After more than 2,000 hours in Dota 2<\/em>, I\u2019ve finally been sent to gamer jail for the first time. It\u2019s worse than I ever imagined, which makes it an extremely effective <\/em>deterrent in a competitive game where teamwork is essential. But now that I\u2019ve been punished, I see that there\u2019s a better way to administer multiplayer justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I had been proud of my perfect player conduct score since Valve introduced the rating system in 2019. (By the way, that\u2019s a score of 10,000, and it comes with a reassuring green smiley face when you\u2019re doing well.) The score is a loose measure of whether you\u2019re an upstanding member of the player community. If you\u2019re reported a lot by your teammates or abandon games before they\u2019re finished, your score goes down. I think those are the right metrics to track, even though people routinely abuse the reporting feature for petty reasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So here\u2019s why I\u2019m<\/em> in the Dota 2 <\/em>cone of shame: I\u2019ve \u201cabandoned\u201d several games over the past couple of weeks due to having a life<\/em>. For various reasons, I\u2019ve had more urgent phone calls to attend to than usual and other things that have demanded my attention in a way I can\u2019t ignore. To be clear: I think it sucks when people leave team games prematurely and, in Dota<\/em>, that includes going AFK for just a few minutes at a time. Even if you return to your keyboard and resume play, the jig is up: you\u2019ll be officially assessed with game abandonment. I\u2019m not proud of abandoning my teammates, even if we still ended up winning several of those games when I returned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve now been placed into what\u2019s called the \u201clow priority punishment pool,\u201d which is a very <\/em>lonely place. It\u2019s difficult to find a match; in my experience, it can take up to 20 minutes to find enough players to queue up with. And the really punishing measure is that you\u2019re required to earn several victories <\/em>to escape this matchmaking pool; losing a game doesn\u2019t get you any closer to freedom. Because each match can last anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour, it could take many hours to get out of purgatory. As of the time of writing this, I\u2019ve got one victory left, after trying to get out of this for about five hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some players are punished more than others for reasons outside of their control<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The way this system is set up means that some players will be punished more than others for reasons outside of their control, whether it\u2019s because of their own skill level, their ability to complete a match with life happening in the background, or because they\u2019re required to complete matches with people who are more likely to be horrible trolls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n