Dota 2 gets 7.35d update, tweaking matchmaking, hero bans, and more

Valve has announced a new update, 7.35d, for Dota 2. This update introduces some new changes to the game, including improved matchmaking and giving players preferences to pick bans based on their.

Update: It seems that the update is already doing its work, allowing people to requeue if they sense something’s fishy with the queue. If you don’t wanna be placed on a toxic side, then you can easily requeue without getting penalty. This would definitely result in more lingering queues, especially for those who want to play as carries or Position 1. As for the updates, they feel more fair, just as I said.

As per the details revealed on the official blog, the game is about to become more attractive, at least for those who have been struggling in matches against Smurfs or boosters, especially those playing against IO/Marci. Well, starting today, you’ll be able to get rid of them more easily, or at least get them eliminated when you’re in a group of 5. Check below in more details:

With today’s update, we’ve removed the start-of-match ban phase and replaced it with ban preferences stored with your account. If you load the heroes tab, you can select the four heroes you don’t want to see in your games. You’re guaranteed when you join a matchmaking game that at least one of them will be banned. You can change your list of banned heroes whenever you want. (If you leave some ban slots empty, it’s possible the empty slot will be selected as your “banned hero”. In other words, there’s no advantage to leaving slots empty.)

Furthermore, this is what’s related to the matchmaking:

This new system addresses a number of problems the previous system had: you can’t forget to ban; you don’t have to learn that sometimes suggested bans are ignored by the game; you’re not on a tight clock to make a stressful decision that, in the end, most players make the same way almost all the time. As an added bonus, it also makes targeted bans impossible, whether those bans are against known personalities or random players in a pub match for which you’ve looked up data.

Millions of Dota players interact with the matchmaker every day and every single one has different priorities when looking for a game. Some prefer to get into a match as quickly as possible, and are willing to accept a higher skill variance in the game to save some time. Others want every match to be perfectly balanced, and are willing to wait longer for the best chance at the closest game. Other players care less about the skill level of the other players, and much more about their personality and behavior in-game.

We’ve long wanted to build features to let players find matches that better align with their individual preferences. Early attempts ran into two main problems:

• First, while players are good at describing their preferences to other people, they aren’t necessarily good at describing their preferences as inputs to a complex, global matchmaking algorithm (“I value skill variance 13% higher than the average Dota player!”). How can we create tools that let players express their preferences naturally and directly?
• Second, changes to the matchmaker affect all Dota players, so we tend toward caution. The matchmaker is always trying to strike a balance between individual player preferences and the health of Dota as a whole. (If matches of Dota are bad, whether because of wild skill gaps or poor player behavior, that’s bad for Dota as a community. If every match is perfect, but takes three hours to form, that’s bad, too.) New matchmaker features available to everyone at once risk breaking the matchmaker, and if we break the matchmaker, we break Dota. How can we ship new matchmaking features and learn how they work in practice while keeping risk to Dota as a whole low?

The only issue will be that this Dota Labs feature will be accessible behind a paywall. To have this enabled, you must have Dota 2 Plus. Either way, there are plenty of other changes too, so you might want to see the details on the official blog.

As for the Crownfall update, it will arrive later, somewhere around mid-April.