Dota 2 Diretide event to launch "with the next update" at the community's very determined request

Diretide was the title of last year's Halloween Dota 2 event. It added a new game mode in which players battled for candy while avoiding the clutches of the monstrous but relentlessly persecuted Rancor, Roshan. There was candy, and giggles, and there were Greevil eggs you could massage with magical essences in preparation for the wintry Greeviling event.

As with all of Valve's seasonal events, Dota 2 players assumed that Diretide would return this year, but October 31 rolled around and nothing happened. As Valve explain in a post on the Dota 2 blog , they decided to drop Diretide to finish work on the next big update, but then slightly forgot to tell anyone. Good news, though! It will roll out with that update, and they've "made a few changes to Diretide that we think makes it more fun than before."

Valve are responding to a bit of drama that broke out when the free update failed to appear. Some Dota 2 fans, frustrated by silence from Valve, started inundating the car manufacturer Volvo with Diretide requests. As Kotaku noted, the "GIVE DIRETIDE" requests even reached Barrack Obama's Facebook page.

Valve explained their silence in the blog post "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?”

They haven't outlined their plans for tweaking Diretide yet, but the next big update "isn't far away now." They add "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."