14 DAY TRIAL // After over a week of negative feedback and online campaigns, Valve has decided to give Dota 2 players their long awaited Diretide in-game event, as the studio confirmed on its blog just why it didn't debut the celebration on Halloween, as per tradition.
Dota 2 is currently one of the most popular free-to-play games out there, as millions of Steam users jump into the multiplayer experience daily.
Unfortunately for them, on Halloween (October 31), the traditional in-game event - Diretide - didn't appear, despite the fact that Valve had already rolled out other themed events for games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
As such, angry over Valve's reluctance to listen to its community, fans have started complaining online on all sorts of websites, and even started addressing their complaints to U.S. President Barrack Obama or car manufacturer Volvo (a reference to a common spelling mistake that turns Valve into Volvo).
Now, the studio has finally posted a reply on the Dota 2 blog, confirming that it will finally give Diretide to players and detailing just what happened inside the studio to prompt the delay.
- We have a huge update in the works that looked like it would be finished in time for Halloween. Stopping that update to work on Diretide seemed like something you would actually be unhappy with us for, because the update is pretty significant. More on that later. - Turning on last year’s Diretide event wasn’t trivial. We’d 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. - We underestimated how much you wanted Diretide. - We made the decision a while ago, and 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.
As such, Diretide will be rolled out in the next patch, while the big update is currently in the final testing phase.
"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," the studio added.
"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."
Expect to see the next Dota 2 update next week.