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DotA 2 Microtransactions
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/22/dota-2-patch-files-hint-at-microtransactions-more/
We already knew that DotA 2, the Valve MOBA, is going to be free to play. Apparently it will make money with micro-transactions like TF2. That's no surprise. Here is the surprise.
We already knew that DotA 2, the Valve MOBA, is going to be free to play. Apparently it will make money with micro-transactions like TF2. That's no surprise. Here is the surprise.
There are also new kinds of couriers to buy (animal pets, basically, that will ferry items back and forth from your base), and there's one more consumable: Something called souls. A "Repentant Soul" will supposedly get players out of the "low priority punishment queue" when used, which suggests some sort of "pay or be punished" system. Gabe Newell mentioned just such a system last year, where he talked about Valve charging players "based on how much fun they are to play with." In other words, act stupid in game, get punished, and then you may have to pay your way out of jail.I don't know how I feel about this craziness yet, but I have to give them a huge amount of credit for coming up with a new idea.
Post edited by Apreche on
Comments
I can get behind that juggernaut aesthetic. Let's just hope Valve learned their mistakes from TF2. Considering the type of people playing DotA 2, there shouldn't be any fuckups in this regard.
But what if someone just sucks ass. What looks like griefing might actually be incompetence. Should that person then have to pay money to keep playing? What if someone is just really really good. They mercilessly destroy all the opponents. On the one hand it might count as being a dick, but on the other hand they're just legitimately good at the game. Should that be punished?
I commend them for the effort and the ingenious idea, and it just may work. However, I am concerned that you will see the same sort of drama about punishments as we currently see surrounding bannings from online forums or from XBLA.
There's also the fact that some of the players will not have real moneys. Imagine some 8 year old is playing for free and rocking the house. Then they get punished, deservedly or not. There's no way they can pay to get redeemed. I foresee troubles in this department.
As long as there is no in-game benefits that you can get only by paying I'm ok with things.
Also, Valve. I'll report people if you kick back 10% of the undick item sales for the users I report.
And again, being punished probably doesn't mean that you have to pay to keep on playing, but you might be able to lessen the punishment by paying. Like a no online matches in the next 24 hours. Not that heavy of a punishment but there still will be people who a willing to pay to skip that 24 hour wait.
You seem to have that silly idea that Valve would ban people forever if they don't pay. I shouldn't even need to tell you that that is ridiculous. So totally ridiculous that it doesn't even make sense. Last time I checked Valve is not a stupid company full of idiots.
More to the point, you're all forgetting something very important. This is their monetization model. They expect to make money of off this, so whatever these purchases specifically do, they expect people to do them often.
...Although, the prospect of cheaters being forced to pay for a free game could have an opposite effect, toying with the cheater's sense of entitlement...
However, I have a lot of faith in Valve that we're just misunderstanding this, especially given what a hardcore genre we're talking about (I'd put Arena gamers in the same category as FPS nuts or RTS fanatics). My guess is the "punishment system" deals with a player's actual reputation and ability. Perhaps you go down in rank from losing a game, but can inflate your rank with a little cash, so more manic players can inflate their ranks without dealing with the grind of playing with noobs? Maybe there's a more comprehensive system to see who deserves what rankings, but a player can appeal this using moneys?
The dudes who aren't assholes get games faster, and without griefers, and the people who troll and flame have to either put up with waiting for shitty games, or pay to get out of it.
1) It means that the game is designed in such a way that griefing is even possible. It would not be hard to design the game in such a way that it would be impossible to do anything that would normally be deserving of punishment.
2) Griefers with money will still be able to torture decent player. It would be better for them to have no way out.
Here's a better idea. If you quit a game before it is over, YOU LOSE. Even if your team wins after you leave, you still get a loss on your record. Of course, on your stats page it will show how many losses are by cause of quitting vs. actual losing. And you know what, put the low priority punishment in there as well. It's fine if people pay to erase the queue punishment, but the only real deterrent is to count it as a loss.
Even if you have a legitimate excuse, like your Internet died, that's rare. You could even let everyone off the hook for one quit per month or something like that. Since everyone will have about the same number of legit quits, it will even out in the end.
