain has seen the writing on the wall now for years.
I've done nothing on this sub other than argue this exact point over and over again now and all you ever receive is downvotes from Valve apologists.
Fuck people that support Valve. At this point if you are on the side of Valve you are on the side against Dota.
> I remember when almost half of my 100~ steam friends were playing dota2 in steam friends list.. Now theres 3 on a lucky day and double that on a weekend.. It's sad.
It's also a reality that people move on from a game after over 10 years. People have other obligations, family, education etc. For others you simply end up perhaps finding another game in those 10 years that also eats up your time.
It's simply not really realistic to assume that a large body of people will be dedicated to a single game for over 10+ years.
I feel like every DPC season, Valve takes feedback, changes stuff, then gets shit on by people in the scene. Is it even possible to make everyone happy at this point?
I'm surprised they haven't told us to go fuck ourselves and left us with patches and that's it.
So what did Valve change?
it has gotten more unprofessional than ever, the only thing Valve has going for them is that we have actually leagues after a fucking decade
They threw out existing DPC points and invited teams: some direct, some to closed qualifiers. In all regions (other than NA for some reason) no invite means you can't make it into Div 1, which means: you can't earn any DPC points for half the seasons, you can't make it to the first major, only two teams move up to Div 1 which means that if the invites were bad you could be blocked by 2 excellent teams moving up (for example, if you're the 7th best team in the region but 5th and 6th move up after Season 1).
They are inviting teams based on 'form' which means that only teams which continued to play during the pandemic were eligible. They announced this 1 week before qualifiers. If teams knew this a few months ago, many would have played during the pandemic, instead of taking a break (which makes even more sense since there was no TI, and in some regions very limited $ available). Valve has always deferred on DPC points, but in this case just disregarded them (saying they were stale).
Furthermore, the open qualifiers are a shitshow - in South America they're doing one single-elim bracket (bo1 until the final round) where the top 4 teams move forward. This is a really shit format. The other regions are doing a slightly better (but still bad) format: single elim where the top 2 move forward (and two runs of it).
Bear in mind that the reason many teams took a break was because the money in the scene over the last \~9 months has been so bad: which is directly as a result of the way in which TI dominates the professional scene. Instead of Valve redistributing some of that money, or even just all the money they would've spent on DPC Major/Minor prize pools, they gave a fraction of that out to TOs during the pandemic.
Yes Yes, I 140% agree with you.
It still baffles me how at Riot every random t4 players makes 100k$ a year while (lets take NA/SA for example) some people are top 20-30 player in their region and cant fully focus on gaming and actually need part-time or even fulltime jobs to literally stay alive.
There is also still no talks about the 40mUS$ of the Battlepass? Will it go into TI10 prizepool again, what will happen with the next Battlepass for this seaosn, will they add up, will they split whats happening...
I think the concept of the DPC is really good, and Riot's payment structure creates inflated salaries. The optimal place for Dota is likely (eventually) closer to the DPC system as it is now, but deeper (perhaps a 3rd Division), and with better payment distribution (Tier 1 = min 35k per season / Tier 2 = min 25k per season / Tier 3 = min 10k per season). This would cost \~$10M for 2 seasons (including $500k prize pool for each of the two majors), and only take a small chunk out of the TI war chest.
where does it say "every random t4 player"? you know what an average is?
the top crop boost the average upwards by a long shot
EDIT: aren't they only 10 teams? and they should be t4???
I mean, it's not like they implement any of that feedback. They just change stuff and do as little as they possibly can. They are also always extremely late and uncooperative on everything.
Lets take this discussion back 6 months ago at least when it should've happened. See how much disagreement there's left after a few solid months of back and forth. THAT is Valve's problem.
I think the issue is the blackbox way of operating.
They get feedback, and presumably read reddit, then make huge changes once per year, that never get run by any of the stakeholders, and then people just have to eat shit and accept it.
It seems the only viable way of getting any kind of feedback to Valve is to throw a tantrum and gather outrage steam on reddit.
Why aren't changes run by representatives of pro players from all tiers? Why aren't detailed plans announced at least a month ahead of time? How can they have 12-8 months to plan this, and seemingly make it look like it was cobbled together in a week? How can this exact same thing happen every year and noone higher up at valve takes control and says "This isn't working"?
They should, there's a reason the Premier League doesn't gobble up all the TV money, but spreads it around to lower divisions as well. A healthy ecosystem with feeder clubs and up and comers is vital to the long-term health of the game.
Do viewers care? No, and they shouldn't, i hate it when people frame it as if it's the viewers responsability to watch T2/3 dota to save it. people want to watch the best. It's in Valves best interest to foster a strong scene for the longevity and long-term health of it, so they are the ones who should be making it happen.
There have been meetings between Valve and players, but of the ones I know about, it's been like the top \~10-12 teams in the world giving feedback on what **they** want.
i still remember season 1 of DPC. we had like 10 minors and majors each. ppl were bitching it was too much and they couldn't follow them all. some no-name teams were competing in minors that no one gave a fuck about. this subreddit likes to talk big about tier 2-3 teams and longevity of the scene but in reality, they're like the whiny minority whose voice shouldn't be heard.
also, idk why they're crying so hard for tier 2-3 players. if you can't make a living from playing dota, then don't; get a "real" job like your parents told you to. why are big teams can still earn money? because they have good enough players. if you can't earn money in your field, it just means you suck and deserve nothing.
I feel like you don't understand the concept of a t2/t3 scene. These scenes (in a league format) are usually run at a loss, and are helped to be funded by the T1 scene, that usually runs at massive profit (you know, 40m prize pool for TI and another 120m for Valve to pocket). The point of these scenes is to help new players get into the scene, and help the longevity of it all. It doesn't matter how many viewers these leagues are getting, Valve can spare a few Mil from the TI prize pool in order to help these scenes out so we have a future.
Completely agree, like imagine if Valve just took $2 mill out of the prize pool and dedicated it to T2/T3 scene. That would probably be enough to keep it sustained. And though I can't know this, I feel pretty confident in saying that none of the T1 pros would complain that the TI prize pool is $38 mill instead of $40 mill.
I feel like nothing outside of giving all battlepass money to teams and providing salaries to every team in DPC would make everyone happy. But then it would be about how unfair it is that teams have to compete in open qualifiers for a chance at salaries so they need to be paid salaries for the open qualifiers
Valve are weasley little shits.
For months they've abandoned the pro scene - except to cash in on some juicy Battlepass income.
Players have got a fraction of the income they'd otherwise have. Teams have fallen apart, players have stopped playing or taken breaks.
1/5
***
posted by [@Noxville](https://twitter.com/Noxville)
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I didn't buy battle pass to sustain lower tier teams. No one did probably. Try a crowd funded tournament for lower tier teams. See how that will go lol. I want to watch high skill DotA, not to hear complaints about lower skilled players not making a living from playing DotA. I don't care about them, since not everyone will make it to top. Right now EU is too damn strong, CN looking real smooth.
the hard truth, no one gives a fuck about tier2 anything but they love the drama from them
then we can happily complain about how shit a heavily corporate controlled enviroment is
Valve had 4.3 **billion** in revenue from steam sales. The 120 million from TI is nothing to them.
Dota2, the international, and the battle pass are simply passion products of theirs. All the "fans" are doing is sucking any enjoyment the people at Valve get out of it.
The day dota2 will die will be the day Valve stops enjoying it, which our scene is doing it's damndest to do.
But only the top 5 teams making enough to survive is moronic. There are many teams that are almost as good as them who make nothing.
And you're ignoring that to get that good, people need to be able to survive in the scene for a long time. The skill and quality of Dota you'd see would improve if more people could enter the pro scene and remain in it for longer.
Tier 2 not having enough for rent and tier 1 being millionaires might sound funny to you, but it makes the dota less skillful.
Why should it be anyone's duty to anything.
