Valve adds Dota 2 Ranked Roles queue for Dota Plus subscribers

One of the Dota 2 community's favourite aspects of the battle pass for The International 2018, which wrapped up in dramatic fashion last month, was the Ranked Roles matchmaking queue, which let players pick a specific role that they couldn't stray from before they jumped into a game. The queue is now being added to Dota Plus, the game's subscription-based service.

In Ranked Roles, each player picks a role—support, mid lane, safe lane, etc—before queuing for a match. The matchmaker will then put five players together so that each team has one safe lane, one mid lane, one off lane, and two support players.

It ensures more balanced, structured games in which you can rely on your teammates to do their job. If you stray from your role, you can be reported by your team—but I reckon most players using it want to take it seriously. Valve didn't say in its blog post whether Ranked Roles is a permanent or temporary addition to Dota Plus.

To kick off the new queue, any players that win five games will earn 5,000 shards.

If you missed The International 2018, then one of the highlights was a match between self-taught AI bots and human players—read all about it here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.