Dota 2 introduces pay-to-win with seasonal Year Beast event

Plenty of free-to-play games suffer from having a money making scheme wedged into them. Sometimes microtransactions offer aesthetic changes, other times they offer a pay-to-win aspect to the game. Dota 2 is a free-to-play MOBA from Valve that, hopefully only  for a short time, now has a pay-to-win feature in the game.

This 'pay-to-win' feature is a part of the randomly occurring Year Beasts in-game event. In this event each team gets a Beast, it appears every five minutes, charges down a lane, and is modified by the teams Ability Points.

The Ability Points can be distributed in different ways:

Your Ability Points can be used to enhance your Year Beast in one of three categories: their ability to support, their effectiveness in combat, or their speed.

At the 10 and 20 minute marks, stronger versions of these bonuses can be obtained, granting Resurrection Aura, Greater Hex, Stampede, and more. The points in your Ability Points Pool refresh back to full at the beginning of each Year Beast Brawl.

How does 'pay-to-win' factor into this? Players on each team can purchase Ability Points or an Arcana Bundle to use during the match. This causes rather unbalanced gameplay; if each team does not have an equal amount of Ability Points to spend on the beast, one team will have a more powerful beast.

That's not all though, whenever the Year Beast event occurs (it's random, but a countdown meter does pop up) players do not have the option to opt out of the event or queue for a different game mode. It is simply Year Beast or nothing.

The good news is, this game mode is seasonal. It's only in the game to celebrate the Chinese New Year. It won't be in the game forever, but regardless of that, an opt out feature should be implemented for those that do not wish to participate in the event.

[Inc Gamers via Verge]

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