Planned 24-hour downtime on Dota 2 servers, no Friday update

Posted by Patrik "Raistlin" Hellstrand 3 months ago

It’s not you, it’s us!
February 10, 2012

Yep, we’ve done it again. There will not be an update today.

Now, before you start a petition to get us all fired, let us tell you what is going on. You are probably aware that the number of people with access to Dota 2 is not equal to the size of the Earth’s population (our internal estimate of the number of people who want Dota 2). The primary reason we haven’t allowed everyone access to the game is because we don’t yet have enough server capacity to run all the games it would require. Our server deployment team has spent the last few months flying around the world setting up new server clusters to increase that capacity.

The extensive network changes we’ve been working on, to support the new replay system among other things, has resulted in significant changes to our servers. This is why we’ve taken longer than anticipated to get this update out. It’s also the reason why we’ll be needing to take down all Dota 2′s servers for 24 hours, starting Tuesday 14th at 11am PST.

On the bright side, our game team has been working as usual, building new heroes and features. So you can expect our next update, which we’re probably going to regret saying will be out next week, to be a packed one. In the meantime, here’s some light reading: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time.