On the 17th of September 2019 Valve announced major new changes into matchmaking for the upcoming season and has ever since kept themselves busy rolling out one update after another in their attempts to improve the player experience.
Valve introduced separate core and support ranks for individual players with a percentage of each rank influencing the other after removing solo and party MMR from the game.
Having introduced the ranked roles system allowing players to select the role they want to play before queuing for matchmaking Valve also introduced the role report function.
This allows players to report those who didn’t play the role they queued for and also for Valve to monitor those who abuse the ranked role system and hand out role specific bans preventing regular abusers from queuing for the abused role in future matchmaking games after they’ve left low priority.
With the September update Valve hit hard on the toxic individuals ruining the gaming experience for everyone else by handing out heavy bans.
Players with a behaviour score of below 3000 had their communication privileges revoked. Also those found violating Steam Service Agreement will have their accounts permanently banned from matchmaking and have the associated mobile number with their Steam account permanently blocked from playing ranked.
Recognizing the recent increase in smurf accounts Valve implemented certain changes to reduce the negative impact smurfs have on the playing community overtime as well as reducing the number of smurf accounts.
They fixed the bug issues which previously allowed players to play ranked without an associated unique phone number. Valve also changed the mechanism to access ranked matchmaking. To access ranked matchmaking a player would now have to clock at least 100 hours of playing time.
Those who have had access to ranked matchmaking without having the requirement met will temporarily be removed from ranked until they have met the criteria.
Valve introduced a post game survey feature in ranked matchmaking to review the experience of individual players. This will allow Valve to collect data and ensure a better playing experience as well as keep track of toxic players.
The October 18th update made sure that Immortal players could only play ranked with and against other Immortal and Divine players only.
This was done to make competition fair and reduce the mmr spread over a game.
On the 11th of November Valve dropped the latest matchmaking update. Previously Valve had prevented 3 member parties from matching with either solo que players or 5 member parties. This made it extremely difficult for 3 member parties to find a game resulting in abnormal que times. Read official statement here.
With this latest update Valve is broadening the matchmaking spectrum once more allowing for 2 and 3 member parties to match against 5 member stacks when the need is high.
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