Reach goes live today, and these are all of the details you’ve been asking about.
Who can play today?
Today we open the ladder to immortal players, as well as anyone who attended ESL Hamburg and received a code in their goody bags. If you are immortal ranked in EU, or NA, you will automatically be approved to enter the site and will simply need to head to www.reach.gg and sign in using steam. If you currently have third party stats disabled in the Dota 2 options, and we do not have a ranking for you on Dotabuff, you’ll need to enable that option so that we can get accurate data for you to seed you properly into the system. All Immortal players will be seeded into our Pinnacle division which is the top division of Reach. Users of lower skill brackets will have the system opened to them in the coming weeks. Stay tuned to our social media for announcements on that front.
Additionally, ensure that the “Block party invites from non-friends” is not selected in the Dota 2 options to allow our bots to invite you to games.
When does it go live?
We launch today at 7:00pm CET for European players. In NA, the first play session begins at 6:00 Pacific (7:00 Mountain, 8:00 Central, and 9:00 Eastern). Play sessions for today will be 4 hours long, with all other days of the week being 5 hours. This is to give us a bit of extra time to evaluate how the first play session goes and fix any issues that arise before the NA play session. Visit the schedule page for a day-by-day breakdown of when games go live and for how long. All times listed there should be local to your system clock in case you’re not in one of the time zones listed above.
How does scoring work?
Scoring is different for Pinnacle and Contender divisions. In Pinnacle, users are scored on a per-day basis. During the 1st to 3rd game of the day, players will be awarded 6 points for a win, and -4 for a loss. During the 4th to 6th game of the day, they will be awarded 4 for a win, and -4 for a loss. For games played beyond their 6th, players will be awarded 2 points for a win, and -2 for a loss. This is to emphasize consistency over a smaller sample of games, and ensure that the most score is derived from the first few games of each play session, as we don’t want players trying to min-max our play windows by giving up on games too early. This system will be in place for the beta weeks, but may warrant a change before season 1, so if you have thoughts on this system, we’d love to hear it in our community discord.
In Contender divisions, we use an algorithm to seed, and adjust your Reach ranking as you play. This system will be in flux through the course of the beta, and may see retroactive tweaks which cause your rating to fluctuate during beta weeks. If your ranking jumps up or down unexpectedly, don’t worry, we’re looking into it.
Is a subscription needed to play?
During the beta we’ll be allowing users into Reach for free to build a solid base of users and gather feedback from high ranked players. As the beta weeks continue on, we’ll be expanding the player pool slightly to stress test our systems and ensure that we can support the full player base we’re hoping for. We’ll be sure to post about additional expansions to the beta on our twitter @PlayReach and our discord. Keep an eye on your Dotabuff profile, as we’ll be notifying users there if they were accepted to the Reach beta.
When Reach launches into Season 1 it will be a premium service which costs $6/month, or $56/year. Reach is a package deal with Dotabuff Plus, so if you already have a subscription you’re set to go. If you subscribe to Reach, you’ll receive Dotabuff Plus as well for the entire duration of your subscription.
What are the prizes?
During the Beta, we’ll be awarding prizes on a series of “Sprints” which include multiple play sessions. Weekday sprints will run from Monday to Friday, and take place in the evenings. Weekend sprints will run from Saturday to Sunday, and run all day in Captain’s Mode.
Weekday sprints will have a prize pool of $1500 per region, with the top 10 players splitting the prize pool.
Weekend sprints will have a prize pool of $1000 per region, with the top 5 players splitting the prize pool.
Prizes and sprints will be structured slightly differently for Season 1 and that will be outlined in a followup post.
What else should I be aware of?
This will be the first time the public uses Reach. This is a beta, and, as such, there are bound to be issues. We are all hands on deck here, and will be working actively to correct any issues that arise in the system. If you notice a bug, or if something doesn’t make sense to you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to a staff member in our discord, or write into our support email at [email protected]. There will be minor hiccups, but we hope you have the best experience possible on Reach, and we’ll be listening to your feedback, and adjusting our approach rapidly.
