This article is brought to you by StatBanana, the best Dota 2 strategy tool.
Dota 2’s massive player base wants to see Valve increase its marketing efforts for the game following Riot Games’ 10-year anniversary celebration for League of Legends.
Riot showed off a lot of content and reworks, including a new League champion, a digital card game called Legends of Runeterra, and a mobile and console version of League, Wild Rift. And it seems that the hype around these projects has led Dota 2 fans to ask for more from Valve.
Matchmaking updates can only take things so far before new problems such as long queue times for high MMR players pop back up and prompt many players, just like Jacky “EternaLEnVy” Mao and other professionals, to smurf. With relatively few new players, there is going to be less competition at the highest level of Dota, which leads to more issues.
On Reddit and Twitter, fans discussed how Valve should use the more than $90 million it made through The International 2019 Battle Pass. One Reddit user broke down many of the community’s biggest needs.
“You guys (Valve) got over $90 million from the TI9 battle pass. What are you gonna spend that on?” Reddit user TheCyberTronn said. “You should be spending some of it on advertising. Advertising draws more players to the game, which improves match quality, and increases the TI prize pool even more. If there are more people with skill comparable to the people at the top right now, there would be fewer issues with queue times for those players.”
Unfortunately, the success of the game doesn’t just come down to the presentation of the game or what kind of marketing the game receives compared to competitors, like League. When a new player downloads Dota and goes through the completely outdated tutorial, they tend to jump into matchmaking and bounce off the game after losing three straight games.
Valve has said it has plans for a revised “New Player Experience” but that was months ago and even if the developers are more focused on the matchmaking before making that push, something needs to be done soon.
Fixing the matchmaking is one thing, but upping the advertising beyond the occasional YouTube ad and organic banners in the Steam client would really help drive some new blood into the game. But for now, the community will keep memeing.
The Dota Pro Circuit starts back up on Nov. 7 and two new heroes are set to release along with a major update and more content. That would be the perfect time to either start a new ad campaign or drop that New Player Experience.
Published: Oct 17, 2019 07:40 pm