Divine play now open!

The Reach Beta month has continued to be an exciting adventure for us, and given us a ton of great insight into the systems that are working under the hood to get you guys competitive games. In a mere three weeks, we've made large transformations to the code that supports our bots, the scoring systems, the behavior score systems, and added a number of moderation tools for our administrators to use. The next step in that journey is to get even more users trying things out, so we can scale up and get a feel for how our divisions below Pinnacle will function.

So to that end, we're now inviting any Divine or above level players to participate in Reach, effective immediately. This will begin with our North American play session, running tonight starting at 5:00 Pacific, and will continue forward through the beta at regular play sessions. Divine level players will be seeded into Contender Tiers of play, and may be promoted to Pinnacle by placing high through each subsequent sprint. This will not affect the current Pinnacle / Immortal player base, but will create a new player pool that we can test our assumptions of the Contender systems against which is an important piece of the puzzle that we haven't been able to focus on yet.

Please note that to participate in Reach you will need to have your medal rank exposed to your Dotabuff profile. If you cannot see your medal ranking on your profile, then we can't either, and we can't verify that you belong.

As this is a Beta, we'd like to remind participants that feedback is critical to our ability to iterate and make this league better, so we'd invite anyone interested in participating to join our Discord and let your thoughts flow in the appropriate feedback channels.

League Update

Also as an update to our current player base, we're working on a number of updates to the league for next week. Primarily, we're focusing on getting winners from the first couple weeks paid. This turned out to be a more lengthy process than we anticipated, as there was a third party application that we had to integrate into the site which took some time. This is being implemented to make sure that there's a clear and safe method for players to confirm their identity with us, and we did not want to take that task lightly, so there were review cycles needed. This has all been implemented on our site, and is now just awaiting a verification pass, so that we can begin emailing prize winners. Those emails should go out soon, early next week at the latest.

Additionally, we've made a number of small changes which won't be immediately noticeable to players, which include updates to our matchmaker which will now find games faster, and some updates to our admin tooling which is in place in anticipation of hiring Administrators which will help to moderate the league.

We also adjusted the scoring system, so now your first 3 wins will award a bonus 2 points instead of your first three games simply being +6/-4.

Over the next week we'll be looking at expanding the Contender Tier more so that we can collect more test data from those games, as well as finalizing the Pinnacle division into it's finished state for the launch of Season 1. This will include decreasing the number of players in the division, setting the rules for who is seeded into the division at launch, and for how players get promoted and demoted to it.

Thanks again everyone for your participation. As always your feedback has been highly valuable, and we're integrating it to make sure that this league is a place that everyone wants to play.