You can read the post here.

http://blog.dota2.com/2013/12/matchmaking/

Are you guys looking forward to this? Do you think this will enable non-ranked mm to be taken less seriously and allow for goofier games?

I personally cannot wait for the next update.

As a non-DOTA player, I assumed this was already in the game.

@cmblasko: There's already matchmaking, but there is no feedback on where you actually fall on the bracket. You used to be able to see which of the three chucks you fell into through a weird backdoor process, but they took that out. MM currently just matches you with equal skilled players and you just accept it at face value. Now you can actually see some amount of feedback on where you fall.

Yeah, this doesn't seem like much of an announcement. They already keep track of your skill level for the purpose of matchmaking, it has just been hidden thus far.

Valve never talked about their match making system before where MMR was completely hidden. Sites like DotaBuff.com could calculate it way back when they could scrape all information out of any public match but with the including of the option of making data anonymous it kind of broke that.

What this is actually doing is creating a ranking and match mode.

The good stuff:

• Unlocked after 150 matches (no smurfing)
• Only visible to yourself and friends (no public trolling). Normal MMR is still hidden (no public trolling either).
• Not available in Low Priority Pool (makes misbehaving even more punishing...or worse if the troll has a troll account just for this sort of thing)
• Separated Normal and MMR match making (performance in one doesn't effect the other)

I think should restrict it to Captain Mode and Captain Draft where I'm not sure why All Pick instead of Random Draft is also allowed in MMR but they needed a third less "hard core mode" to build their rank. I am sort of worried that Normal will become "more gutter" instead of being the "experimental build-goof off mode".

I think this can only be a good thing. If you want to be super competitive about DOTA, there should be a separate lobby for you. The way I see it, public matches should just be fun skirmishes, but people tend to take games like this really seriously. It prevents me from wanting to play DOTA unless I'm with at least 3 people I know. Maybe now this will allow all the competitive players to go to one place and the more casual (as much as that term can possibly apply to a MOBA) players like myself to go to another.

I hope information like this gets shared with other developers using steamworks, who are making some type of online matchmaking game.

That's actually not the exciting part of the announcement; the exciting part is the division of 'normal' and 'ranked,' which has honestly been a baffling omission up until this point.

@ajamafalous: So the announcement is the opposite of the thread title, because really they're adding unranked?

@bisonhero: No they're adding proper ranked matchmaking. Previously they had a hidden mmr (matchmaking rating) but the only way to tell the skill of another person was number of wins they had, which was not a reliable measurement. What they are adding is a visible ranking system for a specific mm queue. Whether there will be a league system (i.e. Starcraft, LoL) is yet to be seen.

The unranked matches will still have a hidden MMR just to make sure similar skill levels are playing against each other. You wouldn't want someone with 10 wins playing against someone with 500.

It's a little bit more complex than that. What exists now will become 'normal' matchmaking, and what they're adding is 'ranked' matchmaking. They will have completely separate MMRs, and, for now, ranked will only be certain game modes. MMR will continue to be hidden in normal matchmaking, but it will be visible in ranked. The hope is that people who want to play competitively will migrate toward ranked, and people who are less competitive, or people who want to mess around with jokey builds, will play in normal.

They also revealed a lot about how their MMR calculations work, which they had previously been pretty quiet about. It's worth taking a few minutes to read through if you have any interest at all, since they go into detail about why they do what they do (for example, they explain why each player will actually have four separate MMRs: Normal Solo, Normal Party, Ranked Solo, and Ranked Party. They also explain how they calculate and balance games with high group skill disparities).

@extomar: @cronus42: I see, that's all very interesting. Knowing how competitive the DOTA scene is, players must have been asking for that data to be exposed for awhile now.

How is this useful? If I'm only seeing my own MMR, how will I know if the system truly matchmake me into a game with people of similar MMR?

When I played HoN back in the closed beta, you get situations where, due to low player count, you get matchmade with anyone after a significant chunk of time. Situations like a team getting a player with an 1800 MMR and just crushing the opposing side, or one team getting a 1300 player and having him just feed the fuck out of the match were entirely possible. If you didn't see what the MMRs were you'd wonder why stuff like this happened.

