Valve has long been known to march to the beat of their own drum. Some time back, Valve’s boss had discussed the possibility of rewarding those that are most helpful within their game communities. Newell postulated that by rewarding the helpful players and penalizing the “trolls”, it could be a better pricing structure for games and help their communities flourish.
“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… 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.”
While that sounded odd and all for the time, it looks like Valve might actually be implementing something of this nature in DOTA 2, according to Forbes.
“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… 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.”
Leave it to Valve to change the way we play our games, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what they come up with, if they indeed do implement a system like this.
