4Game

Excuse my wandering wall of text.

TI is very expensive to run. Venue hire, casters in multiple languages, advertising & marketing, technical staff & equipment, project delivery management, crowd & ticket management, broadcast management, coordinating & planning beforehand, content creation for Battlepass plebs like me….. on and on. It's a massive job to get that going.

And as the esports/dota scene has progressed, most of those people we're so familiar with onstream will want their careers to progress as they grow, so their salaries need to go up etc. The total people / salary cost for the casters alone must be huge.

Not to mention we all have super high expectations for how great TI can be, and so there are certain standards that need to be met to please the mob.

I imagine Dota people at Valve feel this pressure and are trying to look for ways to spread out & grow their cashflow a bit better to support an amazing TI & Battlepass every year. Creative ways to find a better balance between financial smarts & high customer expectations. This split Battlepass is potentially quite a good idea for that. I wonder whether lack of comms has made them look greedy but they're actually just being smart about this all.

Imagine if they were a publicly listed company like Facebook or Google and had that kind of external pressure to grow revenue.

It's incredible & unique how Dota is so very community driven. You may debate this point, but just have a good look at other (non-valve) games. But it must be difficult to work there when the community is so vocal (often angry) & expects so much. We were all pretty disappointed with the Battlepass not feeling as high caliber as previous years.

As salty as we might be about Volvo not giving us a gazillion immortal treasures off the bat (Dudley from Harry Potter comes to mind), you go to admit they are watching & trying to remedy.

They're people too, they love the game too, they don't want to feel like hypocrites. > Reeeee you keep putting Arcanas behind $160 of levels?? Instead of $40 on the shop?? > Yea ok fair, have a free arcana + some levels.

I think we need to respect they want to figure out how to make this work both ways. We want awesome content in our once a year Battlepass and an amazing memorable exciting TI. And they want to find a way to pay for all that, and make money (theyre a business, not a charity, get over it), AND grow Dota somehow.

Sorry for rambling. My point is, I think the simple answer to exhaust all this chaos from our community during TI – is better communication. Which is a hard role to step up to. I don't expect them to answer every angry rant on reddit or youtube.

But because Dota is so community driven, if we'd just known what they were thinking was around their decisions in TI and the battlepass (whether we agreed with it or not), we'd at the very least feel respected & a part of Dota's growth – which we truly are.

TLDR: A community-driven game like Dota is a two way street. Good communication from Valve shows respect for that balance – and we're feeling a bit lacking in respect with how this TI & Battlepass has unfolded.