For many years, fans have been waiting for Half-Life 3 / Episode Three and trying to find "traces" of the game in other Valve projects. Various blogger-dataminers, such as Tyler McVicker and Gabe Follower, talk about the work on the alleged continuation of the franchise, which is usually referred to as "HLX", and look for code in search of details and mentions of technologies.
Valve understands that some community members actively study game files. This weekend, researchers noticed references to the upcoming "Dark Carnival" event in Dota 2 files.
Shortly after the information about the discovery was published online, an update appeared, and dataminer Gabe Follower drew players' attention to a variable with a characteristic name: "m_bHackWhyAreYouGuysReadingOurVariableNames" — the developers are asking "why are you guys even reading our variable names".
Primarily, the message is addressed to Dota 2 players, but Half-Life fans also didn't miss such a discovery. A humorous post by user Re7olutioN went viral in the community: "THEY KNEW, IT'S OVER."
Some players began to worry that Valve would now monitor the code more carefully and erase "traces," but MR_Happy2008 reassured such people: "They've known about this for a long time."