Dota 2 Behavior Score 2026: What It Unlocks, Why It Drops, How to Raise It

Your Dota 2 behavior score is a number Valve tracks on every account to measure how you act in matches. It affects who you are matched with and which features you can use, including ranked play. This guide covers what Valve has confirmed, what only the community reports, and how to raise a low score yourself.

What Is Dota 2 Behavior Score?

Behavior score reflects the quality of your actions in games, and it is separate from your MMR. Valve built the current version in its Summer Client Update of August 2023. That update kept existing scores, raised the cap from 10,000 to 12,000, and added a second number, the communication score, for chat and voice. Some players write "behaviour score". It is the same thing.

We found no official formula, average score or starting score for new accounts, so we do not quote any. Liquipedia says the scores are based on the reports you receive. A July 2025 guide on Hotspawn adds abandons and chat problems.

The rules here are current as of patch 7.41f (September 15, 2026). We found no Valve announcement since August 2023 that changes how the two scores work. When we use an older Valve statement, we give its date.

Behavior Score vs Communication Score: What Each One Unlocks

The two scores do different jobs. Behavior score affects who you are matched with and your access to features such as post-game item drops, game pausing and ranked play. Communication score reflects your chat and voice, and it affects text chat, voice chat, tipping and pinging ally abilities. If your communication score gets low enough, you are muted in text and voice, and your other communication, such as pings and the chat wheel, goes on a 30-second cooldown. Valve described this split in August 2023, and Liquipedia's 2026 page still describes it the same way.

Valve doesn't publish the cutoffs. Liquipedia's Player Behavior Summary page, last edited in June 2026, lists the numbers below. Players maintain that page, so treat them as approximate. We left out its coaching cutoffs, because Valve removed in-game coaching on July 30, 2026.

The Conduct Summary: How Your Score Updates and Where to Check It

The "Dota 2 conduct summary" is the old name. Liquipedia says it became the Player Behavior Summary on August 30, 2023, the day of Valve's update. The game shows it as a pop-up after about every 15 matches. It lists your behavior score, your communication score, and the players you reported successfully. Expect changes in batches of 15 matches, not game by game.

Liquipedia names two ways to see more detail. One is your Steam account data page for Dota 2 (steamcommunity.com/my/gcpd/570, login needed), which includes the reports made against you. The other is a file in your Dota 2 install folder, game/dota/cfg/latest_conduct_1.numbers.txt, which holds your last summary.

Why Your Behavior Score Drops

Valve doesn't publish how much each one costs, but these are the causes current sources describe.

• Reports. Players can report during a match or after it, on either team, with no limit. Liquipedia lists six types: toxic chat, toxic voice, smurfing, griefing, cheating and role abuse. Several reports lower both scores.
• Chat and voice problems. Liquipedia says being silenced by the game for the rest of a match hits communication score hard, and that words turned into asterisks make it more likely. Excessive pings and alerts count as toxic chat too.
• Abandons and AFK. Liquipedia counts an abandon as 5 minutes of total disconnect time (3 in Turbo), 5 minutes without gaining experience (3 in Turbo), or leaving through the matchmaking menu. Hotspawn's July 2025 guide lists abandoning and going AFK as causes of score loss.
• Role abuse. In Ranked Roles, not playing your assigned role can be reported.
• Smurf links. In September 2023, Valve said a main account tied to a smurf account could face anything from temporary behavior score changes to a permanent ban.

Bad behavior can also put you in Low Priority. Liquipedia lists abandons, repeated reports and griefing patterns as triggers. It is a separate, temporary penalty. You can only queue unranked Single Draft, you meet only other Low Priority players, and you cannot queue ranked until you have won the required games. Liquipedia says only wins count.

How to Increase Behavior Score in Dota 2 Yourself

There's no trick to it. Give the system fewer reasons to mark you down, and let clean games add up.

