The New Season of Ranked Dota

Look to Reddit and see threads of people working the last six months only to drop a whole rank and the rest due to having some bad games during calibration, look to my own feed on the Dota homepage and I can see first hand countless friends drop ranks from Legend five to Archon three, from Archon 5 to Crusader 3 and for me from Archon 2 to Crusader one. Now on my main account where I have clocked 4,500 hours and had achieved a mere Crusader three rank. This is due to a multitude of reasons for me mainly being that I abandoned ranked for around 2,000 hours of play, feeling like a lot of players that my rank didn't quite reflect my skill and especially my knowledge. Unlike a lot though I didn't wish to buy an account to achieve my "true" mmr. I took on the challenge of creating a new account to play 100 games and unlock ranked. Then attempting another calibration this was mere weeks before the new calibration. I took on this task to prove to myself that I was above the players in the rank of crusader and I did, I achieved Archon 2 not what I aimed for but still it confirmed to me that I wasn't at my correct mmr.

However roughly 2 weeks after my recent calibration at Archon 2 comes a new ranked season of Dota 2. Fine I thought, perhaps I can achieve a little higher Archon 3 maybe 4. How wrong was I, with the release of the update reddit threads poured through complaining of how the new ranked system appeared to work. Complaints of terribly skilled people being put up ranked because they happened to win their games and skilled people going to multiple medals due to losing some calibration games. I questioned it as I naturally do with Reddit being the hub of complainers and moaners, so I took it on myself to grind the 10 games it takes to achieve a new rank. Over the last few days I have played those games and let me tell you now they have been some of the worst games of Dota I have ever played out of my 2,000 plus games. Why is this? Well out of the 2 games I managed to win out of the 10. I had insanely toxic people raging and flaming from minute one because the game didn't go according to the script they had in their heads of how it would. Naturally you do encounter people like this in games it becomes a guarantee the more games you play however it is rare that you get people this bad. In such a small concentration of games I have had THE worst teammates I have ever played with. I would honestly say that I could have won at least half the games I played with positive open Guardian players rather than the hostile toxic Archon & Legend players I received instead.

Something is vastly wrong right now with the ranked matchmaking system of Dota 2, how is it that 2 weeks ago I achieved Archon 2 equalling around 2,600-2,800 mmr roughly to then achieving Crusader 1 which according to my in game stats puts me at 1,831. How is it physically possible that due to have 8 bad games, I lose nearly 1000 mmr. That is a significant drop off in skill and naturally is not something that is truly reflective in two weeks I have played at least 1 turbo game a day minimum keeping up with my mechanics and such. Understandably I may drop 100-200 mmr reflective of those poor games but nearly 1000? That just seems like a flawed system that needs fixing to me. I have switched back to my main Steam account and am going to attempt to play another 10 games of ranked Dota 2 and see how that turns out for myself.

I can only hope Valve see the insane issues that have come about with the new Ranked season and restart if with a new form of calibration. After my new 10 ranked games I shall see how they turn out and if they further prove the point of flaws in the system, I shall stick to unranked.

Thanks for reading.