As Crownfall gets archived, Dota 2 players resort to astronomy to determine upcoming patch date

Crownfall is finally over after its elongated 10-month runtime, and Dota 2 players are gasping for the next thing to sink their teeth into, as it’s been quite a while since the last time Valve dropped a gameplay update.

Last night’s Crownfall Archive update, as it says on the tin, archives the four-acts-long event. But, contrary to what many had hoped for from a large number of staging updates visible on Dota 2’s SteamDB page, it didn’t accompany a gameplay patch or another similar event replacing Crownfall immediately. Naturally, players starving for content have now latched onto the singular piece of hint that Valve left in the Crownfall Archive blogpost: “It’s time for us to…point our compasses at some new guiding stars.”

In what might be construed as mere copium, one Dota player has their eye set on Feb. 28 as the patch release date owing to the rare full planetary alignment set to take place on that date in real life. The day will see seven planets—Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, Neptune, Mercury, and Saturn—appear in the night sky.

“It’s the next bigger event in the night sky,” the poster said, mustering the last bit of hope at the face of Valve’s seeming neglect. “But it’s about planets rather than stars,” they mention at the end of their Reddit post, perhaps to err on the side of pragmatism, “Take it with a huge grain of salt.”

As a matter of fact, Dota 2 hasn’t had a gameplay patch in a while. The last major one, Patch 7.37, was released on July 31 last year, six months ago. The last alphabet patch, Patch 7.37e, also dropped on Nov. 19, a good three months ago. Quite naturally, the meta has been stale for a while, with players encountering mostly the same overpowered heroes in their matches more often than not.

Keeping aside the astronomical hint, Valve’s delaying of the next gameplay patch might be attributed to the now-running BLAST Slam II event, which has its grand final on Feb. 9. The next tier-one tournament on the horizon is DreamLeague Season 25, which starts on Feb. 16. This means, there’s a one-week downtime where Valve can iron out bugs that a new gameplay patch is inevitably accompanied by. Valve hasn’t been shy about dropping patches mid-tournament, though, as we saw 7.37 released in the middle of Elite League Season Two last year.

That said, Valve has not provided any concrete information about when the new patch will be released or what it will contain. Meanwhile, we can continue our speculations and, if you like, some astronomy.