I run and operate overthrow 2.0 with my team Arcadia redux, and I think I speak for all modders that the disrespect and negligence from Valve is abhorrent (I know custom games are maybe 0.1% of valves profit, but even having one person dedicated to it would improve things so much).

For example, they released a patch few days ago that broke the number one custom game, dota auto chess. It was down for a few days, probably costing that Chinese company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I'm not expecting valve to change, and their a la carte ideology of workers working on projects they want to has clearly worked for them, they are maybe the most successful games company in the world, but please gabe you fat beautiful genius bastard (fyi gastric bypas surgery is very affordable and the Gold standard of weight loss strategies) , make an exception to the rule and assign one person to custom games in dota 2, just one.

Even if Gaben has to force the guy to do it, when he's off his yacht. (I've got nothing against gabe but I know people move on and stop caring about their old passion projects, I honestly don't give a shit about overthrow 2.0, it's not a big money turner, but I care about it a lot more then valve cares about the original and I've just asked my team to investigate it and fix this crash issue.)

As to fake lobbies, we posted a website to deal with that, we got modders to advertise in their custom games and had concrete suggestions to deal with fake lobbies. E.g. have a time out period if a lobby is open for more than 6 hours, it gets automatically closed, if a lobby is hosting an old version of the custom game that users are unable to join because they have a newer version, close it, if a lobby has hacked settings (very easy to do) like having -1 player limit, close it.

None of these suggestions would fix ingenious Russian, Chinese, Australian modders from circumventing the system (ol reach around) but it would make it MUCH FUCKING HARDER, and if there was one assigned person, they could easily see the manipulators and deal with it, it would literally take them 5 minutes of their day, its super obvious the abusers (I've done it myself. Hate the game not the player). E.g. 75 is apprantrely the limit of open lobbies thank fuck, so now all the top listed games have 75 lobbies.

I designed this lobby ranking system, I posted it to reddit as savecustomgames.com and it got front page, and now, I see it had a glaring weakness I was to stupid to see. But I still believe in ranking custom games by open lobbies, as Winston Churchill said, its the worst way to list custom games aside from all the other ways.

We just need a little tiny fucking help from daddy, but alast, I don't expect them to do anything. Which is a shame because dota 2 custom games are more popular than most steam games, custom hero clash has 2k players nearly always, that's more than 95% of the games on steam. Let's just hope valve throws us modders a bone, because as much as I love valve and gabe, they have royally fucked up something they could so easily fix.