STRATZ 2019

A year of growth, rebuilding, and major expansion

Published in

STRATZ

5 min readDec 28, 2019

This time last year, STRATZ was releasing our Hero Meta page, a dynamic player and league follow system, and making updates to our Match Analysis options. It was a very different time for us, where STRATZ.com and our API were our set pieces, and our Neural Networks were having some of their first successful test runs.

This year, our product line has grown dramatically.

💾 Our API now powers popular applications like DotaPlus and DOTA 2 Tracker, and offers both RESTful and GraphQL implementations.

➕ We had our first 5 major releases of STRATZ Plus, along with dozens of significant updates in between.

🎲 We created an [awesome] Drafting Minigame to share at TI9 in Shanghai, and are excited to release it publicly next year.

🛬 We built and have begun privately iterating on a professional match reporting application, which could could very well make its LAN debut in March at ESL One Los Angeles.

🎨 We redesigned the STRATZ.com light and dark themes, and have completely rebuilt our UI design system…

👠 …Which we’ve begun to show little by little these last 2 months through our new beta.STRATZ.com release cycle…

🌅 …That beckoned in the transcendency from STRATZ.com’s long-standing beta state, and the trademarking of the STRATZ logo.

👩‍👩‍👧‍👧 We re-imagined the way we handle our in house project management by working together with the awesome Clubhouse.io product.

😍 We’re finishing a transition from designing our products in Sketch to Figma.

💃 🕺👯 💃 👯 🕺 And neither last nor least, our team has grown tremendously in many ways.

Carceri joined our frontend development team in July and has been grinding relentlessly, often behind the scenes, ensuring that our new UI component library is swift, effective, and scalable.

Keo joined our backend team just last month, and has brought a great energy and enthusiasm to our ranks, along with a focused, methodical determination to make the STRATZ API the obvious choice for every DOTA 2 developer.

🥁 🥁 🥁 🎺 And we’re extremely pleased to announce that just this week, we’ve introduced another new hero to the STRATZ lineup — the mysterious and auspicious Fantôme! Bringing with them thousands of hours of DOTA 2 dominance, and a somehow even greater love of UX, design, and motion, Fantôme has shocked our team with their uncanny ability to bring all of us together around a single visual representation of the future of STRATZ.

Fantôme has already begun to make an impact on how we’ll be presenting our newest features, and you can be sure that your cursor will be dancing happy dances in response to their glowing enthusiasm for your competitive esports experience. Seriously though — Fantôme brings a dynamic to our team that we’ve never had the pleasure to experience, and we know you’ll be thrilled with the impact they make to our offerings in 2020.

The current state of the STRATZ team is at an all-time high, and we’re poised to bring an entirely new experience to all spectrums of the DOTA 2 scene.

As many of you know, this month has been dominated by our focus on our new pro tool. Just two weeks ago, we handed off our first version to a major professional team for feedback and testing. The results have been very positive, and we’re right on the brink of sending off all of the requested new features.

Going into this project, we were never sure whether or not this would be something that we’d introduce to the general public. Today, we’re very happy to announce that we’ve decided that we will. Some really cool features are included in this project, and we think everyone ought to know about them. To what extent we’ll be opening access is undecided, but we can at least tell you that we’ll be showing all of you the best new tool that professionals will be carrying into the booth.

For those of you participating in our public beta testing of STRATZ Plus, we’ve just released version 0.5.2, bringing support for Snapfire and Void Spirit, adding real-time banned hero detection, and crucially adding detection for lanes in matches with pre-determined lanes and roles.

STARTZ Plus is a live draft assistant, providing deep insight into every aspect of the drafting stage of your matches. We’d love to have you join us in testing this program — it won’t be long before we bring our attention back over to bring it out of beta. For more details, join us on Discord and make a request to join the beta test in our General chat channel.

Thank you to everyone for supporting us through 2019 and earlier. The STRATZ community has grown tremendously, and it’s with your help that we’re offered the gift of giving new perspectives on what it means to be a competitive DOTA 2 gamer.

We can’t wait to enter into 2020 and be a part of what makes the coming decade worth being excited for. See you there!

Think you’ve got what it takes to join the STRATZ team? We’re hiring!

Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get a new Supdate every Friday! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!