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A new ranked season of Dota 2 means a lot of server issues while everyone tries to get in and start recalibrating their accounts to break out of the low tiers.
But for professional player Jaron “monkeys-forever” Clinton, he spent over five hours in the matchmaking queue before being kicked due to server maintenance.
All he wanted to do was play a simple game of Dota, but instead, he was forced to watch the menu as the queue timer capped out at 99 minutes without a single match found. Extremely long matchmaking times are common during the first day of a new game or mode releasing for a multiplayer title, but monkeys was a special case.
He started streaming right before season four of ranked matchmaking began for the game, which means he was caught in the middle of the servers switching over. But just because the servers weren’t letting him get into a game didn’t mean he was going to give up.
With determination and well over 500 concurrent viewers, the North American pro sat, holding his pillow and waiting for a match, refusing to let Valve beat his resolve.
“If we play other games while queueing we are just giving into Valve ya know,” monkeys said. “We are saying, hey Valve, it’s acceptable for me to queue this long. This is all Valve provides us with their game, so I am going to sit here and patiently wait for my game of Dota 2.”
He said that just before the five-hour mark of him being stuck in matchmaking hell, and soon after, he was forced out of the lobby by a maintenance notification. This ended his consecutive streak in the queue and sent his chat into ballistics, considering monkeys and all of his viewers were memeing the situation by that point.
Everyone present was cursing “John,” an imaginary Valve employee who became the butt of the stream’s jokes. There were even several tips made on stream to play along with the meme, revolving around firing and then rehiring John because he was the only person working on Dota.
But don’t worry, as soon as the brief maintenance period was over, monkeys hopped right back in and sat in a new lobby for another three hours without finding a single match. This brought his total stream time over eight hours, in which he gained 600 new followers despite not playing a game of Dota 2.
But then, just after he was about to go insane from staring at the same menu for nine hours, the message came in. The holy green notification appeared on his screen and the chat lost it. Monkeys, smiling at the screen, leaned in and declared that “this would be the greatest accept he’d ever done.”
He went on to stream several more hours, playing games with a few noteworthy players like Artour “Arteezy” Babaev and Quinn “CCnC” Callahan. And during that time, he had very few instances of long matchmaking queues.
Earlier in the stream while he was just talking with his chat and waiting for a game, he pinned the extremely long wait on his MMR score being so high. Because he’s in the top percentile of players, he’s forced to pair up differently than others, which makes his experience different.
It looks like most of the initial bugs have been worked out, including an issue involving players’ MMR being wrongfully changed after matches. It’s unclear how this new matchmaking system will affect top players in the higher tiers, but more information will likely come as the season continues.
