Quote:Not My Best Work!
November 8, 2013 - Dota Team
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. 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 didnt 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.
So, why didnt we ship Diretide?
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 years Diretide event wasnt trivial. Wed 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.
Due to our poor prediction of your reaction, and the team being focused on the next update, we didnt spend enough time thinking about talking to you about our decision. As a result, by the time wed realized wed made a bad decision, the pitchforks were out.
Then, why didnt we communicate with you what was going on?
You were already mad and disappointed in the lack of Diretide. Telling you that you werent getting it at all wouldnt have really helped much. Now we started thinking in terms not of what should we say?, but in terms of what should we do?
We were, and still are, confident that youll be happy when you see whats in the next update (which isnt far away now).
Now, what is the fix?
First, were going to ship Diretide with the next update. The rest of the update weve been working on is in final testing, and as each of us finish up our work on it, weve been jumping over to Diretide. Second, were pretty sure the update that weve been working on for a couple of months is going to be pretty significant. In addition, weve made a few changes to Diretide that we think makes it more fun than before. And while we always want the community to tell us exactly how were doing, this is probably a good time to stop ccing innocent car manufacturers with your messages.
Paying attention to what is happening in the community around Dota 2 is one of the most important aspects of what we do at Valve. And while we are clearly not mistake-proof, hopefully it is useful for us to walk everyone through our process for recognizing and then fixing our mistakes.
Honestly i feel bad for valve, especially after they wrote this:
Quote: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.
Valve has to deal with people whining about no updates constantly, and people at valve obviously don't sit around doing nothing, of course they will be working on something. So valve wanted to work and focus on something big, what do they get in return? People who spam meta critic and harass people like cyborgmatt.
And then this comes:
Quote:First, were going to ship Diretide with the next update. The rest of the update weve been working on is in final testing, and as each of us finish up our work on it, weve been jumping over to Diretide.
pineapple anyone who says valve doesn't care and are lazy and only work on hats, seriously pineapple them.
