There are video games, and then there are esports. And then there’s Dota.
For more than a decade, Dota 2 has lead the esports scene by hosting the most massive tournaments, having hosted the first $1,000,000 tournament (TI1), and the first $40,000,000 tournament (the upcoming TI10). There’s little doubt that Valve has single-handedly elevated the entire esports league system by bringing unparalleled capital into the equation, rivaling the payouts seen in traditional sports.
Until very recently however, Dota’s outstanding league presence has been poorly supported through its API, where league data was often incomplete, incorrect, and handling differently between events and patches. With the updates that began this January with the in-game DPC experience, leagues have finally been getting the backend support that they deserve. And so the time for STRATZ to leverage this new data has come.
Welcome to your new home for Dota 2 league stats.
If you’ve ever wanted to see your favorite teams, events, and series on a proper calendar, complete with data, filters, easy navigation, and custom formats, your time has come.
The brand new STRATZ League Calendar is here. Featuring a comprehensive DPC schedule, you can now review the 2021 DPC season by day, month, series, match, team, league, and/or region. Achieving this level of custom league access is no easy feat, and would previously have required a small army of wiki contributors (wink wink, nudge nudge) to attempt to fill in the gaps. Thanks to Valve’s new API, we’re very happy to provide a new take on this league experience to everyone!
In addition to the new calendar view, you can open a chronological list of all series and matches from this years DPC leagues. Basic stats for each match are shown inline when you click any series on either the Calendar or the List view. You can easily filter down to your favorite teams or regions, and during active parts of the season, you can remove completed series to focus on the future.
You’ll also find complete DPC standings, combining teams from across regions for a quick and easy way to compare performance. We’ll be adding DPC points and prize pool money to the Listings for a clear view of who’s earned what.
This year’s DPC leagues are the first to provide [fairly] accurate scheduling data, but we’re hopeful that many more Dota 2 League organizers will be encouraged and empowered to provide similar support moving forward. Our system is built to automatically accept all available league data as it appears, and can generally even handle incomplete or irregular results.
While the DPC gets the most attention, there’s a vibrant and thriving scene of competitive league activity at every skill level. We now support search and stats for just about every recent league, including the hugely popular Reddit and FaceIt Leagues, and many more which you can look through on the professional and amateur leagues pages. Many of these leagues also support detailed stats, with schedules and events available where possible.
Of course, no Dota 2 League experience would be complete without space reserved for the greatest esport event of the year — The International! To finish out our current Leagues section, we’ve dedicated a page to The Internationals, beginning with the 3rd.
This page contains links to each TI’s League pages, showing stats and schedules from the events, and a countdown to the beginning of TI10 (64 days at the time of publication).
Once you’ve found the league you want to explore, a new set of pages become available. First, you’ll be introduced to an overview of stats, which we’re continuing to build out to include live matches, league standings, prize money distribution, and more.
Next, you’ll find the league’s schedule. Here you have the same experience found on the DPC Schedule, only this time specific to a given league. Afterthat you’ll see the League’s Series page, which contains a listing of every series that’s been played. You have the option to expand each series to show every stats from every match, and you can filter down to see only those from a specific team.
To dig deeper into the match data, you’ll want to go to the Stats pages…
Here you’ll find a wide range of stats for every player, team, and hero played (and not played) in the league! You can even search through and compare every draft from every match…which is something that some professional organizations pay a huge premium for, albeit through the use of private lobbies and services.
Pro Tip: you can create obscure leagues and sift through your public match data from them on STRATZ, and nobody else will know how to find them. Save a few thousand $$$. And if you‘re interested in custom data, PM us on Discord. You’re not the first to do it.
For bigger leagues, group stages are where the excitement really begins to build. The best teams battle it out for placement, reputation, and inclusion into the Main Event. The new STRATZ Group Stage pages are the finest available, complete with interactive rows and columns, and easy access to match data from each series by clicking any series card. The Group Stage is a special part of each league, and we took care to give each one the spotlight it deserves.
Building responsive, beautiful, interactive bracketing systems is hard, but it’s something we were committed to bringing to the Dota community.
The Main Event of each major Dota 2 League is celebrated around the world, with millions of viewers and [when possible] thousands in attendance. We want our representation of these events to capture at least a little of the excitement they generate. As our attempt to do that, we’re proud to introduce our new bracket system ✨
Hovering over each team immediately highlights their entire journey across the Main Event, showing their entry and exit points along the way. Clicking any series opens a simple modal showing the matches played, with links to more detailed stats. And the mobile view is just as easy to look at and use. We hope you love it.
In the coming weeks, while we continue with our next big project, we’ll be shipping a few additions to the League(s) experience. We’ll be making refinements to the existing system, including updating Search to make it easier to find any League you might be interested in, and adding new data to make it possible to compare different players by position. We’ve already added support for quickly navigating between matches in a series to every relevant Match page, and you’ll also find that you can now click the name of a League from any match to navigate to that League’s page.
If you find a bug or have a feature request, reach out on Discord and we’ll see if it makes sense to work in. Enjoy!
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 new STRATZ experience in both Simplified Chinese and Thai!
See you soon!
