Dota2 is an upcoming online battle arena game developed by “Icefrog “at Valve Corporation. The game currently still in beta, but it is set to release with a free to play business model sometime in 2013. This will enable users to download the game for free on the Steam platform. Dota2 has an interactive online community, with lots of user to user interaction. This led me to think about several of the concepts regarding online communities taught in class. On the official Dota2 website (www.dota2.com), I can see lots of different aspects of the 7 C’s being put to use. The site has good context and content, as there are game and user interface updates weekly. There are also links which connect to sponsors and forums where players can talk about different guides and strategies on how to play the game. Despite all of these things, the main focus on this blog post is the Dota2 Workshop.
Up until a few months ago, Valve was the sole developer of cosmetic items that characters in the game could wear to differentiate from the basic default model. For example (refer to the picture below), there is a default helmet that a certain character wears, however, there are other special helmets that you can equip onto your character to make him more special.
Players can obtain these items simply by chance from playing the game or purchasing them from the cosmetic store. Recently, Valve has created something called the Dota2 Workshop. This is a feature that allows users to design cosmetic items and submit them to Valve, so they can implement into the game as actual items. The process of whether the item actually gets implemented is based off several different things, one of those is user votes. Players can go on the Dota2 Workshop site and vote up for items they would like to see implemented and down vote cosmetic items they dislike. The nature of this process enables a lot of user to user interaction as well as user generated content. By starting the Dota2 Workshop, Valve has enabled “creators” to contribute to the items in the game, this allows a much wider variety of items as well as saves Valve the time of actually designing and making items themselves. This is definitely a healthy strategy for promoting the game and developing more of an online community where users will talk about Dota2. As an extra incentive for users to submit their designs, Valve has promised to pay the designer a portion of the sales on the item they created. This gives an opportunity for players to share their ideas as well as make some money. Ever since the Dota2 Workshop, there have been many more threads about item trading on Reddit and Twitter. There are also a lot more players talking about cosmetic items in the game. Overall this workshop has further developed the online community and has promoted user to user interaction.