Wintrading Dota 2 Immortal

[LlCrueMielL]

Hello Dota 2 Players, hope this post finds you well.

Now, to preface this (long) post, I am in love with this game. I've been since middle school when I started 11 years ago, and still am well into my career. My purpose of writing this post is to hopefully draw Valve's attention to this issue.

Wintrading has become a pandemic in high immortal games. A brief explanation: shortly after double downs were implemented, players started queueing together/party queueing and in the immortal draft phase would place each other in different teams. Then, one player (let's say on Radiant for our example, Player A) would double down while the player (friend throwing, Player B) on Dire would play the game by griefing or nonchalantly jungling etc. As a result, while player A receives +50 MMR for the uncontested win, player B only receives -25 MMR. The next game, they would repeat in the exact same manner, only with the player roles reversed. Now, player B would receive +50 and player A would only get -25. What started as a few friends clowning around has evolved into a full scale pandemic with multiple players involved in one game eg 1 player receives -25 and 3 receives +50 on the other team. At least 50% of my games anecdotally are wintraded, and that number is about the same when inquiring other friends who play on NA.

Now, why NA? NA servers have a notoriously low player count when compared to EU and SEA (keep in mind CN players de facto play in SEA now due to PerfectWorld restrictions). So, with a low player count at high immortal level, the wintraders can reliably find games versus each other. Please keep in mind, while wintrading certainly exists in all servers, I can only speak about my experience in NA games.

Shockingly, 20-30 players in the top 50 of NA leaderboards are just wintraded accounts. And this is me just going through extrapolating games from me and my group of friends, I'm sure this problem extends to several hundred accounts across the server.

I've thought long and hard how to deal with this problem, and the only solution I came up with is removing double downs for immortal draft games. Now, I understand Crownfall will end in January, so I assume double down purchase-ability will also be removed then. But, are these next two months just supposed to be unplayable? There's still a solid group of old-timers who care about the game, but blatant matchfixing in ranked games (they are not even winning money) is just a new low, and disheartens those who care.

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope this issue gets resolved.

[Taweret]

i made thread recently about wintrading bots in immortal games you can check out the replay, and submit them to the moderation review if you want to help clean community:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/0/598515509750721374/

[yokosami]

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