We all know how great Valve is as a developer and how much it likes to listen to the community and fulfil their wishes 😉 Keeping that in mind let’s take a look at the new experimental matchmaking update that valve pushed out a while ago.

These experimental changes will be initially supposed to be part of the upcoming Summer Scrub changes, but valve decided to release this early citing the following:

We were initially going to release this change as part of the Summer Scrub update, the amount of significant underlying code changes required for this update introduces a lot of potential instability. So we are splitting the Summer Scrub update into two parts, this first part for a matchmaking rework, and the second part soon after for bug fixes and a few quality of life additions.

Valve has done away with the concept of Party and Solo MMR.Party and Solo MMR don’t exist anymore. The matchmaking system is being redesigned. Instead of Party and Solo MMR stats on our profile, we can now see 2 new stats called “Core” and “Support” MMR.

We had Ranked Roles matchmaking exclusively for Battle pass owners and DOTA + subscribers, but ranked roles is now the new “normal” ranked matchmaking.

The support role has been split up into “Hard Support” and “Soft Support”, while the other options are the traditional Off Lane, Safe Lane and Mid Lane.

Now when you matchmake, you will have the option of selecting roles from position 1 through 5 (Safe Lane Core through Hard Support).

Each MMR type will also have its own leaderboard, and for the purposes of this short experimental period, the existing rank will be applied as the initial rank for both Core and Support.

The entire content of the update can be read on Valve’s DOTA 2 BLOG.

The changes will be active till the end of the season.

These experimental changes will remain active for the rest of this season for you to try out. Sometime after The International concludes, we’ll issue a call for community feedback to help guide the next steps in our efforts to increase matchmaking quality for everyone. We hope to have your support and patience through this experiment as well as subsequent changes towards the path of making a better overall matchmaking system.

While these changes might be controversial and might not be liked by all, these are desperately needed in DOTA to keep matchmaking fresh and alive and motivate people to play ranked.

In an effort to maximize overall region balance, we decided to release the Immortal 3 treasure while North America is asleep. Check it out: https://t.co/xKW1D5gNKD — DOTA 2 (@DOTA2) August 6, 2019

P.S. If you haven’t played DOTA 2 recently, Valve released the immortal III treasure for the TI Battle Pass as well. Go check it out.