"The changes were necessary and are welcome." Fly, Astini, Quinn, ponlo react to Valve closing access to professional demos in Dota 2
2025-03-20 13:34:00Valve's latest update closed access to Immortal Draft replays and APIs and forced everyone above 8.5k MMR to have an official name in Dota 2. This caused a lot of discussions among the community. For the most part, the professionals are happy about the changes.
Names being displayed was 100% needed. It was impossible to track the griefers when they could just change names/profiles every game, and you can't check if they were pre-muted during the draft.
Well, for sure changes were necessary and are welcome. Hopefully no more excuses for smurfing also. Also, RIP Dota2ProTracker. Actually happy with this, people will try more to develop their own ideas instead of copying each other, believe this will improve the quality of pro official games.
Analyst Ben "Noxville" Steenhuisen explained why Valve didn't implement an anonymous mode. He said it would be easy to fingerprint them by in-game actions. He expects some creativity in professional Dota following this update.
In general, I'm way more pro-open access to all "public" matches, but I can sort of see why this happened.
If players play pub games on their main, teams will just discover and download all high-immortal games and bypass privacy settings to see what they're practicing. If players play pubs on smurfs/alts/whatever-you-wanna-call them the quality of matches is terrible. Even if Valve anonymized the high-level accounts/replays, fingerprinting players from in-game actions is a lot easier than people would expect.
We'll probably see changes that lead to:
- Some completely unscouted and unexpected picks in pro games.
- Will be more difficult for targeted bans against players.
- More novel ways that teams collect data on each other.
Analyst Robson "Teaguvnor" Meritt hopes this is only a first step, and that the casual players won't be completely blocked from accessing professional builds.
A step in the right direction! But it does hurt lower MMR players who use dota2protracker as the ONLY GOOD source of Dota guides. New players should NOT use in-game guides as they are 1 dimensional. Maybe delay stats by 3 weeks instead? This feels like phase 1 of changes?
Professional player Remus "Ponlo" Goh Zhi Xian is excited about these changes. He also wants creativity instead of "winrate-based" meta.
The idea that players need to figure out what feels good instead of seeing Abaddon and Warlock have absurd winrates and playing it & copying builds… sounds fun to me. Everyone’s gonna be much more incentivised to do something original, I vote yes! Letting winrates be the leading factor in innovation was so stale. You'd try to figure out a build and why a hero has a good winrate instead of thinking what could be possible with all the heroes in Dota, what could fit in your role and the way you want to play. Everyone’s gonna be worse at Dota, but this also means you can do what you want to do more, without facing the same OP heroes that pummel your face into the ground immediately, e.g. Jakiro, Warlock, Abaddon.
His tweet was also reposted by Quinn "Quinn" Callahan. He also highlighted a response from Avo+.
The update came out on Match 19. It hurts analytical services like STRATZ and Dota2ProTracker. Some developers of these platforms have reacted to the changes. You can read more about it below.
