4Game

I keep seeing people posting that we have no right to complain about Valve's lack of communication, because we are still going to buy the Battlepass, meaning we're somehow just as bad. I'm not sure what the malfunction here is in these people's thought processes, but I will try to make it simple.

We players like DotA. We like to play DotA, express ourselves via cosmetics in DotA, complete challenges in DotA, get hyped for DotA gameplay tournaments. This is not the same thing as liking Valve. Valve owns DotA, and there is nothing we can do about this. So when Valve continuously mistreats the community around DotA, us getting upset at them is completely justified – we are going to buy the products, yes, but we are going to buy them after months of Valve refusing to communicate or do anything to improve it. This doesn't mean we're endorsing Valve by buying products, but endorsing DotA. If we don't spend money on DotA or support it, that won't help the game, that will kill it. We only have 2 options – make an uproar so Valve doesn't continue smothering the game, or withdraw support and let it die of natural causes like TF2 did.

Valve rakes in an incredible amount of wealth from this game, it is a top calibre multiplayer title, it deserves some level of re-investment of the outpouring of public support we as players give it, but by all measures DotA's development and investment are shrinking year after year – despite prize pools gloating and Valve gloating about it. Valve consistently bungles pro-events, consistently breaks promises it makes to communicate, consistently leaves game features broken or un-updated. This is not okay. But if we don't support DotA, that doesn't mean things are going to improve, it means that DotA is going to be canned, like TF2 was, or like any other game with faltering numbers gets. Complaining about Valve is 1000% acceptable because we live in a system where corporations can hold Intellectual Property over game titles, and the playerbase has no choice but to comply with the holders of that Intellectual Property. When you call completely valid complaints "Crying" or "Whining", you are actively killing the game you want to defend. You are pushing the pillow down over its face just a little harder.

When we complain, we are exercising our only viable strategy of making the game get better that doesn't involve the game getting its servers shutdown. Stop drinking the Kool-aid and defending a multi-billion dollar corporation that can't bother to pay some relations manager 70k a year to not make us hate being fans of the game. You don't have to get defensive and assume it's just some "crying kid" or a "whale" because they want Valve to do the absolute, bare minimum standard that every other gaming corporation on earth with a Multiplayer title this large is held to. This subreddit's unyielding defense of Valve is such an absolutely bizarre thing. No other multiplayer community on Reddit behaves this way. A single infraction on the level of what Valve has pulled even in the last year would receive 10x the backlash on any other gaming subreddit. We need to make our voices heard if we want to get anything done, defending Valve and pretending everything is fine while player numbers fail is not going to fix anything.