The thing is, if Valve makes money by people paying to escape the low priority queue, that gives them a perverse incentive. Now they want to make the game such that people want to quit and start over very badly. Now people will be torn between suffering through the rest of a shitty game, quitting and suffering in a queue, or quitting and paying moneys. It will no longer be in their interest to count quits as losses.
As an aside, I saw GeekNights at PAX East give your lecture about in-game communities, and I feel that these types of highly competitive yet completely anonymous games create a negative community that is prone to griefing.
I'm currently in the beta so let me clarify how their system works.
When you leave a game, wether drop or raqe quit you get an abandonment stat, i.e tracks how many times you've left a game. (You will get a win or loss depending on wether the team you left ends up winning or losing, most of the time you will get a loss because your team is now 4v5) An algorithm then looks at how many times and how often you abandon games. Then, if you deserve it according to this algorithm you get placed in "low priority" queues. These queues basically put you at the very end of the matchmaking line. Normal queue times are 1-4 mins, low priority is 20-40 min. If you group with other people they will also be in the low priority with you even if they are in good standing so no one will want to play with you. This status last for 24 hours for normal offenders. Repeated offenders gain increasing lengths of low prioirty. According to the article, they will allow you to pay to remove yourself from this penalty.
One more thing regarding the people who quit legitimately, i.e. real life issues, comp/network problems etc. These people should be penalized the same as rage quiters. It is difficult and inaccurate to determine if the quit is legitimate or not and the team of 4 doesn't care if you rage quit or your dog caught on fire. If someone has internet issues and drops a large amount of their games then sure, they are quiting for legitimate issues and not because they choose to, but no one would want or should have to play with them the same as noone wants to play with a habitual rage quiter.
As for griefing, there is a feature that reports them. Typically the report and replay is reviewd by community volunteers and if found guilty will be punished. Playing poorly does not get punished. It is very easy to see the difference between playing poorly and griefing, especially with the chat logs. Currently in the beta, repeated griefers are removed from beta acess and it is not certain what will be the punishment in the actualy game, though it is likely to be similar to the penalty for leaving and can be removed by paying money.
The interesting thing is, wether or not this system of paying to remove punishment is overall good for the community is irrelevant. The fact is, with this system Valve will make more money and they wouldn't mind if more people left games or griefed.
If you are a leaver/rage quitter, your punishment should not be erasable. You are basically giving a license to anyone with money to burn to be an asshole. If you are bad, your punishment should be permanent and unavoidable. No get out of jail for free OR for $50. You wait until you roll doubles.
Also, stats should not be resettable! I'm sure the NY Yankees would love to reset their record in the middle of a losing season with all their moneys, but that would obviously be bullshit.
In addition, why are there queues? I've never had to wait in a queue to play in any online game. When you click play now, it should just match you with someone and let the game begin. The only reason for there to be a queue is if there isn't enough server capacity to handle all the games. That is bullshit. Also, let people run their own dedicated servers. The queue should not even exist, so talking about a system to pay your way out of it is besides the point.
As for griefing, the game should be designed such that griefing is not possible or enjoyable, so nobody will do it in the first place. Prevention is always preferable.
Yeah, Valve is going to probably make mad moneys on this game. But it looks like what they are going to do is collect a bunch of assholes in one place and milk them dry. Since it will be free to play, I'll probably try it out. But what it sounds like, I'll be going back to my old trustworthy FPSes soon afterwards.
Wether or not stats should be resetable is a highly debated argument. Again, if soeone wanted to reset stats they could buy another copy and/or make a new account. But also, reseting stats has no gameplay implications on anyone else so why shouldn't you if you want to? Also, many players suck balls when they first start playing and get better overtime. Permanent stats would account for these early games and would actually be less acurate than if someone reset them recently.
Also, let me clarify queues. The queues have nothing to do with server capacity, it is to match 10 people with the same skill. Games are only fun if everyone is similar in skill and they only way to do that is to make you wait till 9 other people with the same skill queues up. In the beta its 1-4 min for queues and will be much shorter when the game is released so it's not a big deal and is necessary.
