Valve baffled Dota 2 fans with patch notes for 7.34 written entirely in emojis, leading players to work together to sort out what’s actually changing.
Plenty of game developers have tried to make patch notes more fun with little jokes and Easter eggs for fans to find. However, Valve took things several steps further by releasing the latest Dota 2 patch notes entirely in emojis.
Ahead of update 7.34, fans have been looking forward to seeing what changes are coming to the long-running MOBA. However, while the patch notes technically do go over the adjustments to gameplay, heroes, and more, players have had to team up to figure out what all the colorful little symbols mean for the game.
Fans are working together to make sense of Dota 2 update 7.34’s patch notes
In a post on the official Dota 2 website titled “Emojis in the Dark,” a mysterious individual using the name “E.W.” claims to have broken into Valve’s office and stolen the patch notes only for their copy-paste to turn the words into emojis.
From there, Dota 2 fans turned to Reddit to help one another make sense of the post. When the project became too big for organize there, players created a Google Doc that, as of the time of writing this article, is 80 pages long.
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It didn’t take too long for fans to figure out some patterns, such as a fire and chicken emoji next to each other representing the hero Phoenix. Others have been harder to decipher. For example, those on the Google Doc (which had to be set to no editing mode presumably due to trolls) seem to still be debating whether a turtle next to a water droplet means “slow resistance.”
In all likelihood, Valve’s post was intended to tease fans ahead of the actual English-language release of Dota 2 update 7.34’s patch notes in the near future. Though some fans are frustrated by what is clearly an attempt to get some attention, many on Reddit seem to genuinely be having fun working with other Dota community members to translate the bizarre post.
Valve is also not alone in entertaining fans with patch notes, as the latest Baldur’s Gate 3 Hotfix makes some changes to genitals that have players talking.
