In a new developer blog on the Dota 2 site, Valve has introduced a new monthly subscription service. For $4 per month, players will find new features and content added continuously over time. Features include Hero Leveling to earn badges; Reward Shards, hero-specific challenges for achievements that grant XP, the Plus Assistant that grants access to personalized analysis of items, heroes and abilities and makes suggestions to improve gameplay and more.
Other features include:
- Hero Relics to track "statistical milestones with a breakdown of progress in each match" toward attaining battleground achievements
- Hero Chat Wheel to choose "phrases your hero can say in allied or all chat". These phrases are unlocked over time and as the hero badge tier increases
- weekly rewards to earn extra shards to purchase Plus-Exclusive items like Hero Sets for some of the "most popular heroes"
Plus Assistant provides players with analysis and suggestions both in and out of games in the following areas:
- items to use
- abilities to select
- hero suggestions based on what enemies and allies have chosen
- death summary
- lane strategy
- post-game analysis
- global rank trends
- realtime analytics
The Plus Assistant is already under fire on Reddit for "smelling like Pay to Win" by some players, mainly due to the in-game analysis and suggestions. For those more interested in the monetization side of things, an "ex-F2P game product manager" named ShimmyZmizz has posted his thoughts.
Check out the full details by visiting the Dota 2 site.
