Oceanic Dota 2 players report major issues with servers again

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Valve seems to running into more problems as it tries to improve Dota 2’s matchmaking system, which has been a priority of nearly every update since July. 

Now, players from the Oceania region are reporting they are having problems simply getting into matches, regardless of their MMR. This goes beyond the struggles happening in North America and Europe where high MMR matches take forever to pair players together.

The problems seem most prominent in Australia, where some players report things have gotten so bad that even spectating matches is impossible. This comes just 15 days after the last Australian server issue, where most of the players said the game was essentially down. 

Right now, the main focus of the complaints are casual players with decently high MMR waiting in matchmaking queues for over 30 minutes just to have a chance at playing a game. This is the exact same problem popping up again along with additional lag spikes and server problems in general. 

As reported by multiple players on Reddit, the matchmaking will loop and seem to fill, only for the timer to pop and reset upwards of 10 times on average. It has gotten so bad that many players from the region are making custom lobbies and inviting others to join them in the regional chat just to get games going. 

This entire situation is made worse by the only alternative being that players can queue up in Chinese or Southeast Asian servers, which is not ideal for someone just trying to play some casual games.

It is clear from Valve’s messaging and focus that the developers want to make the entire matchmaking system better for new players while removing toxic ones from the game. This has come at the expense of general issues finding matches in the normal queue, however.

There is no quick fix for this and it appears that even when the problems are cleared up, there is a chance it is only temporary and they will come back. Australia is not known for having great server health in general, but despite the laggy mess those players are sometimes forced to deal with, at least they can play the game. 

There should be some fix coming in the next update, but the last one was only four days ago so that might be at least a week or two away.