A usual complaint among DOTA 2 and Steam created game players over the years has been the lack of communication between the community and Valve. The publisher/developer long silence periods have given rise to the memes, jokes, the myth of the janitor, and at times a disheartening feeling. Jeff Hill has been a beacon of bright light amidst this dark path for the community.
Jeff Hill has been constantly communicating with the community via Reddit and Twitter in regards to DOTA 2’s issues,bugs, or updates. However this time he went even further by providing a new bug tracking program directly to the player base, in order to have better communication.
Jeff Hill via Reddit:
“Hi, Reddit! As some of you have noticed, I’ve been chasing down bugs posted here recently. I’m now having trouble keeping track of issues and following up on everything that deserves a response. It turns out having folks reach out to individual posters on Reddit isn’t something that scales well on a game the size of Dota.
We’d like to try using a public Github issue tracker to keep track of submitted issues. Our goals here are to be transparent about what our response is to any issue, and to let the community vote on what’s important to resolve. The voting is hugely important – Reddit is amazing because if something matters to many players it gets a lot of upvotes so we have clear signal on what’s important to you. Even if you don’t submit any new bugs on the tracker, upvoting the bugs you think are important is very valuable and will help us know what to prioritize.
This is an experiment for us and we’re trying something new, please be understanding when things change as we learn what works well and what doesn’t.
The tracker is up on my personal Github account right now at https://github.com/jeffhill/Dota2/issues.
Thank you and have a great day!”
Hill has become a beloved character within the community, as he has continuously provided deep insights into various concerns surrounding DOTA 2, recently talking about performance issues within the latest patch, and dealing with comments and posts on Reddit that detail bugs and other such persisting issues.
To facilitate the process of finding and dealing with these, Hill recently announced that they were putting up a public Github issue tracker as seen above. This is something quite unusual for game developers or public relation employees, however Jeff Hill stated the reason to go this far for the community in a recent post.
Jeff Hill via Reddit:
“Our goals here are to be transparent about what our response is to any issue, and to let the community vote on what’s important to resolve. The voting is hugely important – Reddit is amazing because if something matters to many players it gets a lot of upvotes so we have clear signal on what’s important to you. Even if you don’t submit any new bugs on the tracker, upvoting the bugs you think are important is very valuable and will help us know what to prioritize.”
It’s safe to say the community is quite thrilled about this, however some of them are skeptical as even though the bugs and issues are reported via the program, nobody can assure something will be done about them. Nevertheless players took the news happily as other MOBAs don’t have this level of personal communication from higher ups within the game or company. We shall see the impact of a tool like this in the near future, hopefully it will be an example that providing the community with communication tools is a step forwards in the scene.
