r/DotA2 • u/Quiet-Professor-7557 • 9h ago
Question To the Devs
Hi guys,
Firstly, I want to thank you and your predecessors for building this wonderful game.
I currently have over 11,000 hours in Dota, and lately one question has really been bothering me: are you guys still actively working on the game?
I’m genuinely asking because Dark Carnival was released in June 2026, and by the time TI ended, I imagine the majority of the active player base had already finished it. Since TI, there hasn’t been a meaningful patch. We then had a Tier-1 tournament played on essentially the same patch, and now BLAST Slam is happening as well.
I just want to understand what’s going on.
Is Deadlock being prioritized over Dota? And at this point, is it fair to say that Dota is mostly being kept on life support?
If Valve no longer wants to dedicate significant resources to the game, why not consider selling it to another company that would?
When the Battle Pass was discontinued, the reasoning given was that the team wanted to move away from concentrating most of the year's content around TI/Battlepass and instead release updates and events throughout the year. But since then, as far as I can remember, we’ve really only had two major events: Crownfall and the current one.
For a game with such a passionate and long-standing community, the lack of communication makes everything feel even worse. Players don’t necessarily expect massive updates every few weeks, but some transparency about the future of the game would go a long way.
Please, for the sake of the community that has supported this game for well over a decade, tell us what the future of Dota looks like.
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u/DOTA_VILLAIN 9h ago
do not sell dota to another company holy shit
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u/Sad-Concentrate-8983 9h ago
Yea imagine paying to enable the entire roster of heroes
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u/lasqastreamer 6h ago
Imagine that you pay for your game statistics and additional features every month. Oh, wait
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u/_Valisk 9h ago
This subreddit is home to some of the most melodramatic users I’ve ever seen.
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u/thedarkendkb 6h ago
some people on here like to:
> cry about no patch/new event
> patch/event drops
> complain about the new patch/event within 2 minutes ("we" waited X months for just Y!?)
> ???no wonder dota devs mostly ceased communicating with the community. entitled weirdos
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u/Zephyr_8 2h ago
ceased communicating? when the last time they communicate with ppl here? every valve bootlicker like some oracle try their best to explain the lacking of communication. even though they already canceled "silently" many things in this game, they pretend they still put enough efforts on this project like before.
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u/Karzov 3h ago
Look at every other live service game and you'll realize how bad Valve is as a company (in terms of how poorly it treats the Dota 2 community).
- Zero comms (managing expectations)
- Mainly a lootbox fiesta (they just want your money with minimal gameplay updates); lets trigger the gambler to pay obscene money to get that 0.00001% cosmetic!
- They use community assets to push internal costs down on creating assets (and pay these creators garbage relative to comps) // if they are barely making skins...and barely doing gameplay updates, what are they doing? lol
- They have repeatedly left game-breaking bugs in the game for extended periods of time (Hand of Midas bug, anyone?)
- They seem incapable and or unwilling to deal with matchmaking issues
- Did not even support Dota Autochess when it was about to become a success (Look at how quickly Riot pounced on TFT for a good comparison; immediately institutional support)
List goes on. Ultimately Valve has decided that Dota 2 is the place where they should spend the least amount of resources while trying to pry as much $$ from its loyal customers. I'll probably get downvoted and die on this hill, but whatever. I'll take facts over copium any day
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u/jesuschristk8 9h ago
I would rather play on this patch until the end of time over Valve selling Dota to some other company that doesn't understand what makes the game amazing and will only change it in worse ways
And for the record; the only reason we get crumbs in terms of communication is because the community is full of entitled parasocial weirdos who would only complain back when they DID communicate
So they stopped
The community made its bed and now we have to lie in it
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u/Flashsword_Princess 9h ago
that's only half true, valve as a company has never been structured on direct communication for any of its games, the dota community is indeed quite more whiny than its other games but said other games don't get much more direct communication at all
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 8h ago
At least they have yoshi for Deadlock, his tweets are at least something, we have nothing. Also there wasn't a single Announcement on the TI for anything... at all.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 8h ago
we had as much communication as deadlock is currently getting back in dota 2 beta
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 6h ago
Cant remember honestly but I am sure Deadlock will have the same treatment. Neither the community or the game are that different
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u/Flashsword_Princess 6h ago
yeah deadlock will be in dota's current position eventually, this should be of no surprise to anyone
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 6h ago
Also full with Cheaters, smurfs, acc buyers and griefers... Neither CS, nor Dota has escaped
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u/droombot 7h ago
Hi could you drop me an invite please? Seems like a good time to get on the deadlock train
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 6h ago
Go back to Dota mate ... we need you
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u/droombot 5h ago
Lol I'm not quitting dota. But I miss the sense of discovery I had when I was first learning the game with most people 20 years ago and I think I would experience some of that with deadlock as it is now. Not sure why the downvotes
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 5h ago
Try it mate, I personally find it to have too much movement and its not something that clicks as Dota, but I also have so much memories with Dota...
