Toxic community is something that affects pretty much every online game, doubly so for PVP centric games. Valve seeks to address this issue with a new update that adjusts multiple aspects of ranked play, including requiring players to register a phone number to queue up for Ranked mode in DOTA 2.
With how competitive and addicting games like League of Legends and DOTA 2, it’s no surprise that tensions run high and you start to run into toxic gameplay that ruins the enjoyment of others. Whether this toxicity is language related, intentional feeding, or leaving a game early when things don’t go your way, the behavior of gamers can affect the experience of their teammates pretty quickly and severely.
In the more competitive modes of MOBAs like DOTA 2, people rely on every teammate to carry their weight, and the penalties for losing result in a lower ELO or rank. Losing fair and square is already disappointing enough, but the experience is 1000 times worse when you lose due to toxic teammates.
The addition of a phone number requirement for ranked play lowers the amount of duplicate accounts players can create, as a given phone number can only be on one account at a time.
“There will be a two-week grace period from today during which players have time to register a number, but starting on May 4th, accounts without a registered number will no longer be eligible for Ranked play. If a phone number is removed from an account after registration, a new number can be added, but there will be a three-month waiting period before the removed number can be registered on a new account. This is to prevent using the same number on multiple accounts. Online services that provide phone numbers are not allowed.”
In DOTA 2, players who leave the game early or are reported multiple times by teammates are put into a “low priority queue” where they are forced, for a time, to play only against other reported players and leavers. This situation has worked well, but Valve has made some tweaks to make the system a little bit better with this new patch.
“Being marked for low-priority matches now results in a duration-based ban from the Ranked queue, in addition to the current game-count-based low priority requirement. The ban will start at a low threshold of a few hours, and increase up to four days for players who are very frequently in low priority.”
Completely locking toxic players out of ranked for a short period of time may result in some meaningful behavior form. If not, at least we don’t have to deal with them for up to four days!
In addition to fixing toxicity issues, Valve introduced several changes to DOTA 2 with this patch intended to result in more balanced matches. Players can now queue up solo again and be matched mostly against players who also queued up by themselves. There was also an adjustment to the way MMR is calculated for players who queue together with vastly different ratings.
“Starting today, if a player’s Solo MMR is higher than their Party MMR, queuing in a party will result in the matchmaker assigning a higher MMR to that player. Effectively, these players will search for a match as if their MMR were halfway between the Solo and Party MMR values.”
What do you guys think of these changes? I think necessitating a phone number attached to an account is a little extreme, but considering how rough the community can be at times maybe it’s necessary. Is Valve overstepping their boundaries with this update? Sound off in the comments below!
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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