In a blog post, the DOTA Team announced some changes to the DOTA 2 matchmaking system in order to be, “more fun for players of all levels.”
“Today’s update includes some engineering changes to the core matchmaking system to allow for bigger changes and better analytical capabilities. Over the next year, we’ll be spending more time focusing on various aspects of matchmaking such as intra-team balance, player conduct, new player experience, abusive behaviors, account buying, friend and teamplay aspects, high mmr matchmaking dynamics, and other issues in an effort to make the overall experience of playing Dota more fun for players of all levels.”
The post continues, citing that matchmaking is about striking a balance between many different factors involved. The new update includes experimental changes set to last until the conclusion of the season.
The first such experiment is removing Solo and Party MMRs.
“We expect this to be the most controversial component in today’s update, as we’ve heard fair criticisms of it in the past. We can’t say that we are fully confident that this will end up being a good change either, so we’ll want to wait until the end of the season when we gather feedback and data on how it has played out after players have had a chance to absorb it.”
There are two major drivers behind this change: teamplay and social, and the value and “correctness” of the MMR value. Here, the blog elaborates,
“For the teamplay aspect: We think it is really crucial for you to not have a disincentive to play with your friends. The game currently overly emphasizes playing solo and establishes a strong social reward mechanism for this, which causes many players to prefer playing alone than with friends.
For the correctness of the MMR aspect: We recognize that there is a tradeoff here on the mmr data quality if the match has solo mmr numbers with party mmr numbers, however we feel that the impact of that data noise is much smaller than even we initially considered it to be early on and generally with how it is discussed online.”
The blog concludes with request for feedback after the conclusion of The International to help guide the next steps for improving matchmaking quality.
You can read the full post here.
