My experience on reach.gg

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"DotaBuff & ESL have just announced their partnership and formed a new online league called Reach. It seems like it mainly focuses on Tier Two and Three players and will provide them with a platform to show off their skills, and hopefully, get noticed by a big team."

So first of all I wanna thank ESL for investing in this league and providing this big prizepool so they can help the upcoming tier 2 scene. The problem is that the people that they put in charge with this league refuse to listen to what the players have to say. The league is going through bad times at the moment and it's only because of them.
With all my respect for the staff, I don't think that they are right in every aspect of the managemt of this league, which is why I strongly believe that they should let more experienced players offer some feedback. Higher ranked immortals consider this a waste of time and I would say that this is against the entire concept of what ESL presented the league to be. They only have 1 active admin who rarely gets help from the main staff member Cpt.Canuck which means that there's a chance that they'll be overwhelmed with the problems: delayed asnwers, people who get reported for ruining games on purpose get to play 2-3 more games on the league and the games don't get canceled either and they might ruin again which means that you not only wasted, but actually lost ~ 40% of ur maximum points for the day.

Let's talk about stats, personal experience and what other high-ranked players have to say about the league.


⦁ STATS
- About 50.000 dollars spent on prizes on both regions
- A total of 120 total players in pinnacle(the highest tier) right now
- A maximum of 20 players with over 7k mmr currently playing on this league and over half of them have around 2-3 games because of the quality of the games here(pui daca vrei: which puts them in the demotion window for inactivity).
- Out of 15 players that got prize money, only 4 of them were above 7k mmr (the rest are 6k or less, obviously).
- A lot of high ranked(7-8k+) players only tried it for 1 season and gave up because of the matchmaking system .
- Around 10 divine players + 1 ancient that played in last sprint( plus one 4k rank player that was vouched for the last 3 days of the sprint and managed to maintain a 0% winrate over the 10 games that he played.) Also, they said that the matchmaking system will be superior and that they will encourage competition only to have games where the 4k player gets matched against an 8k player without any balance regarding the other eight players whatsoever.
- Around 20 players who are 4 or 5k immortal rank and most of them are playing on core roles.(imagine the balance when you have games where two 6k players and three 5k players get matched against two 8k players, one 7k player and two 5k players, resulting in a 6k mmr difference between the teams and the admins saying that it's fair... but would you agree with that if you got matched in this game by valve?)
- Only 1 player that got in top 3-4 in around 10 sprints
-Some of the 7k+ mmr players finished the last sprint in the demotion window with 30% winrate in over 20 games, and one of them is a well known player in the tier 2 scene(I really struggled here whether I should give names or not but I don't see how people would not think I'm subjective without some kind of proof)
https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Goddam ,for example, had several unplayable games so he stopped playing like many other players. According to the rules of the league, this guy should be demoted. Also according to the rules of this league, some of the 5k mmr players deserve to keep playing here even though they underperformed.
As you all know, there's a pretty big struggle balancing your life when talking about tier 2/tier 3 dota because it's not a way to earn a living and you somtimes sacrifice time you'd usually spend with friends/family/gf/ other hobbies and that's fine because it's a choice we're willing to make to have our shot at making it big in DotA. However, investing time in this league at the moment is a waste of it because the games are far from balanced ( some players got to play 10 games in 3 hours all of them being 6=>22 minutes long) and the admins refuse to fix it or apologize for it.
Let me give you an example: Players had to qualify for the big league and we did, which is fine. Three days into the season( after playing 8 P.M. => 01:00 A.M. every day on the league) they vouched underperforming players and whoever got matched with them got their share of losses and had no more chances at the top spots anymore. The admins did not apologize, they did not cancel the day of the season, they did not kick out the underperforming players they just said that they can't kick people for underperforming( which is completely against what pinnacle was presented as).
Cpt.Canuck promised us after we complained about the game quality in the qualifiers for the league that it's worth it because only the "big boys" will make it in said league and that it's only one week of "suffering" for the chance to play in a more tryhard and organized environment. There will be a mandatory use of discord, no underperforming players,tryhards, fun games, punished people for being toxic or ruining on purpose. We have players who qualified by having a 50% winrate with only 2 games played. Of course, they are underperforming in the bigger league because they cared about the number of the players in the pinnacle. I get it, having a low pool of high-skilled players doesn't bring you, as the owner, money or sponsors. However, they are not being honest and they are breaking the promises that they made.
To further expand on what I just said, they canceled the games where intentional ruiners or feeders were found in the first days of reach. Now they refuse to do so and only ban them with increments ( from 1 hr to 3hrs to 1 day to 3 days etc etc) which encourages matchfixing(k0tuk, a top 300 player is the only one who got permanently banned for matchfixing and the games got canceled as well, but other than that they refuse to acknowledge it). There's also a problem with people who ask their friends to queue on it and dodge the last games of the night so that the games don't count and it's always that same accounts and they don't get removed but that's the smallest problem this league has atm.


