WHAT IS DOTA2 ?

6 min readApr 28, 2020

DotA2 is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that developed and published by Valve. It can play by every platform such as Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. The game is a sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DotA). It is a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. However, DotA2 has evolve into stand alone game.

HOW TO PLAY ?

DotA 2 has a style of play that is a fight between 2 teams. Each team can have a maximum of 5 players, which will occupy a strategic point in each area. In which each team has “Ancient” at the end of both sides. Players will play the role of a unit that is classified as “hero” which received a level up from the battle also they can choose a variety of heroes. The player’s goal is to destroy the “Ancient” located in the opponent’s stronghold.

WHY IS DOTA2 ?

We believe that the gaming industry is currently one of the most highly-regarded events in the world. According to DotA2 is one of the most popular games in the world. Finally, we chose DotA2 because we think that most people who do not play this game do not know much about this game. We would like to present various aspects of this game to everyone.

STEAM

Steam is a platform for buying licensed games. Around 2 million people are online and play games via stream every day. This graph shows the proportion of the top 5 most played games. According to the graph, it can be seen that DotA2 is the second most played game. DotA2 has an average of around 400,000 players a day and has been like this for 8 years together.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1GkUxIU0qZYOBHj063P9EcMaSr31COpTI

PLAYERS IN EACH COUNTRY

This is DotA2’s registered user data about 4 years ago. We can see that a lot of people are playing DotA2. I want you to look at the numbers in this graph and imagine its enormous growth today.

3 MAIN PERSPECTIVE

We have divided the 3 perspectives that we would like to present, which can easily understand even if don’t know DotA2.

Player’s perspective

Paired heroes win rate

We have obtained this data from a user on GitHub. He has collected the data as a datasets obtained from approximately 5000 games. However, we have chosen to analyze the winning rate of catching a hero.

This heat map show which matching heroes have a high win rate. If you are a player that is still looking for a hero to play when your teammates choose different heroes, this graph can tell which heroes works well with your teammates’ heroes.

In addition, you can go through our studies to create competitive advantages. At the pro player level, choosing a hero for each match is very important, so each team has to analyze the advantage and disadvantage of the hero thoroughly before starting to compete.

Node link diagram

According to above node link diagram, it shows matching heroes with a win rate above 65% in order to create easy understanding and player perception.

Developers’ perspective

Game developers have to keep checking the game system to be the best. That causes the development of different versions of the program to add interesting tools or improve the system of the program. In the game industry we call improvements as “Patch”, each patch has its own unique features to attract the attention of players that are still playing or players who will join in the future.

Game developers are always responsible for balancing the game. Some heroes have been adjusted to higher abilities in order to make players come to play more. And some heroes have been reduced in order to prevent them from being too good.

Parallel coordinates chart

Comparing the win rate data of the heroes in each patch and comparing it, there may not be much clear insight yet, then we try to differentiate the win rate of each hero patch to see the win rate changes. We can clearly see that some heroes with win rate change are outlier. Game developers will get benefits from this if any Outlier heroes have something wrong.

Business’s perspective

Each year the gaming industry is growing. Many games make money for the company. In terms of the company, we should look at which games we should invest in especially to make more money.

TI

Each year, DotA2 will have the largest competition called the international (TI). There will be 18 contestants selected from different regions in the world. This program has been organized from 2011 until the present.

TI prize pool

We can see that the growth of prize money is increasing every year. From the graph in recent years, there are over 30 million dollars in prize money, which is about 900 million baht in Thailand. This is a prize of all ranks, but the winner receiving a total of 15 million US dollars in approximately 450 Thai baht. This is a lot of money when compared to other games. From the numbers that indicate this winnings, we can interpret that the company must have so much income that this prize can be given to players without financial damage to the company and indicate that the company or the gaming industry grows each year.

Arcana skin

In 2016, there was the idea of game developers that in every event the international competition. It will be voted on which heroes to make a competitive skin called the “Arcana skin”. People who voting need to buy something called Battle pass, similar to the DotA2 game subscription.

From the graph, we found that there are a lot of votes that are very close for each year. However, what we really attend is voting. It can be seen since 2017 the voting of both sides combined have exceeded 50 million vote. Earlier, we have presented about the number of DotA2 players 4 years ago compared to the present. We found that the number of players in the game has increased considerably. This can indicate how much the gaming industry has grown.

Skins

Skin is something which changes to the appearance of the hero in the game or as an accessory such as weapons, hats, shoes, armbands. These things simply add beauty and do not increase the ability of the hero. The company would make a lot of money right here.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1xIFtiDdZv0QB-2Pnlvlt4wS6q-I2grez

We assumed that the company will create skins for heroes that have a lot of players so that people will buy a lot of skins. We interested in the number of selections ratio for each hero and the number of skins ratio. In addition, we calculated the average of both ratios. As a result, they have the same ratio.