Dota 2 Reborn is broken and losing tons of players as a result

Dota 2 Reborn marks the highly competitive and immensely popular Dota 2’s shift to the much more capable Source Engine 2.

With it comes a great many improvements, many of which have made marked improvements to the user experience, particularly when browsing your inventory or personalising heroes, watching DotaTV games, socialising with friends or the community, and showing off your achievements.

The Source Engine 2 has also allowed for an absurd number of custom game types and an assortment of new ways to play Dota 2, some of which are immensely enjoyable.

It’s even allowed Warcraft 3 custom maps to flourish once more with many of them being recreated in Dota 2, with mixed results – though many of them are more enjoyable than their StarCraft 2 counterparts.

You’d imagine, then, that Dota 2 Reborn would mark a new milestone for Valve and the already massive Dota 2 community – nope.

Like with so many games of late, Valve has committed one of the greatest videogaming sins, releasing a game before its ready – are you listening Warner Bros. and Ubisoft?

There are only two ways in which that is acceptable, the game is in beta or it’s an Early Release title. Dota 2 Reborn is neither of those things.

In fact, Dota 2 Reborn was in beta for a relatively short period while Valve slowly transitioned players over from the Source Engine 1 client, but was nowhere near ready when they halted all activity in the original client, forcing players to use Reborn or nothing.

So are you surprised that a good deal of players stopped playing Dota 2 Reborn during September? We’re not; we’ve had quite a few aggravating experiences with Reborn ourselves.

As pointed out by NeoGAF user Archie, Dota 2’s new client is “haemorrhaging players”.

Over the period of 30 days, in fact, Dota 2, has lost an average of 98,787 players, the largest change in players in the game’s history – the second largest being a gain of 92, 920 over August in 2013, likely attributed to The International 2013 (TI3).

It should be pointed out that the average over the past few days has been higher than September’s overall average – Valve has made a committed effort to patch the living hell out of Dota 2 Reborn – so the worst of it may be behind Valve. We also suspect that some of the player decline is a result of impending exams and academic obligations for players all around the world.

That said, it doesn’t excuse Valve. We get that having a larger player base playing Reborn will result in much more user feedback as well as bugs being picked up sooner, and that’s great. But we’re all suffering for it.

This nonsense of releasing an incomplete game and having us as free quality assurance staff needs to stop, sooner rather than later.