⦁ MATCHMAKING SYSTEM

1.You'll experience a lot of unbalanced games.
An example of 1 of the most unbalanced games i saw was last sprint where 50 rank player "ZipZapper" was in a match with two divines and two 5k players and he was playing against an average of 1k rank players. If he'd win this in valve's matchmaking he should gain 250 mmr.
2.A lot of bad players especially on cores, most of them being 2k to 5k rank.
3.You'll experience high finding time(30-60+ minutes) if playing as a core since most of the decent pos 4-5 players dont want to support in a game where there's a huge discrepancy between the cores.
4. People who don't understand what a microphone or basic communcation is.
5. A lof of these games have the lower ranked players just running around like headless chickens and the higher ranked players(who are like 3-4k above them) just throw themselves at them to try and snowball further.
6. A lot of people complain and report players and games but it rarely happens since there's only 1 admin and he doesn't have the time to watch all the replays and see whatever matchfixing or game ruining details that he needs in order to ban people.
7. Expanding on number 6, the admins are inconsistent. People are not being demoted after being last place on the league, the wrong number of people are being promoted, random vouched divine players in the immortal only league, randomly assigned divine/ancient players as being immortals, and there's nothing being done about it. Your games get ruined and you don't even get an apology. Also, there are situations where one of the admins is banning someone and Cpt.Cannuck unbans them wrongly.
I have been playing on this league since the beta season where i got top 3-4 in the first sprint, and you might think that i got it because i deserved it but no, the only reason that I got this place is because I was lucky and every player that ever won prizes on this league was just lucky or abused the system being smurfs(another point of inconsistency is when they said that smurfs are not allowed, a lot of them played on the league and didn't get banned because "they are just too many" and now they are saying that smurfs don't matter anymore because the system "takes care of it". In reality, your queue time is a lot lower and you get better teammates so it still grants you advantages that they refused to understand when we presented it to them)
What I want to say about the beta season is that the games were just bad because all immortals could play here from 5k rank to rank 1.. The quality of the games was so poor, there were game ruiners, flamers, account buyers, matchfixers and so on but I believed in the fact that the admins are gathering data and that they will improve the system with each passing season. I tried my luck next sprint but i ended up getting a lot of ruiners and I was starting to lose hope because they were not getting banned(or just for a couple of hours, but never permanently). I didn't feel like playing next season because it didn't feel like a way to improve yourself and the valve matchmaking system, as stupid as it can be sometimes, was way better than what reach was providing. The main admin, Cptn.Canuck told me this: https://imgur.com/a/Vr7hnHt

So i waited for the next season to start.
Live season started and I was surprised because the league was not capped at 500 rank players, but rather they implemented a qualification sprint and again all the high rank players were forced to play with immortals 5k rank and even divines for 7-8 more days. I also suggested to Capt.Canuck to also make top 500 rank people be automatically qualified in pinnacle because the system screwed high ranked players a lot of times and there may be a chance that some of them refuse to play the qualifier because of the quality of the games.
Like i said before, they wanted the numbers so bad that they even qualified people with only 2 games and a 50% winrate, resulting in the same divine and lower-skilled players underperforming players in the pool.

