Valve seeks to put and end to toxicity in Dota 2

The Dota 2 Summer Client Update has brought a number of changes to the game. Some are small, but others could impact the community significantly.

There’s now a new reporting system that seeks to give players more power over the other players’ behavior score. Valve essentially invites us to be the judges and speak freely about what others were like in our games.

Another key change is the armory, which is now much easier to use. If you love cosmetics, you’ll certainly love the new armory because it lets you experiment with skins in a more convenient way.

Together with this update, Valve also released a Collector’s Cache or a skin box full of interesting items. Some of them look really cool and make your heroes feel different. The Collector’s Cache costs just $2.49, so it’s quite cheap. By far, the best set in it is Kunkka’s Sea Spirit. Snapfire’s Snailfire is not bad either.

New player behavior system

The new player behavior system introduced by Valve seeks to minimize the number of ruined matches and maximize the number of great matches. And the mechanisms used for that are quite smart.

If you commend a player, the odds of being paired up with them in the future go up. But here’s the catch. The odds of being required to play against them in the future also go up. So in a sense, Valve wants to bring people who like each other close together, but not necessarily in ways that would result in more MMR being earned.

It will be interesting to see what people choose to do given the new rules. Will they risk commending someone who’s really good for a chance of being asked to play against them in the future? Or will they prefer to avoid the commend altogether?

You can now also Dislike players and the effect is exactly the opposite. No doubt, lots of people will use this feature just to guarantee that someone who’s bad at the game doesn’t end up as their teammate again.

Dota 2 has a new reporting system. Now you can complain about multiple things:

• Toxic Chat
• Toxic Voice
• Smurfing
• Griefing
• Cheating
• Role Abuse

These six categories make it easier for you to pinpoint with great accuracy why you hated playing with someone. And Valve’s system is now designed to know whether someone destroyed their items. The same goes for smurfing.

In the new system, your number of reports is no longer limited. Which is great news!

Header: Valve