Valve Shouldn’t Have Brought Back AP to Ranked Matches

To spice things up in Ranked Matchmaking for Dota 2, Valve implemented an interesting, albeit temporary, change for its millions of players. For the last week or so, playing in Ranked was limited to two modes: Captain’s Mode (CM) and Random Draft (RD). So if a pleb such as myself wants to climb the Matchmaking Rating (MMR) ladder in that state, I would have to choose between CM or RD as my preferred poison. The beloved All Pick (AP) was temporarily wiped clear from Ranked Matchmaking. In a patch today, the change was reverted and AP was once again allowed in Ranked Matchmaking. The idea had some good merits as well as some flaws but it was ultimately a great idea.

CM is the most competitive and complete way to play Dota 2. It’s a mind game between the two captains predicting possible synergies and counters across the multitude of bans and picks  across the drafting phase. There is a crazy amount of possible combinations in a single game of Dota 2. A perfect Dota 2 draft for any side is already half a victory. Professional players such as Clement “Puppey” Ivanov and Peter “ppd” Dager made their mark by being some of the best drafters/captains in the game.

But these guys are part of a team who practice together for several hours a day. The pro teams build trust on each other’s competence from playing hundreds of games with each other. So giving the casual player the platform to play Dota 2 in the most ‘competitive’ way  is definitely a good idea right?

But here comes the rub in the pub: currently the Captain will automatically be presented to the one with the highest MMR on your side.  In a perfect world, players will trust one stranger’s game plan to the letter. But who are we kidding? How will the everyday pub player place his trust on a random ‘Captain’ named “mid or feed’ solely because he slightly has higher MMR than you?

The main problem is that you don’t even have the power to choose your own hero, the whole idea of having a Captain who has no idea how you play can crash and burn pretty quick.  Those 25 MMR points you are putting on the line is in the hands of a complete stranger. And not a lot of people are cool with that.

In its current state Ranked CM gives one player absolute power to determine a team’s fate. He may or may not listen to the suggestions of his newfound ragtag group of randoms. He may force players to use high skill-ceiling heroes such as Ember Spirit or Invoker just because it suits his master plan is already a disaster waiting to happen. The pub captain may also be completely democratic and try to appease his teammates suggestions every step of the way. But again it remains a double-edged sword.

Some professional players have already chimed in on Valve’s new change during implementation:

cant practice in this new ranked 🙁 im so sad

— EternaLEnVy (@EternaLEnVy1991) March 30, 2016

I don't know about everyone else but I'm seriously enjoying not playing against invoker 40 games in a row

— Saahil Arora (@UniverseDota) April 1, 2016

While I like the change, I think the highest mmr should also have the option to decline captain in CM

— Tal Aizik (@Fly_dota2) March 31, 2016

What is Valve trying to fix?

Dota 2 is a deeply dense game with various synergies and hard counters across its ever-growing hero pool. However for the past couple of months, we have been seeing the same old heroes match in and match out. One could easily say the meta is getting stale.

Let’s look at Invoker’s stats for example:

That’s 13 million matches played on Invoker alone. But look at the graph below, ever since the changes to Ranked Matchmaking his pick rate has plummeted from a crazy 40% to 35%. If that isn’t progress then I don’t know what is.

Then you have the one-two punch of Outworld Devourer (OD) and Omniknight or the global presence of the Zeus-Spectre-Nature’s Prophet trifecta. The meta has been absolutely stale because everyone is ‘cheesing’ their way up the MMR ladder. Cheesing is the repetitive usage of ‘pocket’ strategies simply because they the provide ‘easiest’ way to achieve the victory. It’s always going to be Invoker this and OD that.

What can be a better approach?

Popular MOBAs such as League of Legends (LoL) and Heroes of the Storm (HotS) do feature a form of ‘banning’ in their Ranked play. However, players in those games will still have the freedom of choosing their own heroes and not have a Captain pick for them.

A more reasonable change Valve should go for is having a sort of banning system but still give individual players a chance to select the hero they would like to use themselves. Maybe even give each player to ban one hero of their choosing.  It would definitely be more of a win-win situation.

The end of Hero Spamming?

Some pub stars turned pro however made their mark on to the scene by spamming heroes to achieve MMR nirvana and the public’s loving attention. Notable players such as  Aliwi “w33” Omar (Meepo), Jesse “Jerax” Vainikka (Earth Spirit) and even Syed “SumaiL” Hassan (Storm Spirit) rose to fame (and MMR) by spamming the heroes they were best in. Unless these players were the Captains in each and every single one of their pub games, they would be unable to spam their signature heroes anymore.

Change, when it first reads its ugly head, is usually unwelcome. A few more tweaks like the change I mentioned earlier can really make this change shine. Overall, it will promote more versatility in skill across the MMR brackets.

As for the pro scene, it should also improve the quality of the 7,000 and up MMR players coming in. w33 was surprisingly taken out of Team Secret after they bagged top honors at the Shanghai Major. It was a well-known fact that w33 has a very limited hero pool (mostly revolving around Invoker, Windranger and OD) compared to other Mid players at the pro level. With a captain as talented as Puppey, w33 limits his sides options at the Mid slot which likely led to his sacking despite the winning performance.

Please bring it back, Valve!

I believe that this change is something that Valve should bring back. Everyone will be raising their pitchforks at first but that is a natural reaction to change. If they give it time they will see that this change is for the better. Ranked Matchmaking is supposed to be playing the game in the most competitive environment. Playing as or against OD for XX games is neither exciting nor competitive.

Players should give CM a chance because down the line it will provide a more dynamic meta and more exciting matches. I personally enjoyed seeing a good variety of heroes in the matches I played in CM. Hell, I even saw Io. Yep, that little ball of light made an appearance.   And if you really don’t want to give CM a chance there is still RD. As for the casuals, AP is the mode tailor-made for them. If you want to play competitive, please play CM.

Featured image by Gab “GBstep” Lazaro

Stats from Dotabuff.com

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