This is where i fuck up: I became toxic, I started dodging games because a lot of people are doing the same (games where your carry is divine 3 and their carry is 8k but the system doesn't balance the game through the other 8 players because "we invented a new system that doesn't care about mmr") and I felt like my real life mood was affected as well by the performances that I had in the league. People mute you, they ignore your calls, they tell you that being 3k mmr above them is just a bigger number and that it doesn't matter because that's not how you measure skill in dota. I'm sorry for what I did and I truly apologize to everyone that I have flamed or raged at, and this goes out to all of you guys if you ever feel like your performance in dota determines the mood of your day you should step back and rethink your priorities. A friend of mine told me something about this league that makes a lot of sense when you watch the discord chats: There's never a high-ranked player(7k+) saying that the system is ok, every single one of them has complained about it and there are some semi-pro players who complained about it as well but I would rather not give any names unless this escalates or if the league dies out which I guess will happen in a couple of seasons becaue people have their limits on being screwed by the same system over and over again.
You know who compliments the system and says that it's perfect the way it is? the lower-ranked or lower-division players. Every time a top 500 player says something bad about the system they jump on them and start saying that it's perfect " I'm 4k but i eat immortals like you for breakfast" , "mmr is just a number", "all immortals are arrogant, teamwork is key in dota and you'll never get it" , " I destroyed all the immortals that I got in 1v1" etc. This is kinda scary because it's quite clearly who this league is aiming to appeal to: the players who think that the valve system is screwing them over and it doesn't allow them to reach their full potential but that's simply not true.
I play in the first sprint after the beta and I ended up having a negative winrate after 40 games. I had the worst games i've ever seen, having full 5k and divines players against averages of 6.5k+ . There were good, balanced games as well, but most of them were just 15-20 minute stomps(I'll repeat myself and mention the fact that we would get like 10-12 games per 240 minutes which is insanely bad considering there's a pick phase and a queue time as well)
In the second sprint i played around 40 games but the system screwed up and didn't prioritize me in the queue even though i was waiting for a very long time (40-60+minutes)and I couldn't play as many games as I wanted to. People, myself included, have reported this problem to the admins but it took them a long time to fix it. Again, no apology, they don't care that you invest 3-4 days into the league and some bug screws you over, not their problem. You have proof with the conversation with the admins below.
https://imgur.com/ZHGGn7Q

Thats me after spending 80 hours on that amazing league wich is made to help me and other high rank players to enter tier 2 as the title in the announcement says, but seems like admins think also mmr is nothing and they have better ranking system then actual matchmaking and also they think those 5k mmr players deserve a chance to enter in the pro scene.

So basically they just made a stew from 4k to 8k+players and refused to balance teams based on their mmr because they say that the system is broken and keep balancing the games based on their system which balances the game based on where you are on the leaderboard. There is a big sacrifice in trying to play professional dota and advertising yourself as a launching ramp for specifically that and doing what I mentioned above is just a big slap in the face to whoever decided to invest time in their platform and got screwed over by the system. What I would also like to mention is how they said that they will try different matching systems ( like 2 players are captains and they draft the other 8 players FPL-style) and other things like that but they never did and they refuesd to improve the current system too. Cpt.Canuck said that since the underperforming players have 50% winrate( it's only a couple of them,most of them have under 50%) then it's okay because that means that they are actually overperforming! But most of the games that they win is by them getting carried or by getting matched against each other. A lot of high ranked players stopped playing on this league.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone and I apologize to every single player that I flamed. I'm really disappointed in the people in charge with reach.gg and with myself. I thought that after so many failed leagues people will understand how important it is to be transparent with your goals and accept/ debate feedback but they refuse to communicate with us. I strongly believe that if they listened to the more experienced players the league would be in a much better place. I also know that they are not doing this on purpose and that they want what's the best for the league, but so do the players and it's insane to me that they don't get an apology, some explanations or some sort of communication or way to offer feedback.

This is my last attempt to send the message to the higher-ups of reach, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that players like Xcalibur, KheZu, Mastermind, SaberLight, Ar1sE, VANSKOR, bOne7, goddam, TANNER, Shad, MNT- and much more players gave up on it after one season because of the low quality of the games. The number of players didn't decrease by a lot but their quality got considerably lower. I think the best solution would be to have part of the prizepool given to the lower tiers ( they are lacking players in the lower tiers) and that would actually encourage some competition and future prospectives for lower ranked players to play on their league. Also, get a new division for immortals where you divide everything from top 1000 immortals or top 500.

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