Last month Dota 2 developer Valve issued bans to some of the MOBA game’s most toxic players, saying that they “are too big of a tax on the rest of the community and are not wanted.” Now, the studio is introducing a new system that will disable chat and voice for players if their behaviour drops below a set threshold.
In the most recent Dota 2 matchmaking update notes, posted on the game’s website yesterday, Valve includes a section on “Communication and Low Behaviour Score.” In this, the studio says that the last wave of bans “affected only a very small percentage of all players, and we also wanted a more gradual system to address players that are not at the furthest extreme but are still big outliers from the general player population.”
This new system, Valve explains, is based on players’ behaviour scores, which the studio uses to track toxic players: “to that end, players that have a behaviour score below 3000 are no longer able to use chat or voice until their score rises above the acceptable threshold.”
Valve says it believes that this “more gradual user-facing reinforcement mechanism” will help to protect the wider Dota 2 community from “outliers,” as well as functioning as a way of warning players straying towards that threshold, which could motivate them to improve their behaviour.
The studio also explains that the threshold is set to 3000 “due to the low probability that anyone would be that low without having had a consistently negative impact on the experiences of many different teammates.”
While the post indicates that the update – and this new system – should be live as of yesterday, Valve says that it’s “expecting the next day or two to be a little unstable as we iron out issues with the update,” adding that its focus over the next few weeks will be looking over the results and “following up as needed based on what we learn.”
If you’re looking to jump into the game, check out our guide to Dota 2 heroes for beginners. Or, if you’re yet to get stuck into a MOBA title, you might find our guide helpful in deciding which is the best MOBA game for you, where we give a breakdown of some of the biggest.