As with griefing, there are a few anti griefing prevention methods in game but I don't see how it is possible to make any team-based game grief free.
IMHO, they should be using the Leagues and Seasons system that SC2 has; every three months or so they reset everyone to zero, have you play placement matches, put you in a group of peers and let you play you way up the ladder, matching you with better opponents the more often you win until you start losing again.
If they did do that, I would agree that paying for stat resets would be lame. As it stands it is pretty lame anyways, but you have to have a reason for people to just not constantly smurf if you want your match making to be worth a damn.
However, there needs to be mixing of skills whether people like it or not.In Counter-Strike there is no matchmaking. Everyone plays against everybody. Personally I always want to play against the best, non-cheating, players available. How can I possibly get better if I keep playing against crappy players like myself? I need to see what the good players do, to learn from them. You can't practice on Glass Joe for a year and then expect to be able to beat Mike Tyson.
In sports every team plays every team on their schedule. You don't cancel a game because one team is way better than the other. And sometimes, the underdog wins. With matchmaking you never have an underdog, so a huge element of drama and excitement is completely removed from the game.
Also, even if you accept matchmaking, why do the queues take so long? Unless there just aren't enough players playing, just match up the players of closest skill level immediately. Or maybe the skill level rankings are too fine-grained. There are only 3 level 3 dudes out there? Clearly there need to be less levels. Even with matchmaking, a game should start immediately if there are actually a reasonable number of players of any skill level. Consider NS. In NS you can definitely grief. You can get in the comm chair and blow all the resources on stupid shit. You can also give the other team information on the global chat. You can also just die on purpose constantly to give the other team resources. You can also stand in the way of your own teammates, such as blocking a fleeing onos.
Sometimes people do these things unintentionally. Blocking the onos happens rather often. But have you ever seen anyone do these things on purpose? I haven't. While these things are all possible to do, they are not fun. There is no incentive or reward for doing them. The game is designed such that nobody would want to do these things on purpose, so nobody does. Playing properly is so much more fun than griefing, and people do the most fun thing. The problem with these MOBA games it that they are designed such that griefing can often be as fun, or more fun, than playing seriously. The solution isn't to punish griefers, it's to fix the game.
I agree with your point on griefing, but I really dont see how to stop people from doing it. However, at the higher level brackets, there are virtually no griefers, as griefers are generally lower leveled players. At higher brackets people are much more focused on winning.
First, too long queue times? I just played a match of LoL and I think it took me two seconds to get a game. I'm pretty sure that if I go to play TF2 and press it's "Find me a server" button it would take a lot longer than that to find me a game. And only thing TF2 has to worry about is that the server is not full. LoL found me 9 other players on relatively close level who were waiting to start a new game. All in two seconds. Not too long in my opinion.
Also griefing and dickheads in game. It's impossible to eliminate, there are ways to lessen it, but there's no eliminating it. I would like to give a little challenge to Scott or anyone who wants to train their skills in game design. I give two (I first wanted to give three but I realized that one is already solved) simple problems that happen in LoL and probably in other DOTA-likes too.
1. Rage quitters. The kind of people who in first half of the match shout at the "noobs" on his team and in the middle of the match say "Fuck you noooobs! I'm out of here" and quit, leaving the team in 4 vs 5 situation.
2. Feeders. The kind of people who decide that their team sucks and decide to buy all speed boosting items so they can run as fast as they can to the enemy to be killed by them and thus giving them huge amount of exp and gold.
Scott said that that kind of griefing happens because people find it more fun than actually playing the game. I don't buy that. I can't see any way how that kind of action is more fun than actually playing the game. I could maybe understand that someone gets frustrated by a unskilled team members and see that match is unwinnable and thus tries to hasten the end, but at least LoL has a surrender vote for the situations when it seems like there is no way to win anymore and I at least always try to do my best even when I see that victory is pretty much unobtainable at that point. Also I have been in games where one team rules the early game but when the other team gets pushed in defensive position they get their shit together and raise to win the game.
I might have had a point in this rambling, not sure.