Dota Underlords is getting separate ranked and casual modes

Players who want a low-stress way to play autobattler Dota Underlords without risking their precious rank will soon be able to do that, as it's getting separate casual and ranked modes in the next update. As Valve's blog post puts it, with tongue firmly in cheek, "we've made the ground-breaking design decision to have two ways of playing".

To unlock the ranked mode you'll have to complete at least five games in casual. Daily challenges can still be completed in casual mode, and you can queue up solo or with friends. However, in ranked mode you'll only be able to queue solo, which is bound to be a bummer for some people.

There's also a new rank system coming, one that's designed to be more transparent, and in which "your Rank is now a number you can see that moves up and down in a predictable way. This change is based solely on where you finish in a Ranked match and does not depend on your opponents' Rank."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.