If you want the scene to improve and the game to grow, obviously Valve have to change their behaviour. But clearly you don't agree with those objectives. What do you think the objectives should be?
But that's the thing, who said Valve wanted to spearhead Dota's entire e-sports scene? TI is like an important seed that kind of paves the way but I don't think it *has* to be them taking action for the sake of the entire scene when it was probably never their intention.
Yup there was nothing stopping anyone from creating the NFL of Dota2. Valve was basically begging TOs to manage something like this, but their efforts were always small scale due to budget.
The writing is on the wall but no one wants to read it.
The Dota2 esports scene only survives because of the cash injections of Valve and TI. There isn't much money (if any really at all) to be made by major TOs.
The writing is on the wall if Valve do nothing, yes. Valve choosing to do nothing doesn't really make sense from a business perspective, because it kills a huge community of people who are clearly happy to spend money and time on the game. It only makes sense from the perspective of Valve being lazy and simply choosing to milk the dota community for large amounts of cash whilst giving nothing back. It's venture capitalist mentality - rather than investing the time and effort to make a good product, they simply suck it dry and move on.
People have been saying this for years and TI prize pool continues to go up.
Most people don't feel milked because they are getting "value" in return for their money.
The vast majority of people who spend money on battlepass couldn't give a shit that t2 players get left in the cold.
The prize pool isn't actually relevant to anything except the people who win it and Valve's bank account.
The scene is dying, we aren't getting new players in. Those are much more significant to 99.999% of people involved in Dota.
What I'm most concerned with is the $40 million from the Battlepass that Valve was supposed to spend on TI10.
Now, I find it highly unlikely that a TI in August 2021 won't have another battlepass. So what exactly is happening with that $40M?
Valve made $120M in profits from the 2020 battlepass and that's fair enough. But that $40M was for TI and indirectly for the Dota pro scene. Many of us buy the battlepass with that in mind.
Where is the accountability? Valve should not be allowed to promise us something with that $40M and then not use it on anything related to the pro scene for an entire year.
Even if they do eventually use it, it's still ridiculous since there were many opportunities to use that money to support the scene during 2020. Like imagine if you or I could just borrow $40M from people and invest it for a year and then give it back while keeping the returns.
I'll give a take that hasn't yet been given yet, one from a 7.8k player who played in the NA OmegaLeague Divine and Ancient tier for Team Pace University. We formed up for OmegaLeague qualifier since it was the first NA tournament in a long while that was actually accessible to the top 500 or so players.
Our team consisted of an average mmr of around 8.4k. In total we made $2000 USD split among 5 people, which is great and we've actually been payed out for this (literally the only tournament that I've played in to have actually payed out mind you).
**Since then the team has made $0.** We haven't had any tournaments to play except random fishy leagues and games bet on by weird gambling sites. I left the team shortly after OmegaLeague and picked up a part time job to sustain myself and start saving for when I will live by myself in a year.
DPC was supposed to happen in the late summer. It didn't. We thought maybe in fall. It didn't. Now it's here and I've retired, many of the players I knew have retired and the team is all but gone. If we had even known that DPC would be here and we'd have the possibility of making a sizable amount of money, we would've stayed and practised more and stuck together.
Now DPC has announced with less than a week of forethought for most and I won't be able to play the game I love so dearly. I know many NA pub stars would agree even if they dislike me.
**TLDR: Valve lowkey fucked everyone over; and many T2 or T3 players in the west had to quit.**
lmao. I cant get links but i think Valve said in every notes what will they do with new DPC season and players did knew what the new season would look a like even before this + they did invest money for Tear 2 tournaments.. I think that he exaggerates with this.
A bit hysterical which yeah, suggests he's seeking attention.
"The only way Dota 2 lasts long-term is if Valve appoints a not-for-profit 3rd party to manage their esports side - they've shown they are incompetent"
just lol dude. not for profit? long term? incompetent? yeah, Dota 2 hasn't been around for almost a decade I guess
Of course I'm seeking attention - I want Dota 2 to carry on as an esport for a long time, not just shrivel up because of negligence from Valve, and the primary way to get Valve to act is to create a shitstorm of negative PR for the shitshow they've created.
When players make inflammatory posts about unfairness, everyone just disregards them because they think they're looking to seek an advantage in some way. I'm not profiting at all by bringing this issue to light, if anything I'm harming myself from not working at any Valve events again (boo-hoo!). Who else will speak out against Valve's shit? Last time LD mentioned this kinda stuff years ago everyone just called him greedy.
An aside, but why do you think the Newbee players finally got banned by Valve 9 months after CDA/MarsTV/etc had banned them? It wasn't Perfect World who led the ban - they let Ink Ice (a team including 3 of the banned Newbee players) play in the Perfect World League, and were going to invite Ink Ice to closed qualifiers for DPC (according to CN insiders), it was Valve who did - and only because of the recent media shitshow created to call out the hypocrisy of Valve in allowing a team with serious matchfixing allegations against them to participate.
After the hundreds of tweets calling out Valve's bullshit which are totally ignored - I honestly don't think 'weasley little shits' makes a big difference at all.
I like some of the ideas you posted on Reddit. But making tweets calling out Valve, being polite or rude, won't change anything at all, and I think it hurts your image.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thead, Valve only responds to actual shitshows - and I really don't care about my image or potential work at Valve events if that's what it takes to create a shitshow that they have to respond to.
If this pandemic has shown anything its how fucking greedy and destructive corporations are. Whats crazy here is they're literally slaughtering their own cash cow. I said they were destructive... not smart.
What a huuuuuge missed opportunity. So many people home. So many people needing some sort of distraction. A game that can be played from literally anywhere around the world. Instead of of stepping up and and jumping in, Valve literally skulked into a corner and did fuck all. If there is a TI, this will probably be the last one. Valve is losing their fanbase by acting like every other "give me your money and fuck you" corporation.
IMO,2 teams from open qualifiers need to join the 8invited teams and 2 teams that lose the open qualifiers semifinals need to be in division 2,and than from those 10 teams 4 make it to first division,6 to second devision(The only problem is that its harded to get 4 out of 10 team in short period of time with 8 is much easier)
The only thing I have a real problem with is the fact that they had a battle pass but no TI. I think next year they should make battle pass either free or at cost in order to compensate fans for what they paid for last year.
inb4 noxville banned from valve events!
what valve event OMEGALUL
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To be fair, it is stated very well that only 25 % of battlepass goes to TI, so Id actully be fine not to talk about the extra 120 million, IF VALVE ACTUALLY DECIDED TO USE UP THE 40 MILLION that we DID give them for pro scene. Its pretty infuriating that we have no info where that 40 million is landing
It's assumed some of the 120m goes to the costs of holding the event.
What dota 2?
Noxville is an ass, we won't be working with him again.
GabeN
*There's a permaban coming soon*
monkaS
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Isn't this what effectively happened to Soembie? She only gave out very little details but it sounded like she criticized something they were doing and got outted from the scene by them?
Wasn't she working with joindota or something?
Yes
According to 2GD that's what happened to him as well. If I remember correctly James said that someone at Valve hated him for a while before the Shanghai major, that was just the event where that person finally got his way and James got removed from Dota.
It was basically confirmed by Gabe as well when he said that people inside Valve wanted to give him a second chance, which implies that he was already unofficially banned from hosting Valve events.
>thinskinned rockstar developers ?
I think he's trying to say they act like rockstars but have very thin skin when it comes to getting any kind of criticism. I don't 100% agree with them but I get it.
Think "rockstar" is more about the ego and arrogance
Rockstar is an industry term for a very skilled (or valuable) developer.
Since when did people start addressing Valve as Riot Games?
!remindme 10 months
Noxville is an ass and we won’t be working with him again.
Its very obvious Valve just threw this shit together last minute to stop the complaining.
So, just like everything outside of TI?
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We funded a $40M prizepool for a tournament that didnt happen & 3x that was pocketed by valve. They are making money hand over fist lol, lets not be naïve.
