Valve is “freeing” Dota 2, so wave goodbye to battle passes

pcgamesn.com:

While I hate to admit it, Dota 2 has been relatively stagnant for a while now. Valve’s premier MOBA game has dropped off of the radar a little in recent years, struggling against competitor League of Legends. The New Frontiers update, however, breathed a gust of much-needed fresh air into Dota 2, and Valve isn’t stopping there.

In a June 19 update prefacing the game’s tenth anniversary, Valve looks back at the game’s past, its current state, and how Dota will look in the future. The main changes proposed are directed at the battle pass system, which the devs are deliberately planning to shift away from.

Battle passes are the backbone of Dota’s content, stuffed with cosmetics, in-game currency, and more. They’re the only real content drops we see, but all of that is set to change following the colossal New Frontiers update.

Having continually placed content in the battle pass to enhance its value, the devs quickly noticed that their sole focus was only on preparing the battle pass, limiting their ability to try new things. This is an issue, however, as Valve notes that “most Dota players never buy a battle pass and never get any rewards from it.

“We made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content and instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn’t fit into a Battle Pass. While work is still in progress on future updates, the first of these has shipped: New Frontiers and patch 7.33 couldn’t have shipped as they did if we were focusing all our efforts on producing Battle Pass content.

“We’re going to continue on the path that started with New Frontiers,” Valve continues. “This means