Intentional Game Ruining

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I want to start off by saying that I think the worst thing one can do is give a troll attention because attention tends to be their sole motivator. However, at this point, I feel the need to speak up. If you watch my channel on a regular basis, you will know who Venom is. If you don't, let me briefly fill you in. Venom is a top 100 NA carry player who is known to not take games seriously all of the time. Throughout the course of this entire year, and even more so recently, he has taken it upon himself to intentionally queue at the same time that I do and when he is on the opponent team he picks one of his 3 best heroes and tries to win. But, when he is on my team, he picks a carry hero like Venomancer and proceeds to buy midas/boots of travel or some semblance of this build and intentionally ruin the game (Most recent match ID 4298265829). If I had to guess, he has done this over 100 times in the last year.

Now, I understand that everyone who plays Dota and any other video game has to deal with toxicity in some capacity. But, streaming and Dota are what provide me with my income and if you ask any high level Dota player, MMR means a lot in regards to potentially getting invited to teams. Now I am not saying that Venom alone is keeping me from being top MMR but he is intentionally and directly affecting my MMR. Not only am I guaranteed to lose MMR anytime he is on my team, but I am also stuck wasting 30 minutes on stream where an incredibly toxic environment is created because I am frustrated at the situation and the chat devolves into some discussion predicated solely on this guy ruining my games. Other popular games have taken measures to prevent and/or minimize stream sniping. At this point, there is nothing that I can do to protect myself from what he is doing other than adding a massive delay on my stream and hiding when I queue. But, even if I were to do that, the pool of players at the highest bracket is so small that he could probably insert himself into my games anyways.

I believe this type of behavior is infectious and sets a tone for a community to see that this kind of trolling is acceptable as well as rampant at the highest level of the game. My initial idea is that I should be able to have a short list of people that I am allowed to ban from ever being on my team. This isn't the only solution I would assume and I am open to any and all ideas from members of the community as well as Valve. But, at this current moment, I have no means of defending myself. My ability to make a living, gain MMR, and the overall integrity of the game are all at the hands of one guy that can ruin my games anytime he feels like it.

Thank you for listening. My only hope is that this post will reach enough people to make a difference.

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