![]() I know I messed around with it for a few minutes and the map editor is a special version of Hammer, at least the last time I tried it. They mentioned in the video that developing a Dota custom game is more akin to something like Unity. It's not as simple as just someone creating Dota as a Warcraft 3 map. These things are not easy to make, and making modifications to games has only gotten more complex over time. My personal take: I really wish the solution wasn't just scorched earth. They can see Valve's perspective on this from a legal standpoint: Someone could take Pudge's model and have it in another standalone game and then point back to all the arcade games monetizing this way and say they can do it, why can't I? They mentioned an idea of a standalone mobile game, maybe not with Dota abilities, as one of the biggest accessibility issues of Ability Arena is that you have to play Dota to actually understand it, because of the fact that there's 250 abilities and Dota players know what they all do. There's a possibility of a version of Ability Arena with the ranking features, monetization, and all stripped out and would never be updated again, but for now that's just talk and it doesn't sound like there's anything concrete. They suggested something like a simple number change of the $1 to maybe $5. Valve said they could not implement that mainly due to resources. Jenkins and Sunsfan suggested something like having more tiers of the Custom Games Pass, like a $5 and $10 tier in addition to the $1 tier. The Dota team is smaller than it used to be, Steam is of course still the big money in Valve. There's a handful of people in Valve that are absolutely on the side of games like Ability Arena, but unfortunately they do not have the power to direct more of the Dota team's attention toward Arcade. They were never making profit on this thing and they never intended to, but wanted to at least break even. ![]() ![]() Sunsfan and Jenkins invested $250,000 over the game's lifespan. Even one of the devs was someone that worked at Google that just volunteered to do this because they loved the game. They had multiple actual programmers, they had to have someone familiar with the particle system and UI system, which VERY few people have familiarity with. Making and maintaining these mods is not as simple as something like Warcraft 3 maps. The problem is that $1/month is not enough for most of these games. Basically you can spend $1 a month on this thing and get some extra cosmetic or flair and support the game. The Custom Games pass exists, and Auto Chess and a few others use it. I also never saw either of those gods in any of my games. There's actually only two gods you couldn't get without paying any money, and their winrate was incredibly low. Ability Arena was actually fair, but unfortunately, they were not able to get away with not having loot boxes (for gods), however the game isn't pay to win. Sunsfan and Jenkins were initially hopeful that Valve started seeming to care about the Arcade, as they really hadn't and many Pay to Win and scam games had gotten out of hand there. The legal team follows up again, and Sunsfan this time contacts Valve to find out if it's real, and apparently it is. Sunsfan gets an email from someone claiming to be Valve's legal team, but it's coming from Germany for some reason, telling them to remove the monetization in Ability Arena. When Sunsfan woke up, he just demoted this person to Herald (lowest rank) and basically scrubbed their data (since that's what they would want if they didn't want their data out there under GDPR). Sunsfan was asleep when all this was going on. This person also threatened to report them for GDPR violation, and did so. Instead, they started issuing death threats against Ability Arena devs. Someone reached Immortal, and didn't do the picture right, and the volunteer asked them to do it again. You have to get it verified, and there's a process that one volunteer does that involves the person taking a picture of a certain screen and uploading it. Ability Arena has a system where if you reach Immortal rank (the highest), you can get an emblem and access to exclusive chat channel in Discord. The promised Sunsfan and Jenkins video on the situation went up.
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