Dota 2: The new matchmaking system raises Big question marks on MMR

Image courtesy: kovlekimg.pw
Image courtesy: kovlekimg.pw

The International is around the corner and just a week away from being one of the most important things to watch on the internet for the Dota lovers out there.

In the midst of all this, Valve subtly rolled out one of the biggest changes in Dota’s history. The billion-dollar corporation, introduced changes to how we increase or decrease our MMR in the famous game of dota.

The changes made were huge but came as a part of the “Spring Cleaning Update” issued by the developers as a way of clearing the game from bugs and other drawbacks. This was quite funny because the update shook the entire Dota community, from the very grass root naive gamers to the professional players.

This article is not about what the update contains as that is already given in the blog post by the game’s official website.

However, there is important information about the impact of the changes and how it will affect the Dota players in the foreseeable future. To read about the changes made to the MMR system please visit here.

There is a huge question mark on the new matchmaking and MMR system. It may or may not affect a common Dota 2 player's badge significantly. However, the outcome depends on the player himself and not the system.

The new MMR system is divided into Core and Support and there is no Solo MMR to flaunt about among friends. But the new system represents the game of Dota better. Defense Of The Ancients has always been a team game and Solo Matchmaking added an extra layer of difficulty to the matches.

Firstly, one has to gel well with their teammates and have the calm to not rage on the one player who is feeding or making worthless items, otherwise it would throw the game anyway. Secondly, once the player has done dealing with their teammates they now have to think about winning the game and put all the effort required for it.

Now that Solo matchmaking is no more, one can queue with their friends and play and still manage to increase their Core or Support MMR. So the extra layer of difficulty is completely out of the picture.

It is clear how this new matchmaking helps the Dota players in general. However, there is still a negative part of this system. First of all, even when most people had the space to play party games, their MMR numbers were still quite low.

Even in five-man stacks, people lost games because either they had a lack of coordination or treated the party games as a solo challenge and just played with the same mindset.

If one doesn't take advantage of their team gameplay, with special highlight to the word “team”, they will not get significant MMR unless someone on their team is playing with a smurf account and are highly skilled to roll over the opponents.

It will be very interesting to see how people take advantage of having a good team and playing with coordination in this season of Dota to make the most out of this new system.