Valve Announces Emergency Maintenance for Dota 2

In a sudden turn of events, Valve, the publishers of Dota 2, have announced that they will do some emergency maintenance on the “Game Coordinator” starting February 4, 2016, 8:00 a.m. Philippine Standard Time (PST).

The Game Coordinator is the software component responsible for creating new matches and storing them on Valve servers after the games are finished. Each match is assigned an identification number and as it turned out, the company has almost ran out of match IDs.

Here is a statement from an administrator on the Valve developers’ forum:

“A long time ago, we thought it’d be safe to store Match IDs in 32-bit integers. “It will be forever before Dota players play 4.3 billion matches!” we thought. “We’ve got plenty of time! Think of all the bits we’ll save!” As it turns out, that was optimistic…”

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The admin further explained the reasons on the same post:

“…we made some changes that greatly accelerated the rate of exhaustion of the namespace, such as assigning the ID as soon as the match came out of matchmaking, where it would be consumed even if the match was never actually played, and assigning all private lobbies and even offline bot matches a Match ID. So the time when a 32-bit Match ID wasn’t big enough came far sooner than we thought.”

The developers plan to copy the matches from the old 32-bit system into the newer 64-bit system as well as to restructure the matchmaking system during the course of the maintenance.

Valve expects to be able to finish the system checks in only a “few hours” due to the fact that they were already able to work on the relevant software issues beforehand, though results of matches will be “significantly delayed for a period of time afterwards”.

Read the official Valve announcement HERE.

Featured image taken from the Dota 2 official website.

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