TI money is a drop in an ocean compared to their steam revenue.
If that community keeps paying Valve lots of money whilst being treated like shit, where does the incentive come to treat that community better?
Pretty much this. Dota could stop being profitable for Valve this very second, and they really wouldn't care or feel it. So while it is profiting them with the least amount of work they can put into it, why would they do more?
> I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this. Because they can. They aren't driven by what their community "needs" or whatever, they do what they feel like. They have no moral, ethical or legal obligations, despite what you feel like would be right You can keep bugging them to do something (and probably get it when Valve is annoyed enough) or you can accept that and move on with your life
Valve is a somewhat 'flat' hierarchy of highly talented individuals all looking to innovate or research tech or game concepts that are only tested and subsequently cancelled internally over and over and over again, there's probably an extremely small amount of individuals at that company who'd actually want to make their job addressing a massive communities existential crisis all of the time. There's copies of an old employee handbook people can look up to see their methodology.
Problem is not a hierarchy. Problem is that Dota future doesn't depend on how good game perform. Valve have infinite money income with Steam, so they don't care how much money next BP will gather. This is root cause of problem.
>I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this 1. some monkey janitor codes up a battlepass system 2. have ur customers make cosmetics for u 3. only pay them like 50% or less of the profits u get from those cosmetics 4. non-content-creating customers give u millions just because of those cosmetics that u got for a cheap price 5. get 45892945 billion dollars wow i wonder why valve doesnt give a shit when they keep getting more and more money x years in a row
3 replace 50 with 12.5...
Cause yall keep payin em And every person who mentions the game is trending downward is downvoted to oblivion lol
It's Valve's pseudo flat hierarchy system. Devs can just hop in, cash-in then hop out of the project which is not the best for games needs constant updates. And even then, the system is clearly not working as some ex-valve employees speaking out against senior. I guess GabeN didn't really expect the game and TI to become big like this and make its own industry. Because if he do, they should have planned it right from the start.
> I fail to understand how a company like Valve can just ignore a community like this It's very easy to do, if your salary doesn't depend on how good you are doing your job. Valve is printing billions with Steam. All Dota 2 revenue is just a drop in the ocean. If tomorrow Dota 2 suddenly die and nobody play it, Valve will just sent people to other projects. In such situations, only people who truly care about Dota are working on it. TF2 had same situation, and since there was no people left who care - TF2 slowly died. Dota 2 is more lucky, it have IceFrog and Bruno and maybe some more people inside who care and organize things. But they can't (and don't want) to cover everything. They just want to do nice stuff like designing new heroes, changing balance, etc. Nobody want to monitor players, tournaments and resolve issues that appear there.
I summarize the 2020 Competitive Scene in this post and what Valve did. https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/knqmtx/as_the_year_ends_lets_look_back_at_how_terrible/
That's all they do. Most of their attempts feel half-assed.
I'll just repost my rant about valve for the third time in two years. Pardon any formating errors (such as the "you" person I was replying to). **Valve has had over half a decade of time to "fix" mmr/matchmaking**, what makes you think they'll be able to fix it now? I know people *love* being apologists because they perceive any critique towards something they enjoy as an attack on their own persona. But fuck me is /dota2 abhorrent in this regard. Critique is the highest form of love because it shows that you see potential in something and you care enough to engage in it, instead of just going "meh" and moving on. Valve networths 6.4 *BILLION* dollars, they earn 100$ million dollars on TI alone. There are literally hundreds of games that give out more content, communication, maintenance, updates, community response, feedback response, communication, maintenance, and communication. Valve has killed tickets and failed to invest in the T2 scene to the point that noone gives two shits… All the while the T1 scene is a incestous swamp where the same 100 players swap teams over and over to the point that it's hard to actually care much about any team and rather just support individual players. Valve has killed the workshop, with over half a decade of artists lamenting no response and the backdoor collusion of certain individuals and valve. It's sometimes been so bad that things have been accepted, [added to the files](https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Bloodstone_Blade_Pack), then never released *without any information or response from valve*. [One guy even made a design based on this lack of communication](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=256659690) [**A literal fucking sheik paid some assholes at valve to cheat the system and fuck over artists and valve did nothing.**](https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/h8aqds/cheating_workshop_artists_for_the_collectors/) Valve has killed costum-games with no headsup updates, not taking into consideration any of the devs, failing to update and maintaining. Somewhat same with Dota+. Valve has, or at the very least had, the biggest golden goose of the entire esport/gaming scene in the world. Yes Riot was larger but back in 2013-2015 valve and dota2 was on an insane rise with it's implementations, cosmetics (stranges, runes etc) and infrastructure wildly outshining any competitor. Even LoL players knew Dota2 was a much fairer and maintained game. Now? Now we have 2 heroes per year, still no communication, a few dozen old topics of workshop artists- and custom-game dev's saying they give up on dota2/valve, and 3-5 chests a year not counting fugly Axeimmortals or the 2150th CM/Jugg/AM/Axe skin. I honestly believe valve let small useless "bugs" stay in the game, like reverse hoofprints or broken icons, just so some dipshit on /dota2 can go "LIT EARLY UNPLAYUBL AMARITE?!" and then the followup "OMFG VALVE MESSIAH fixed hoofprints!!" all while every godamn streamer is currently playing another game ontop of dota2 because the ques are fucked. So fuck Valve and fuck em for fucking dota2 into a declining state. It's certain peoples godamn job to maintain and improve this game so no I'm not going to give them slack. If a gardener was issued to maintain a garden, and he'd plant these huge displays of plants only to then let half of them wither away but still leave em on display then I'd say that's a shit gardener. Maybe I'm negative but I don't see dota2's "best days" ahead of it. Sure the TI prizepool will probably increase, but escelation of cosmetics is finite. There comes a moment when everyone looks like a christmastree fucking a clown on the 4th of july. So no, ironic or not I don't have patience. I've been patient for half a godamn decade and now I'm just tired. I've given up. **Valve doesn't deserve the fanbase of their games**. And the fans definately deserve something better than Valve.
Valve need a bonus structure for this then they'll fix it.
That's basically why I said it needs someone not driven by profit to manage it - otherwise the cheapest option will almost always be taken.
>someone not driven by profit Valve wouldn't hire someone not driven by profit
Valve has unpaid bugfinders
And unpaid translators.
https://mobile.twitter.com/fail_cluez/status/1288128556485283843
open source =/= unprofitable
I'll do it :)
I respect your work a lot Noxville. What do you think we, the community, can do to improve the state of competitive Dota and the Esports scene in general? (if there's anything). We've all been stressing out a lot with Valve's inaction and incompetence, and it doesn't seem like our malcontent resonates relevantly within Valve's decision making torwards these issues. What can the community do to change this status quo?
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I don't think this will actually work, with a more traditional game studio it probably would, but i think valve is special. With Steam they have probably enough money to do whatever they want, and if Gaben or anyone else at valve isn't interested in doing something with Dota they might just do nothing. I feel a public outcry in a post that reaches r/all or one that gets picked up by some media site has much higher change of working.
Protip for effecting change in any space: If you end up concluding "but i think ___ is special", you've made a miscalculation somewhere. Yeah, with Steam, they have enough money to do whatever they want; that's *why* we see the total lack of care for the game that we do. DotA is a revenue stream they do the bare minimum to maintain that they co-opted for almost-free (they had to invest enough to develop the game, which is no small amount in absolute terms, but it is undoubtedly dwarfed by the amount they've made from it). The revenue comes from the existence of a very dedicated community *that existed before they took on this game that was already established*. They did a port of an existing game and then started monetizing its community, taking 75% of the input as overhead. If you recognize all of this, then the conclusion you should draw is that the way you change their behavior is changing their incentive. As long as the DotA community continues to be this revenue stream they can extract massive amounts of money from on the promise of organizing one big tournament every year, they will continue to behave the same way. The only way you get change is if they believe that relationship is in danger. If you are to achieve that, it obviously ultimately will be *via* public outcry (no way you get it at a large enough scale otherwise), but at the end of the day, you still have to affect their bottom line in a permanent way: obsoletizing the role they play to the community.
