EternaLEnVy banned for 6 months due to new Dota 2 matchmaking system

June 2023 · 3 minute read

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Jacky “EternaLEnVy” Mao is one of the most polarizing Dota 2 players in history, partially thanks to his high-level play and his personality.

But today, the player was banned from competitive play within the Dota 2 client because the new matchmaking system deemed his account as toxic following months of poor behavior scoring. 

After finishing a match on stream, a small message popped up over the ‘Find Match’ button in the client, informing EE that matchmaking was disabled for his account due to “excessive reports, failing to ready-up, or abandoning.” This translated into about a nearly year-long ban for the top player.

EE himself commented in the Reddit thread with a clip of his ban, trying to explain his situation to all of the users debating how this could have happened by explaining his last few months of playing Dota outside of the pro-scene.

“I started at 9k Conduct summary somewhere during July. Then I started to role steal all the way to 1 conduct summary within a span of two weeks,” EE said.  “Then after they implemented the stealing role report at the start of games I stopped and since then I’ve won 90% of my games playing unconventional heroes and being PMA (positive mental attitude). During this time my conduct summary kept going up, but I would always end up in low priority anyway. Finally today after raising my conduct summary from 600 to 1.6K I am banned for 6 months.”

So, back in July, EE was nearly maxed out on behavior score, meaning he had been playing well and doing so within his role. But then he started to role steal, which is something Valve addressed recently through its role report features. Players can tell the system a player is going out of their queued role and will punish the reported player while lessening the blow for the other teammates. 

I realized after playing the patch that the dota team put in more time writing that blog post than fixing high match making.

— EternaLEnVy (@EternaLEnVy1991) October 11, 2019

This report feature basically deemed EE toxic for well over three months before a shift in the matchmaking forced him to start playing in a more traditional way. Even without the dedicated role steal report, he still dropped more than 8,000 behavior score in three months.

It likely took the system longer to ban EE because he is at a high MMR and was slowly rebuilding his behavior score, but going from 600 to 1,600 still had him in low priority, where a majority of the bans take place. 

I’ve been abandoning one game per week n forfeiting games since 2014. Whether it becomes a big deal on reddit is random.

— EternaLEnVy (@EternaLEnVy1991) July 5, 2018

And just like he said, this is not a new thing for EE either, considering he frequently abandons matches. None of this will affect his actual career, though, since he will still be attending the upcoming MDL Chengdu Major with the team he built, the Fighting Pandas.

Unfortunately for EE, this will probably impact his ability to stream competitive games in simple matchmaking unless he successfully appeals the ban and can clean up his game.  Without an appeal, he will have to wait until Aug. 8, 2020, to get back into competitive matchmaking.

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