Valve changed Dota 2 in-game chat to celebrate the Lunar New Year 2025. After patch that released of the new Charms of the Snake treasure, players noticed they started hissing while talking to each other in text chat.
The change is quite subtle, as it simply turns any single S letter into a triple S. The effect is similar to a depiction of a snake-talk. This also works in Cyrillic and other languages.
The community enjoyed this little trick. In the dedicated Reddit thread, some players admitted they got scared their keyboards were broken before they realized what happened. One user shared that he thought a Venomancer player was role-playing his character. Some suggested Valve should keep this feature until the end of 2025.
On January 29, Valve released the Charms of the Snake treasure to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The collection includes nine community made sets for different heroes, including a rare one for Lich and a very rare for Necrophos. You can take a look at them via the link below.