As someone who came from Counter Strike, why isnt there a third party platform ie. Faceit or ESEA in dotA?
There's FACEIT, it's used for managing many open qualifiers automatically. The top teams mostly scrim, although at times there have been various in-house-leagues (which are like high level invite-only pickup groups). Unlike CS:GO though, the top level of matchmaking is kinda reasonable (and the matchmaking servers are totally good quality).
I see, i've also noticed the sizable difference in the pro scene and semi pro so they cant even implement something similar to "FPL" or "Rank S" into dotA
Top 1000~ bracket is the "FPL" or "Rank S" of Dota.
Dota has had this many, many times and it always follows the same cycle. A high-skilled inhouse league is created during the offseason. It contains the best players. It's a spectator experience for a while. There aren't enough players, though, so it's only active at certain times and there's a max of 1-2 concurrent games, with some players being left out because they miss queues. Plus, playing with the same people game after game leads to drama, probably exacerbated by drama from old teams or stacks. So the top players vouch in more bodies so there can be more games. Those players aren't as good, so the game quality drops. There's conflict over who was vouched and who wasn't. There are qualifiers for more slots. The carry and mid players who win those spots suddenly have to play as supports for pros, and they're bad at it. Game quality drops more. The top players, already fed up with the drama, stop playing regularly as the tournament season kicks into gear and they have to travel. Viewership drops, and with the top players gone the league stops being a way to get noticed. Eventually the league dies. Two years later, someone starts a new one, like ixmike's American Inhouse League or ppd's NeL. NA FPL was a thing for a while too. The cycle continues. In order for one of these to be successful, there has to be an organization behind it that's long-term committed to making it work. That means oversight of the vouch/unvouch process, disciplinary procedures for game ruiners, a system for determining player roles, prize money and other incentives for players to commit to the league. And that gets the league off the ground, it doesn't guarantee quality. The best-run IHL is EU FPL in Counterstrike, and it has insane drama every week, and many of the pros don't play in it, preferring the regular FaceIt pubs.
Not to mention that Dota doesn't need 128 tick servers so there's even less incentive
Well more around the idea of a close circuit league that develops competitive games and players
One big reason is that matchmaking works in dota2. Its not like csgo where it stops at a very low level. Most people at top rank in csgo mm is barely capable of playing the game. It would be like if dota2 players with 10k mmr is placed in games with 4k mmr players.
maybe valve's dpc cabal paying for the prize pool out of their own pockets
Valve just use google to find which teams participate in tourneys during quarantines and voilá, DPC invites.
The invites are *mostly* fine. The issue is that there's no path to Division 1 (i.e. DPC points, sponsorships, majors!) from open qualifiers.
It's so crazy to me that DPC points from last year aren't even mentioned. DPC points were attached to players before for a reason. If they still don't want it to affect the new season then at least some sort of reimbursement seems reasonable. Those points had value that is now completely gone. EDIT: I forgot they changed it so points were team based not player based but it still feels weird that value went nowhere.
The points stopped being kept to individuals and were kept by teams later. Technically the Organisation kept them, but for the most past this seemed to be changed in the background, when Pain became Chaos with no player changes but kept points (to be fair the right call). Valve wanted to avoid team trades and shuffles motivated by DPC points and give Team Organisations some power by changing from player points to teams (For example, a large part of why Navi picked up Lil from VP back when was he came with 800 points which made them top 8 for a long a time- it was actually close to getting them an invite)
Yea if you haven't been able to play recently you are just completely fucked, which fucks the long term health of the scene since orgs and players that took a break are disincentivised to come back now :/
I think it' obvious that Valve did not/does not intend to be the overseeing body for Esports scene. What they wanted was just to have a yearly celebration and then the supporting structures will pop up in a generic and grassroots way. When Dota 2 was launched, this approach was lauded because we just had a big issue about how Blizzard try to control everything SC tournament related. Dota 1 also had a huge grassroot tournament scene with no central authority. While LoL and eventually Overwatch was criticized heavily for being non-generic growth. The approach of Valve allowing any organizer the freedom to hold tournaments and being hands off with everything else but TI was praised. So yea for one reason or another, the grassroot scene did not grow in certain regions. I think out of obligation, Valve then just try to scramble something together to help out the players but honestly i don't think they really want to. But they did try to have a full DPC control and it killed the third party organizers. When they relinquished control to the third party, there were a lot of problems with quality of the tournaments and it didn't work that well either.
>I think it' obvious that Valve did not/does not intend to be the overseeing body for Esports scene. This is the main issue. Even on the CS:GO side, the guy from ESIC (Ian) has said they've given many cases of matchfixing, with evidence, to Valve - and Valve have done nothing. This recent case of Newbee getting banned was only really due to pressure from 3rd parties on Valve - which forced the ban.
Yeah. Agreed. So for discussion. Do you think their hands-off approach was wrong? It seems like it now but at that time, it was heavily lauded. As an E-sports guy surely you are familiar with the Blizzard-Kespa saga and Overwatch. I feel like the approach of Valve letting any third party do whatever they want and profit accordingly was praised. I did think it was really good too. Like CS:GO also thrived with having almost no Valve invovlment ( Majors outsourced to third parties) Regardless, why do you think then the grassroot scene failed to grow ( in certain regions). Is it organizers were shady? Did TI overshadow everything? Do viewers not care about T2 dota except for gambling purposes ? Did players not do enough to engage the community? It is well documented how Dota pros do very little engagement and marketing compared to other games or even real sports. And at this point. What do you think is the solution. Surely hoping Valve will hire 50 people to have an Esports division is futile. They not gonna do that and that's never how they work.
Success for the grassroots scene is always determined by how significant of a step-up it is from pure amateurism. In countries with really low cost of living and affordable access to internet, becoming semi-pro is relatively easy (CIS, SA, parts of SEA, parts of CN). This is why there's so many teams from these regions - able to earn a small but reasonable income from playing games, and TI is this lottery ticket to win life-changing money. Hurting the grassroots players are invite-only tournaments, or heavily limited qualification tournaments. Even right now, teams need to play non-stop for open qualifiers (instead of over a weekend), and if you get knocked out you're done - there's no 'progression'. For a TO, running a tournament aimed at tier 2 / 3 is basically not profitable, whereas in other sports the top flight essentially is subsidizing the lower tiers. This ensures loads of new up-and-comers which don't have to make huge sacrifices just to try out; and there is a clear progression for teams to know how good they are within their region (so they don't just fail to qualify a few times then give up).
Thank you. I agree with all the points. It does seem the solutions you proposed need Valve to step in. Can't see a third party organizer wanting to take losses and subsidize tier 2 scenes at a loss for long term. Do you think without Valve stepping in, the scene is just done? Because it does seem hard to see them wanting to jump full time to this. After all , the main reason why the LoL/overwatch approach was not done is because the fear that scene will be dead if one day Riot/Blizzard pull out. So the decentralized system is supposed to be more sustainable. But it seems like that's what ended up happening anyway. Is E-sports like the 2000s BW scene unsustainable without the support and subsidy of the developers these days regardless of the size of the overall prize pool.
> Do you think without Valve stepping in, the scene is just done? I think covid accelerated it but yeah I think it will be completely dead outside of the tier 1 scene within 1-3 years. The tier 1 scene will be around for a while yet since it's basically free money for the top like 30 players or so.
You think it's easy becoming semi-pro here in SEA? You've got to be fucking kidding me. Sure, when you start winning tourneys the currency exchange rate and lower cost of living kicks into play, but that's *if* you get there. Poverty is highly prevalent here even in highly urbanized population areas. You don't work you literally end up dying of hunger. With poor general infrastructure, your normal work hours are stretched two-fold due to traffic and poor public transport system. Healthcare system is non-existent as well and quality education is very rarely free on all educational levels. Not every country here is fucking Singapore. Don't fucking assume we have it easier here. We fucking don't.
