Dota 2 to contain community rewards based on mentoring others

Gabe Newell has said Valve plans to provide rewards to Dota 2 players for contributing to the community when serving as "coaches."

Speaking with the Seven Day Cooldown podcast via Polygon, Newell said this will ensure that those who mentor in the free-to-play game will be "recognized and accommodated," for their efforts.

“We're trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they're playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they're playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet," he said.

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people.

"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?"

Newell touched upon this philosophy previously last year with Develop, when he said suggested a scaling monetization based on a customer's contribution.

"An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with," he said. "Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community.

"So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice."

Valve has yet to announced a concrete business model for the game, other than it will be "freemium with a twist", and an exact release is still unannounced.