You might remember a website that went offline a few months ago called dota.rgp.io. This site contained data visualizations for lots of different historical trends in Dota, and disappeared without a public explanation.
A few months after it went offline, one of our top contributors, who goes by the name Spectral_Leamare on Discord, asked us if we could replicate the stats that had been displayed on that site. Not long after, we began to hear more requests for these insights. So we decided it was time to bring these stats back.
The first of these stats that we brought back is the player count in queue by server. While this can be interesting to look at, the real value in checking on queue rates is for players who are looking to find a match as quickly as possible, but whose lowest ping server isn’t getting a lot of traffic. Knowing when to include another server or two when you queue can easily save you 10–20 minutes of waiting to get in a game, especially if you play during off-hours.
This new tool allows you to look at every server in the world to see the queue rates in ~15 minute intervals. You can filter out which servers you’re interesting in using the Select element on the top left of the page, and can even use it to look at collections of servers by region.
We’ve only just begun collecting this type of data, so if you’re seeing this article shortly after publication, you’ll only see a few hours worth of trends. We plan to store 8 days worth of insights moving forward on a rolling basis so you can compare daily trends through an entire week, which can be especially useful if there’s an issue with Valve’s servers when you check the page, since you’ll still be able to approximate what the current queue trends are likely to be by checking the values from the same time on previous days.
Next up on the stats train is the current rank distribution by player. Looking at every player in the game, we can see that as of January 1st 2021, 6,761,810 players are calibrated. The average rank for all players is between Crusader IV and V, while about 72,220 players, or about 1.1%, have reached Immortal.
Another request we received was for a collection of charts showing the matchmaking trends over the last several years. We bundled these together so you can view match counts by game mode and region from the very beginning of Dota 2, and a breakdown of match count by rank since we began collecting this data in 2016.
Viewing these charts reveals several interesting insights. For example, South America is the only region that has been growing consistently from the very beginning. European servers have generated the most traffic overall, but from 2016–2017 they were out-paced by South East Asia!
Turbo matchmaking has been consistently experiencing a spike in traffic each May, almost definitely because of the release of each Battle Pass [aka Cavern Crawl], with player counts gradually returning to normal over the following months.
Harold player matchmaking has seen some major peaks and valleys over time, before finally becoming more consistent in September of 2019, when Season 4 began.
For our final resurrection of data from dota.rgp.io, we’ve added active and expired subscription counts for Dota Plus into cards found on the page headers of both the Road to Grandmaster and the Dota Plus Leaderboard. Just like with our player queue data, we’ve just begun to collect this, and we’ll have the option to add a historical trend chart that starts with data from this month once enough time has passed to make this data interesting.
What this data reveals is that Dota Plus is a very popular offering, with over 10% of active players opting to pay for the service. It will be interesting to see how each change to Dota Plus impacts the subscriber count moving forward.
If that wasn’t enough to get the new year started off, we’ve also added complete support for the new Aghanim’s Shard and Scepter updates!
You’ll find this new set of icons across the site in appropriate places like match and guide pages. We’ve also added support for Aghanim’s Blessing and Shard buffs, which use their item images as references, just like in game. We’ll be looking to add context-specific tooltips to these icons in the near future.
Last but definitely not least, Blukai has begun a laundry list of upgrades and cleanups across STRATZ. Most of these improvements will not be directly publicly facing, but once they’re complete, we’ll be sharing insights for those who are interesting in keeping up with behind the scenes action!
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? Take a look at our most significant achievements from all of 2020!
See you soon!
