Why I think Dota 2 going free-to-play is a bad idea

After the last school year (which did not end well, but that's not the point of this post), I've decided to try out being a beta tester (read: someone who can't wait for the game to be released) of Dota 2, the derivative of the immensely popular action RTS game Defense of the Ancients (whose roots started as a Warcraft 3 map), created by Valve (who also created other not-so-popular titles like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Portal). The process was simple. Go to the Dota 2 webpage/blog, fill out a simple survey about your Dota habits and skills (which I'm sure a lot of people have purposefully put in false information), and wait for Valve to contact you back with your Dota 2 "beta key". For most people, the "wait" takes weeks, even months. For me though, it's just 12 hours or so. Probably because of my Steam game collection and loyalty to Valve and Steam:

I actually have more games that would probably fit 5 or more screenshots, but listing them all here would make me look like a douchebag.

Anyway, after downloading Dota 2 and having fun with it, I've somehow accumulated a little bit less than 200 hours of play time in the course of less than a month. Which is not totally a bad sign for my productivity because I still managed to work on some hobby projects of mine here and there, and I merely substituted the countless games of Solitaire with Dota 2 every time I needed a break.

What I liked about the community of Dota 2 that it was seemingly better than that of Garena's (where most online interactions between Dota players occur) original W3 Dota. Gameplay-wise, people in Dota 2 actually intentionally choose support heroes to help their teammates. In a Garena W3 Dota game, if you happen to come up against a team with a solid lineup (not consisting of 5 carries), they're pubstompers and you should clear out immediately or you're in for a bad game. And there are really a lot of other differences between the Dota 2 and Garena W3 Dota community that makes the former more superior than the latter.

It is in my observations that I believe the relative "good" behavior of Dota 2 players is due to the mere fact that beta keys are limited and once they're banned from playing, it sure is going to take a hell lot of time to get another one. Kind of like Team Fortress 2 before it became Free-To-Play, nobody would dare to cheat (although some did anyway, with hilarious consequences) because they didn't want to waste the $60-$10 (depending on how early you bought the game) that they spent.

But now it seems that Valve has decided to turn Dota 2 into a free-to-play game and follow Team Fortress 2's business model to generate income, which is simply "to sell useless cosmetic items at ridiculous prices while taking advantage of people's gambling tendencies by capitalizing on selling keys that open special item crates". The good news is that the game is probably already in a complete working state and that Valve is ready to "sell" it to people. The bad news is that the game is now open for everybody to play, which includes the diverse species of 'tards that inhabit Philippine comshops, that I'm desperately so trying to avoid running into in games.

There were some comforting thoughts that came out of my mind after hearing the news, however. Steam's current way of game distribution is that every user account using Steam on a computer was given separate copies of games for themselves, even if they both owned the game. Which means there would probably hundreds of Steam accounts logging in a single computer in a comshop every month. Doing the math, that would mean 5GB~ (a single installation of Dota 2, not including the base Source Engine stuff) * 100 worth of data installed on a single computer, or 500GB. I highly believe that comshops do not have that kind of money to acquire hard drives larger than 500 gigabytes, nor would it give them any sort of business advantage for doing so. Also, every time a new user wants to play Dota 2, they would have to download the game again for themselves, which, given how immensely slow the average Internet connection in the Philippines is, would take a very, very long amount of time.

Also, Dota 2 has some very strict hardware requirements that would require beefy computers. Which means most comshops will probably not be able to play Dota 2 since they commonly employ Intel GPUs from 2005 as their graphics cards, unless the kids today are fine with playing games at slideshow speed (what has this generation come to?).

After writing all of that, I now feel kind of comforted that most kinds of people that I don't like to play with won't be able to play Dota 2. The game's matchmaker would also do good to keep me safe as well, since nowadays I usually get teamed up with and put up against respectable gentlemen who actually know how to play. And if buying from the Dota 2 store would guarantee me a spot in the Dota 2 community's civilized circle, I would totally throw my money in Valve's direction for the sake of my own sanity (sadly, not for the sake of my wallet).