The matchmaking rating in Dota 2 has become a sign of pride in the game’s competitive circuit. Players who quickly ascend the ladder, shattering previous MMR records on their way, has come to be been taken as a sign of the player’s abilities, and has in some cases even acted as the precursor to players actually joining professional squads.
So when an account boasting an incredible 10,000 MMR appeared on the Southeast Asian leaderboard, people were obviously curious about how this was accomplished. As it turns out, however, it had nothing to do with skill, or the player abusing some flavor-of-the-month hero. The user simply boosted his rating by filling all of his matches with 10 of his own accounts.
In a Q&A translated on Reddit, the alleged booster says they would “rather not share” how he could fill each game with 10 of his own accounts. They were, however, adamant that they were clear with their intentions. “My accounts’ mmr fluctuation affects no one,” they wrote. “I’m not doing this because of some noble goal to show ‘This ranking system sucks’ or ‘I just want Valve to see the problem’. I’m not ruining ranked, or doing this as a service… I’m boosting because I can, and I like it.”
Props for being honest, I suppose?
Account boosting has come to take a wide array of different shapes in the past few years. Methods for boosting in 2017 seem to have gotten a lot more creative than simply having skilled players playing on low-rated accounts and manually increasing MMR.
Most boosters currently rely on creating two in-game parties consisting of nine bots. The booster teams up in one of the parties, while the other party consists solely of bots. Each party then queues up on servers with lower populations, meaning it becomes more likely that the two parties will be face up against each other. Meaning the party with the actual booster can proceed to win games easily.
The Q&A as a whole is rather entertaining and worth a read, mostly due to the booster’s cavalier and dismissive responses. For example, the person conducting the Q&A claims that the booster is harming Vietnamese Dota 2—a fact the booster does seem to admit to, only to respond by asking: “What kind of image did the [Vietnamese] scene have before? What’s its position in the world?”
So yeah, we’re not just at 10k MMR yet, folks, although it’ll only be a matter of time until some pros do reach that summit.
