This time last year, Valve launched Dota 2’s Diretide update – an alternate Halloween replete with a 30 minute game mode and rash of new couriers. As you know, once is the requisite number of times a thing must happen before it’s declared tradition, and so the Dota 2 community sat up on October 30 again this year and waited. On October 31, they waited. And on November 1, when a new patch introduced some distinctly unfestive cosmetic items, they waited.
Now, they’re done waiting. And with no explanation forthcoming from Valve, they’ve turned their complaint cannons against the corporation with the nearest possible nomenclature: car manufacturers Volvo.
‘༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE’
That’s the template message that’s been filling up the Volvo subreddit and official Facebook page this weekend. But other creative variations abound. ‘im switching over to league of lexus’, for instance, and ‘reinstalling Heroes of Nissan’.
Why Volvo? Dota was once reportedly misspelled Doto by somebody at some stage in its history, and its community latched onto the idea of replacing each vowel with an O. Don’t dig too deep in your search for reason, though – that’s the mistake some Volvo redditors have made.
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To their credit, the online truck and bus community has taken the Diretide upset in their stride. Bemusement has given way to acceptance and even amusement.
“I love a good trolling,” wrote one /r/Volvo moderator. “Just keep it to one thread.”
And nobody has reacted with such good spirit as Volvo’s own Facebook team, who posted this on Saturday:
The only party not in on the joke, it seems, are Valve. Have they missed a trick, or do you think the Dota community are in for a late treat?