Dota 2 rating was squished. Why the number fell and what it means now
Players woke up today to find their MMR had shrunk. Nobody lost games, no account was hacked, there was no patch note — everyone simply has a different number. Here is how far it fell, why your medal is unchanged, and what to do with the reference points you were used to.
What happened
Valve rebuilt the rating scale. The upper bound used to run to roughly 18,000 MMR; now the entire range fits into about 9,500. This was reported by Championat, citing the change on top players: Alan «Satanic» Gallyamov dropped to 9,400 — roughly half of what he had before.
Valve published no separate announcement and gave no reason. As of publication there is no patch note describing the recalculation.
The main thing: your medal did not change
This is the first thing to check and the point at which you can relax. The number fell, not your place in the table. You did not get worse, and the opponents around you are the same as yesterday.
A change of scale is like converting a distance from metres to yards: the figure is different, the road is the same. Relative standing was preserved — whoever was above you is still above you, and the leaderboard was not reshuffled.
How far it was squished
Unevenly — and that is the most important part to understand. The higher the rating, the harder the squish.
The top figure is the public Satanic case. The second is an account on our own team — we checked it as soon as we heard the news.
Clearly there is no single coefficient: at the top the rating is cut almost in half, near the Immortal Draft threshold by about a fifth. The lower the rank, the smaller the change should be, but there are no public examples from the bottom of the scale yet.
Practical takeaway: do not try to convert your old rating by a percentage. The coefficient differs across the scale, and any simple formula you run into in chat today was almost certainly made up.
What stopped working
The squish devalued the familiar reference points all at once.
Numbers in guides and videos are outdated. Any material saying «at 6,000 people play like this, at 9,000 like that» is now talking about different players than before. That includes our own guides — we are reviewing them.
«I am a 5k player» means something else now. Yesterday's five thousand and today's five thousand are different levels of play. When talking to someone you do not know, say which scale you mean, or you are discussing two different things.
Goals have to be reassigned. If you were grinding toward, say, 6,000, that number no longer marks the thing you were heading for. Comparing yourself to your past self is now only correct by medal.
Every point matters more. The range got narrower while the number of players in it stayed the same. The same hundred points now separate a more noticeable gap in opponent quality — and take longer to earn.
Unchanged, meanwhile: your medal and rank, your standing relative to friends, your actual skill, your behaviour score, your match history and your hero statistics.
What is still unknown
Honestly: there are a lot of blanks, and anyone confidently filling them with numbers today invented those numbers.
The exact conversion formula has not been published. It is unknown how the change affected the lower ranks — there are no public examples below Immortal yet. Valve did not explain the reason: the squish could have been needed to fight the rating inflation that built up over the years, or for something else entirely.
There is also a direct contradiction. The report states that the Immortal Draft entry threshold stayed the same — 8,500 MMR. But if an account at 8,350 became 6,500, then a player sitting at 8,500 yesterday is well below that mark today. Either the threshold did move, or the squish works in a more complicated way than described. There is no clarity yet.
We will update this article once official data appears.
What to do right now
Do not panic and do not queue to win it back. Your rank is where it was, there is nothing to catch up on. The worst thing you can do today is sit down on tilt to reclaim «lost» points that nobody took.
Write down your new number. A week from now there will be plenty of arguing about who had what, and a screenshot settles it.
Do not trust conversions from chat. The coefficient is uneven, so any simple proportion is lying.
Postpone calibration unless it is urgent. While the scale has not settled and there are no official explanations, it is calmer to go through it later.
Why calibration became riskier
The range used to be wide, and a bad calibration cost you a notional five hundred points spread across a large scale. Now the scale is narrower while the number of players in it is the same: those same five hundred points throw you noticeably further back — and climbing out takes longer, because every point comes more slowly.
If you are planning to calibrate this season, it makes sense either to work out the new thresholds and take your time, or to calibrate with a booster — then the result does not depend on how your first games happen to fall on a scale nobody understands yet.
If you were heading for a specific number and now do not know where to go, it is easier to work from your medal than from the figure. Our boost calculator counts by ranks, so the target is set in categories that still mean something, not in points whose meaning changed today.
And to be straight about our own prices: our pricing is tied to MMR ranges too, and we are recalculating it for the new scale. If you spot an inconsistency on our side in the coming days — tell us, we will fix it and recalculate your order.
FAQ
Why did my MMR drop if I did not lose any games?
Valve rebuilt the scale: the whole range now fits into roughly 9,500 instead of the previous ~18,000. The number dropped, your skill did not. Your medal, your rank and your position relative to other players are unchanged.
By what percentage did the rating drop?
There is no single coefficient, the squish is uneven. At the very top the rating roughly halved (around 18,000 became 9,400), while near the Immortal Draft threshold it lost about a fifth (8,350 became 6,500). Converting your old rating by a percentage is pointless.
Did my medal change?
No. Only the numeric MMR value changed. Medals, ranks and leaderboard positions were preserved, and the relative standing of players did not shift.
Should I calibrate right now?
If it is not urgent, waiting is the safer call. There are no official explanations or clear thresholds yet, and on a squished scale a bad calibration costs more: the same losing streak throws you further back and takes longer to climb out of.
Did Valve explain why they did this?
No. There was no separate announcement and no patch note explaining the reason at the time of publication. One community theory is that it fights the rating inflation that built up over the years, but there is no official confirmation of that.
Can I still find out my old MMR?
The previous value is not shown anywhere inside the game. If it survives on old screenshots or in third-party stats services, save them — there is no other way to recover the number after the fact.