Everyone in the Dota 2 community knows about the International Battle Pass. It’s a huge package of cosmetic rewards that also include challenges that enhance your experience. It can be bought and is leveled up by playing, but you can also purchase levels to unlock better rewards and cosmetics. Like all items you can buy in Dota 2, not a single bit of it affects gameplay.
The more important aspect of the Battle Pass (the one you’ve probably heard about) is that 25 percent of all revenue from Battle Pass sales go to the prize pool for the Dota 2 International tournament – Valve’s biggest annual tournament akin to a Dota 2 Super Bowl. The prize pool is fast approaching $20 million and is on-pace to break the record for largest prize pool in eSports history (a record Valve itself set at the previous International).
Given that so many people buy this, as is evidenced by the International’s sky-high prize pool, you can surmise that players take their rewards very seriously. When players purchased the initial Battle Pass ($9.99 for a level-1 Battle Pass and $36.99 for a level-75 Battle Pass) and subsequently leveled up the Battle Pass (~$2.50 per level) they expected to get a series of daily and weekly rewards up until the deadline for redeeming these rewards, which had been set at Sept. 1, 2017 – weeks after the International is supposed to end.
So, when players noticed late last night that the message on the countdown timer that once said “The International 2017 Battle Pass event ends on: September 1st, 2017,” now listed that date as “August 20th, 2017, the whole Dota 2 community turned the passion they had for receiving rewards into anger for being denied them. After all, they paid for rewards up until September 1 – not until August 20. As one Redditor pointed out, this would deprive players of 2 weekly challenges, 9 daily challenges, and a host of other rewards that are slated to release as time goes on.
Over the course of 10 hours, this post, calling the move “unacceptable,” was upvoted more than 7,600 times, soaring to the top of the Dota 2 sub-Reddit r/Dota2. The community was fed up, and they’ve been burned before by changing rewards. One particular skin for a courier (a small donkey in game that brings Heroes their in-game items) was initially advertised as available at Battle Pass level 1950, but later changed to more than 2225. Another item gained by the Battle Pass (tickets to the Battle Cup) was promised at particular levels before being abruptly changed. So the Dota 2 community was used to what they saw as shady dealings from Valve’s handling of the Battle Pass.
This supposed change in the deadline was the straw the broke the camel’s back. One Redditor even went so far as to submit a complaint to the European Commission on Consumer Disputes over what they saw as “false advertising.” Everyone expected Valve to simply ignore any complaints brought directly to them, as they have with these previous issues. Suffice it to say, the Dota 2 community was in complete outrage mode following this change.
The only problem? Turns out the date change was an unintended hiccup. As one Valve employee explained on Reddit: “In a recent update, the static text label date was changed to match the intended expiration date being displayed by the countdown timer, however we should have instead changed the countdown timer to match the September 1st date. This will be fixed today.”
So, before, the date was correct, but the countdown timer was 12 days off, as you can see in the image above. In an attempt to fix this, Valve accidentally changed the the final date instead of the timer. Since this revelation, the original poster of the hugely-upvoted Reddit thread has removed his post, and many users have expressed embarrassment over the outrage. In response to Valve’s post, one user wrote: “Wow who would have thought this was a non-issue that didn’t warrant a complete overreaction?” while another sarcastically quipped “At least no one overreacted.”
While this was all a classic case of “much ado about nothing,” it’s clear to everyone that you don’t mess with Dota 2 players’ Battle Passes. OK?
