New Player Behavior System and Reports in Dota 2

On the night of August 31, Valve released the Summer Update for the Dota 2 client, which, among other things, added a new behavior and complaints rating system.

Playing Dota with malicious or toxic people can ruin what would have been a great match. So Valve are introducing some new player behavior features to make sure you have more of the good experiences and fewer of the bad.

Before, a player could commend other players in the post-game, but that commendation wouldn’t affect future matchmaking. Now, any player you commend will be more likely to show up in your future matches, either on your team or the enemy side.

Additionally, developers added a “Dislike” button that will ensure players you’d prefer not to play with, for whatever reason, are less likely to show up in future matches.

There can be a big difference between players you'd prefer not to play with, and players who are outright toxic. Dota’s new reporting system will let you report Toxic Chat, Toxic Voice, Smurfing, Griefing, Cheating and Role Abuse.

All reports automatically take into consideration a wide range of supporting hard data: a Griefing report knows whether someone destroyed their items, and a Smurfing report looks at both gameplay and account properties.

Players can now report toxic behavior at any time during and after the game. The new reporting system also removes the cap on the number of reports you can submit, and now allows you to report toxicity on either team. This new volume of reporting data will give Valve more confidence in taking action against bad actors, as well as identifying and ignoring spurious reporters.

The only thing worse than having a bad in-game experience with someone is knowing they're still out there afterwards, ruining games for other players. Our new system was built from the ground up to make sure Valve can connect actions with consequences — not only for bad actors but also for good ones — so whenever your reports result in developers taking action against a player, Valve will let you know your report was successful and who was punished.

When a player reports someone for toxic chat through the in-game scoreboard, that chat will be analyzed in real-time. If the text is determined to be toxic, the offending player will have their voice and chat muted for all players immediately, and for the remainder of the game.

They will still be able to use pings, alt-clicks and pre-set chat wheels, but with a throttle — the offending player will be text and voice muted, and all other communication will be on a thirty-second cooldown.

Every player already has a behavior score, a number between 0 and 10,000 which reflects the quality of your actions in-game. Players will now also have a communication score, which reflects the quality of their in-game chat and speech interactions. Current behavior scores carry over into the new system, but the cap for both new behavior score and communication score has increased to 12,000.

Before, a player’s behavior score only affected who they got matched with. Now, it will also affect the features they’ll have access to, such as post-game item drops, game pausing, and ranked play. Likewise, communication score will affect pinging ally abilities, coaching, tipping, text and voice chat. If a communication score gets low enough, that player will be text and voice muted, and all other communication will be on a thirty-second cooldown.

Behavior Score up to 12,000

Commuication Score up to 12,000

The new system relies on the accumulation of large amounts of data, so its accuracy will only improve over time. This means that in the beginning, Valve will try to act quite cautiously. Developers will always base their decisions on the data they have the most confidence in.