Hey everyone! My name's Bruno Carlucci, I'm a software engineer from Argentina, and I'm the guy behind this site's idea.

I've been playing DotA since v6.20 and occasionally following the DotA scene. I was lucky enough to be in Köln on the first "The International" tournament the whole 4 days and I was thoroughly impressed with the dedication of the players and the attention to detail of certain teams. It dawned on me that DotA (and Dota 2) was a game with very clear parameters, and that there might be a chance that those parameters would indicate, within some degree of certainty, who had the upper hand in a match.

The first problem that intrigued me was that of "counterpicking". The lack of heroes on Dota 2 at the International (I think they were just 55) made clear that certain heroes were strong because "there were no counters to them". Now, that made me curious. How hard of a counter is a counter? A Slardar is generally capable of neutralizing a Riki, but does that mean that a Riki will never be able to perform well against a team that has picked a Slardar? Naturally, that's not the case, because a game depends on way more than just 1 player. But if the win percentage varied too much, you could attribute it to the "counter effect". Now, notice that this didn't need to imply the Win% vs the counterpick HAD to be bad, it only needed to be worse than the Win% vs everything else.

In the midst of my musings, I met shostakovich and I shared my idea with him. He encouraged me to pursue it, and the first version of this site was born. There were few tournaments back then but between The International and ESWC, we had enough to start fiddling with lots of stuff. The list of stats to track grew quickly, and we added more parameters to track. The cool thing was that we started "getting" what was going on. There was predictability in picks, we could see certain heroes being better than others (and not always the same heroes, it rotated with the metagame!), we saw that some carries naturally had more GPM than others, that certain heroes were particularly good at killing (while others were exceptionally good at dying!), that certain teams played with a slower pace than others, or more teamfight oriented than others (as opposed as pushing or ganking compositions), and more importantly, that Windrunner was EVERYWHERE!

This was hosted at my home and I didn't have an available web server to host it. "But, web servers are cheap!" - you might say, but not for the Argentinian economy. This was a hobby of mine and I didn't feel like making it a business, finding a way to monetize it and investing on it at that moment. Also the site looked like crap because even though I like to consider myself a decent software engineer, I'm a terrible web designer! So, going open was a no-go. However, thanks to the friends I made in the community, we were able to reach casters, players, news organizations, and most of them received the project with great enthusiasm. Since then, thanks to the continuous support of a lot of people, we are (somewhat) ready to share our project with everyone as I initially wanted. I do sincerely hope that you will enjoy skimming through this site as much as I enjoyed making it, and I promise you that more stuff is on the making!

Last but not least, a little shameless self-plug. Due to my country's deteriorating economic and social condition (Think not of it like Greece's crisis but rather as something more Orwell-esque, where we're slowly losing our liberties) I'm planning on moving away in the following months, most likely to Europe, as I'm a European national and it would be easier, but I'm not closing the doors to other opportunities. If you live somewhere where the software industry is challenging and interesting, and you can put me in touch with some company interested in hiring, let me know! (Also here's my CV). Oh, and if said company were Valve, I'd go through whichever set of tasks they'd require of me to prove them that I'm a real catch! In any case, it's really hard to search for a job when you live in another continent, as employers, understandably, won't risk engaging in negotiations with a person that may perfectly never go to the destination country, so this would help a lot.

Regardless: this is a picture of my dog, Diamante! He'd love to be famous!

Bruno.

Hi. My name is Bruno Tomaz, I'm a philosophy teacher from Brazil, and I'm the guy behind this site's idea.

I honestly don't remember when I started playing DotA: it was at the time when FearDarkness was part of Complexity. I've been following the competitive scene since then. I always liked to discuss DotA in terms of strategy: I used to write some blog posts that I called 'Dota as chess' to discuss strategy. Eventually I joined the strategy team at GosuGamers. There, I told heikki and sabmud - two great guys who were with me at the team - that it would be awesome to have statistics of the competitive scene, as it would provide us a lot more of information for our replay analysis. At the time, however, it wasn't possible, as the team were focused on other things.

One day, after becoming the leader of the strategy crew, I was asking the users for feedback. And then I received a massive wall of text with on-the-spot feedback. I decided to talk with the guy who wrote that - that's how I met Wicked. We started talking about a lot of things, from metaphysical meditations to music. And when DotA statistics came into the conversation, we just went 'Let's do this' and started making plans. That's how the whole project got started.

And executing this was tricky sometimes, because it's not only a matter of having a system that can collect all the data. We spent hours and hours discussing which data we should collect, how we should present it, what is interesting, what is not, etc. And that was just the beginning, as we had to load the information from the matches manually while improving the ideas and the philosophy behind the project. And naturally, this project became very personal.

I do believe that doing deep match analysis is an essential part of DotA - if you never did it, then you never fully played DotA. This is the instance per excellence to get better in the game. As I see, there are a couple of things that make DotA unique and different: the particular format of the map and the huge amount of possibilities and complexity created by more of 100 heroes present in the game are the most important ones, and both are the reasons why DotA is all about strategy and tactics. There's a lot to analyze in a particular match, ranging from the player's mechanics to the strategical and tactical manuevers employed, and having statistics to consult is very important when you're analyzing. The numbers doesn't provide the answers, as every game has it's own truth, but the numbers prepare you to study and find the answers.

Lastly, I want to remember that this project is the result of cooperation between people, not only me and Wicked, but everyone else who somehow helped. Thank you very much.

PS: This is something worth listening at least once in your lives.