Why do you need to know the MMR of everyone on your team? Why does knowing this tell you why you lost?? Matches are much more complex than "I rocked/sucked" and "That other guy sucked/rocked". What does it change knowing the MMR of your team or your opponents change about your strategy in CM/CD? Knowing the MMR of all 10 players isn't going to fix a broken/lopsided match either but what knowing those ranks will do is give people the ability to pre-emptively chew out/give up/whatever if the game doesn't go their way in the first 10 minutes.

Letting other people view another's MMR ranking is toxic. Let me repeat that because it is important: Letting other people view another's MMR ranking is toxic. It setups up prejudice in the match before the first pick. It stifles amateur/semi-pro mobility because who is going to want to play with the new guy? The problem with lopsided matches is the match making failed in the parameters given instead of knowing someone's MMR.

@extomar said:

Then there's no meaning to know your own MMR either. A metric has no meaning if there's no barometer for you to measure it against. If you're going to implement MMR, you should surface all that information. If you're not going to show me anything meaningful, then don't show any - keep it all hidden as per what they already have.

HoN does this within reason by showing the MMR and how much your rating will shift if you win or lose. At least they're transparent about it.

Furthermore, MMR doesn't change the already toxic nature of MOBA-type games. You can already figure out a person's experience by digging through their profiles.

From experience with LOL and 'normals' I can assure you this will not allow for goofier games, you'll try to do something different and someone will become toxic

But this also means that people who treat DotA as a serious game will be segregated from people who play for fun.

I play about 3 games of Dota every 6 months or so, so I really don't care that much, but that blog is a really interesting read. It's all pretty much common sense but it's nice to see specifics about how they break down the matchmaking data.

@chiablo: Not really. Coming from SC2, you can only play so much ladder (ranked) in a day.

There is "no meaning" yet people have whined about getting some sort of MMR ranking system (check reddit and this sub-forum for those details). It evidently means something to a player if they see their number move up from 2500 to 3000 but you don't have to believe me. And you don't need to know if the 9 other people have a MMR is going up down or sideways to feel good about your ranking going up from 2500 to 3000.

I like Valve's latest push for being more transparent. Transparency is discussing ranking and how match making works. Revealing ranking data about the nine other players in a match is not transparency.

Furthermore, MMR doesn't change the already toxic nature of MOBA-type games. You can already figure out a person's experience by digging through their profiles.

There are two fallacies in this. You can not figure out a person's experience by digging through someone's profile. Knowing the profiles of all of the player doesn't tell you anything about the match before it is played. All you need to do is look at the action on Dotabuff and Dota2Lounge for the evidence of this.

Great, I think the current MM is busted.

I started playing a few months ago, have put 180h into it (but about 30-40 of those are from watching matches and stuff like TI3) and often go into matches with players with 2000h and get trounced. I know that doesn't necessarily mean they're better but c'mon. I currently have 70 something wins and 70 something losses, so it's weird when I choose to match with no premades and go up against folks who are obviously far better at the game.

Also, fuck "smurfs".

Maybe I should give Dota 2 another spin. I think I played around 150 Queen of Pain matches and stopped during the summer. It would be great if I got placed into a low tier bracket due to inactivity and was able to go on a rampage. The more matches I played the harder it became to get 15-20 kills to 1-2 deaths with my Queen of Pain. I guess that means the MM worked most of the time. Sometimes you'd still get individuals that seemed to have been incorrectly matched and did terrible.

Cautiously very optimistic about this, I think this has long been needed. There's people who just want to play and there's people who want to compete.

Finally DOTA 2 may have a non-toxic way to serve both valid desires which hopefully will make everyone happier.

While I enjoy having more metrics and numbers on my profile, I dislike sergregating the playerbase even more. On top of having several different modes, you are also gonna split all of those into two? Matchmaking is already not optimal, I'd rather just not have ranked if it's going to unbalance normal matchmaking even more. And it's ultimately for the meaningless goal of seeing numbers rise, number that no one else can see....

