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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players?

Dota 2 already does. There is what's colloquially called "hidden pools". If you get reported for flaming in chat or being obnoxious you start getting preferentially matchmaked with other such people until your hidden metric for obnoxiousness/abuse improves.

I know this because I pretty consistently play in a team with a hothead who just can't help himself but start flaming in all chat, usually the following few games we get matched next are also with people like that. When I que solo, it's fine. When we que together and he has been "a good boy [tm]" the matchmaking is fine also, until he starts talking shit again in all chat. Then it's back to the hidden pool.

I was under the impression that the low priority pool is not "hidden", but very explicit - when you go there, when you're on a premade team with someone who goes there and when your report sends someone there. Or do you mean to claim that there's a separate hidden pool on top of the explicit LP pool? Why'd they do that?

Oh there definitely is an explicit low priority pool, but before you get slapped with that one, you can be assigned a hidden pool where it just ques you with other people who are getting excessive reports be it for verbal abuse or griefing. To this day the hidden pools remain unacknowledged by valve publicly.

While they did say they have "hidden pools" for hackers and voice/text abuse in CSgo/CS2 they have not admitted to the same in Dota2. Both games are running on the same base engine and both games also are part of valve's Overwatch pseudo AI moderation system.

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