Valve succesfully trolls Dota 2 community over Diretide

Update 8/11/2013: Valve have told the community what’s going on with Diretide.

Update 3/11/2013: Community responds to Diretide 

Valve seems to have a general corporate policy of not actually talking to the community or letting anybody know what’s happening. Today, that was used to full effect to annoy lots of Dota 2 players.

Last year – when Dota 2 was in beta – it had a Halloween event, called Diretide, which offered a new game mode that had Roshan roaming the map in search of candy. For some reason, people assumed that this would be an annual event (possibly because Team Fortress 2‘s Halloween event was annual, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got some Halloween bits and bobs this year too) and eagerly awaited its reappearance.

This did not happen on 29 October, when Scream Fortress launched. It didn’t happen yesterday, on Halloween itself. So maybe it’d happen today? Hopes were raised when Dota 2 started downloading a 73MB patch… which turned out to contain hats. I’m not sure they could’ve annoyed the community more perfectly if they’d tried.

In fairness, Valve never said that Diretide would happen this year. On the other hand, their general insistence in not giving the community any idea of what’s coming up, what they’re working on, and what may or may not happen is starting to take its toll, particularly when said community is given hat after hat after hat rather than the heroes/events/fixes that are actually desired.

But hey! Hats. That’s what we all really want, right?

Update: As ten million of you have commented, Valve did indeed describe Diretide as an annual event.