A small chance of getting an item after every match. A sure chance of getting an item after a match If you level up.I haven't dabbled into DOTA 2 trading yet, but are the items you get worth something? How do you get them?
Is it like TF2, where you play 50 - 80 minutes and you get 1 random drop, 99% of the time worth shit?
Or do you get it by winning matches/achievements?
And of course Valve is more generous, they have other sources of income, which enables them to be generous. I just feel and fear that in the end DOTA will win, simply because they are waaaaayyyyyyyy bigger and richer than LoL. And that would be a shame IMHO
But during Halloween, Valve had a special game mode where winning team gets 2 items and losing team gets only one. Matches under that mode lasts around 23-30 mins. Though, this event lowered the prices of a lot of items in the dota 2 trading market and a lot of common items now really worth so small. Only the good looking sets/items are only worth something. The only items not affected by this is the new items during that time.
This Christmas though, they weren't giving out too much. Matches lasts for 11-30 mins, 1 nice present for winning team and 1 naughty for losing team. Chances for getting really good items for both gifts are really really small though but there were also people who gets good items on naughty gifts. I managed to pick something that is drop-only and traded it for this, a purchase-only item.
This event also lowered the current existing items, but not very much like on halloween. People still wouldn't trade newer items for old ones.
Valve still profits in Dota 2 though, aside from their other incomes.
Also, dota community is really bigger since came first years before LOL and HoN. Dota 2 players will just be "migrating" from wc3 dota. HoN wasn't exactly a 1:1 copy because IceFrog wasn't in it so it didn't pull most of the wc3 dota players. LoL isn't really something close to dota from what i know. The gameplay rules are different since they have AP(?) and AD. So it probably didn't entice a lot of wc3 dota players before. Dota 2 however, has IceFrog and is backed by Valve so it would really end up pulling a lot of already existing wc3 dota players.
In the end, Yes dota 2 would win because it has an older and bigger community, and not just because of Valve.