TONE POLICING

(I agree)

..."apologizing", but anyway....

Wow! That's really weird to see Valve completely giving in to fan hysteria like this when they've typically been so immune to that sort of thing. An explanation and an apology would be one thing, but to see them totally cave like this is pretty crazy.

Also, why would you even bother pushing out a Halloween related event after Halloween?

つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE

As much as I wanted Diretide I think releasing it two weeks after Halloween and after everything that happened is just silly and misses the whole festive spirit the event should have. While it's obvious that the Dota community went full retard I can't help but feel that most of it could have been avoided by just communicating with the community. Valve shouldn't apologize but they also can't keep going and ignore the community, hopefully some lessons were learned by both sides.

With that said all of those who went outside of the Dota 2 forums are just assholes and are probably assholes in real life.

The only reason they did this is because of Blizzard's MOBA's new video.

I don't see how this is the case. Valve did owe an apology to their reasonably disappointed fans for their lack of communication. Continuing to ignore their userbase as a whole because a handful of players were acting like baboons would have been much worse.

So they're doing the event cus fans bitched, and now fans will bitch about the update being delayed to cater the event. I feel for Valve, they have some awful fans in DOTA.

I don't get it. I tried diretide lasr year and it was stupid, nobody played the game while it was on, everyone was just collecting candies for no reason.

Man, fuck the MOBA community. All of it.

The problem is that even when they did apologise and explained their reason for why this Diretide event didn't happen this year, they promise to release it in the near future. Why bother?

DIRETIDE, DO OR DIIIIIEEE!

Valve should've said something.

But that doesn't mean you reward shitty childlike behavior.

Also, it's coming up on mid November

I'd rather they were this apologetic about Half-Life 3.

I've never liked the holiday stuff anyway, why would a bunch of DotA players want to not play DotA? You know, besides the items.

@chaser324: "Apologising" is a completely acceptable way to spell it. Infact, it's thought to be the original brittish spelling of the word, where-as apologizing is the american version which has become popularized. I am the grammer-swede and I am here to save the day.

Anycase, Sweep, very solid post. You bring some good points to the discussion, and while I personally am very happy to get Diretide, delayed or not, I agree with you that their approach to this was wrong. However, I'd argue that their post is less apologetic and more pleading. They underestimated the impact of their failure to communicate with the community. Understandably so as said community's response was outrageous in scale and form.But at this point, I'm quite certain that they've been in contact with Volvo, and it is to them who they've apologized profusely. This post of theirs is an effort to still the waters, avoid as much collateral damage as possible.

I don't believe their releasing Diretide has especially much to do with us players at all, and far more to do with their relationships with other companies, or at least, the public appearance of said relationships.

I do agree that this is setting a bad precedent, and I hope that they release another statement WITH the upcoming patch, once things have cooled down, and then state that they'll never give in to blackmail again. I could easily see that being the case.

Edit: @flipperdesert: Gabe announced to a couple of reporters (in an unofficial manner, but still) he'd invited to the office on his birthday that they were working on Half-Life 3 for the next Source Engine. Additionally, they've copy-righted the term "Half-Life 3". It boggles my mind that so few people are aware of this.

I would rather they just do Diretide and not have to write a blog/apology/excuse at all. /s

The vast majority of the people that make up the Dota 2 community are complete idiots.

Plus, there is a special website that allows you to play the darn thing anytime, so people just want hats. Because they are idiots.

I know. I was messing with Sweep.

EDIT: And also, that Half Life 3 trademark thing I think you're referring to was proven to be faked.

I don't believe that it's the worst thing they could do, and while it is a dangerous precedent it also shows that they're listening, as does their recent trend of adding quick fixes/suggestions from r/DotA2/. Hopefully the result of this is that Valve hire someone to handle community relations for Dota 2, or someone from the studio steps up and takes the mantle (given the way Valve reportedly works, the latter's more likely). The blog/twitter/facebook have been sorely neglected this year, apart from a deluge of posts through TI3, and often substantial changes are made and relegated to an update tab with no attention drawn to it.

