author: Zuzanna Domeradzka
Valve Encoded Changes to Dota 2 With Emotes; Community Loves It
The popular Dota 2 received a new update today. Valve, however, endoded the list of changes using... emotes. Fans loved deciphering them.
Many multiplayer games receive regular updates that fix bugs or introduce new content. Developers often announce upcoming changes in advance, and on the day the patch is released they share the full list. The developers of the very popular free-to-play game Dota 2 recently displayed some creativity and a sense of humor, as they encoded the update information with... emotes.
Emoji instead of text
Yesterday the official website of Dota 2 posted a message titled "Emoji in the dark." It concerned update 7.34 and its contents surprised many fans of the game:
"Hey, everyone. I don’t have much time. I snuck into Valve and managed to grab the complete patch notes for 7.34, and I’m posting them for everyone to read. But I think something went wrong with my copy-paste, because it’s all in emoticons. Anyway, so long as you can read emoji, you should be okay."
Under a short message written in normal text, the developers actually put a list of changes in the form of emoji. What's more, Valve really made an effort and the whole message can be deciphered. Some fans took the task seriously - they created a nearly 80-page long file on Google Drive with a translation of all the emoji changes.
Some points turned out to be quite easy to guess. Numbers, arrows and percentages suggest that some parameters have been changed, such as the damage dealt by specific characters. Many of the points relate to just such innovations.
However, some of the information was quite enigmatic, which led to amusing thoughts from the fans. For example, Brewmaster (who was shown with an emoji of beer and a bear) lived to see a change in the form of a shield and the number 1 - a player interpreted this to be the transformation into an immortal character. Another ambiguity was Doom and the mute and hospital emoticons next to it (Doom is no longer muted and prevents healing?).
Fans enjoyed the game and expressed appreciation for the effort it took to code the list of changes with emotes - even if artificial intelligence was used to translate.
"I wonder if they used AI to translate the list of changes into emotes, or if some poor soul had to do it all by hand," asks Reddit user u/Bartekmms.
"I don't know who writes these funny Valve blog posts, but they're amazing. [...] I really like their humorous approach, and whoever writes these messages is amazing," praises Reddit user u/podteod.
Some tried to solve the coded content in emoji.Reddit, u/wykrhm
The real list of changes
Valve, despite the successful joke in the form of an unusual message, decided to release the full list of changes - in normal text, so that we do not have to wonder about its meaning. Update 7.34 is now available and brought, among other things, character skill balance and changes to Captains Mode. The full, real list of changes can be found here.
Recently, Valve has been working on new "cool stuff" that will come to Dota 2 to celebrate the game's 10th anniversary. However, they stressed that they are not ready yet, but will be released "soon."
As the developers wrote, yesterday's news with emotes was "an unprecedented and exceptionally ridiculous leak of a list of changes." Will Valve still decide to announce updates in a similar way in the future? Certainly, such deciphering of changes is interesting, but it could prove tiresome in the long run.
