Quartero, Dota 2’s new dealer of free hats, is a nice chap who surely won’t kill me and sell my skin

Valve, perhaps newly wary of financial transactions after being put over a barrel by Steam’s payment processors, have elected to give away a bunch of Dota 2 cosmetics for free – and are employing the kindliest, definitely non-murderiest of fellas to handle the goods. Sharply dressed satyr Quartero was added to Dotes yesterday alongside the 7.39d balance update, and now that he’s stuffed a Witch Doctor bauble into my hands for nothing, I can safely say that the chances of my burgled body being found behind the remains of his hastily abandoned shop are almost zero.

Just look at him, the scamp. Could a multiple homicidist flash a winning smile like that? I bet he couldn’t even hide more than three or four of his favourite stabbing knives inside that tailoring. There’s just something about him that makes you want to shake his hand, and feel the leathery skin that only a lifetime of hard, honest charity work – certainly not over 400 unsolved cases of strangling deaths – could produce.

I’m less convinced by Valve’s reasoning for hosting Quartero front and centre of Dota’s redesigned dashboard, which can be paraphrased as “Losers don’t want to see stats for the last time they lost, here’s a pile of free stuff instead.” Which sounds lovely, except a cursory look at Big Q’s terms and conditions reveals that the cosmetics must in fact be earned though completing matches, with wins in both standard and Turbo Mode games netting more goodie-unlocking XP than losses. Staying offline and rolling over Easy bots doesn’t count, either. I tried.

In other words, it’s a battle pass in disguise, and one I suspect is in place for reasons less to do with saving your blushes every time you log back on after a loss, and more about encouraging you to play more Dota. Quartero, you cad! Ah, who am I kidding, I can’t stay mad at that face. Of course you can make it up to me by cutting the identifying labels out of my clothes and leading me into this disused mine.