The Reach Beta has been a valuable month for us at Elo. The feedback from our community has allowed us to make considerable progress in refining the key automated systems of the platform and we couldn't possibly be more excited to see people begin to play in Season One.

Fairer Matchmaking

We've made huge improvements to our matchmaking system, some of which came in during the later weeks of the beta. On top of it, we’ve created extra tools that could help us respond to feedback even faster and streamline the development process as we continue to make improvements during Season One and beyond.

We now confidently have the ability to responsively expand queues in response to player demand and have been monitoring sessions closely to respond to player needs. This is a continuous effort to make sure our games are as balanced and are as enjoyable as possible, but it is only a part of how we are trying to make Reach even better.

The human touch

Managing a community as diverse as Dota can be hard and while the Reach automated penalty system has seen a lot of upgrades over the course of beta, we didn’t feel it was enough. Starting from the next season, a team of experienced admins is going to be helping us with community moderation.

This is part of our commitment towards fostering a healthier community. We are currently developing our guidelines with strict definitions of bannable negative behaviors and the human touch is necessary to avoid disproportionate responses to false positives, while still allowing us to confidently, instantly and permanently separate our player base from intentional game ruiners and those with other toxic behaviors.

Additionally, the admins will help us with gathering feedback and feature proposals, so that Reach will improve season-to-season. We had many of our assumptions challenged during the beta and we feel like a continuous open dialogue with our community is the only correct path towards delivering a better product.

Reach for everyone

So far only the Immortal and Divine players got to experience our improved matchmaking, but starting next season Reach is going to be available to all calibrated players who have their ranked medal displayed in their Dotabuff profile.

Our goal is to create a thriving and friendly community with balanced games, no matter the skill level. We firmly believe that this environment will help in alleviating some of the regular matchmaking problems for both casual and serious players and are ready to welcome anyone willing to be willing to play hard, communicate, and strive for improvement, to join us on this journey..

The Reach Beta Statistics

We are still the biggest Dota-related statistics website at our core and we simply can’t skip sharing our Reach Beta numbers with you:

• More than 2000 unique players, mostly from the Immortal bracket, have participated in the Reach Beta

• Over 2600 games were played in our Pinnacle Division Beta Season, the highest level Reach bracket

• $20,000 was awarded in prizes, shared among the top amateur players, many of whom had no previous esports earnings

• 17,000 lines of code were added to the project, covering a number of different systems from the core matchmaking algorithms to the site UI and more.

The Future of Reach

The Reach Beta was an astounding success and we can’t wait to allow more players to experience the better matchmaking and our curated community of like-minded, competitively driven players and there is still so much more we are not ready to share quite yet.

We also didn’t forget about our commitment to help the Tier 2 Dota scene and talented, unknown players, so stay tuned for our next big announcement next week, December 1st.