Hello Dota community

I think it's time someone should bring up the idea of migrating to a new official Dota game that is solely developed, maintained and governed by the community.

Before I get into the details I'd like to explain why this is needed, what is the problem that this solves.

Dota is not a typical game like Call of Duty that gets boring very quickly and has to be remade every year to keep its bluffed engine going.
Dota is also not a game like Chess that never changes, but rather somewhere in between.
Dota's changes are evolutionary while keeping its core unchanged but has that "ever greeness" to it like Chess. Meaning Dota never gets old and doesn't need sequels but rather small updates to break metas as well as improve and add gameplay experiences that make sense such as 5 couriers or a Roshan with no Dire advantage.

From here I'll break down the problems/solutions that a decentralised platform would have over a company like Valve in three categories –
1. Financials
2. Gameplay
3. Pro scene

Financials Problem

Stuff like items, battle-passes, Dota plus and so on

A. Valve are making buttloads of cash from us for buying stuff that could easily be made and sold by the community. such as sets, map skins, announcers or chat wheel lines.
I mean wouldn't it be frikking awesome to have a Dendi Announcer which he could make himself and sell?
Or how about an exclusive SF set made by Team Tickles? It's just a great way for pros to actually make some money while devoting their time to improve without any job.

B. Official tournaments should be funded by taking a commission off of all sales in the game or just have it the old way where you buy to watch in-game while 100% of the money goes to funding the event and prize pool being disrupted in a way that the community votes and decides or the buyer himself respectfully.

Gameplay Problems

This is the least problematic of the three as the game is well maintained and frequently updated, however there are still some problems and improvements to be made

A. There aren't enough servers, playing from my country to the closest servers causes to me have a 90-110 ping which puts me at a substantial disadvantage to other players. And my situation is still a lot better than many other players around the world.

B. Changes that are being made are not always rational to better gameplay.
Valve dictates the changes to the game while the players have absolutely no saying what so ever.
Wouldn't it be better to have the actual players have a saying or even deciding what heroes should be nerfed or buffed or just general changes in the game? Valve doesn't play as much Dota to actually know what matters and as a proof of this statement, do you all remember that recent patch that made everyone drop neutral items on the map? Also that damn mute button hasn't changed.

C. Official custom games are bound to what and when Valve decides to deploy them. I personally remember 2013 quite well, I was looking forward to Diretide but landed up with a "Not my best work" with a Lich image a month later on the Dota blog.
It would generally be kinda cool to have community made custom modes that can potentially reward you with items for good plays or even a competitive scene in them? and just generally have seasonal official custom game modes and are voted by the community to be made official.

Pro Scene Problems

I think many of us can agree this this is a major problem right and can potentially kill off the whole game soon as Valve is actively discouraging the devotion of pro players to the game.

A. Valve controls the MONEY. There is an enormous conflict of interests here, Valve wants to make as much money as possible, that means they are incentivised to pay the least amount possible to preserve the pro scene and we damn sure can all feel that.
On top of that as I demonstrated in the financials, they do not distribute the money correctly.

B. Uncertainty of schedules, communication and Pro Circuit system.
If you have not heard the recents news, winter majors are cancelled, and I think this is what broke the ice for me to create this blog post. Valve just spat in the face of the top division 1 teams who worked their asses off to get to where they are. If you are not aware, the majors is suppose to be a LAN competition where there is a respectable prize pool. Well that just went bye bye because someone at Valve just woke up in the morning and decided that.
Please tell me, is there any better way to make pro players to quit?
And what about TI10 being delayed like 5 times because Valve wanted a crowed? And still didn't get one BTW!
One could write an entire blog post on how Valve neglects the pro scene and people do.

C. TI qualification needs to changed. I won't pretend to know how, or what needs to change. This is something we as a community can be decided and voted

So What's the Solution?

as you guessed from the title, and I will go now a bit more into detail, it's an open source version of the game, made by the community. Due to licensing issues some names may have to change (maybe even the name of the game) but the mechanics and gameplay will not.
The source code of the game will be available for everyone to download and compile as they wish and for the less tech savvy, it will available as an installable (EXE for Windows or something like Appimage/Flatpak for Linux) hosted by a volunteering "Dota Foundation" to deal with everything that can't be fully decentralised technically yet.

