If what Ness said exists, does exist, then that's at least a step in the right direction.
Paying sure as hell will prevent more bad players from playing than making it free. It's not the long-term I'm worried about. It's the initial game. You're pretty much forced to play with your friends if you want to get anywhere ranked, unless you play a carry every game and your team isn't too terrible.
If the game is free, what you get are people that are bad at it, specifically joining a match with the intent of ruining it. I watched this happen plenty of times in DotA. At least with HoN (when people were paying to play), while there were plenty of bad players, the amount of leavers was drastically reduced.
And perhaps that's actually what I was trying to get at. It's not so much the bad players that bother as the people that leave the damn game 15 minutes in, or the people that want to concede after 10 minutes of barely losing.
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