• Finish every game. Do not leave through the menu. If you disconnect, reconnect fast, because total disconnect time can count as an abandon.
• Play the role you queued for. Role abuse is a report type.
• Do not grief. No feeding on purpose, no going AFK, no stealing farm, no destroying items, no using abilities against your own team. Liquipedia and Hotspawn list these as griefing.
• Keep chat clean, or stay silent. If you are angry, do not type. If the filter turns your words into asterisks, stop. Use pings sparingly, because spam can count as toxic chat.
• Use Dislike, not arguments. The post-game screen offers Commend, Dislike and Report. In August 2023, Valve said players you dislike show up less in your future matches. Save reports for real offenses, not for a bad game.
• Commend good teammates. In August 2023, Valve said players you commend are more likely to appear in your matches. We found no source saying that giving commends raises your own score.
• Do not count on Turbo. Turbo games count toward your 15-match cycle, but Liquipedia lists smaller maximum gains for them.
• Check why you were reported. Reports against you are listed on your Steam account data page for Dota 2. Fix the pattern you find first.

Behavior Score Not Going Up? How Long Recovery Takes

Valve doesn't publish a recovery time. The best clue is Liquipedia, which lists the most points one summary can add when you received no reports.

Read it like this. Points arrive once per summary, about every 15 matches, so one or two games change nothing you can see. Gains shrink as your score rises, Turbo gains are smaller, and reports can pull a summary below its maximum. If these figures are right, a best-case climb from 3,000 to 7,000 behavior score takes about 11 summaries, roughly 165 matches. That is our arithmetic on community numbers, not a promise.

Behavior Score Myths

• "Under 3,000 you are in a shadow pool." Hotspawn's July 2025 guide describes a pool where you meet only griefers. We found no Valve statement using that name. What sources support is smaller: low-score players are matched with each other, and Liquipedia lists 3,000 as the ranked cutoff.
• "Winning raises my score." Liquipedia describes the score as a measure of your actions in games. Nothing we found ties it to winning or losing.
• "Mass reports will drop someone's score." Liquipedia says the system stops counting an excessive number of reports.
• "I will just start a new account." Valve's September 2023 post counted alternate accounts used to be toxic without consequence as smurf accounts. It banned 90,000 of them and said it traced them to their main accounts. In August 2025, Valve announced more than 75,000 further bans of win traders, smurfs and other bad actors.

If You'd Rather Not Do It Yourself

Raising the score yourself is the first route, and it costs nothing but games. If you cannot spend the time, there are three options on our site. The choice is yours.

• One-to-one coaching: you play your own account while a coach reviews your games with you. It doesn't change the score directly; it helps with the habits that get you reported.
• Behavior score boost: a booster plays on your account to raise the score. The order page has live chat with your booster and our team, and an encrypted Steam login box that only your booster (and our admins, if needed) can open and that is deleted when the order is done.
• Low priority removal: a booster wins the required Low Priority games on your account.

You can pay by PayPal, card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and the site is available in 10 languages.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Dota 2 behavior score reset?

We found no Valve statement about a scheduled reset in patch notes 7.33 to 7.41f or in Valve's Steam announcements since mid-2022. In August 2023, Valve said current scores would carry over into the new system. Your score moves with your games, in the 15-match summaries described above. A fresh account is not a clean fix either, as the myths above explain.

Does behavior score affect matchmaking in Dota 2?

Yes. Hotspawn's June 2026 guide says low-score players are matched with players of similar scores. In March 2024, Valve said Dota Plus members would see an estimate of skill range and player behavior scores when a match is found, with a choice to accept or requeue. Liquipedia's Dota Plus page, edited in August 2026, still lists that Pre-Match Analysis as an experimental feature.

What is the highest behavior score in Dota 2?

The cap is 12,000, for both behavior score and communication score. Valve raised it from 10,000 in August 2023, and 2025 and 2026 sources still describe a scale that ends at 12,000.

What is the difference between behavior score and low priority?

Behavior score is a running number based on your actions and reports. Low Priority is a temporary penalty. According to Liquipedia, you leave it by winning the required games, and losses do not count.

Bottom Line

Behavior score is Valve's record of how you play. It gates ranked, pausing and post-game drops, and communication score gates chat. It moves in batches of 15 matches, so the fix is slow and plain: finish games, play your role, and keep chat clean. Do that first. If you would rather not, coaching lets you keep playing your own account, and the boost is there too. When your score is back and ranked is open again, read how Dota 2 MMR calibration works before your next ranked run.