Not My Best Work! [Apology from valve]

[Malthe]

http://blog.dota2.com/2013/11/not-my-best-work/

Spoiler

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 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.

So, why didn’t 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 year’s Diretide event wasn’t trivial. We’d 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 didn’t spend enough time thinking about talking to you about our decision. As a result, by the time we’d realized we’d made a bad decision, the pitchforks were out.

Then, why didn’t we communicate with you what was going on?

• You were already mad and disappointed in the lack of Diretide. Telling you that you weren’t getting it at all wouldn’t 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 you’ll be happy when you see what’s in the next update (which isn’t far away now).

Now, what is the fix?

First, we’re going to ship Diretide with the next update. The rest of the update we’ve been working on is in final testing, and as each of us finish up our work on it, we’ve been jumping over to Diretide. Second, we’re pretty sure the update that we’ve been working on for a couple of months is going to be pretty significant. In addition, we’ve 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 we’re doing, this is probably a good time to stop cc’ing 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:

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:

First, we’re going to ship Diretide with the next update. The rest of the update we’ve been working on is in final testing, and as each of us finish up our work on it, we’ve been jumping over to Diretide.

pineapple anyone who says valve doesn't care and are lazy and only work on hats, seriously pineapple them.

[xparasite9]

Gib Dortids plx.
hue.


Is it bad that I kind of want a fiasco like this to happen to Nexon?

[Words]

The internet is an awful place sometimes, people behaving so poorly just because of one event.
It's annoying how whiny the community is though, every single thing that happens is a reason to peach like a brainless moron. Metacritic thing is just pinnacle of stupidity.

[Salguod]

I still think they could've just said something like "No diretide this year, we're working on a big update!" And people would be like, Oh okay, hype! Similar to the responses now, except without what happened. Maybe they don't have a dedicated PR, but this would be one sentence and people would've been satisfied.

Not saying it was right for those people to act out like they did, but Valve could've handled it better without much effort. Oh well, moving on.

[SoR0XaS]

What's this Diretide thingy? A lot of people were whining about it.

[Malthe]

I still think they could've just said something like "No diretide this year, we're working on a big update!" And people would be like, Oh okay, hype! Similar to the responses now, except without what happened. Maybe they don't have a dedicated PR, but this would be one sentence and people would've been satisfied.

Not saying it was right for those people to act out like they did, but Valve could've handled it better without much effort. Oh well, moving on.

That's just it though, valve doesn't have a dedicated PR section like that, if you read the valve employee handbook you learn that their work-structure is very fluid, and if everyone were busy with the new updates it's incredibly likely nobody took a step back and thought, hey maybe we should tell them that there wont be a diretide this year.
Clearly valve should have just announced that, but regardless a part of the community still reacted like babies.

What's this Diretide thingy? A lot of people were whining about it.

Halloween event.

[IllegallySane]

I really don't feel like Valve should be the one apologizing, because it's the community that forced Valve's hand and made the outcry go outside the community. Also yeah, the whole Metacritic bit was the epitome of full retard. No other fandom/community I've been in threw a tantrum this bad/severe, which is saying a lot. It damages the first impressions of DoTA since Metacritic (while shouldn't be taken 100%, still gives people with no idea about the game if it's worth playing. Because yes, let's shi't on a big review site and make the whole community look like a bunch of extremely whiny pricks just because of no Halloween event.

[Words]

It's hard to expect something different when the community celebrates "trolling"/stupidity so often. For example, when it comes to most casters and big team's players they have a limit but community as a whole doesn't have a brain to distinguish "fun" from idiocy and they just repeat what they see. Except it's not just casters but part of the community itself that makes a joke that not everyone understands/takes for what it is: a joke! Just look at EternalEnvy; people joke about him calling him EE-sama but somehow a part of the community thinks it's serious. However, it's not just the "trolling" but also how mean players and casters are rather often. I don't think the average moron that's on stream chat can tell the difference between a terrible terrible joke and being seriously stupid.
I'm not saying it's celebrities fault though, because I'd be a hypocrite.

[Chew]

The internet is an awful place sometimes, people behaving so poorly just because of one event.
It's annoying how whiny the community is though, every single thing that happens is a reason to peach like a brainless moron. Metacritic thing is just pinnacle of stupidity.

While I agree completly on this.
There's still people out there full of creativity, and those people are very thankful and dedicated. And IMO they're enough of them to overshadow the stupidity.

[Takebacker]

I really wish they would have just said "stop whining, you guys are being unfair" or something of that nature. Only things companies ever do is apologize so it'd be great to see valve be like a stern parent in this situation.

[Words]

I really wish they would have just said "stop whining, you guys are being unfair" or something of that nature. Only things companies ever do is apologize so it'd be great to see valve be like a stern parent in this situation.

I don't know if stern parents work when kids are already spoiled.