Hey Valve: the Dota 2 front page sucks
Executive summary: you are now not only managing a game with many millions of players, you are also running the keystone events of its competitive scene. Your front page is pretty, but it sucks ass as a portal to relevant information about both of these because of what appears to be neglect, and maybe a lack of organizational theory. Sometimes the website sucks at a deeper level. As a player your website should make it easy to stay informed, reminisce, and evangelize, about the game and its pinnacle competitions both. It does a very uneven job of this, and not even because it's busy selling itself to new players, which it fails to do in any visible way. It's time to fix it.
Let's look at what's on the sidebar:
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The Shanghai major in the special slot below player count. This is the previous major. Qualifiers are done for Manila. You can't even buy a battle pass for Shanghai any more. But at least this page is updated as though the major already happened...
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The Winter Battle Pass. Spring Cleaning? Not there. 6.87? Not there. Where should I look for them? Can you find them in the updates tab?
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6.86 "Balance of Power". Great update. Not even the most recent major patch.
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The Frankfurt Major, which has only been updated in the brackets. This should have been changed to a hype post-event roundup with pretty pictures and video long ago.
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The Reborn updates tracker, last updated September 8th. Surely some closure can be brought to this page. It just sits there like a sad child.
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TI5 page which is honestly an embarrassment at this point. Historic esports event and the main page looks virtually unchanged from when it was first launched.
Guess what's at the top of the page? That's right, the Winter Battle Pass, which I reiterate, is expired.
So to summarize, in the sidebar you're missing a major version patch and a named update. You've got the previous major and an expired Battle Pass at the top of the sidebar, and the latter at the top of the page. Neither Frankfurt nor TI5 pages have been updated*.
- Your main pages for these events should be cradle-to-the-grave relevant to what's happening - and I mean more than an instagram feed. I'm going to TI6 and visiting old friends while I'm in Washington. Explaining TI6 should have been as simple as linking to the TI5 page. It wasn't. And as nice as Free to Play is, it totally fails to communicate what a current TI looks like.
So how should it be?
Enable us to keep up, reminisce, and evangelize
Events should have one unified page for the event. Event announcement? Event page. Tickets details? Event page. Invites? Event page. Tournament in progress? Event page. Post-tournament hype? Event page. Always with the most relevant thing up front. No hunting for blog posts. No old-ass, outdated pages. Make it easier for us to keep up, and easier for us to share what we love with our friends. Maybe, should we dream, a unified hub page for Valve Dota events, making it easier still to walk down memory lane, and to share our passion.
Patch together your patch notes
Your patches? Get a unified theory and apply it in at least once place. That Updates tab should be better than just a blog aggregate. Right now the official page is probably the worst place to look for patches, unless you have a direct link to an update. You're putting them on the sidebar with no consistent rationale, and the Updates tab doesn't show version numbers, and doesn't include major updates as far as I can tell. A working RSS feed for patch notes somewhere would also not go amiss (this complaint may be outdated).
Figure out what you're doing with that damn sidebar
You're setting expectations for what we can find there and those expectations have gotten far less reliable. You've got updates all the way to the Shopkeeper but not the two most recent patches.
Stop hiding your best content!
Where are the comics, VALVE? Where are they. Why do I have to hunt for them. Not to short some of your major patch notes but this is the best content on your website. Let it shine!
Pretend you're a curious prospective player and go to dota2.com
Now remember you work at Valve and feel very embarrassed.
That's all I've got for now. Thanks for listening or not listening. The tl;dr is at the top.
[e] I love goooold! Thanks for being my first! And thanks to everyone in this thread helping bring discussion to not just the titular issue but the various things it is symptomatic of. I very much respect Valve's team but it's always important to recognize the trade-offs in how you do business.
Posted May 11, 2016, 9:05 PM UTC · edited