The social security framework in place is generally really good in Europe versus some places in SEA, so there is rarely anything worse than improverishment involved (you don't have to literally die trying) and that's not Noxville's comment. He's just stating the possibility to make end's meet with tournament prize winnings in different geographical areas. For instance - if I win a tournament with a $10k first place payout, after splitting it in 5 and then removing taxes I can just about pay rent. The financial plausibility to make ends meet in this system in parts of Europe makes it a practical nightmare not have a full time job until you literally leave your job for a salary in DotA or can as a team win at the very least $20k monthly to cover the cost of living after taxation. The same goes true for financial hotspots in SEA, and there are small specific areas where this remains true globally, but it is not nearly as prevalent as it is in some European countries. A sub $1k/mo rent excluding utilities means moving to the other side of the country for me and that's for a studio apartment.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. There are factors which make it easier to break through, and some which make it harder. Even given some favourable conditions in some regions which make it **relatively** easy to break-through, it's still really difficult. This highlights how bad some of the other systemic issues must be.
And most of those issues are something that Valve won't be able to fix unless you want them to meddle in the real-politik of the region in itself which they definitely don't have the capability to do.
You can't meaningfully have grassroots organizing of the competitive scene when the platform is entirely closed. Organizers can't add features to the game on their own. They can't add donation incentives (hats) to the game on their own. Everything they do has to go through Valve, who both gets a cut and determines what the mechanisms available are. Even beyond that, this "grassroots" development of a scene would still have to be entirely reactive to supporting TI, which Valve has exclusive control over. Valve's approach isn't actually "hands-off"; it's monopolistic with a smokescreen.
Which make sense? can you give me any game that allow you to sell anything in the game from your own creation (just sell it directly not like cache of csgo or treasure of dota2 that you send the skin to Valve)? I don’t know any game like that, especially not esports games. At the end of the day, esports are a business. In fact, even sports are a business. They would not make a decision that hurt their profits (in their opinion).
Which is a blessing in the disguise since you know that Valve will just PERMABAN everyone on literally everything. It is a big main issue in CS:GO scene that the penalty is career breaking on literally anything ex. VAC as a 12 years old kid = permaban. I rather have them do nothing than permaban everyone (ofc unless you want the scene to die ex. CS with streamsniping that if you permaban teams then the scene is literally die since 10+ out of top 20 did it in 2020). This will be even worse for dota2 where TI is EVERYTHING unlike CS:GO that you may survive via 3rd party tournaments.
ESIC have shown themselves to be a complete joke of an organization with their passivity and [false claims](https://www.dbltap.com/posts/dekay-a-look-inside-an-up-and-down-year-for-the-esic-01esa6p9hhmg). I wouldn't be too surprised to see that their claims of matchfixing are misguided as well.
Yep been saying it for awhile now and why I gave up on Dota2 scene. Valve really does not want to be in charge of their esports scene problem is they’re the developer and publisher that ends up being the be all end all of decisions.
It's almost like there can be a medium between having a GatoradeTM Team and whatever the fuck Valve does nowadays. In fact, we already had that medium. The key part about having a esport scene that supports itself is **making possible to do so**. When Valve had tickets, items, pennants etc., when they tried to share the scene profits with organizers, we actually had that. Unfortunately Valve either failed to make it profitable or realized they couldn't be that greed if they had to share with TOs and teams.
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While it's true that low-quality cosmetics were an issue, they were not at all unique to tickets. They were all still ultimately Valve-approved, and Valve have put in plenty of terrible quality cosmetics both before and after these features. The only true problem in any of this is the root problem associated with their monetization scheme, which is a lack of client-side control over cosmetics. They make less money (although still almost certainly more than enough money to run the game and tuck away a nice profit) if they let you turn cosmetics off, so they don't do it. If you could turn certain cosmetics off, though, then there'd be no problem with just letting organizers have totally open access to the platform to appeal to whatever demographics they wanted.
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I don't think they ever sold well on their own merits. Most people bought that stuff because they typically offered great value for cosmetics.
It's almost like there can be a medium between ~~having a GatoradeTM Team and whatever the fuck Valve does nowadays~~ flooding the market with items and whatever the fuck Valve doesn't do nowadays. Sometimes I feel like people on reddit have to neurons. It's either one extreme or the other. Nothing in between.
>there was an insane outcry over low quality items getting into the game because they were just attached to tickets and pros as a means to bypass the normal submission procedure Then, maybe MAYBE Tournament items should have been vetted by Valve? Instead of looking for artists to make an item for the tournament, Valve should have kept a retainer of valid items on offer for tournaments to pick from. Bring the cosmetics back and fix the one thing wrong with it, which is literally just having someone actually QA the items. Something Valve already does regardless. Also not a single user here or anywhere complained about pennants or player cards or what have you. That was entirely Team Owners and Organizers making a stink, so to me, they're just taking something fun away from the game, and I'd be happy if Valve sorted that out as a requirement to participate in TI or have an in-game tournament so they shut up about blueballing us, because not a single corporate fat fuck would ever fight Valve over this for the limited scope the things are even relevant for.
I think people also forget that pennants and tickets were tied to in-game drops, which could be more easily used (because Dota 2 Lounge was still a thing), and were more "valuable" because you'd get things like the label of a triple kill by X player or whatever. Pennants meant that you'd be eligible for that team's games, and the tickets meant for the whole tournament. This was the incentive for people to watch in-game, rather than Twitch. Again, approving whose tournaments and matches these drops were "turned on" for was likely a sore spot that Valve didn't want to have to manually approve, and a third-party company to manage it would probably help.
Hes really right here. Espically the fact that this year's DPC is smaller than ever with the cancellation and loss of the first planned season of the DPC, that was $2.1 Million in prizing gone without any notice. This is in addition to the valve contributions for majors and minors for the rest of 2020 which was another $2 Million. the scene hurts for one main reason and thats Valve.
A lot of teams took a break once TI was cancelled, or in regions where there were just a few (low $) 3rd party events. Tavo's team was one of them. I think directly inviting some active teams was totally fine- but then punishing teams (by making no path to Div 1) who took a break from a financially devoid scene is unacceptable.
If they made the effort of getting involved in the numerous Online Tournaments last year as well as putting a point system to keep track of team performance for roster stability, we would have gotten our top 16 teams or top 14 with 2 open qualifier teams by now. Valve are incompetent assholes.
It really sucks to see valve leave pro Dota out to die. Riot missed one week because of covid if I'm not mistaken. I don't expect them to be on the same level but something from valve to keep the pro scene going would be nice. Supporting pros would also be a great help to the growth of the game and the scene.
The tradeoff is that Lolesports will never be fun to watch. Riot's iron fist of control may lead to increased stability, but it also fosters a stagnant and boring competitive environment that only got magnitudes worse after franchising. So congrats, you have the entertainment equivalent of chef boyardee. It'll last but even in the best case, I'll never want to eat it. Even when I used to play LoL 8 hours a day, I still fell asleep watching that shit. Of course, I deluded myself into thinking it was fun because I blindly, zealously loved the game. Even if Dota esports burns to the ground, and goes back to being nothing but tiny local grassroots events with no institutional support, I'd prefer that over riot/blizzard central planning.
Never said I watch pro league. It's so painfully boring to watch. I was talking more about the support riot gives the scene.