Ever since Mass Effect I want every developer to give people on the internet the middle finger and keep working on whatever they're working on. There's a reason the people who work at Valve work at Valve and the people who are angry on the internet are people who are angry on the internet.

They don't owe you the annualization of a feature just because you like it last year, especially when it was not promised to be annualized.

You do not get to "demand" what albums a band you're into releases or not, just because you're into them. You're a fan, they're the creative group you admire. You have every right to criticize the creative output from whatever source of entertainment you enjoy, but to make presumptuous, childish demands (not requests, near-hostile demands) is well below any reasonable level of maturity.

Sweep is also being a bit presumptuous about it though. Maybe Valve got to a point into that other update's development that they can afford to shuffle some of its developers to other projects - so maybe there isn't any real damage done by all this, internally. But I agree with him that, yes, "ethically" this is unfortunate.

In the end, I'm glad you'll have fun with it, but I am not glad Valve opened up a gap in their apparently fully-busy schedule, seemingly taken up by an actually important update, to please the unrelentingly entitled internet masses: whether or not that affected the company internally, and progress on the game you love so much, in any meaningful way.

While I'm not going to argue that it was owed or that people were right to demand it (although the "༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE" hivemind was fun when it was just that), but they have explicitly called it an annual event. "The most ominous event of Diretide is the annual suspension of Roshan's enchantment."

i thought this diretide shit was some lame pokemon thing lolol

Yeah I figured that was probably the case, I wasn't sure myself. I placed it after an "especially" because the rest of the argument still stands.

Just like usual, I'm speechless when confronted with Internet ragefests. I'm referring to reaction of the update, or lack thereof, itself and not the Valve apology.

I never said anything about any features.

They didn't need to re-release Diretide but it is clearly obvious why this whole indecent happened. Dota 2 is Vavle's most popular game and they failed to communicate that Diretide was not coming and that they were working on a cool new update. Instead, they left people in the dark that were expecting this annual event to come. Meanwhile, Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO both got Halloween updates and the Dota community felt left out. If this blog said that Diretide wasn't coming but an awesome new update was that would have been cool as well. But the whole issue would of been avoided if it happened before Halloween.

MOBAs attract the worst kind of people. CONFIRMED

Halloween event in the middle of November.

Sounds like a ghost/water type.

It's just one guy in PR putting out a statement. It's not like everyone else in the company is actually apologetic or cares that the fans didn't get what they wanted.

That's right the BASTARDS!!!!!!!!! F***ing start on Half Life 3 next! Yes I know that is beat to death but I agree with both points of flipperdesert's post. I think the only holiday game I really liked was Borderland's Ned or Zed Island. That was cool, and about my only zombie game to boot. Otherwise the stuff tends to get tied to halloween or x-mas and seems irrelevant to play later.

Dota 2 is something I just like to watch. Up to now I had no idea what Diretide was, and all I know now it is Halloween specific.

Diretide was not unreasonably expected. Dota players watched as every other Valve game got some sort of halloween content, and yet not a single peep came from the Dota team. Whether they had an event or not, they should have had the foresight to see that this was going to be a big deal, and got out in front of it. There would have been fallout, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fierce. As it stands, everyone who was legitimately looking forward to the event spent days just waiting and expecting. As one of those people, I was incredibly disappointed in Valve.

Now, I didn't go and bomb their metacritic or spout awful fucking memes all over the internet, but even so I was baffled at Valve suddenly not giving a fuck about it's players. I've played Dota a lot now, more then any other game ever. It's a bit of a blow to think that the one game that legitimately keeps me interested in games is going to stagnate - which was the only conclusion I could reach from their complete lack of caring. I figured they had nothing to show for the past 4 months, and so they kept quiet. Little did I know that Valve's complete lack of direct community management meant that they simply forgot.

