Dota 2 players are reporting glitched conduct scores

Conduct scores are nearly as important as MMR for Dota 2 matchmaking, which is why players are up in arms about their score suddenly dropping by 80%.

Dota 2 players have reported a strange glitch affecting conduct scores over the past week. According to several individual reports, high scores have suddenly dropped massively, affecting matchmaking pools and resulting in longer queue times.

It’s not clear exactly what is causing this glitch, but Valve’s deafening silence on the issue isn’t helping the situation.

A weird glitch is tanking conduct scores in Dota 2

Conduct score is Dota 2’s way of determining how friendly players are in their online matches. The score ranges from one to 10,000, with commends boosting the score while reports and abandons lower it.

Matchmaking takes conduct score into account when creating games and tries to match well-behaved players with each other while keeping consistently toxic accounts quarantined away. As a result, high conduct score is an important factor for daily grinders.

This glitch appears to immediately alter conduct scores to several thousand below what they used to be. The user-visible conduct score checkups show multiple commends and a clean bill of abandons under a snarling red emoticon. All of these reports have been submitted by Dota 2 subreddit users over the past week.

The even stranger part about this is that conduct scores tend to increase or decrease incrementally, so for a 10,000 score to drop to just a few thousand suddenly is a clear sign that there’s something going wrong. 

Valve has not confirmed that this is a glitch, but Dota 2’s developer would likely announce if there were going to be some sort of correction to the conduct score formula. Even so, the high number of commends and lack of abandons on several profiles points to something messing up.

Expect to see some kind of update in the next week or so fixing the issue, though an actual gameplay update patch is still a few weeks away, at least.

What is a normal conduct score in Dota 2?

A normal conduct score in Dota 2 is 9,000 and up, which requires a clean conduct report with very few reports or abandons.

Conduct score is surprisingly precious in Dota 2, which is ranked among the most toxic esport titles to play casually. Users report that dropping below 9,000 shifts players into a looser matchmaking pool, putting them into contact with users that repeatedly grief by abusing teammates or game mechanics. Players with a perfect conduct score of 10,000 aren’t necessarily immune to toxic behavior, but it’s much rarer in that matchmaking pool.

Making matters worse is that conduct is entirely determined by other players, so Dota 2 grinders that favor particularly cheesy heroes like Arc Warden and Broodmother are often targeted by mass reports. These players can even be chat banned despite never typing a single word in any of their matches.

Having a low conduct score often results in a downward spiral, as more vindictive players are more likely to use the report feature on their teammates and enemies. As a result, players sometimes intentionally grind conduct by being friendly in less-behaved matches, hoping to get commends. It’s also one of the reasons why players spam commend requests after matches, though that method is not exactly reliable.