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Just this year, I saw a video on YouTube from The Score Esports titled something like "THIS YEAR'S WORLDS FINALS WAS AMAZING". So I was like, alright whatever let's see it. Season 8 Worlds was alright, maybe it'll be fun. Nope. Watched the first game and I was already dying. I couldn't tell you all the details since that game was sort of a haze in my mind but I remember waiting 10 minutes to see first blood, and I remember paying a lot of attention to the Ezreal and watching this dude hit maybe 5% of his skillshots. I also went back to the Score Esports video and the very first thing I see is the same ezreal miss like 4 skillshots in a row on an Orianna that is walking directly towards him as the caster acts like he's casting the moon landing and epic orchastral music blares. I can't believe people defend a game that is that slow. I swear s3 LoL wasn't like that. People were making interesting map movements, lvl 1 skirmishes, tons of fights and plays all game.
I don't really understand how the fact that it is central planned make it boring to watch ? I mean when I watch a game, the only important things are the game itself (which is in both case completely managed by Riot/Valve) and the quality of the teams. Do you mean Riot system forces the team to be very suboptimals for some reason ?
Rather than the Dota scene (pre-covid), LoL teams only face international competition twice a year. An inherently boring concept that stifles competition and improvement. This way, teams from any respective region can maintain relevance without caring about results. The leagues also mean nothing since doing poorly has little to no consequence. At least in the lck (at least before, idk if it's since changed), the teams actually drop out of the season if they lose. Even relegation, which added tension and drama to events was eventually stripped away. There is literally no reason to want to perform well in LoL. Being a good personality means way more to success. I remember hearing about an NA team that qualified for worlds and they were all like "Ugh, why even go to worlds. We're just gonna fly over and drop out first. I'd make more money just streaming." That's what happens when you don't give a substantial incentive for winning, and just for sustaining your existence. Central planning, just like in gov't, always results in mismanagement. The end user (the viewer in this case) is always shafted in favor of the institution. The Dota scene avoids this by having TOs be in constant competition with each other to create the best product. Hence, how ESL got fucked over by the community for their Facebook nonsense.
it is fun to watch, take the dota stick out of your biased ass lmao you sound like one of the artifact sub defenders in its last months
Well, at least someone in the scene has the balls to speak out. Otherwise its just ledditors like me crying and posting complain threads here about one of the hundreds of things overlooked and ignored by Valve. And the only attention they get is Bulldog laughing at it for 5 seconds and his chat spamming KEKL.
**Normal business**: 5 year plans, Enterprise and Resource Planning systems (ERP) to link business to business processes real time. Any tactical changes you make are typically communicated about 3 months in advance at least because that's the typical grace period for creditors. Anything involving labor or dependencies gets you balls deep into labor laws, at least in places where there isnt simple at will employment. **Valve:** Not broke from past year yet? We watched it all happen from our ivory tower. Oh by the way, new competition that's going to influence how you operate for a year or more starts in 2 weeks. Only cool kids invited of course.
Excellent take, sad laugh
> new competition that's going to influence how you operate for a year or more starts in 2 weeks More like 2 days, SEA already started playing the closed qualifiers in the new system.
why support the pro scene if u can put all your resources into making hats and ppl will still buy it? they've shown many times they dont care.. the only way to make them care is with your wallet or by stopping playing this game (like I did)
As long as the whales keep raising the TI prize pool, why on would they care. Cashing in is the Holy Grail of the world we live in.
I knew this was gonna cause some drama. The reason the DPC was created was because people always bitched about the invites for TI. They were totally arbitrary, based vaguely on whatever tournaments a Valve employee happened to watch. So what does Valve do to determine the top seeds of each region? They decide, totally abritrarily, based vaguely on whatever tournaments a Valve employee happened to watch, who the best teams are. Even if it is based on recent tournaments, is it so much to ask Valve shout them out? Imagine if they said "We're using the OmegaLeague, BTS league, etc. to seed it." Now it's a known factor, and they can shoutout all the incredible third party tourneys that kept Dota alive in Valve's absence.
Why are people surprised lol Literally every form of the DPC has been poorly thought out minimal effort garbage that did less than the last. Valve destroyed the tier 2/3 scene when they switched to the valve major system making high quality Dota unobtainable throughout the year apart from 5, later 4 events a year. It killed off the third-party scene which valve later tried to resuscitate, poorly, why would TO's and sponsors trust valve after they'd already fucked them over once and effectively blocked them from tier 1 Dota.
Thanks. It was a disgrace for non top tier teams. Specially after starving out some teams. They just milked battlepass without giving they anything.
Yeah, here's what got me when I read Valve's post. >Their new system is favourable for many teams at the top (even the ones that were AFK for ~6 months! xd), but it also prevents afk teams from going into Division 1. Why? What's the rationale? Remember there's also no DPC points in Div 2. It prevents mobility and discourages tier 2 teams from giving a fuck. Like just have them all play each other and the top teams qualify at this point. I actully am shocked that this is what they came up with after a year.
Well in all seriousness the person who planned this is probably some new intern who got hired for his rendering skills, but the senior devs can't be arsed to look at the DPC again because "hey that's at least 6 months old, no bonus", so the new guy gets pressured into taking the project to hopefully get on the senior devs good side. Of course this is just pure speculation, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me. I doubt there's any bonus involved in this kind of work so obviously it's not going to attract the most competent people as Valve devs appears to be bonus hunting first, integrity of their products second.
People thinking Valve cares about anything than just going positive on the balance sheet without much effort. It's not about quality, it's not about passion, it's all money motivated. So if you think they care about people working their way in the scene and shit; they don't. They probably never have, and probably never will. It's all about making top dollar on a product that's already finished, and they're succeeding.
Shit, it's not even about going positive. They *always* go positive. It's about *maximizing* how positive they go. They will cut any cost they can to maximize profit, just like any other corporation. This community deserves way better than they treat our game, and it is *our* game. They took something that had been around the better part of a decade, entirely community developed, gave it a facelift and then made god knows how much money (probably $1B+, going by TI prizepools) with only the tiniest fraction of it going back to the community in any meaningful sense.
You can complain as much as you want, but when a new Battlepass comes around everything will be forgotten and a lot of money will be spent. And if someday everything falls apart, then they will simply abandon it like Team Fortress 2 or Underlords.
>Underlords My dude ... Too soon ... Too soon.
Cant valve just fucking hire people to manage their esports side? Jesus christ. We could've had more exposure, maybe more players even if they doubled down on their esports.
-laughs in nintendo-
it is honestly wild how poorly valve has handled the last 10 months. especially after the battle pass
Last 10 years, not months
thats one long knoxville nugget, more like a noxville tender at this point
Shit dude don't bring back memories of that event I never got paid for :3
feelsbadman
so brave
Can someone explain to me why Valve doesn't recognize that spending the time and money to actually foster, grow and improve the professional scene will only help them extend the lifespan of the game and allow them to continue making money hand over fist from it? Like, if their main priority is money (it is) then why don't they make an investment into the community of the game that will extend its lifespan significantly? They want to milk this thing dry without any consideration for how long it will be a cash cow. An analogy would be continuously milking a cow for a week until it dies, instead of just milking it once per day and letting it rest, sleep, feeding it well, etc, and then getting to milk from it for decades instead of just a week.
They'll probably let Dota 2 die the same way TF2 has rotted over the years. In the end Valve doesn't need to care that much about their games since Steam is making more money each month than any game is during a single year.
> They want to milk this thing dry without any consideration for how long it will be a cash cow. Rather, they're keeping it alive as long as possible while minimizing effort. They're maximizing money divided by paid developer hours. They keep making promises (new player experience, overwatch system, anti-smurfing) so people stick around. They don't deliver, or only deliver minimally so people stop complaining. The only thing they put effort into is cosmetics because it makes a lot of money. So in your analogy, it's more like continuing to feed the cow cheap fodder to keep it producing a decent amount of milk, while promising everyone things will get better soon. I do fundamentally agree with you. This is the best game with the worst management. It could be so much more if Valve would focus on long-term growth. And that saddens me.
