It's strange, because Valve actually tackles the really difficult problems better than any other developer I've seen; for example, their MMR algorithm is actually really good, and its accuracy has been proven when people make an alt account and go through ranked matchmaking again.

But it's the simple things that they seem to either have trouble with or not care about, and those are what are starting to devalue their product in everyone's eyes. Just a few of these things: * Not putting up a warning in the game before planned maintenance. Yes, those of us who know enough about Valve know that it happens every Tuesday, but even then, the time isn't consistent. Plus, why should players have to look up a maintenance time outside of the game? * Consistency and general polish. The audiovisual design of the game is some of the best I've ever seen, and the recently-added heroes have all been very well-done. But, there's just so much overlooked stuff. In-game builds are still sort of broken, tooltips are still not verified every patch, the armory is still awkward, the "Live Tournament" indicator still means nothing, there's still plenty of information that you have to look on an external wiki to find, etc. * Pro scene support. The fact that Valve's end was the holdup for a lot of tournaments paying the players is starting to cause teams to not go to certain tournaments based on prize pool concerns. And, as great as The International is, they've still been doing mind-boggling things like giving half of the prize pool to the winning team instead of creating a more even spread to support the scene in the long term. * The new trading restrictions that hurt normal players/consumers who just want to quickly sell duplicate items or trade them to their friends, much more than they stop actual scammers.

And, the less-simple problems that are still causing a lot of issues:

• The load-game feature is still worthless most of the time; in a time where servers are constantly getting attacked, this needs to be a priority.
• Pathing is messing up way too often.
• The servers are still completely unstable. It sounds like this isn't entirely Valve's fault, but it's still incredibly frustrating to the playerbase.

I honestly just wish they would have more people work on the game. The flaws of Valve's company structure start to become way too apparent in situations like these; they just don't have enough manpower devoted to the game to tackle its most important issues.