Valve, the developer of Dota 2, has made an interesting change to the game’s most popular mode. In ranked all-pick matches, players with similar skill levels will now be placed on a team of five and can choose any hero they want to play. However, a recent update on May 31st has introduced a new experiment where 25 heroes will be randomly removed at the start of each draft.
Valve has not provided an explanation for this update, but it may be an attempt to address the issue of certain heroes being overly popular in matchmaking games. In the past, there have been patches where specific heroes were consistently picked, such as Troll Warlord and Sniper in Patch 6.83. These heroes were so strong that they had a winrate of almost 55 percent each.
To combat this, Valve introduced the ability to ban heroes in the drafting stage in May 2016. They also temporarily removed the ranked all-pick mode. However, this recent update only affects the ranked all-pick mode, so players can still freely choose heroes in the unranked version.
It is unclear when the full range of heroes will be available again in all-pick mode. In the meantime, players are encouraged to try out daring or off-meta heroes.
Dota 2, Valve, ranked all-pick, heroes, matchmaking, ban heroes, experiment