Financials Solution

For some of you who don't know exactly how tokenomics work, it could help to first read a little about how Crypto smart contracts work, particularly ERC20 Protocol and NFTs but I will try to keep it noob friendly as much as I can.
Dota will have its own ERC20 Token on the Ethereum blockchain. This token will be used to buy and sell items and what not but may also be used to pay the Pro Players in official tournaments (will have to be decided laters by everyone). The token is important to keep the platform decentralised as there is no other way to move money from person X to person Y without a middle man, it's also important as the sales will be linked to a smart contract which will slash some percentage off of each transaction to fund tournaments, events and patches. I will go more in detail in the Gameplay solution section and the pro scene one.

A. No one will be making cash anymore off of sales in the game. Every penny will go straight back into the community's experience

B. Custom games will be available as they are now, however officials ones will be voted by the community every once in a while where it's decided to be appropriate.

Gameplay Solutions

Patches will be developed by the community devs (anyone can be one) and are incentivised to do so via native token when their patch is chosen. When a patch is chosen it will be submitted to the Github repository and updated natively in the game.
As a side note, this also allows players to play older version of the game if they prefer.

A. Servers will be run and maintained by the community. Anyone can run a server to host games, on top of that there will be a system where you can q for a match that's hosted by 1 out of the 10 players in the game, the one with the fastest connection will be to host the game, the only problem with this is that the ping / connection speed will not be fair, so a possible solutions is to elevate the ping of the host to match other players. I am not sure yet what the optimal solution would be.

B. All updates and patches will be decided by voters holding the native Dota token. The devs will be paid from the transaction fees from buying and selling NFT items in the game, and those fees will be decided by the token holders as well. Token holders will be governing everything related to changes in the game, from approving new NFT sets to official custom games. The reason we need item validators is to avoid copying someone else's work or changing the heroes so much that it gets too confusing in the game itself.

C. Custom game modes will be open for everyone to create just like they are now, however official ones, such as Diretide or Aghanim will be voted to be made official once a season or something like that, I'm not sure how frequently yet.
On top of that, game modes or custom games that the community plays a really big amount will be made a regular game mode option for queueing to find a match, like the one where every time you spawn with a different hero until one team has 40 kills.

Pro Scene Solution

What we need, is to incentives pros in the game to commit to it, because they are what makes the game what it is. I think one of the reasons we don't see so many NA teams as competitive as the Asia ones is because NA people cannot afford to play Dota 2 full time or competitively for that matter due to the lack of funding or proper distribution and opportunities to make a respectable living.
This needs to change

A. No centralised entity will have control over the the money made in Dota, because all transactions will be in a decentralised token. The control over how much prize pool will be is unknown because there are a few possibilities, it could come in the form of transaction fees, just tournament spectating passes or by letting the community sell items while promoting that a portion will go to the tournament, there are a plethora of ways to find funding for tournaments.

B. I am not sure yet how tournaments should be structured, this can be decided later by the Pro Players themselves as they have to agree to participate. For the official TI, there could be a bidding system for organisers as the TI teams will vote on which organiser will be best to host the competition.

C. Who actually qualifies to participate is something I don't yet know how to structure, this should most definitely be decided by the community later on in the project.

Final Verdict

Once upon the time Valve was a passionate company, they basically changed the gaming industry forever, creating new communities amazing gameplay experiences and great maintenance. However it feels like from around 2013 (and I used to play other Valve games too) they are on a linear down heal. I don't want to just let Dota die because the company is losing its ways, and the best solution is to make it community governed.

This post is by no means official in anyway, there are many things I have not talked or am wrong about as this needs its own platform of discussion to really go in depth on all details.

This post is an experiment, I'd like to see how far this goes and how much interests there is in a project like this.
I'd be willing to take charge and lead out something like this if there is enough hype around. I'd need to see what you all think and what pro players think.

Who the hell am I? I'm a programmer and a student who has an interest in the Crypto space and Dota 2, I've played Dota since 2012 for around 6-7k hours.

What's in it for the initial devs? Usually in the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) the developers keep around 10-20% and sell it in 3 stages to the public for early investors. Similar to how an IPO works.

If you are interested and know someone that could influence please share it with them, and please DM me if you have ideas or want to join the project, specially if you have relevant skills.

It's time we retire Valve from their "passion project" and take control of what's important to us as a community and not rely on a money hungry organisation to decided shit for us.