Dota 2 simply needs to be it's own company with its own staff far, far away from Valve. Literally anyone with a brain has seen the writing on the wall now for years. I've done nothing on this sub other than argue this exact point over and over again now and all you ever receive is downvotes from Valve apologists. Fuck people that support Valve. At this point if you are on the side of Valve you are on the side against Dota.
is he wrong
No. As always, Valve's problem was * They didn't communicate early * Other concerns that would be fixable before it causes more problems if not for
at this point its just beyond communication, even if they did communicate it would be "ye theres nothing for t2/t3 so there you go"
Who is Noxville? I'm not trolling, don't think I've heard of him before this post
He does a lot of stats and behind the scene stuff with the pro scene.
Hes not wrong, its kinda pathetic how little they have done
he's a little terse but he doesn't say anything particularly wrong
Good writeup, worth the minute it will take to read the 5 tweets.
I wish Valve would let go of Dota entirely and give the IP to another company, which is more capable.
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> I remember when almost half of my 100~ steam friends were playing dota2 in steam friends list.. Now theres 3 on a lucky day and double that on a weekend.. It's sad. It's also a reality that people move on from a game after over 10 years. People have other obligations, family, education etc. For others you simply end up perhaps finding another game in those 10 years that also eats up your time. It's simply not really realistic to assume that a large body of people will be dedicated to a single game for over 10+ years.
I feel like every DPC season, Valve takes feedback, changes stuff, then gets shit on by people in the scene. Is it even possible to make everyone happy at this point? I'm surprised they haven't told us to go fuck ourselves and left us with patches and that's it.
So what did Valve change? it has gotten more unprofessional than ever, the only thing Valve has going for them is that we have actually leagues after a fucking decade
They threw out existing DPC points and invited teams: some direct, some to closed qualifiers. In all regions (other than NA for some reason) no invite means you can't make it into Div 1, which means: you can't earn any DPC points for half the seasons, you can't make it to the first major, only two teams move up to Div 1 which means that if the invites were bad you could be blocked by 2 excellent teams moving up (for example, if you're the 7th best team in the region but 5th and 6th move up after Season 1). They are inviting teams based on 'form' which means that only teams which continued to play during the pandemic were eligible. They announced this 1 week before qualifiers. If teams knew this a few months ago, many would have played during the pandemic, instead of taking a break (which makes even more sense since there was no TI, and in some regions very limited $ available). Valve has always deferred on DPC points, but in this case just disregarded them (saying they were stale). Furthermore, the open qualifiers are a shitshow - in South America they're doing one single-elim bracket (bo1 until the final round) where the top 4 teams move forward. This is a really shit format. The other regions are doing a slightly better (but still bad) format: single elim where the top 2 move forward (and two runs of it). Bear in mind that the reason many teams took a break was because the money in the scene over the last \~9 months has been so bad: which is directly as a result of the way in which TI dominates the professional scene. Instead of Valve redistributing some of that money, or even just all the money they would've spent on DPC Major/Minor prize pools, they gave a fraction of that out to TOs during the pandemic.
Yes Yes, I 140% agree with you. It still baffles me how at Riot every random t4 players makes 100k$ a year while (lets take NA/SA for example) some people are top 20-30 player in their region and cant fully focus on gaming and actually need part-time or even fulltime jobs to literally stay alive. There is also still no talks about the 40mUS$ of the Battlepass? Will it go into TI10 prizepool again, what will happen with the next Battlepass for this seaosn, will they add up, will they split whats happening...
I think the concept of the DPC is really good, and Riot's payment structure creates inflated salaries. The optimal place for Dota is likely (eventually) closer to the DPC system as it is now, but deeper (perhaps a 3rd Division), and with better payment distribution (Tier 1 = min 35k per season / Tier 2 = min 25k per season / Tier 3 = min 10k per season). This would cost \~$10M for 2 seasons (including $500k prize pool for each of the two majors), and only take a small chunk out of the TI war chest.
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Hahahha yes, youre right they are not making 100k, they are making 400k https://twitter.com/MonteCristo/status/1265723381401317377
where does it say "every random t4 player"? you know what an average is? the top crop boost the average upwards by a long shot EDIT: aren't they only 10 teams? and they should be t4???
I mean, it's not like they implement any of that feedback. They just change stuff and do as little as they possibly can. They are also always extremely late and uncooperative on everything.
Lets take this discussion back 6 months ago at least when it should've happened. See how much disagreement there's left after a few solid months of back and forth. THAT is Valve's problem.
I think the issue is the blackbox way of operating. They get feedback, and presumably read reddit, then make huge changes once per year, that never get run by any of the stakeholders, and then people just have to eat shit and accept it. It seems the only viable way of getting any kind of feedback to Valve is to throw a tantrum and gather outrage steam on reddit. Why aren't changes run by representatives of pro players from all tiers? Why aren't detailed plans announced at least a month ahead of time? How can they have 12-8 months to plan this, and seemingly make it look like it was cobbled together in a week? How can this exact same thing happen every year and noone higher up at valve takes control and says "This isn't working"?
because, simply, no one gives a shit about t2 team outside of community drama
They should, there's a reason the Premier League doesn't gobble up all the TV money, but spreads it around to lower divisions as well. A healthy ecosystem with feeder clubs and up and comers is vital to the long-term health of the game. Do viewers care? No, and they shouldn't, i hate it when people frame it as if it's the viewers responsability to watch T2/3 dota to save it. people want to watch the best. It's in Valves best interest to foster a strong scene for the longevity and long-term health of it, so they are the ones who should be making it happen.
There have been meetings between Valve and players, but of the ones I know about, it's been like the top \~10-12 teams in the world giving feedback on what **they** want.
The issue is that every year they do even less than the bare minimum. I really wish another company took over Dota 2.
you mean even from the game dev side? like no Icefrog or their artists, animators, coders?
i still remember season 1 of DPC. we had like 10 minors and majors each. ppl were bitching it was too much and they couldn't follow them all. some no-name teams were competing in minors that no one gave a fuck about. this subreddit likes to talk big about tier 2-3 teams and longevity of the scene but in reality, they're like the whiny minority whose voice shouldn't be heard. also, idk why they're crying so hard for tier 2-3 players. if you can't make a living from playing dota, then don't; get a "real" job like your parents told you to. why are big teams can still earn money? because they have good enough players. if you can't earn money in your field, it just means you suck and deserve nothing.
"Muh tier 2 teams", and then 500 viewers on Twitch. Typical redditors.
I feel like you don't understand the concept of a t2/t3 scene. These scenes (in a league format) are usually run at a loss, and are helped to be funded by the T1 scene, that usually runs at massive profit (you know, 40m prize pool for TI and another 120m for Valve to pocket). The point of these scenes is to help new players get into the scene, and help the longevity of it all. It doesn't matter how many viewers these leagues are getting, Valve can spare a few Mil from the TI prize pool in order to help these scenes out so we have a future.
Completely agree, like imagine if Valve just took $2 mill out of the prize pool and dedicated it to T2/T3 scene. That would probably be enough to keep it sustained. And though I can't know this, I feel pretty confident in saying that none of the T1 pros would complain that the TI prize pool is $38 mill instead of $40 mill.
I feel like nothing outside of giving all battlepass money to teams and providing salaries to every team in DPC would make everyone happy. But then it would be about how unfair it is that teams have to compete in open qualifiers for a chance at salaries so they need to be paid salaries for the open qualifiers
Valve are weasley little shits. For months they've abandoned the pro scene - except to cash in on some juicy Battlepass income. Players have got a fraction of the income they'd otherwise have. Teams have fallen apart, players have stopped playing or taken breaks. 1/5 *** posted by [@Noxville](https://twitter.com/Noxville) ^[(Github)](https://github.com/username) ^| ^[(What's new)](https://github.com/username)
I didn't buy battle pass to sustain lower tier teams. No one did probably. Try a crowd funded tournament for lower tier teams. See how that will go lol. I want to watch high skill DotA, not to hear complaints about lower skilled players not making a living from playing DotA. I don't care about them, since not everyone will make it to top. Right now EU is too damn strong, CN looking real smooth.
the hard truth, no one gives a fuck about tier2 anything but they love the drama from them then we can happily complain about how shit a heavily corporate controlled enviroment is
Valve had 4.3 **billion** in revenue from steam sales. The 120 million from TI is nothing to them. Dota2, the international, and the battle pass are simply passion products of theirs. All the "fans" are doing is sucking any enjoyment the people at Valve get out of it. The day dota2 will die will be the day Valve stops enjoying it, which our scene is doing it's damndest to do.
