STRATZ 2022
Well may you ask, “How did this world take its form?” Why of all the worlds in creation, has this one its strange properties, its diverse and motley collection of creatures, cultures and lore? “The answer,” One whispers, “lies with the Titans.” -Elder Titan, the Worldsmith
For many people around the world, this decade has been rife with great anxiety and confusion. At times, it might feel like your Tier 3 towers are low on HP, and that the enemy’s Aegis just won’t expire. But through all the uncertainty and sense of decline, we here at STRATZ have been relentless in our efforts to help you achieve your next win, giving you a team and product you can rely on.
This year, we’re proud to have released 29 major updates to you, alongside countless smaller releases. We’re developed great relationships with professionals across multiple disciplines within the Dota community, and partnered with beloved resources like Dota2ProTracker. And just as we’ve done for the past several years, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve more than doubled our site traffic again in 2022!
There’s a lot for us to celebrate this year, and even more to look forward to in 2023 and beyond. The new year will of course bring with it a boatload of new content and features as always, but we’ll also be beginning to focus on new areas of development, with special emphasis on the expanding STRATZ community, and the gaming sphere at large.
This period of continued growth and change will extend beyond just our products, but will also see us beginning to welcome more new members to the STRATZ team, both internally and in yet-unannounced roles that will begin to become available for dedicated members of our community.
While we can’t wait to tell you more about what’s coming next, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on our most significant releases from 2022. It all began once upon a time this past January…
…when we released Noto Sans as our new typeface! We then continued working through the month on building the intricate, highly scalable and feature rich desktop navigation system that you now use to move around STRATZ.com! This went live in the first week of February.
After that, we added site-wide support for live matches and real-time match queue analytics, bringing more life to every page for players and fans alike.
In the beginning of March, we overhauled your Player Heroes stats, and added exclusive support for tracking your Dota Plus progress. We then added more context into your Heroes stats by releasing your Hero Streaks page. At the same time, we rebuilt the Match Lanes overview page, and prepared to provide more detailed lane analysis tools.
We finished off the month of March by releasing a brand new Colorblind Mode, making STRATZ more accessible than ever before!
We didn’t waste any time getting more content into your hands in April, releasing your previously teased advanced laning analysis tools! We also unveiled Lane Outcomes across the site with this update, and made several improvements to the visual theming options.
Once your advanced laning updates were live, we hastened the release of your final match lane analytics page, which gives you the ability to more intimately compare heroes by position. We also addressed some issues associated with unauthorized use of our API during this update.
We finished off our April releases with huge additions to your Player Overview page, adding support for filters, activity, hero stats, and teammates. We topped off these updates with more filters and Dota Plus stats at the beginning of May, and began to unveil updates to your Match Overview page!
By the middle of the month, we announced a major update to Team pages, this time adding player data for both current and former members of each roster. During this release, we also had a significant update to your Search page, making finding anything you want easier than ever before!
May ended with our biggest Match page update in a long time, with a complete refactor of your Match Overview page, introducing two new views, and setting the stage for additional Match page updates. And for the first time ever, we focused on making your Match page be a joy to use on mobile!
June kicked off with more Match Overview updates, this time adding detailed insights for Objectives, a team net worth and XP chart, lane outcomes, and the draft order. During this release, we also announced site-wide support for the Ukrainian language, made possible by one of our community translators, Makakass.
We finished the release of the new Match Overview on June 10th, with the release of its updated Pageheader and Summary Row, hero ability and item builds, and kill breakdowns by team and hero.
The following week, we had a big spring cleaning release, which included lots of quality of life improvements across the site for things like search, filters, localization, performance, and more. We also announced that our newest team member, P1, had just reached the end of his behind-the-scenes work on rewriting our component library from javascript into typescript.
Shortly thereafter, we were caught with our trousers firmly in place when a Dota update made our OCR implementation fail in STRATZ+, making the application no longer able to detect heroes. We took this opportunity to completely rework how STRATZ+ handles detection, which we’d had aspirations to achieve previously, and in doing so, resolve almost all of the major bug reports and release most of the feature requests that STRATZ+ users had waited a long time for. This major update arrived in July.
We then launched another huge, long-awaited update to start off August, with the release of your new Hero Overview pages. This update added features like lane performance, top players, and featured guides to the Hero Overview, while modernizing the experience and preparing for the addition of other new Hero pages.
While this was an exciting release, it also marked the final one that STRATZ’s lead designer of almost 3 years, Fantôme, would be around to celebrate with us, as they ventured off into their new roles in a world so unfathomably dark, so utterly desolate and devoid of valor and glory…the world outside of gaming. All jokes aside, Fantôme moved on into their next chapter, having left a wake of enlightenment and progress during their time here at STRATZ.
The following week, we released your new Players Peers page, giving you the ability to reflect on your experiences with your both your greatest allies, and toughest foes.
To finish off August, we released a complete redesign for the World Leaderboards pages, adding filters and giving you quick insights into the top players you follow.
We rushed headfirst into September, releasing both your new Hero Synergies pages, and the [at that time] freshly available TI11 Battlepass Leaderboard. We also shared at this time that we were already well into our efforts to make sweeping updates to the STRATZ backend.
Our next update would be a totally new set of tools to do in-depth analysis of Match Vision, providing access to visualizations and controls that exist nowhere else.
To finish off September, we released a complete redesign of your Battle Pass Leaderboard page, adding a level chart, filters, and a few new data points along the way. We also released a set of performance updates across the site during the update, most notably to the Hero Guides pages.
Of course part of that update was to prepare for our early October release of brand new Battle Pass leaderboards for Rank and Country. For the first time ever, we could all thank Crusaders and China for leading their respective categories’ contributions to this years TI prize pool!
We quickly followed up this release with more new Battle Pass content — this time for Compendium Predictions! Valve hadn’t given everyone a free Battle Pass just yet, so sadly only buyers were able to get value out of this set of tools, but undoubtedly a great deal of BP points were earned with the help of these tools.
The following week, we released a complete redesign of our Leagues Overview page, adding dedicated support for TI, the DPC, and both professional and amateur leagues. We also adding support for live compendium predictions for you to use to track each prediction during TI.
With TI complete, we began November by releasing your Match Ability Builds page. We also pushed out complete support for this year’s Diretide, both for Player and Match pages.
The following week, we unveiled details on our near-comprehensive upgrade across our servers, showing off the 12 shiny new machines that are powering STRATZ today, and the system that’ll allow us to scale well beyond our current demands! We also spoke about our transition to CockroachDB and Clickhouse, along with other software upgrades.
The vast majority of the work to get our new backend up and running is now complete, and we believe we’ve ironed out the rough patches that seem to inevitably accompany major infrastructure changes.
The last week of November saw our team release your highly-detailed new Match Objectives page, complete with an assortment of interactive content to dig into how your game-states evolve over time, and which players had the most significant direct contributions to those changes.
Our 29th and final major update of the year came earlier this month with the release of your powerful new Match Builds page. Using this, you can explore intricacies of your and your fellow players’ item and ability builds beyond anything that could be done without tremendous effort in the past.
Today, we have multiple big releases that are very close to their public debut. Alas, they will mark the beginning of our release cycle in 2023, and can be expected to begin coming out in the middle of January. Our team will be away for the beginning of the month, getting some rest and preparing to take on the challenges that will arrive with the upcoming transitions that will be happening at STRATZ!
Happy New Year, and we can’t wait to share with you what 2023 has in store!
Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get notifications of our latest Supdates! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!
Did you miss our last Supdate? Take a look at your new Builds Timeline!
Thanks for reading!
