Discussion: Dota 2 Matchmaking "Hidden Pool"

*I put a decent amount of time into this, so I'd appreciate it if you all took the time to read it instead of dismissing it. Thank you!* :)

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Two posts from Valve developer Fletcher on the dev forums have given the community the idea that there is are two sorts of "hidden pools."

- First, a shadowban pool for bots, people who dodge repeatedly, people who run multiple instances of Dota on their PC, etc. This pool is known for its extremely long queue times.

- Second, a "hidden pool" for flamers and people who intentionally throw the games.

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Here are the relevant Fletcher posts:

[**05-24-2014**; thread titled "Unable to find a game"](http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=133856&page=25&p=1082330#post1082330)

>**Players who repeatedly engage in activities significantly harmful to the community are put into a separate matchmaking pool for two months.** Players who run multiple instances are only segregated as long as they continue to run multiple instances. If you think you have been segregated merely for running multiple instances, then stop running multiple instances for a day or two, and then try to find a match again. You should find that you are back in the ordinary matchmaking pool with the rest of the community.

>Running multiple instances of Dota 2 on the same computer is not supported. We certainly regret misidentifying adorable married couples playing together or fans watching multiple games as bad actors. We can try to tune our detection heuristics to better discriminate between malicious players and ordinary players. However, please don't interpret anything I've said in this post as sanctioning any particular use case for running multiple instances, or as a description of our policy that you can depend on us to follow in the future. While we will try to exercise judgement, we cannot promise any player who runs multiple instances that they will be free from negative consequence.

[*Note that he distinguishes between the first pool (where people are stuck for two months) and the much more short-term pool for multiple instances (where people will only be stuck so long as they are running multiple instances).*]

[**05-30-2014**; thread titled "Problem with search match"](http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=136838)

>**We are making some improvements to matchmaking to put players with similar play styles together. For example, players who repeatedly abandon games before they begin, or intentionally throw the match.** We want to make sure these sorts of players can more easily find each other, to increase everybody's enjoyment of the game.

Importantly, (I think) both of the OPs in the original threads were about the shadow-ban pool, not the "hidden pool" of flamers. It is possible that the "hidden pool" doesn't exist.

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The shadow-ban pool more or less speaks for itself. It seems like almost everyone who has been put in it has either run multiple instances of Dota or otherwise majorly messed up.

My questions are about the "hidden pool":

**1.) How do you know if you're in the "hidden pool"?** My queue times are normal, but the past month or so I've noticed more people abandoning than usual, but I also usually queue with friends. It could be that one of them is in it, or it could be just the way things are in Dota. Yesterday in particular, I lost seven matches in a row, and it seemed like literally ever loss was caused by someone else on my team either intentionally feed or abandoning. I don't mean "someone besides me sucked." I mean literally someone gave up before we actually lost and either started feeding couriers or AFK'd in fountain. Two of those were even ranked games! And in non-ranked games with my stack, a lot of the time we see the enemy abandon if we're winning.

**2.) Does the "hidden pool" just affect normal unranked matchmaking or both ranked and unranked?**

**3.) Does one ever get out of the "hidden pool"?** Does it expire after two months if you don't get egregious reports?

**4.) How can Valve possibly tell if someone is "intentionally throwing" the game as Fletcher says?** At the ends of a lot of games with my stack, I will sell my items right before the enemy takes the throne when everyone else is AFK in base and buy a train of couriers. But looking at the score screen, there's no way for a Valve employee to tell that you didn't sell your items and start feeding couriers when your team was still winning.

**5.) Are reports even a good metric for determining whether someone deserves to be in the "hidden pool"?** People report for all kinds of reasons. I have been told that I was "reported" before ten minutes passed into the game; people will claim that they are reporting you if you just take their rune or farm, etc. You can even see this on the streams of high-MMR players.

**6.) Do the end-game "Rate this Player" polls actually serve a purpose?** Some speculated that 1-star players would be matched together. However, how someone ranks these people is often determined simply by whether the game was lost or won; just because you don't want to play with someone who fed doesn't mean that you think they flamed or fed intentionally. And lots of people (myself included) jokingly rate their friends with 1-star, because I know we always play together anyway instead of solo-queuing at the same time.

**7.) Can you be put in the hidden pool if your stack is full of flamers?** Some of my IRL friends are rude in Dota and will abandon if the game is going poorly; I have a friend with a 4%(!) abandon rate. But I'm not going to stop playing with an IRL friend just to avoid the "hidden pool."

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I realize that these questions probably cannot be answered by the reddit community. I hope to start a serious discussion, because there are a lot of problems with the idea that everyone who is reported is necessarily reported fairly. I've put a lot of money into Dota 2 and plan to for the foreseeable future; the last thing I want is to lose the full privileges of having an account because of people who are flaming me reporting me.