Back in 2017, some of the most dedicated Dota 2 players spent hundreds of dollars on microtransactions to win a special collectible statue. The versions that Valve shipped out were so ugly, and so poorly received, that Valve said it would make replacements. Yesterday, it said that it was finally ready to ship them out.
“Today, we are pleased to announce that the Collector’s Baby Roshan statue redesign is complete and the shipping phase has begun,” read an email Valve sent to recipients on Thursday. “Baby Roshan is now physically larger, heavier, and has improved detail.” Everyone who’s owed one should receive it within the next three months, Valve said.
The Collector’s Baby Roshan was first announced in a blog post during the leadup to the 2017 Dota 2 world championship. It would be nickel-silver finished, approximately three inches tall, and be available to any player who managed to hit level 2,000 on their battle pass that season.
The battle pass itself cost $10, with players able to level it up slowly by playing matches or by spending more money. For every additional $10 spent, they could raise their rank 25 more levels. Buying your way to level 2,000 would cost just north of $800. It’s also possible to grind for levels, but only if you decide to treat it like a full-time job, and even then it wouldn’t have been enough to get all the way to 2,000. The Collector’s Baby Roshan was, in effect, meant to be a special bonus to the most dedicated (and deep pocketed) Dota 2 fans.
But the statues that eventually arrived in early 2018 ended up being nothing of the sort. Players began posting pictures of them on Reddit. Far from the antiqued metallic look in the original blog post, the statues lacked detail and had lots of visible seams and imperfections. In May 2018 Valve announced that the quality of the statues was indeed “poor,” and that it would be working on producing a new run more in line with the original prototype.
Before it could produce replacement statues, Valve announced a new version of the Baby Roshan statue for that year’s battle pass. Months went by, and neither version ever shipped. “$1,689.00 deep for 2 statues and I have neither,” wrote reddit user dkstrider in a post from November.
“We deeply apologize for the significant delays on these statues, as we had to overcome substantial production challenges to get a reliable process in place,” Valve said in this week’s update, though it did not go into detail about the cause of the problems. Valve declined to comment.
The email also contains several photos comparing the new versions of the statues to the original, to prove to any fans who might have lost faith that the long wait hasn’t completely been in vain. Valve is also giving each person a special custom in-game Baby Roshan cosmetic as well, to try and make amends.
Valve said it will ship out the replacements for the 2017 statues first, and then send the 2018 statues.