Cover-Credits:
The back end of Dota 2 has mostly been a mystery, as Valve kept the development of the game strictly under wraps, keeping the communication as minimal as possible. However, recently, a Valve employee named Jeff Hill has become popular among the Dota 2 community for seemingly acting as the link between the two parties. Hill has been discussing a lot of topics related to the game’s smooth functioning, including bug and quality fixes. He mentioned in response to the appreciation for his work on Reddit that although he was a regular on Reddit, he worked with around 30 people on Dota 2 and that does not include teams working in other departments.
Valve’s Jeff Hill says 30 more people work in conjunction with him on Dota 2
After a prolonged period of self paced fixes by Valve, the company has now visibly opened itself up to the community to address certain issues related to the game’s functioning.
Throughout the past months, Hill has been the main contact between them, and after numerous users thanked him for his help, Hill eventually responded to such a comment by stating that there were other people who were assisting him at Valve.
“I'm extremely lucky to have many talented colleagues who do a ton of great work," said Hill. "I'm just the guy who posts on Reddit most often - and while it's charming to see the community be so kind to me personally, there's like 30 other folks just on the Dota game team who do good work for you every single day and just don't post about it... and that's not counting all the folks on ops, steam, support, localization, and other teams I'm sure I'm overlooking out of ignorance.”
Hill does not even consider himself a bridge between Valve and the community but rather someone who simply likes to use Reddit from time to time, thanking the community for their kindness. “I'm not even what you'd think of as a "lead" or anything, I'm just some guy who writes code and also writes the odd post on Reddit sometimes. So thank you for the kind words and silly memes (my kids think they're hilarious), but please remember that I'm just one guy and there's a whole bunch of folks here working for you, he said”
In a separate comment, the Valve employee also said that his first game was released around 2012, and he joined Reddit around the same time. It then took him close to a year to join Valve.
With the community and Hill constantly communicating, the most significant change that has taken place in the past few months has arguably been the public bug tracker. At the time of writing, more than 1000 bug issues stay open on GitHub, and more than 200 have been resolved.
