Halloween last year saw Dota 2 heroes out collecting (and stealing) candy, but this year they were stuck with plain old boring murder for macabre entertainment. The Diretide event, it seemed, was not returning. An uncharacteristically candid Valve has explained that it had hoped to launch a "huge update" for Halloween instead but fell short, and is now working to deliver Diretide a little late.

"Whenever we make a significant mistake, we spend a bunch of time looking at what happened, why it happened, and how we can fix it. Most of the time we do this privately, but in our recent mistake around Diretide, we felt sharing our analysis with you made sense," Valve said in a blog post on Friday.

The mysterious "huge update" was keeping everyone busy, and was supposed to be enough of a Halloween treat by itself. Updating Diretide to work with Dota's 2013 codebase and UI would only delay the update and ultimately, Valve said, "We underestimated how much you wanted Diretide."

Valve's silence on Diretide only aggravated irritable corners of the Internet further. "By the time we'd realized we'd made a bad decision, the pitchforks were out," it said.

As work on that update began to wrap up and enter final testing, Dota 2 team members shifted over to updating Diretide, and the Halloween event is now due to launch alongside that "pretty significant" patch. Whenever that comes. And whatever it brings.