Keeping the lights on, and a medal for every hero you play

The tip jar was never going to be enough on its own, and I knew it. Every match simulated, every draft analyzed, every profile saved runs on a server somewhere, and that server sends me a bill whether or not anyone chipped in that month. A hobby you can afford to lose is a wonderful thing. A hobby quietly draining your bank account is a different feeling, and I noticed I was starting to hesitate before adding features, doing the small math in my head about what each new thing would cost to keep alive.

That hesitation is the real problem. A tool that is afraid to grow stops being useful. I did not want the future of Dota Captain to depend on how long I could personally keep paying for it, because that is a fragile foundation and it puts the project one bad month away from going dark.

The trap I most wanted to avoid was the obvious one, where the good parts get locked behind a paywall and the free version slowly rots into a demo. I use free tools too. I know exactly how it feels when the thing you loved becomes a nag screen with a checkout button. I did not want to build that, so I sat on the whole idea for far longer than I should have, until I had a version I could actually stand behind.

So here it is. There is now an optional Supporter Pack, a small monthly or yearly pledge that keeps the servers running. That is the honest, unglamorous purpose of it. If you have ever gotten value out of this thing and you want it to still be here next year, this is the button that makes that happen, and I am grateful to anyone who presses it.

The most important word in that sentence is optional. Nothing that helps you play better lives behind it. The draft analysis, the counter and synergy suggestions, the match engine, the build tools, all of that stays free for everyone, and I mean to keep it that way. If you never spend a cent, you still get the full brain of the app. The pledge keeps the lights on. It does not buy the map.

The perks that come with it are deliberately the fun stuff rather than the useful stuff. Supporters play with no ads, get a gold supporter tag, and unlock exclusive profile banners along with new card frames and particle effects for their cards. It is cosmetic pride, mostly. A way to say you were here and you chipped in, without changing the balance of anyone's actual play.

A couple of the perks are conveniences rather than pure cosmetics, and I want to be upfront about them because I thought hard about where the line should sit. Supporters can save up to fifty item build presets instead of ten, which is genuinely handy if you tinker with a lot of heroes, and they can show their real hero mastery medals to opponents rather than keeping them private.

The one I chewed on the longest is Double Down. It lets a supporter double the rating and XP they win or lose, capped at three matches a day. I kept asking myself whether that crossed my own line about not selling power. In the end I decided it does not, because the cap is deliberately small and the risk is symmetric. You are not buying wins. You are choosing to raise the stakes on a handful of matches, and doubling what you lose is just as real as doubling what you win. It is a spice, not an advantage, and the three per day ceiling exists precisely so it stays that way.

If you disagree with where I drew that line, I understand. These are the judgment calls a solo project makes without a committee, and I would rather tell you my reasoning and let you push back than pretend the decision was obvious.

The other half of this update is something I built for everyone, supporter or not, and it is the part I am actually excited about. Heroes now earn a mastery level. Every game you play in solo or ranked levels up the specific heroes you played, carrying each one through six medal tiers, from Bronze all the way to Grandmaster. That medal then shows up on your heroes right where you meet them, in the draft, in the strategy screen, and in the match itself.

I love this because it quietly rewards the thing Dota actually asks of you, which is depth over breadth. The best players are not the ones who have touched every hero once. They are the ones who have played the same handful hundreds of times and know exactly how their spells feel at every minute of the game. A hero pool is not a checklist. It is a small set of tools you have earned the right to trust, and now the app finally reflects that instead of treating a first-time pick and a hundred-game comfort pick as the same thing.

There is also a new Hero Levels page that lays out all your heroes and their current levels in one place. You open it from Most Played in the lobby. It turned into one of those screens I did not expect to stare at as much as I do, watching the medals slowly climb and noticing which heroes I lean on far more than I thought I did.

I want to end this the way I started it, which is nervously and gratefully. Asking for support feels vulnerable in a way that shipping a feature never does, and I have rewritten this post more times than any other. If you decide to support, thank you, truly, you are the reason this keeps existing. If you do not, that is completely fine, and I hope the free version keeps earning its place in your games.

As always, the match engine underneath all of this is an approximation and a work in progress. It gets things wrong, I get things wrong, and mastery levels do not make the simulation any smarter than it was yesterday. This update is about sustainability and a little bit of pride, not a claim that I have solved Dota. I have not, and I will keep saying so.

Thank you for reading the one post I was most afraid to write. Now go play a hero enough times to earn its Grandmaster medal, and let me know where the tool still lets you down.