DotA 2 : It's mostly a numbers game

As I previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of using numbers as a way to understand things. For that I have been collecting a lot of numbers from the games I play, mostly all pubs. After gathering enough that I feel that I may be able to draw some conclusions or at least some patterns.

The first aspect I compared in my games was to see whether gold collection or XP collection actually produce a good indicator of which team will win a game. I used the total gold accumulated to make a ratio where I divide gold accumulated by the winning team by the gold accumulated by the losing team. A ratio of 1 means both teams accumulated the same, anything above one represents the winning team having more gold than the losing team.

All the data below is based on my last 131 matches. As you can see it appears pretty obvious from looking at these ratios that both are indicators on average to what team will win, and it is obvious that the team to get the most will tend to win. However looking at the individual numbers, I do see that there are 8 out of the 131 matches where a team with less XP actually managed to win. Most of them are quite close to 1, however there is a 0.84 and a 0.86, which sort of suggest that in general the rule works but there are circumstances where the cumulative XP isn't the only indicator.

Interestingly however, is the fact that the gold ratio is a much much better predictor. Only one game in my records has a 0.99 ratio, which is basically 1. While it does appear that gold might be the more important number here, it did make me wonder what kind of effect towers have in this. How much of this gold is actually coming from towers, in which case the late game, especially when the other team is doomed in their fountain, produces large amounts of gold, that are hardly useful for the purpose of predicting a winner. I suppose it would be much more useful to look at numbers excluding tower gold, or numbers up to the last 5-10 minutes. Another option which is probably more verifiable is to look at last hits, since this will potentially be less biased, however the late game can offer a large amount of creep killing as well.




Another cool little graph I produced was looking at the same gold ratio vs the duration of a game. I figured that games that last longer will generally have a more even gold distribution as teams are probably more balanced. From plotting these 131 games, it is pretty clear that this trend is accurate. For the most part games with a gold ratio close to 1 tended to last 45-65 minutes. As an aside, the average duration of my 131 games was 40.6 minutes.

My last comparison involves looking at my performance and how much I contribute to team gold in my wins and losses. Basically I divide my total accumulated gold by the gold accumulated by my team. Initially this sounded like a good comparison and I have a 20.7 ± 0.6 % during my losses, and a 19.0 ± 0.4 % participation during my wins. While there may even be a statistical difference suggesting that I do seem to be less important of a player during games I lose, I think not accounting for my role adds a lot of noise to the data. I mean this is an obvious stat to look at, but I wanted to see how much of an impact I actually have. A much more meaninful comparison would be to isolate only the gold I contribute in games I play a particular hero or a particular role.

So that's what I did. If I make the same graph but only look at my Furion games this is what it looks like. I did 22.3 ± 0.7 % of my team's gold during my losses and did 19.7 ± 0.8 % during my victories. Showing a slightly less noisy graph despite it having less than a quarter of the data points.

Anyway, I just wanted to post some interesting graphs for now, even if they are not terribly insightful. I will be looking to post more impactful graphs and information later on, as I learn more about this deliciously complex game.

DotA 2: 200 hours and counting

Since I've began playing Dota a couple months ago I've actually racked up 200 hrs of gameplay. Which is a lot considering my RL responsibilities. It's a really great game, that has managed to keep bringing me back virtually every night. I haven't had an experience like this with a game since I stopped playing WoW. Usually games get old after 20-50 hours for me. However, since DotA is so challenging and so complex, it makes you feel like you have to play more and more, to practice to actually become half decent. 200 hours is actually considered very noobie still, generally people that get good play thousands of hours, and it really does take that long to absorb even the basic complexities of this incredible game.

I think since this game has essentially become my new goto game, I might actually start posting more about my experiences in this game, what I learn and my thoughts on some of it. I know I'm still very fresh, but I figured some of my experiences may be useful to other new players and perhaps if I get some feedback, some more seasoned players may be able to point out flaws in what I'm saying.

Much like other aspects of my life, including work, I really enjoy trying to make sense of things using concrete information, and nothing is more concrete than numbers, which this game actually offers quite a bit of, so I might try to focus on that.

In terms of what my experience in the game has been so far, I have been playing mostly public match making games (Pubs as they call it, which is confusing since on wow they called it PUGs). I have played over 150 Pub games and some Co-op games when I try new heroes. I also started to play some BOT games now as a way to practice some of the more basic skills in this game such as last hitting and general mechanics of new heroes.

My record right now shows that I've played (win rate in brackets)

Nature's Prophet (Furion) - 46 games (54%)
Viper - 29 (52%)
Venomancer - 24 (63%)
Witch Doctor - 18 (61%)
Spirit Breaker - 10 (50%)
Crystal Maiden - 8 (623%)
Windrunner - 7 (43%)

I have played a couple other heroes more casually such as Phantom Assassin, Templar Assassin, Wisp, Morphling (my current obsession), Omniknight.

A lot of people suggest playing a lot of different heroes initially but I must say I find it frustrating to try new heroes in a Pub because I generally suck when I do that, so I rather play a few initially, get familiar and see how much it matches my play style and my taste. I've found that some heroes are great in terms of how well I can use them, but they aren't crazy fun to play for me (Crystam Maiden is the hero I'm thinking of). Then I have heroes like Windrunner and Leshrac, which I do enjoy playing but tend to suck at them at this point.