There’s a lot of buzz behind the scenes here at STRATZ as our team prepares for the long awaited TI10 Main Event! Fantôme has been hammering away relentlessly on bringing you a worthy [League Companion — TBA], while KB wears several hats on the field of battle to ensure that the brains and circuitry required to power that experience is screwed tight.
Blukai and Carceri have been tag-teaming both the existing expansions we’re working through to complete your brand new Hero(es) experiences, while polishing and breaking new ground in the exciting new STRATZ League content.
Also, our team’s not-so-new comer 🎉Andrew🎉 has been hammering away on some experimental content that will arrive on a STRATZ.com near you in the near future. Andrew’s entering his senior year at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where he studies computer science. He first reached out to us last September, and started getting his hands dirty in our systems shortly thereafter.
Andrew has proven himself to be a tough and intelligent contributor from the very beginning, and is responsible for the recently released Site Map and Special Events pages, among several other small projects and improvements. He landed an official internship with us earlier this year, and most recently has been putting together a secret project that we can’t wait to share with you!
Along with being an all-around great guy, Andrew’s a longtime Immortal Dota player who has brought unique insights and a fun positive energy into our daily standups. Our team’s ambitions and attention to detail can be demanding, and we couldn’t be happier to have someone like Andrew to make our collective journey that much stronger.
So without further ado, onto this week’s release!
Possibly the biggest of the big news this week is another addition to your new Hero experience — this time, one that will feel both very familiar, and hopefully very refreshing. Introducing the new Heroes Abilities Descriptions pages!
The new Hero Abilities Descriptions pages are a living documentation for every hero with a huge range of details, and serve as a natural expansion for our recently released Hero Attributes pages. As we all know, Dota is a massively complex game, where even simple mechanics are often rife with nuance. These pages are our first attempts at capturing the full essence of all 121 heroes’ abilities and displaying both the simple and advanced nature of each of them.
Within these pages, you can quickly find which abilities pierce spell immunity and are themselves dispellable, which abilities are affected or activated by Aghanim’s Shard and Scepter, view a dynamically zoomed minimap of every abilities cast or attack range, and much more. There’s a lot to be unveiled by brushing through these volumes, and best of all — they’re always up to date!
We still have some updates to make to complete this experience, some which will be completed as early as next week, with others coming online as they connect with other new planned content across the site. Stay tuned for more!
Another huge update today is one that we’ve been anticipating for a long time, and we’re super excited to release it to you. Some of our long-time users might recall a time when STRATZ was home to comprehensive match statistics, leveraging Valve’s replay system to uncover stats from all players. A couple years ago, we completely removed all anonymous match history data from the site, and haven’t budged on our commitment to maintaining player autonomy in that regard.
However, League matches are broadcast publicly and stats for these matches have long been open to the general public. Today, we’re proud to offer comprehensive open support for league match histories for all players! This is a huge transformation for users that are looking to explore the matches from their favorite pros, and is also a great way for amateur competitors to explore their own achievements, even if they aren’t comfortable exposing their full match histories.
You thought you could hide all those crazy high IMPs from us forever, didn’t you Arteezy?! 😈
Many thousands of new profiles have just come online because of this update. This brings an entirely new functionality to the links on the Global Leaderboards, where most players have significant league match histories, and also vastly improves the usefulness of exploring League matches, as the linked players profiles will now contain the most relevant content relating to their public match histories in league play. And of course, player links in pro matches will now provide meaningful information for any anonymous players who are active in any leagues.
We’re continuing to explore ways that we can leverage other forms of public match history, to open up new opportunities to share interesting insights from top players in ways that don’t compromise players’ rights to privacy.
Last up this week is a significant update to how we handle the display of League Group Stages. While we really love how elegantly our cross tables display the information from the majority of leagues’ group stages, the TI10 qualifiers made it clear that we need to expand our new bracket system to support relevant group stage events. And so we’ve done it.
The new Group Stage bracket system automatically detects when it should to be used. Alongside this update, we’ve also enabled the ability to navigate between different parts of Group Stage events using our signature Circlet controls at the top of the page. The circle part is pending. 😁
We’ve got several more League updates in the pipeline, so stay tuned as we move together towards TI10 in just over a month!
An update on localization: We’ve been hopeful that the Gitlocalize team would be able to solve a significant bug that [was discovered by our German translator Ingi, and] has prevented us from releasing major new updates for our volunteer translators to tackle, which we expect will effectively allow the completion of entirely localized experiences for several languages. Unfortunately, we haven’t received any updates since Blukai provided a detailed report of these issues to their team on June 9th, and so we’re considering to attempt workarounds so that our translators can move forward. We’ll make an announcement once we know more, and we’re sorry for the delay.
See you next week!
Think you’ve got what it takes to join the STRATZ team? We’re looking for a new Machine Learning Developer!
Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get a new Supdate most Fridays! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!
Did you miss our last Supdate? Check out the Nemestice Battle Pass Leaderboard!
See you soon!
