You’re now going to need to provide a phone number to play matchmaking in Dota 2
Valve announced last week that they’re bringing a few changes to matchmaking in Dota 2.
First on the changelist is that players will now need to register a phone number to play matchmade games. Valve said that they’re bringing these changes to avoid smurfing, or creating and playing on multiple accounts.
Players using multiple accounts create a negative matchmaking experience at all skill brackets, so our goal is to add just enough friction to this process that the number of players doing this will be noticeably reduced. Having more players using their primary accounts will have a positive effect on both Ranked and Unranked Matchmaking.
Players will have to register a phone number before May 4. After that, players without numbers will not be eligible for Ranked games.
Valve is also bringing back Solo Queue, where players can match with other players queueing solo.
Another change comes to how party games are matched. The new matchmaker takes into account your Solo and Party MMR. If your Solo MMR is higher than your Party MMR, queuing in a party will result in the matchmaker assigning you a higher MMR. Put simply, the system will take the average of your Solo and Party MMR.
While the current Party MMR number generally reflects the likelihood that you’ll win a given match correctly, we’ve found that when a Solo MMR is dramatically higher than a Party MMR, the match becomes extremely volatile, resulting in an unpleasant and uncompetitive experience for both teams.
This update also includes several changes intended to remove undesirable behavior from the matchmaking pool. IOf you get marked for low-priority games, aside from having to fulfill the low-prio games, you also get aduration-based ban from Ranked queues. This ban can go up to four days. Valve has also tightened the parameters when detecting players who are intenionally feeding, and botting.
Last but not the least, Ranked Matchmaking will no longer be available in South Africa, India, and Dubai. This is because some players from other regions use these regions for Ranked Matchmaking. Due to their nature of having low Ranked populations, players can abuse these servers. For the time being, players in these regions will need to join Ranked Matchmaking queues in one of the other nearby supported servers.
Feature image from Dota 2 blog
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