Valve Changes Ranked Matchmaking System Again

Amidst concerns of a declining player base and complaints about the lowering match quality, Valve has changed the Ranked Matchmaking system once again. This drastic change is one of many experiments that Valve is trying, to stabilize the declining Dota 2 player base.

According to Valve,

Players will now receive or lose a fixed 20 Points for Party Games and 30 Points for Solo games instead of variable MMR.
The Dota 2 developers have also removed the Fast/Slow Queue system and have replaced it with Ranked Roles and Ranked Classic (Where all 5 roles have to be selected).
- Players will need to queue 1 Ranked Classic Game, to earn 4 Ranked Roles tokens.
- Both Core and Support MMR will be affected in Ranked Classic Games

You can read the Full Patch Notes HERE.

Valve also admitted that the Slow/Fast Queue system was flawed and was not successful in producing good quality games.

We are making this change because the slow/fast queue concept has not been successful in producing good quality games. The end result was slow queue waiting a little bit longer, and then forcing very bad quality matches on the entire player pool.

Earlier in the day, Valve also released a small update for Dota 2, in which they added sounds for neutral items.