Playing Dota 2 is seeming harder than it ever has been these days.
This isn’t because of any sort of shift to the meta or increase in toxicity in what is already the most toxic player base in online gaming. No, it’s harder than ever because Valve just can’t seem to keep the game coordinator steadily operational.
For the third time this week, players reported mass issues with the Dota 2 game coordinator. This followed two similarly finicky days earlier in the week that prevented players from getting any games in.
Valve addressed the issue on June 17, with the publisher stating “there is a network issue that is causing Game Coordinator unresponsiveness for many players. We are aware of this issue and working on a fix.”
We apologize for the Game Coordinate responsiveness issues this morning, we are working to fix it as soon as possible.
— DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) June 18, 2020
This was followed by a similar admission the following day. In both cases, the issues lasted for hours on end and led to many simply wasting their time trying to play the game while Dota 2 is in the midst of a limited-time event with The International 10 Battle Pass. The issues appeared once again the next day, leaving fans feeling increasingly frustrated with Valve.
The net effect of this was below-average player counts throughout the week. Though Dota 2 has been hitting daily peaks between 600,000 and 700,000, these issues have seen the player count dip well below those marks, with June 17 failing to even reach 500,000.
It would be fair to jump to the conclusion that these issues stemmed from the TI10 Battle Pass. The event is a special time for Dota 2 players, giving them actual incentive to play in the form of premium skins and other rewards.
While this is always a highlight for Dota 2 players, the player count has actually gone down since the introduction of the TI10 Battle Pass. Both in terms of averages and peaks, things should be running more smoothly than normal for Dota 2.
While these are some fairly rough hiccups, Dota 2 fans can likely count on Valve to attempt to fix these issues sooner than later.
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