Halloween 2013 came and went without so much as a peep about the Diretide event for Dota 2 from Valve. Fans were, to put it mildly, pissed right the hell off at that.

Today, Valve updated the Dota 2 blog with some fresh information as to why there was no Diretide and offers up an apology to the fans in the process. First up, why wasn't there Diretide this year?
  • 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.

Alright, that's understandable. So, why didn't they say anything about this sooner?
  • 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).

Damn, they know their communities quite well! Alright, so now it's time for the trick question here: What are they going to do to make up for it?
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.

That's... a really great way of handling this.