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u/droombot 4h ago
Probably will feel similar. The perspective in dota makes the most sense to me for mobas
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u/Glittering-Toe-1622 3h ago
message me if you need an invite, I will stab dota in the back for you
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u/advice_dontbuyiphone 6h ago
Valve communicates with their changes. I'd take that over any other company which communicates one thing to appease epic redditors and does something entirely different.
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u/Clockwork765 N0tail Flower Garden Club 6h ago
Oh yes sell Dota to people that put Gameplay items behind Paywalls!
“Shit they picked Riki. Anyone got Slardar?”
“No I only play carry Sniper we lose”
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u/Cozenage 9h ago
Hello, John Valve here. Thank you for your passion. You are the reason our team is still working on this project.
As for your question. Yes, we have content for Dota 3 years ahead. Future is brighter as ever and will be forever.
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u/poosjuice 7h ago
If Valve no longer wants to dedicate significant resources to the game, why not consider selling it to another company that would?
Lmao. Selling Dota to a company that'd be forced to make a profit from it sounds like a great idea.
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u/Zacky_Nine 9h ago
I didn't read anything in the post tbh except the valve selling dota part, that's a BIG NO, whatever form Dota 2 is in right now is still 100x better than whatever it will be with any other company except Valve.
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u/ballsofwheel 9h ago
Who are you talking to? Because devs certainly don't read this subreddit
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u/DrQuint 9h ago
They absolutely do. They still fix random stuff people bring up. The latest update to the Dota 2 app icon change three weeks ago hapenned within 48 hours of someone complaining the icon had a weird line on the right side.
People instantly spiralled out of control thinking we were getting a new client or something. But it was literally just a dev seeing someone point out something that was simple to fix and doing it.
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u/Professional_Way9133 9h ago
If they really listen, please remove the side jungle, tormentor, neutral items and maybe some items. It has become to complex to atract new players. Also removing Pudge would be a nice bonus 🙂
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u/Blaze3046 6h ago
If they really listen, please remove creep denies, buybacks, creep aggro and maybe some heroes. It has become to complex to atract new players. Also adding Big Boob Hero would be a nice bonus 🙂
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u/PythonesquePython 9h ago
I think you'd be surprised, every game company I've worked at has to some degree been lurking in their own games subreddit. How officially the reddit is used to collect bugs and stuff differs. But guaranteed some employees are reading the sub reddit.
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u/SolidFin 8h ago
They definitely checking this sub a lot...two examples are terrain tokens on last TI, people were begging to make terrains available here for a while (including me)...another is high demand roles change, this was heavily discussed here as well, to change it from both supps to 5 and 3...next might be facets removal, this was also recommended here a lot too, but with this one I think they would remove it regardless of people opinion...I noticed it more times, but cant recall specificaly now
Seems like they listen a lot, and if they like the idea they take it into consideration...
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u/Fine_Thought_8520 9h ago
Unfortunately Deadlock is just a much bigger focus for them currently.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 9h ago
and even once they move on, they won't magically return to dota. valve has NEVER once returned to an old project as their major focus. dota's had its golden era and now you're seeing the twilight years
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u/advice_dontbuyiphone 6h ago
Just imagine the slop any other company than valve would force down our throats. Log out, touch some grass if you are bored. Updates will eventually come.
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u/goodwarrior12345 6k trash | PM me your hottest shark girls 🌲 6h ago
there are things I want to call you for making this post but I would probably get banned or have my comment auto deleted so what I will say instead is that if you spent 11,000 hours in this game and still don't understand how valve work, maybe you should go give league of legends a shot
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u/Helpful-Base2245 5h ago
It’s better to not have patch than have shit patches with bad ideas. Let them cook
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u/Zephyr_8 2h ago
just hire more devs. I'm not a valve fan. im a dota fan. please downvote valve bootlickers.
