Dota 2 servers down three days in a row, Valve has no answers

By Neslyn Apduhan

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Jun 19, 2020

Reading time: 4 min

Dota 2 fans have been complaining about server issues for three days now, and this may not be the end of their problems.

Dota 2 servers were down again today, marking the third consecutive day in which the Dota 2 client’s game coordinator experienced significant issues.

Fans were queuing for matches normally, but they couldn’t find any games. The “finding match” button also seems to vanish after a few minutes. It will then automatically queue players for matches and reset the finding match timer, serving only to further frustrate players trying to play some Dota.

One silver lining of the long queue time is the increased number of trivia questions being answered. Some fans used this opportunity to rack up as many as 10,000 trivia points and claim the related battle pass reward. But this is little consolation for not being able to play at all, especially for players who are only able to play for limited amounts of time each day.

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During the first day of downtime, Valve acknowledged the issue and assured fans that developers were working on it.

The second day saw Valve apologize again for the ongoing issue, while continuing to reassure players that it was being worked on.

Once again, Valve sincerely apologized for the issue today. The developer also posted that it is having difficulties in locating the root cause of the issue, a worrying sign that problems may continue to persist.

Guild contracts might be the culprit of the sudden “extreme load” happening at the same time for the past three days. Contracts are renewed every day and players often opt to log in when those new contracts came in. This will increase the options for higher tier contracts that are easy to achieve.

Meanwhile, some players logged in before the contracts expire to earn daily achievements. This might be worth looking at, but the player charts say otherwise.

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Steamcharts indicated that there’s no sudden and significant spike in the number of players during those hours, leaving only more questions as to what exactly is the cause of the issue.

Dota 2 fans have mixed response as Valve struggles with servers

Some fans have lauded Valve for being communicative despite not understanding the ongoing issue. For the past three days, Valve has updated fans through Twitter to confirm that the game coordinator is unresponsive.

Valve has been transparent and told fans that it is still trying to find the root cause of the problem. This is a marked improvement for the developer, as Valve has been at times notorious for remaining silent about ongoing issues in and around the Dota 2 scene.

Players insisted that Valve should compensate them for the unscheduled maintenance. Battle Pass owners are urging the company to give away at least five Battle Pass levels for free, given that the pass is only active for a limited time and these issues are cutting into that time. It’s been noted that this practice has already been popularized by many mobile game developers, who compensate players when server issues prevent them from taking advantage of limited-time modes and activations.

Fans also unleashed their humor and creativity with in reaction tweets.

Fans have little to zero knowledge about what’s really going on behind the scenes. Valve did well in acknowledging the issue, but that may not be enough to appease the fans if the downtime continues to be a problem.

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