Valve operates as a slightly closed shop, rarely granting staff interviews and keeping community engagement to a minimum. The studio's latest game, Deadlock, was even released semi-covertly with no official confirmation until the cat was well and truly out of the bag (which may have been some inspired marketing). Valve people, generally speaking, keep their thoughts within Valve. So Valve engineer Fletcher Dunn is a brave soul: some might even say foolhardy.
Dunn is an extraordinarily overqualified man who, among other things, has co-authored a free book on 3D math in game development. His role at Valve seems focused on networking, and he's worked across the studio's titles even though the focus here is CS2. He also drops breadcrumbs in public which, to a community oft-starved of information, are seized upon with relish.
"I have some new network stuff that will be shipping in CS soon," said Dunn with a smiley emoji on October 2, referring to the recent Armory update. His replies were immediately flooded by Counter-Strike players tremendously excited that a Valve dev was saying something, anything, about their beloved game: soon the talk turned to Operations, new maps, and all the exciting things Dunn was going to deliver.
"Oh crap this was a mistake," Dunn posted shortly afterwards. "Don't get excited. I am only a tiny part of this great team."
The problem is that no matter what Dunn says, and the vast majority of what he does talk about is networking issues, it is at best a "rare W" from Valve and at worst is some sort of implicit confirmation of Half-Life 3. It also makes him a bit of a target for the spittle-flecked mob who think harassing developers on social media is a sane pastime.
"Fix the game overpaid idiots dev," says the perfectly named VoxPopuli490. "Hey idiot fix the subtick you c**t," runs another healthy missive. Some of this stuff is hard to even parse: "You broken CS2 network loss packets for no reason and 2sec lags only in CS2." Yeah Fletcher Dunn! What about that?!? Other demands include that Dunn somehow sort out a new CS server in Colorado.
To be fair to the Counter-Strike community, which is of course many millions of individuals rather than a big toxic blob, many saw the Dunn pile-on and went in to thank him for communication, tell him to ignore the idiots, and so on.
"A rule of thumb I use is that if my first encounter on social media with a random person is for them to be a snarky dickhead, I assume that the expected total value of all future interactions is negative, and block them," says Dunn, which sounds a bit exhausting. "It is possible to express negative feedback, criticism, or disagreement in a polite way."
Oh it's possible alright. CS fan Bizarro rather sweetly says "I don't know what you do at Valve but you are their best worker for sure." Citation needed, says Dunn: "Not by a long shot... I'm just the only one dumb enough to be on Twitter."
Dunn proved the hero that the TF2 community had long been crying out for in 2021, fixing a major community servers issue. At the time Dunn played up to the community joke about Valve's maintenance of the game: "I'm just the janitor tbh," says our hero.
Dunn's workload currently seems split between CS2 and Deadlock, and given he's the only chap who sticks his head over the parapet it's likely he'll remain a focal point for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Nevertheless it's sad that, when someone from a black box like Valve is willing to engage in public, the public at large quickly gives them every reason not to. You can't say Valve doesn't talk to us and then, when someone does, pile on with every problem you have and start calling them names. Well, you can, but let's see where it ends up.
Amidst the unpleasantness, however, Dunn maintains his good humour, and doesn't seem to let any of it grind him down. Last week he posted about using ChatGPT to identify a new matchmaking algorithm he could use in Deadlock, and is generally interested in experimenting with this software: one post he made about it contained a mathematical term that led to the inevitable.
"Lambda??? Half-Life 3 confirmed???" says a breathless Patsabame.
Dunn's got one word for ya: "lol."
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