How To View Your Dota 2 Behavior Score
There’s no denying that the online gaming community, like the internet as a whole, is a festering cesspool of toxicity. As you’d expect, the waters get murkier the more crowded the environment, which is why games such as Dota 2, with unique monthly player counts in the millions, need to have systems in place to deter disorderly conduct.
Valve has a system in place for the MOBA that discourages and subsequently penalizes players for abandoning multiple games as well as being reported for Communication Abuse, Intentional Ability Abuse, or Intentional Feeding. The most severe of those penalties comes see players relegated to “low-priority” matchmaking with other offenders for a limited amount of games as well as having receiving a temporary ban on text and voice chat.
It seems you don’t receive a clean slate every time you climb out of low-priority matchmaking or a communication ban, however. Dota 2 maintains a history of your conduct, and recently, it was revealed that this conduct history is reflected in a new metric called “behavior score.”
Update: The article has been updated to include the changes to the behavior score metric in the 10/03/2017 update.
So, What is Behavior Score?
As the name implies, it is a reflection of in-game behavior, likely calculated based on factors included in a player’s Conduct Summary – Abandons, Reports, and Commends – covering the past 25 games. Whether or not this score is updated with the same 10-match frequency as the Conduct Summary remains unclear.
In fact, very little else is known about behavior score as of this writing, with the only officially confirmed use of the metric being to help match new players with those that have had “consistently high behavior scores,” shielding the former from the toxic end of the game’s player-base as they familiarize themselves with the game.
Does Behavior Score Affect Matchmaking?
As mentioned above, there is no official confirmation that behavior score affects matchmaking in any way other than making Dota 2 a friendlier place for newcomers. That said, Valve hasn’t explicitly discredited the possibility that it might have another purpose. Community conjecture suggests that behavior-based matchmaking might apply to all players, and not just newbies and their chosen chaperones. This implies that the game might be lumping together toxic players and vice versa within the same skill level.
Not everyone agrees with this theory, though. While some players have reported being consistently matched with rude teammates after having their own behavior scores reduced, others claim having experienced no noticeable difference across similar variation in the score. Of course, neither observation has yet been validated.
The October 3, 2017 update does mention having changed “the weight given to behavior metrics to be more focused on a very small percentage of players that were the most offensive players, rather than the general population,” though that could still be in reference to how bans and Low Priority penalties are handled.
How Do I Check My Behavior Score?
That’s quite simple. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Launch Dota 2 and open the Settings screen by clicking the cog-shaped icon in the top-left corner.
2. Switch to the Options tab and click Advanced Options.
3. Scroll down and turn the Enable Console option on.
4. Restart Dota 2. Note that you do not need to restart if console was already enabled.
5. Open up the console. The default hotkey is the grave accent (`) or tilde (~) key. You can check yours from the Hotkeys tab on the Settings screen.
6. In the console, enter the following two commands:
developer 1 dota_game_account_debug
7. In the long list of player stats displayed, look for the one labeled behavior_score. This is your current behavior score.
What’s a Good or Bad Behavior Score?
Once again, there is no concrete definition of the behavior score spectrum yet as it remains a backend metric. Before the latest change to its representation as part of the October 3, 2017 update, behavior score used to have a numerical value up to a maximum of 10,000 – the higher, the better. This numerical value has now been swapped with a grading system, with players reporting having received C, D, and Normal scores. Forum conjecture suggests that any scores below Normal might be considered poor while Normal itself covers any grades above C.
The aforementioned update explicitly mentions behavior score having been recalibrated, however, so it might be a little too early to determine the specifics. We will be sure to update this article with whatever we find in the days to come.
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