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Valve apologise for lack of Diretide and say it’s on its way with a new update

Dota 2 diretide Valve

Valve have been doing a fair bit of instrospection of late. Despite saying last year that their Halloween Diretide event would be “the annual suspension of Roshan’s enchantment”, they didn’t run it this year. This made the community quite unhappy and, for tangential reasons, troll the car company Volvo. Valve have admitted they did wrong by their fans and wanted to explain how the error occurred and how they’re going to fix it.

They also say sorry for not saying sorry sooner.

“Whenever we make a significant mistake, we spend a bunch of time looking at what happened, why it happened, and how we can fix it,” write Valve in their blog post on the matter. “Most of the time we do this privately, but in our recent mistake around Diretide, we felt sharing our analysis with you made sense.

“First, what happened – we didn’t ship a Diretide event this year, and you were rightly upset about it. That was clearly a mistake, and then we compounded the problem by not telling you what was going on.”

The reasons for not releasing a Diretide event are pretty simple: Valve “have a huge update in the works” and they had planned on shipping that “in time for Halloween.” Plus, it’s no mean feat to simply switch on a Diretide event, especially as between it running last year and now Valve have “done a year of work on the game which had changed our codebase, UI, and other systems enough that we would need to do some work to resurrect it.”

Interestingly, Valve also blame their current team setup, saying that they “failed to employ our usual process of regularly asking ourselves whether we were still on the right track. There were a bunch of people on the Dota 2 team who poked at the decision to not do it as Halloween approached, but due to how busy everyone was with our next major update, no-one really took the time to step back and objectively realise we were being collectively crazy.”

Valve don’t see their mistake as simply not running Diretide this year but also for not saying why they weren’t sooner. “By the time we’d realized we’d made a bad decision, the pitchforks were out.”

Why didn’t they? Well “You were already mad and disappointed in the lack of Diretide. Telling you that you weren’t getting it at all wouldn’t have really helped much. Now we started thinking in terms not of “what should we say?”, but in terms of “what should we do?””

Plus, with a new update on the way they thought they could appease the masses.

Right, onto the nice things, how are they hoping to fix the situation? “First, we’re going to ship Diretide with the next update. The rest of the update we’ve been working on is in final testing, and as each of us finish up our work on it, we’ve been jumping over to Diretide. Second, we’re pretty sure the update that we’ve been working on for a couple of months is going to be pretty significant. In addition, we’ve made a few changes to Diretide that we think makes it more fun than before.”

Oh, and how do Volvo fit into all this? Valve would like you to ease up on “cc’ing innocent car manufacturers with your messages.”

It sounds like that update will be out in the next week or two. Can’t wait to see what Valve have up their sleeve, the 6.79 update made massive changes to the game. Hopefully it will be equally game changing.