Every game has its own way of treating high Elo brackets. But it’s not often that we see a high Elo rank have a matchmaking system of its own like Dota 2’s Immortal, whose so-called “Immortal Draft” is causing lots of headaches for its players.
Immortal Draft is causing so much of a headache, in fact, that people are actively calling on Valve to either kill or redesign the concept altogether. Players on social media, especially Reddit, have been citing numerous problems with the Immortal Draft mode, primarily win-trading and double MMR token abuse, among others. Win-trading especially is troublesome because, in Immortal Draft, players in the same party can end up on opposite teams due to the mode’s team scrambling mechanic, allowing some players in said parties to troll and rig wins for their friends.
The Dota 2 subreddit has seen numerous posts regarding Immortal Draft over the past few days, with one long thread even offering suggestions for fixing it. In the thread, user jjdotes claims Immortal Draft should be turned into the usual role queue with so-called tokens to determine if you are a core, support, or flex player and match you accordingly. The current system, players believe, causes frequent occurrences of players trolling if they don’t get their desired hero or role picked, the win-trading mentioned above, and sees players “taking out grudges from past games,” as one user put it.
Valve introduced the Immortal Draft mode to alleviate issues that have plagued the high Elo games of Dota 2 for a while, mainly including players refusing to play different roles and match queues lasting for over 10 minutes. It was introduced to the game last year in Patch 7.33, but it seems like it hasn’t caught on quite well. The developer hasn’t responded to these calls for change to Immortal Draft and is probably busy with all the Deadlock shenanigans going around.
