Open letter towards Valve regarding the state of the Immortal bracket

Hi r/Dota2, this open letter is directed towards Valve since we all know they frequently browse this subreddit.

This may come off as whining from a 6k~ player to the other members of the reddit community but I genuinely don't care at this point, this has to be brought up so that Valve employees can atleast see it and and not be able to feign ignorance regarding the problem.

A lot of posts on this subreddit is regarding complaints about smurfs in lower brackets, and this is a completely valid complaint and I sympathize wholeheartedly with the people making these posts, we have smurfs in immortal too and we hate them aswell.

But this post is in regards to the other side of the issue: Accountbuyers.

The immortal bracket is absolutely PLAGUED with these types of accounts, we have one almost every single game, and sometimes several in the same game.

The MMR requirement to reach immortal is 5620-5630, and the people who buy accounts almost always buy accounts that are just at that specific limit to have hit immortal OR their account is somewhere slightly above (100-200 MMR). Seeing as the immortal bracket has an extremely limited player pool due to the nature of ranked (Immortal bracket players make up around 1% of the entire player base if not less, if I'm not mistaken), these accounts end up in virtually every single match unless you make it over a certain threshold. The chances of ending up with these bought accounts in your games lower drastically once you start to reach MMR in which the disparity is too high for you to be matched with these accounts regularly (this only happens if the current pool of people who queue around lets say 7-8k MMR isn't able to match with 10 people around the same rank, and thus the matchmaker starts searching for more "imbalanced" matches in order for you to just find a game).

But from my perspective as I'm hovering around the 6k MMR rating, these accounts are in EVERY. SINGLE. GODDAMN. GAME. Queueing for a game in immortal around my rank is less about getting teammates that you're able to get along with or speak the same language as, and way more about rolling the die to see which team ends up with more accounts that have been bought than the other team.

The 6k MMR rating also has a problem with smurfs, but this is less of a problem than the bought accounts, it's possible to win against smurfs, but it's near impossible to win with a teammate that helps the opposing team more than they are helping your team. Most games we're not even playing dota, it's either a stomp in one direction or a stomp in the other.

You guys remember back in spring last year when the dota anime dropped and the new player experience was added?

You remember that valve promised to crack down on smurfs and bought accounts and even added a report function at the end of games?

Pepperidge farm fucking remembers.

I'm genuinely begging the valve people who frequent this subreddit to address this issue, I'd be more than happy to provide match ID's or even player ID's for that matter so they can investigate this issue. It's time for you to face the fact that smurfs are not the only thing plagueing this game.

How are these accounts allowed to ruin the games for all of us because you won't or can't act when the proof of these accounts not belonging in this bracket is staring everyone in the face?

Please Valve, I'm on my fucking knees here, please do something about this problem, I know that our bracket is very small and we're a small portion of the player population, but we're also amongst the MOST dedicated people to this game hence why we've ended up at the rating we have, why are we being punished for your inactions to sort this issue out?

// uLoco