Valve is changing Dota 2 Collector’s Cache submissions

After opening voting on the 2020 Collector’s Cache on June 6, Valve is now reworking the system to be more fair after numerous complaints from the Dota 2 community. 

Due to multiple factors, such as polygon limits, tagging, and community feedback, Valve has deemed that some aspects of the current system were rightfully called unfair and will be replacing them. 

The biggest problem that Valve encountered was the polygon limit that is allotted by Steam workshop tools, which limits the “budget” of a creation that can be submitted. Upon further review, some of the submissions placed in the Collector’s Cache voting were discovered to be over that limit. Those top selections that went over-budget will be removed and replaced with the next two most highly-voted sets.

It appears this problem was done on accident by creators that Valve has previously contracted to do work for through the workshop in the past. Those users had their accounts tagged by Valve so they can submit the raw files for a variety of types of content, privately, through the workshop, which gave them different guidelines without the submissions being flagged. 

Valve is going to be more vigilant in monitoring future submissions and is also changing how its submission process for contract work to prevent this from happening in the future.

Likewise, Valve also commented on sets that had references to particles prior to the voting. This has to do with Valve’s approach to saving popular content for potential future releases through the workshop and is something the developers do quite frequently. 

“The reason for that is because it can be released at a later date in another treasure if it doesn’t make it in the community-driven portion of the Collector’s Cache,” Valve said. “A similar scenario happened last year, where we had enough extra resources to be able to create a second Cache using some older popular items and some newer ones. “

Valve said it is currently unsure if there will be a second Cache this year or if future treasure will just feature other items the developers have saved or pick up on in the coming months. Either way, it looks like the changes to the Collector’s Cache Submissions will be swift and harmless to the ongoing process.