DOTA 2 Loot Boxes are Now Transparent in The Netherlands

Now that loot boxes are illegal in Belgium and the Netherlands, companies and games that have employed them are stuck making an uncomfortable decision: do they give up their precious monetization practices to make a fairer and more enjoyable system? Or do they become spiteful jerks about it? So far, at least, it seems Valve is leaning towards the latter. First, they made sure that CS:GO players in these two nations just straight-up lose their ability to access content, and now they’re deciding to do something even more petty and pointless for DOTA 2... at least, in The Netherlands.

What they’ve done, see, is made the content of the loot boxes visible before you purchase them.

“That’s not so bad”, you might be saying, but hoo boy, they go out of their way to strip the joy out of things from there. Specifically, the loot in each box is tied to the account, not the box itself. In other words, what you’re seeing isn’t the loot in that box, but rather what you’ll get the next time you open a box of that type. Doesn’t matter if you trade it, sell it (which you can’t do anyway), reset your computer, reinstall your client: your account is doomed to get that specific loot the moment you open that kind of chest.

And no, you can’t buy multiple chests in order to be surprised by the second one. You can now only buy and open chests one at a time.

So yeah. It’s taking all the downsides of randomized loot and stripping away the fun of cracking open a box to see what’s inside. Kinda crappy, but if it stops the compulsive need to buy loot boxes I guess it can be tolerated. Although, I think we can all agree it would be better to just get rid of the random loot entirely.

Whatever. Be thankful for what you get I suppose.