Then again, maybe this is my opportunity to matchmake with people of similar skill. Preliminaries into ranked might be enough to get me out of the semi-gutter I hang out in when playing the "very rare" solo or duo game. An mmr reset of sorts.

To me, having a visible mmr is for my benefit only so why allow anyone else to see it? It's a visible representation that "yes I'm better than I was last month".

I'm looking forward to this. Hopefully it will allow for a bit more casual matches without making it too clowny. But it's a fine line, so we have to wait and see.

Hidden MMR makes no sense. Meaningless number with nothing to compare it to.

That being said, I'm sure it wont take long for the equivalent of Lolking.com to appear that track's players MMR anyways and lets you look up your opponents. Circumventing the system.

I really really hope that they simultaneously implement a functioning language filter into the new ranked MMR so that there is a good chance I can play with an entire team that can speak the same language.

MMR is a meaningless number that only makes sense to the Match Making system anyway. What does comparing it to another MMR mean?? Its the same crazy idea people cling to about Video Game Review Scores that there is something equivalent or ordered in comparing AC4 and Tearaway. Knowing or not knowing changes nothing about the matches you play and seems to cause a lot of problems. Other factors like whether or not your team speaks the same language has more of influence on the match.

This is a purely "game design" thing but people like to see numbers go up and bars go from red to green even if that is actually a meaningless thing. Showing the player their Team MMR is going up and down is something some players want even though it actually means nothing to anything about the system. Whatever makes them happy I guess.

People have been trying to build "lolking.com" and failing for awhile now and lolking helps make LoL more toxic so whatever.

@xeiphyer: You compare it to itself. Similar to Starcraft ladders. I didn't care what anyone else was doing I only cared that I graduated to Gold from Silver.

Seems pretty meaningless, definitely won't impact more than a tiny percent of players.

What took so long?

They wanted to make sure things like Dota TV, new heroes, and other systems work before adding another mode. Seems like a good call to me since people have been getting by for years without this.

i really hope that muted players will be unable to join ranked matches. and valve has to do something with russians who cannot speak english. when i (very rarely) play solo i choose EU W only, english only. in many cases i get russians who talk russian whole game...

playing ranking MM with those players will be even more pain now.

In theory, but this theory isn't true in LoL so its far from a forgone conclusion, the are plenty of try hards in Normals and plenty of Trolls in Ranked. It's a nice concept but with free to play games to such large scale you'll always get arseholes in every gamemode.

@lamzor: I'm not sure about muted players but I do know that people in low priority will not be able to join ranked matches.

Also yeah the few days I've had morning's off and played dota on US-E with english preference, it's nothing but Russians. Nothing against them, but I prefer to be able to communicate with AT LEAST ONE person on my team.

Stat threads pop up on reddit and dev.dota2.com where there is something unusual going on with the Russian servers where many have speculated there is an unusual "Turbo Dota" thing going on there. Some hyper aggressive form of play where one side wins in 10 minutes. That or item farming and other such schemes. Who knows?

If all of this really happens I can see why if someone is some Russian player who just solo queues and loses in 7 minutes constantly or is not at all interested in that kind of game, you might flee that server for EU-W.

In other announcements: Frostivius 2013 is incoming! Someone (Valve) fixed up the old board that was ruined by the Greevling. Just what are Skeleton King and Queen of Pain doing? Queen of Presents?? And there was some data in the Sept update there was data for a "Wraith King" which is probably Blizzard name change thing but can easily be turned into Wreath King? In any event, MMR matches will probably come after this.

There are Russian and EU E servers. I dont mind russians(who cannot speak english) there, even in ENG only category. But playing on EUW in ENG only category, that is really dick move and valve should do something about it. Im sure its possible to restrict people having russian steam/dota2 version playing on this option. Im not english native speaker and i cannot imagine having localized steam and dota. Btw i dont have any problems with russians who can (at least barely) speak english and have english keyboard installed.