I agree that ideally they shouldn't have given the people who freaked out and did some childish shit what they wanted, but that's just a smaller percentage of a larger whole that was just extremely disappointed in Valve. They had to apologize in some way to those legitimate fans of their game that expressed their disappointment in more reasonable ways. Besides, precedent doesn't matter for the people who flipped their shit. they're going to be idiots regardless, so fuck if I care if they'll probably gain some new sense that what they're doing is worthwhile and affecting change - they're wrong.

@sweep: Welcome to the service industry sweep, where you are wrong especially when you are right. Valve is just trying to become the mcdonalds of video games and being an apologist and kissing the ass of a bunch of dumb twats has always long term been more profitable than telling them off like they deserve.

Valve should cancel DOTA2 and work on making a next-gen remake of Half-Life 2.

@gw305: Hey there, Trolly McTrollerson, keep it up and see what happens :D

I think that releasing two weeks after Halloween is a punishment worse than not releasing it at all.

I have always viewed the issue as not "No Diretide this year!!" The issue is that Valve did a poor job telling anyone about it. A lot of the mess would have been avoided if weeks before they would have said "Sorry, no Diretide because we are working on something big!!"

As a side topic: I am fine with no Diretide but what I think Dota 2 needs is some pre-made goof off/decompress modes in the vein of Diretide.

Damn. Dota 2 is crazy. Y'all are crazy.

Yea I have to agree I give Valve more props even because they apparently all stopped and went, Wait...why didn't we do this event so they have to feel a little understanding of the outrage I didn't care I don't play but when Brad said there wasn't an event happening in the Bombcast I thought that was odd it didn't seem like them to not do an expected event with No explanation. It doesn't excuse how some of the community reacted but ignoring everyone who had a legit reason to be angry would have been far sillier.

Oh. Was this not about Animal Crossing? I thought diretide was a spooky event town, like Brigadoon.

I kind of wish there was a way for Valve to give Diretide to everyone except those who went way out of their way to be assholes about it, just to spite them.

Yeah, Im with you. Great now the crazies got their stupid event. Stuff like this furthers my decision never to participate in a MOBA community they are collectively awful.

Watching some stand up comedy of Chris Titus recently. He told a story at the DMV a child was screaming and telling, then leaving for the door while their dad was third in line. So the father had to chase and kid only ended up throwing hims arms around hitting his father. And what the parent said was "Nathane!....What can we do to make it ok."

This reminds me of that story. Where the child is out of hand but the parent negotiates. While Valve may not have been perfect it already thought about it and the consequences until the community go uppity.

Fuck me. The way people go on about Diretide makes me cringe. It's a dumb holiday event, get over it.

Thanks a lot, Obama.

People who cried over diretired need to look at themselves for a moment.... do you really think it's healthy that a game has gotten it's claws so deep that you'll freak out if they don't deliver a holiday event? It's not a healthy attitude to be certain but I don't think it's even a healthy state of mind period, it's like you're under some sort of heavy mind control, it's fucked up and you should probably stop playing the game.

And lets put this into perspective for a moment, Riot didn't put the Halloween map into League Of Legends this year and barely a murmer was made by the community... this is the LoL community remember... the LoL community which is widely regarded the worst on the internet.

There could be worse things to do then apologize. I don't think apologizing for something is that big a deal. Perhaps it's a case of being the bigger person in the situation. Valve tends to have a pretty good understanding of the community for all their games, perhaps they just legitimately felt they made a mistake and wanted to apologize. I don't see why that's such a huge problem.

I totally agree with you conceptually, but I don't find the tone here that bad really. It's weird they're releasing it now though - does anyone still care?

This issue highlights the problem with working in the dark. How are we supposed to know Valve is working on an update and unable to do Diretide if they don't tell us? You can argue that they shouldn't have to, but I still think transparency would do this industry some good.

It is really weird that they wouldn't expect people to want Diretide, that's what blew my mind.

WHEREE'S DIRETIDE????!!!!!!!?????!!!!! D': D': D': D':