STRATZ+ Goes Global

While STRATZ stays at home

But the Battle Pass is still coming soon

Every year, the STRATZ team puts our booties on and sets sail for The International. Except for this year, following Valve’s announcement that the massive event will be delayed until at least 2021. It’s not a surprise, and it’s certainly for the best, but it’s sad news regardless.

On the bright side, while the world stays at home, and while Dota sees a huge spike in active players, STRATZ+ has just finished preparing to accept localization assistance from our community. So far, we’ve received word from contributors looking to provide translations for Russian, French, Portuguese, Persian, and Czech languages. We’ll be releasing new language support on a rolling basis as our contributors finish, and will be looking to give public recognition to those who offer significant contributions, unless they wish to remain anonymous.

Reach out on Discord if you want to help translate STRATZ+ into your language.

On the Neural Network side of the STRATZ+ news front, Ben “Shadow Of My Colossus” Brain, STRATZ AI’s marksman, has set his sights on getting our networks ready to support Captain’s Mode — Battle Cup champions rejoice!

STRATZ+ like you’ve never heard it before

Earlier today, we released a new mini-series of STRATZ+ introduction videos. We broke down the experience into 11 short clips, totaling 18 minutes for the whole series. We hope this video tutorial approach helps both new and existing users gain clarity on the STRATZ+ experience. You can expect to see this playlist in-app very shortly, alongside an updated Start Page design.

Last week we gave a brief update on our renewed development of STRATZ.com when we told you that Carceri was pounding away at a big new update. While much of this work is hidden behind the veil of #Private-Github-Repo status, you can get a sneak peak into the first portion of our updated page navigation on beta.STRATZ.com. More to come on this topic very soon.

In the wild wild world of STRATZ API, we finally have some results of the Cassandra-to-Scylla database transfer we spoke about a few weeks ago. And they are shiny indeed.

First, let’s do a basic primer on how databases work.

*clears throat*

Okay, so databases store information on a server. Sometimes, people ask for some of that information. When they do, the server has to ..read that information, which takes time. This is sometimes called read time.

Before we updated our backend, STRATZ API was reporting an average read time of about 250ms (0.25 seconds). Not amazing.

After our transition to ScyllaDB, which included some screen time between Ken and Scylla’s team, our average read time is now down to about 17ms — an improvement of about 1500%! For those interested in more deets, our 95% (slowest 5% of read times) rate went from about 900ms to 60ms, and our 99% rate went from around 4.6s to about 500ms. Now that is amazing.

Alongside the GraphQL overhaul we recently completed, and the Gzip update from Keo a few weeks back, the STRATZ API is bussling along at previously unimagined speeds. While we don’t have the numbers on it, load times on STRATZ.com have reduced sharply, allowing for a much better experience for everyone.

Finally, our team has been tinkering with site analytics for years, first using Google’s analytics, then more recently with Fathom, and as of today, we’ve upgraded our toolset to Matomo. I know, I know — how we track our site traffic doesn’t really get the blood flowing like getting access to another new exclusive analytics feature, but we’re hoping that this upgrade will serve as an important step forward to uncovering user behavior across our products to help identify common pain points, underutilized site paths, and a number of other means for exploring how we can improve our user experience.

Think you’ve got what it takes to join the STRATZ team? We’re hiring!

Enjoy keeping up with what’s happening at STRATZ? Follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Facebook to get a new Supdate every Friday! If you want to get more involved, join us on Discord!