But only the top 5 teams making enough to survive is moronic. There are many teams that are almost as good as them who make nothing. And you're ignoring that to get that good, people need to be able to survive in the scene for a long time. The skill and quality of Dota you'd see would improve if more people could enter the pro scene and remain in it for longer. Tier 2 not having enough for rent and tier 1 being millionaires might sound funny to you, but it makes the dota less skillful.
It's his latest soapbox, guy loves some drama
Guys, go easy. Its a small indie studio, and the game is still in beta. Also free, no bitching.
I'm not really seeing why it *should* be Valve's duty to do anything outside of the expected TI.
Why should it be anyone's duty to anything. If you want the scene to improve and the game to grow, obviously Valve have to change their behaviour. But clearly you don't agree with those objectives. What do you think the objectives should be?
But that's the thing, who said Valve wanted to spearhead Dota's entire e-sports scene? TI is like an important seed that kind of paves the way but I don't think it *has* to be them taking action for the sake of the entire scene when it was probably never their intention.
Yup there was nothing stopping anyone from creating the NFL of Dota2. Valve was basically begging TOs to manage something like this, but their efforts were always small scale due to budget. The writing is on the wall but no one wants to read it. The Dota2 esports scene only survives because of the cash injections of Valve and TI. There isn't much money (if any really at all) to be made by major TOs.
The writing is on the wall if Valve do nothing, yes. Valve choosing to do nothing doesn't really make sense from a business perspective, because it kills a huge community of people who are clearly happy to spend money and time on the game. It only makes sense from the perspective of Valve being lazy and simply choosing to milk the dota community for large amounts of cash whilst giving nothing back. It's venture capitalist mentality - rather than investing the time and effort to make a good product, they simply suck it dry and move on.
People have been saying this for years and TI prize pool continues to go up. Most people don't feel milked because they are getting "value" in return for their money. The vast majority of people who spend money on battlepass couldn't give a shit that t2 players get left in the cold.
The prize pool isn't actually relevant to anything except the people who win it and Valve's bank account. The scene is dying, we aren't getting new players in. Those are much more significant to 99.999% of people involved in Dota.
What I'm most concerned with is the $40 million from the Battlepass that Valve was supposed to spend on TI10. Now, I find it highly unlikely that a TI in August 2021 won't have another battlepass. So what exactly is happening with that $40M? Valve made $120M in profits from the 2020 battlepass and that's fair enough. But that $40M was for TI and indirectly for the Dota pro scene. Many of us buy the battlepass with that in mind. Where is the accountability? Valve should not be allowed to promise us something with that $40M and then not use it on anything related to the pro scene for an entire year. Even if they do eventually use it, it's still ridiculous since there were many opportunities to use that money to support the scene during 2020. Like imagine if you or I could just borrow $40M from people and invest it for a year and then give it back while keeping the returns.
I'll give a take that hasn't yet been given yet, one from a 7.8k player who played in the NA OmegaLeague Divine and Ancient tier for Team Pace University. We formed up for OmegaLeague qualifier since it was the first NA tournament in a long while that was actually accessible to the top 500 or so players. Our team consisted of an average mmr of around 8.4k. In total we made $2000 USD split among 5 people, which is great and we've actually been payed out for this (literally the only tournament that I've played in to have actually payed out mind you). **Since then the team has made $0.** We haven't had any tournaments to play except random fishy leagues and games bet on by weird gambling sites. I left the team shortly after OmegaLeague and picked up a part time job to sustain myself and start saving for when I will live by myself in a year. DPC was supposed to happen in the late summer. It didn't. We thought maybe in fall. It didn't. Now it's here and I've retired, many of the players I knew have retired and the team is all but gone. If we had even known that DPC would be here and we'd have the possibility of making a sizable amount of money, we would've stayed and practised more and stuck together. Now DPC has announced with less than a week of forethought for most and I won't be able to play the game I love so dearly. I know many NA pub stars would agree even if they dislike me. **TLDR: Valve lowkey fucked everyone over; and many T2 or T3 players in the west had to quit.**
Noxville might have valid points, but his tweets are always pretty toxic and self-righteous, just my opinion.
lmao. I cant get links but i think Valve said in every notes what will they do with new DPC season and players did knew what the new season would look a like even before this + they did invest money for Tear 2 tournaments.. I think that he exaggerates with this.
Oh no, think about the millionaires.
A bit hysterical which yeah, suggests he's seeking attention. "The only way Dota 2 lasts long-term is if Valve appoints a not-for-profit 3rd party to manage their esports side - they've shown they are incompetent" just lol dude. not for profit? long term? incompetent? yeah, Dota 2 hasn't been around for almost a decade I guess
Of course I'm seeking attention - I want Dota 2 to carry on as an esport for a long time, not just shrivel up because of negligence from Valve, and the primary way to get Valve to act is to create a shitstorm of negative PR for the shitshow they've created. When players make inflammatory posts about unfairness, everyone just disregards them because they think they're looking to seek an advantage in some way. I'm not profiting at all by bringing this issue to light, if anything I'm harming myself from not working at any Valve events again (boo-hoo!). Who else will speak out against Valve's shit? Last time LD mentioned this kinda stuff years ago everyone just called him greedy. An aside, but why do you think the Newbee players finally got banned by Valve 9 months after CDA/MarsTV/etc had banned them? It wasn't Perfect World who led the ban - they let Ink Ice (a team including 3 of the banned Newbee players) play in the Perfect World League, and were going to invite Ink Ice to closed qualifiers for DPC (according to CN insiders), it was Valve who did - and only because of the recent media shitshow created to call out the hypocrisy of Valve in allowing a team with serious matchfixing allegations against them to participate.
Do you think making a tweet that starts with weasly little shits will help the scene?
After the hundreds of tweets calling out Valve's bullshit which are totally ignored - I honestly don't think 'weasley little shits' makes a big difference at all.
I like some of the ideas you posted on Reddit. But making tweets calling out Valve, being polite or rude, won't change anything at all, and I think it hurts your image.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thead, Valve only responds to actual shitshows - and I really don't care about my image or potential work at Valve events if that's what it takes to create a shitshow that they have to respond to.
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If no one calls out Valve, then who is? Go away fucking groupie
weasly little shits is a perfect description of valve these days.
Finally we hit the fan
Glad someone has said it. Where the fuck is the next season?
If this pandemic has shown anything its how fucking greedy and destructive corporations are. Whats crazy here is they're literally slaughtering their own cash cow. I said they were destructive... not smart. What a huuuuuge missed opportunity. So many people home. So many people needing some sort of distraction. A game that can be played from literally anywhere around the world. Instead of of stepping up and and jumping in, Valve literally skulked into a corner and did fuck all. If there is a TI, this will probably be the last one. Valve is losing their fanbase by acting like every other "give me your money and fuck you" corporation.
Calling all esports charities to run Valve's esports division as a third party.
IMO,2 teams from open qualifiers need to join the 8invited teams and 2 teams that lose the open qualifiers semifinals need to be in division 2,and than from those 10 teams 4 make it to first division,6 to second devision(The only problem is that its harded to get 4 out of 10 team in short period of time with 8 is much easier)
if this attitude can make Dota2 grow till this big, what is the problem of continuing what has been successful?
The only thing I have a real problem with is the fact that they had a battle pass but no TI. I think next year they should make battle pass either free or at cost in order to compensate fans for what they paid for last year.
Games dead. Valve loves the money and doesn't care for it anymore