14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has confirmed that it won't run a Diretide event this year, as it wants to focus on plenty of major updates for Dota 2, instead of dropping everything to organize the in-game festivity.
Dota 2's massive community caused quite a stir last year in and around the Halloween season, as Valve didn't organize its traditional Diretide in-game event in the popular multiplayer online battle arena title.
What resulted was a huge effort from the community to get Valve to answer about Diretide 2013, resulting in messages being sent to Swedish car maker Volvo, as well as to president Barrack Obama and other such wacky efforts.
In the end, Valve organized Diretide, in order to please the community and offer them certain rewards.
No Diretide for 2014
This year, however, Valve has seemingly learned its lesson and emphasized during the announcement of Dota 2 patch 6.82 that it will not organize a Diretide festivity.
According to the studio, quite a lot of updates for Dota 2 are currently in development, some being set to appear this year, while others are scheduled to surface in early 2015. As such, stopping their creation process to focus on Diretide would end up affecting the patching process and upsetting gamers in the long run.
"We on the Dota 2 team have a number of updates in the works right now that we’re really excited about, some for the rest of this year, and a big update for early next year. But we’re pretty sure we won’t be able to make enough progress on the larger update if we put it down to work on Diretide – so we’ve decided that we’re not going to ship a Diretide event this year," the studio explains.
"We know that last year we weren’t clear enough in our communication about this, so this year we wanted to be up front about it early. Next year will bring monumental changes to Dota 2, and we’re confident that when you’ve seen what we’ve been working on, you’ll agree it was worth it."
Patch 6.82 and other updates should make up for it
The studio promises plenty of major changes for Dota 2, starting with the already-announced patch 6.82, which overhauls the game's iconic map, as well as plenty of heroes, including Shadow Fiend, Bloodseeker, Phantom Lancer, and many other characters.
As of yet, however, don't expect any release dates about these future patches, as Valve is notorious for unveiling release estimates and then failing to respect them.