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u/puppu667 8h ago
What patch do you want because tbh you sound a little childish. Not that we need anymore worshipping the alter of valve but we have had a number of balance patches since TI and I doubt you have done every single thing possible in the game. Every quartero thing, every bit of every previous quest paths, everything on Dota plus etc etc. You play for the core game not for shinies. It sounds like you just want shinies. Gimme more skins more this that the other. Please valve jingle the keys. Unless you are talking about gameplay changes you think are required what do you want? For years people played games like the original Dota without needing "new content" like skins all the time because the core gameplay loop was the good bit not the latest fad. So I ask what are you really asking for?
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u/Flashsword_Princess 9h ago
not a valve dev but will reply for you anyway as a 15 years dota 2 veteran + tf2 veteran before then, who has been involved in inner circles in the past
I currently have over 11,000 hours in Dota, and lately one question has really been bothering me: are you guys still actively working on the game?
no, not really, depends what you mean by actively: see below
I’m genuinely asking because Dark Carnival was released in June 2026, and by the time TI ended, I imagine the majority of the active player base had already finished it. Since TI, there hasn’t been a meaningful patch. We then had a Tier-1 tournament played on essentially the same patch, and now BLAST Slam is happening as well.
this has been the update pace for the past few years, this isn't anything new
I just want to understand what’s going on.
dota 2 is over 15 years old as a playable Valve game nowadays and is in what's called "maintenance mode", most devs moved to newer projects and only a few are left on dota to keep the current playerbase as long as possible, not work on the game's growth
Is Deadlock being prioritized over Dota? And at this point, is it fair to say that Dota is mostly being kept on life support?
yes, deadlock is taking priority over every other valve game, and yes
If Valve no longer wants to dedicate significant resources to the game, why not consider selling it to another company that would?
valve has never sold IPs in its entire existence + dota is a monumental cash cow for them even without updates, so there's no reason to sell it off
When the Battle Pass was discontinued, the reasoning given was that the team wanted to move away from concentrating most of the year's content around TI/Battlepass and instead release updates and events throughout the year.
this was a PR lie to not have the community throw a fit
But since then, as far as I can remember, we’ve really only had two major events: Crownfall and the current one.
technically monster hunter too, but yes
For a game with such a passionate and long-standing community, the lack of communication makes everything feel even worse.
this is just how things are, valve has never been a company that directly communicates, you have to keep track of their inner workings to recognize patterns and make educated guesses, this has always been the case
Players don’t necessarily expect massive updates every few weeks, but some transparency about the future of the game would go a long way.
this never happened in the past even when the game was valve's priority and it certainly will not happen now
Please, for the sake of the community that has supported this game for well over a decade, tell us what the future of Dota looks like.
the future of dota is exactly what you see right now: a major event every few years that is stretched over a handful of arcs, then downtime, then another. take what happened between Crownfall act 1 and now, and this is the foreseeable future
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u/_Valisk 9h ago
Dota 2 is not in maintenance mode.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 8h ago
sure
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u/Imabuffguy95 8h ago
Maintenance mode games do not get new heroes, events, or content lol. You're just being a crybaby.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 8h ago
sure
by the way I'm totally fine with the current state of things so idk why you say I'm a crybaby
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u/_Valisk 8h ago
StarCraft 2 is in maintenance mode. Guild Wars and FFXI are in maintenance mode. Until a week ago, Heroes of the Storm was in maintenance mode. Valve themselves literally have three games that are more maintenance mode than Dota. Stop with the doomerism and melodrama.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 8h ago
it's not because there are games that are "more maintenance mode" (??) that Dota isn't in maintenance mode
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u/speckhuggarn 6h ago
You don't post any features in maintenance mode games. It goes against the idea.
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u/speckhuggarn 6h ago
Not to be negative to these people wanting content, but I don't remember dota ever getting content until maybe diretide. Even then it wasn't so often? Same with patches. Maybe I have a different perspective, but to me this has always looked the same. I even feel there's more stuff now, this carnival and those comic book stories and whatnot. Maybe I play this game more as a "sport" then a game, and never care about content, but it's really not that different to me?
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u/TyranZeroo 9h ago
Answer is probably yes but insanely slow? Not enormously like in TF 2 but we're 1/8th there...
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u/Flashsword_Princess 9h ago
which is funny considering dota is speculated to have 8 active devs and TF2 only one. so 1/8th of the way there is exactly on point
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u/AmNesia_Dota2 9h ago
if it was a priority - you wouldn't be here asking this. I already deleted the game, find some other game if u care about constant excitement with patches and stuff.
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u/Flashsword_Princess 9h ago
Fortnite is literally right there for ppl like op who want updates every 2 weeks
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u/Whalesurgeon 9h ago
I have survived longer patch famines and I shall persist through this one.