Diretide, the Halloween event of yester-year, has finally been announced in the recent Dota 2 blog by Valve. The collective internet tempter-tantrum has finally resulted in the upcoming re-release of the event, accompanied by a disgustingly apologetic letter from the Valve team. You can read the whole letter over here, but I'm just going to grab some quotes so you get the gist of it:

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.

As a result, by the time we’d realized we’d made a bad decision, the pitchforks were out.

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.

My issue here is with the tone. The blog explains, in completely reasonable terms, the reason that the event did not take place:

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.

A lack of communication was also perhaps unwise, but the wheedling, apologetic nature of the blog is by far the most worrying element of this entire scenario. In apologising, in caving in to the pressure applied by the spoilt, screaming man-children of the internet, Valve is vindicating their behaviour; Vindicating the personal harassment of community figures, and the moronic spam-attacks on entirely unrelated and relatively innocent car manufacturers. Valve is enabling the morons of the internet. For Diretide? I mean fuck.

I guess the next move is Gabe goes round to everyone's house and personally installs Half Life 3 on their computers? I know it's great that Valve is listening to community feedback, but this sets a pretty dangerous precedent: Where internet communities effectively bully developers into the features that they think they want. Excuse fucking me, but I'm not quite sure I want the NeoGAF hivemind dictating how my games are produced.

Anyway.

Thanks For Reading

Love Sweep