The direction Valve is taking

I think there's a bit more to be said here, and blaming it all on greed seems a little ridiculous.

Punishments: I feel like this is an issue people complain about more than it actually happens. Those who are banned by their team for what seems like no reason are generally pretty vocal, and those that are banned legitimately will almost always say it was undeserved. I think the issue many people are seeing, and the one that's most visible at lower levels of play in particular is a vitriolic and antagonistic community. I know far too many people who have left or given up on the game because of the way they end up getting talked too while trying to learn, even if they find the game itself fun. I think Valve is likely trying to find a balance, punishments need to be strict and easily given enough that those toxic players are removed from the standard player pool. Punishments at the same time though must be lenient and difficult enough to get that players who aren't actually deserving of the punishment pool don't get put there and can get out in a reasonable amount of time and resume normal play. Right now based on the some of the people I've seen in games, it looks like the punishment system might need to be even more strict, especially on chronic offenders.

Cosmetics: I can to some extent agree that Valve has clearly changed their position over the years on this issue without ever formally announcing it. At the same time though it does seem that this is what the majority of the community wants. I don't really support the trend, but so long as heros remain uniquely identifiable I don't see it being much of an issue, I already have a few thousand particle effects for spells memorized, I don't see a few more changing things. This argument has effectively been going on since the first diretide when coal and snowballs were added and I don't think it's changed much. Some control is necessary to avoid things getting too out of hand but your whole argument in regard to cosmetic effects and particles seems to boil down to the slippery slope fallacy. As for the market, I have to agree with you. Making items and sets untradable or marketable just seems dumb. Honestly it seems so dumb that I've kind of been assuming it's part of some larger change to the steam item system and only temporary. (I would love to see auras again though)

Events: There are a lot of opinions on this, personally though, truth be told, I usually play the even maps once, then never again. I just don't really find them as interesting as everyone else seems to so I'll avoid saying too much since they obviously just aren't targeted toward me. My biggest issue with this event is that it forces you to play it.

Gameplay: There are bugs, there are pages and pages and pages of bugs, http://dev.dota2.com/ has a ton of them. At the same time though there are also rapid bug fixes for anything major, and there's a ton of work being done to fix the actual gameplay bugs including a recent massive rework to path-finding. Most of the bugs that go unfixed are the cosmetic ones. Additionally when valve adds cosmetics from the game they grab them from the community market or commission them from people in the community. Valve doesn't do much work at all on cosmetics aside from making sure they work in game and some basic QA.

Servers: Something is going on with the servers, they are clearly overloaded. But this hasn't been an issue forever. Adding servers into a farm like that take time and must be done carefully to avoid catastrophe. It might take them a few months to properly expand their infrastructure.

The biggest issue I think is one that's not addressed by you, and that's communication. They don't need to really listen to to the community, honestly I think they'd go mad in a day if they did, but some kind of statement occasionally about the general direction of the game would be very nice, and would probably stop people from villainizing them at every turn.

/r/DotA2 Thread