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Valve is attempting to "buy marketshare" with these huge cash prizes. (It's even more than it looks like; the League of Legends Season One prize was $100,000 split among eight teams, with $50k to the winners; Valve is giving away $1.6m to all teams, and $1m to the winners. That's 16x the prize purpose overall, and 20x the prize purse to the top team.) While this is a bit dodgy from an ethical perspective, it's also an effective way for larger publishers to push around smaller ones and shoulder them out of the market.
Let's say you're a top player at this type of game. Which game are you going to play? If I'm HotshotGG or Shushei or whoever, I know which game I'm looking to play for money. Then you get the trickle-down effect, as the thousands of people who watch Hotshot stream follow the big name players over to whatever game they're playing next. This huge cash prize is a very smart "shock and awe" move to drum up interest in DOTA2.
Now it remains to be seen where things play out from here, but I agree that Riot has to stop making promises and then not delivering on them. They've produced exactly two things in 2011: Tribunal (not even a game mode) and Coop vs AI. That's not good enough. They advertised Magma Chamber in SEPTEMBER 2010. How the hell does it take 11 months to create a goddamn map?!? 
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Well Magma Chamber was shelved, it's not like they've been working on it.
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Well, I used to play a lot of DotA when the first clones started to appear (first LoL, then HoN, then a lot of others). If I remember correctly, bith LoL and HoN used the same strategy that Valve is using now: they offered good prize money in tournaments and even payed some sites to start talking about the game (sites that had a famous DotA competitive scene coverage). Pendragon (I think he is someone pretty high in the LoL hierarchy) even started to publish news about LoL in the DotA official website (that he was the admin), which lead to the end of the Icefrog-Pendragon partnership.
Not that it justifies what Valve is doing (and not that it deserves to be justified), but the "smaller publishers" did it first to the "independent publisher" with his mod map (Icefrog and DotA1).
Anyway, I really think DotA2 will be a better game then the other of the genre. But, we'll have to wait and see.
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Jowy Wrote:Well Magma Chamber was shelved, it's not like they've been working on it. And they never even officially announced that they had shelved it.
Also, Observer Mode
Replays
New Graphics update (I don't personally care about this, but they have mentioned it many times)
Stealth Rework
Soon™
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Sullla Wrote:Let's say you're a top player at this type of game. Which game are you going to play? If I'm HotshotGG or Shushei or whoever, I know which game I'm looking to play for money. Then you get the trickle-down effect, as the thousands of people who watch Hotshot stream follow the big name players over to whatever game they're playing next. This huge cash prize is a very smart "shock and awe" move to drum up interest in DOTA2.
I absolutely agree. Added to this Steam is a very competetive platform as well. Almost everybody has some games at Steam, if Valve decides to push DOTA2, every Steam user will probably notice, since it will be on top of the sales charts & news.
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I guess the one thing they did mention about any new maps, Dominion, Magma Chamber, or otherwise, is that they would not be released until the game's graphics update was completed. This is a dumb thing to do.
The map is essentially designed - it was shown off in several magazines, so if lagging on this art upgrade is truly what's causing those delays, that is a terrible release decision from a marketing standpoint. Maybe it makes sense from a technical standpoint, don't want to have to redo the new models for pathing and such on the new map, but why not just release the map and update the graphically updated champs individually like they have with Janna, Trynd, and Kayle? Because Riot has no sense of timing - announcing things way too early before the preliminaries are even addressed. Hype is good, but not if it takes an excess of time to deliver.
At least to Riot's credit this time, they seem to have an actual playable version of this new game mode that will be completely ready after PAX. That does offer some hope for a quick release, but as Sullla mentioned.... Magma Chamber....
Edit: I think my biggest issue with this announcement is Riot's presentation of it. If you read their posts on the forum and such, they hyped this announcement as an amazing release that would occur this week. Instead, it's another planned feature coming Soon™ to add to the ever increasing pile.
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VarisNox Wrote:At least to Riot's credit this time, they seem to have an actual playable version of this new game mode that will be completely ready after PAX. That does offer some hope for a quick release
I wouldn't bet my house on it though, they were using observer mode several months ago in WCG.
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Dantski Wrote:I wouldn't bet my house on it though, they were using observer mode several months ago in WCG.
Are you talking about Dreamhack? The observer mode they've used in most tournaments, including the previous WCG was a weird 6th summoner spot with a special summoner spell that revealed the map. Dreamhack had a prototype of their new observer system, and that was not that long ago. In one of their announcement posts, they did mention that they have a more recent and stable build that they are also bringing to PAX, so at least they're continuing its development and haven't dropped it completely like magma chamber.
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It may be the smart move, from a business standpoint, for Riot to be delaying these features and then start Season 2 and release them all together right as Dota 2 comes out. That way they can steal some of Valve's thunder and keep the LoL players playing with the wealth of new features. The simultaneous release of observer mode, Dominion, graphics update, ladder reset, etc, etc would do a lot for them, imo.
Obviously not the best deal for us players, but I try not to get too worked up over video game companies trying to make money from their products. LoL is a lot of fun and they've done a great job promoting it and building the base. The best thing is that Valve and Dota 2 may help push features along in LoL - competition in action! And that's always good for us consumers.
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I'm just waiting to see if DOTA2 will have hats.
Their tourney doesn't make a whole lot of sense and was in fact discussed in detailed on State of the Game (Primary StarCraft II Talk Show). It is weird because it is an invite only pre-release tourney. I mean, this tourney won't work for making people buy a DOTA2 to participate in it. Not exactly the most conventional marketing strategy but I'm sure Gabe has his reasons (even if it is to wave money infront of people to make more money).
Maybe they want to show that Valve is really committed to the competitive scene?
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