For all those of you who are not aware of this brilliant warcraft game, here’s an intro…

Defense of the Ancients (DotA) is an action real-time strategy mod for the video game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion, Warcraft III:

The Frozen Throne, based on the "Aeon of Strife" map for StarCraft. Here’s how the game works. The objective of the scenario is for each team to destroy the opponents' Ancients, heavily guarded structures at opposing corners of the map. Players use powerful units known as heroes, and are assisted by allied heroes and AI-controlled fighters. As in role-playing games, players level up their heroes and use gold to buy equipment during the mission. Pretty neat yes?

Let me clarify a misconception here: GIRLS TOO PLAY DOTA. YES WE DO.
There have been many variations of the original concept; the most popular being DotA Allstars, which eventually was simplified to DotA with the release of version 6.68.

Coming to the awesome teaser: there’s a new twist in DOTA’S sequel, DOTA 2, according to the co-founder of Valve, Gabe Newell.

Apparently, the PC and Mac-compatible real-time strategy game will use a free-to-play funding model, but one that hasn't been used in any other game before! Newell claimed: "The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community? 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."

Newell provided examples of behavior that would be rewarded, such as players who are useful guides or those who volunteer their time to train others. He said he could not point to an existing free-to-play model that works like the model that Valve has in mind for DOTA 2. He did not specify how valued players would be identified or rewarded.

Newell added that he wants to see this kind of reward system expand into other games, “in a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience."

Newell was asked whether this concept was related to social networking, to which he said: "If I had to talk about a model, it would be more about how gamers can benefit from a collective action of all the other gamers and there are a bunch of different ways that can occur, whether from things that look like traditional social networking notifications to higher-value activities. As far as I know, Facebook doesn't have the ability for people to fundamentally modify or edit the underlying Facebook experience."  I couldn’t agree more! :p And I can’t wait for this new candy! Woohoo!