Players with low behavior score could be trapped in matches that couldn’t be unpaused by “less toxic” players before this update.

With a huge update coming to Dota 2 on August 31, it’s no wonder there were a fair few bugs and missed features. As a result, a big list of fixes and updates were made live late on September 1 to kick off the new month of Dota 2 play. But in particular, one major issue was fixed.

Dota 2 games that couldn’t be unpaused

That issue was that a low behavior score prevented you from pausing and unpausing. However, this was quickly abused, as per a story from Reddit user u/EffectiveHousing2582 shared: 

As per the post, one player went to eat, realizing they had the highest behavior score in the entire game, and paused. This trapped players with lower behavior scores from even being able to unpause for over an hour. 

Luckily, that problem is no more as Valve quickly fixed the issue in the latest patch. Now if you're trapped in a pause by a malicious player with higher behaviour score, you can still unpause after five seconds and continue playing Dota 2:

From yesterday's patch (Image via Valve)
From yesterday's patch (Image via Valve)

And here are the full patch notes, just in case you’re interested:

Dota 2 Patch Notes 09/01/2023 Summer Update Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that would appear to allow you to commend/dislike the same player multiple times in postgame
  • Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause behavior score or communication score to get set to 0 incorrectly (the affected accounts have had their appropriate scores restored)
  • Re-added the ability to rotate your hero with mousewheel in the Armory and pregame
  • Re-added the ability to demo custom terrains
  • In games where the majority of connected players have a behavior score too low to allow them to pause the game, those players will now be able to unpause if the game has been paused for at least 5s
  • Fixed grouping by item type in the All Items tab in the Armory
  • Fixed announcer packs not loading properly when entering pregame
  • Fixed places in the new Armory where fonts would sometimes display at an incorrect size
  • Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause dead units to not stay dead (Undying, Spirit Bear, Wraith King)
  • Fixed multikill banners not being accessible in the new Armory
  • Fixed an issue that would cause the game to change monitors when running in fullscreen on multi-monitor displays
  • Fixed Dark Seer’s “More Than Mental Mass” taunt not playing sounds
  • Fixed Phoenix’s Crimson Dawn set only changing the appearance of the head instead of the full set
  • Fixed server crashes involving abilities from Dark Seer, Razor, and Hoodwink
  • Fixed a client crash when displaying certain tooltips (including Tranquil Boots)
  • Fixed custom game JavaScript support
  • Fixed Hammer crashing on startup
  • Fixed a crash when returning to the dashboard after playing a game
  • Fixed some over-bright rendering in Vulkan when color-correction post-processing was enabled
  • Fixed a crash in the Vulkan renderer on Linux
  • Fixed a crash on Linux GPUs with low memory
  • Fixed fullscreen flickering on multi-monitor Linux systems
  • Fixed a crash on MacOS versions older than 10.15
  • Fixed a hang on MacOS when purchasing certain items in the Armory
  • Fixed a particle crash on older Windows machines without SSE4.1 support
  • Fixed terrain sometimes displaying incorrectly (or being invisible) on low-spec Windows machines
  • Fixed a particle rendering error with Phoenix’s Solar Gyre
  • Fixed display of owned Kill Streak Effect in the Shard Shop
  • Fixed incorrect items sometimes appearing under the Tools section in the Shard Shop
  • Fixed some cosmetic particle effects not showing properly when previewing items in the Loadout or in the Armory (Void Spirit weapon particles, for example)
  • Fixed summons appearing next to heroes in postgame
  • Fixed Dota Plus quest to commend players not correctly counting all commends
  • Fixed a server crash when players were spectating under certain conditions
  • Fixed a rare courier-related server crash in Turbo
  • Fixed an issue where using Armlet could cause a unit to behave oddly on death (for example, give death bounty twice, or in Wraith King’s case, be teleported to the fountain on Reincarnation)

Changes to Armory and loadouts

  • Added persona selector to pregame loadout
  • Added slot headings to pregame loadout
  • Re-introduced Hero Relics into the shard shop
  • Disabled rebundling for items with unlocked styles, or which unpack with dynamic gems
  • Owned world items can now be demoed through the item details popup
  • Improved the display of chat wheels in the new Armory

Fixes to reports and commends

  • Commending a player no longer prints a chat message every time (to prevent post-game commend sprees from pushing all actual chat offscreen)
  • Added a new, distinct sound for disliking a player

Overall, there are a lot of quality-of-life fixes. But we’re still chuckling over the nine Dota 2 players trapped in a game, unable to unpause, as they’re all as toxic as one another. Although, we wouldn’t be laughing if it happened to us!


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