After Ti9, not only will there be major line-up changes for each team, but Valve is also doing a lot of updates to the Dota2's mechanics itself. Today, a major update to the game has been released, which has tweaked the game's ranking matchmaking, anti-“smurfing epidemic” and anti-cheating monitoring systems and so on.

The major changes will impact the way each match will be affected by roles and the actions Valve is taking to stop the rampant use of smurf accounts within its game.

The first big change is Valve acknowledging how messy matchmaking has become because of players drafting heroes in bad roles. Match quality takes a significant dip if one player decides to pick a hero more suited for support in an offlane position.

This update is changing how matchmaking prioritizes players, swapping from rank to role selection as the biggest deciding factor. Valve is going to keep on tweaking this method as the season progresses and hopes that it will help align player roles more consistently.

For the Smurf accounts, “We recognize that recently there has been an increase in smurf accounts,” Valve said. “We share the sentiments the community has expressed on this issue and we consider it a high priority for us to solve as well. There isn’t a single solution that can address this issue easily, but we hope that a combination of multiple different changes over time will reduce the negative impacts and frequency of it.”

The devs are changing how MMR is going to work now between Core and support ranks. This new system will try to average out various numbers and percentages within MMR so players will have a rank more representative of their overall skill. But this change hurts players who might want to try and learn new roles, instead incentivizing safer hero drafting to protect total MMR.

At last Valve has reworked the way it’ll ban players with low behavior scores and those who go against the company’s terms of service by doing things like purchasing accounts.

For more details you can read the full blog here.