Dota 2

Toxicity came up more often than any other complaint: 390 reviews use the word, 162 of them thumbs-up. Players described flaming from the first creep wave, teammates who give up and grief after one death, slurs in every language, and the running joke that Dota teaches you to swear in Russian, Spanish or Tagalog. Some thumbs-up reviewers treated it as weather to be muted. Negative reviewers, including long-term players, said it had corroded the whole experience: every match has someone trying to ruin it, and a team game whose standard advice is to mute your team has failed as a team game. Some EU and NA players asked for region locks or language-based matchmaking ("VALVE LOCK REGIONS"). Several blamed Valve's enforcement as much as the players: in their view the behavior score system (below) punishes the wrong people and lets the worst behavior through.

Smurfs come up in 196 reviews, and players described them at every rank: new players matched against veterans on fresh accounts, ranked climbs undone by boosters and bought accounts, beginners farmed by experienced players. Several reviews described bot accounts in lobbies and in the new-player mode, a complaint the review section itself backs up with waves of bot-posted duplicate reviews. Cheating came up too: scripters, map hacks, and the feeling that Valve rarely acts ("only protect cheaters," as one 12,000-hour player put it).

Alongside these ran the "forced 50%" belief: that matchmaking deliberately builds unwinnable teams after a win streak to hold everyone near a 50% win rate. 17 reviews call the game or its matchmaking rigged, and a ranked complaint with 106 upvotes describes the pattern: "When you start winning it puts you alone with 4 worst players." Whether or not the mechanism exists, the belief fed a wider sense that ranked results reflect the matchmaker's mood rather than skill. Thumbs-up reviews complained as well ("the matchmaking will test your patience"), 9 reviews call it the worst matchmaking they have seen, and players described one-sided 20-minute stomps in either direction as normal.

103 reviews mention the behavior, conduct or communication score, and the second most-upvoted negative review in the slice (184 upvotes) is about this system. The accusation is that the scores punish whoever gets reported, guilty or not. Players described scores dropping after a few reports even when they kept quiet, being muted after reports they called false, and being mass-reported, sometimes by the griefers who ruined the match. Eight reviews compare it to a "social credit system". The low priority queue drew particular anger (39 reviews mention it): players described being locked into Single Draft games beside actual griefers until they win their way out, and said it pushes people to quit rather than serve the sentence.

Two things made it worse. Crashes, disconnects and the September 2026 server instability turned into abandons, low priority and lost score, and players found no appeal path ("no meaningful appeal process" for Low Priority, as one put it) and "no support" from Valve. Players also said the Overwatch review system hands out penalties based on how many reports someone collects.

A 2026 complaint held that Valve was neglecting the game. The battle pass came up in 54 reviews, and 16 ask for it or the Compendium back ("WE WANT BATTLE PASS"), describing the current events as less generous and less of a spectacle. Players also pointed to content droughts between patches, fewer hero releases, facets and Ranked Classic removed instead of reworked, recycled event formats, and updates that seemed to ship without testing (see servers). A few reviews answered that the game is "constantly updated" and that a thirteen-year-old free game still getting map-scale overhauls is hardly abandoned.

Two 2026 monetization changes drew complaints. Candyworks, the candy-shop cosmetic system, comes up in 22 reviews. Players described paying for reroll after reroll that rarely produced an arcana ("150 Rerolls did not even get 1 Arcana."), and some called it a scam or straight gambling in place of the battle pass. The second was The International 2026's fantasy and prediction rewards, which locked items, including a terrain that can't be bought any other way, behind top-percentile finishes. Players watched their percentile fall as the final results came in and lost rewards they thought they had earned; one asked Valve to "hide the percentile until the final calculation are done rather than giving false hope." Thumbs-up reviews made the same complaint: "You shouldn't have offered a terrain as a reward if you didn't actually want to give it away." The Dark Carnival event drew a few complaints of its own, about duplicate items and minigames.

203 reviews mention servers, disconnects or crashes, and these complaints picked up in the weeks after The International 2026. Players reported coordinator outages, mid-match disconnects and crash loops, made worse by the behavior system turning each technical failure into an abandon penalty. The longest-running grievance was the Arcade: players reported custom-game servers broken or offline for weeks through late August and September 2026, said Valve "basically threw the arcade community to trash," and some custom-game players posted negative reviews about that alone. Older technical complaints ran underneath: long queues at off-peak hours and in some regions, and occasional pathing and ability-responsiveness bugs.

Newcomers and returning players described an overwhelming amount to learn with little useful onboarding, a new-player mode that limits hero choice ("Why are Heros even blocked?") and reportedly contains bots, and immediate exposure to smurfs and to veterans with no patience for beginners. Some experienced players made the same point for them. One wrote "for the first time in my life im going to recommend new players go play League of Legends," because there is less smurfing there. Players who pushed through answered that the difficulty is the point and the reward is a decade of depth.