About / FAQ
This is a website to display various summary statistics for Dota 2 heroes, allowing the identification of characteristics and trends of the metagame. Each page displays a table containing the statistics of each hero in that metric, along with associated graphs that focus on the top 10 heroes of each metric.
Where does the data come from? - Data is downloaded from public Dota 2 matches played on official servers, in ranked and unranked game lobbies. Acquired with the help of the Opendota API.
Is the data from a specific rank or skill bracket? - I did not wish to only examine high MMR/Immortal rank data, as the majority of Dota 2 games are played in ranks lower than that. Dota 2 match data no longer contains the usual "Normal/High/Very High" skill variable that was determined by Valve, so finding an exact rank or skill bracket of a match requires examining data of player ID's in that match, which I am not focusing on.
What is a hero's rating? How is it calculated? - Hero ratings are calculated using Wilson confidence interval lower bound. This is a method of creating a combined ranking metric for data that has a measurable form of frequency (number of picks), a form of positive rating (wins), and a form of negative rating (losses). The purpose is to create a metric that ranks heroes by considering both their popularity and their success rate simultaneously, rather than choosing lesser ranking methods such as most picks, most wins, difference between wins/losses, average winrate etc. which would skew results and lead to various issues such as high winrate heroes being ranked at the top even if they only have a few picks, or high pickrate heroes being ranked at the top regardless of whether they win often or not.
Are the results live/continuously updated? - Results are not live, as I do not continuously download match data. For this analysis, I downloaded a large amount of matches all played around the same time recently, from the current game version (7.31b), making sure the sample is very large so it can be considered representative. Updating results is easily done, but new results requires acquiring data constantly and potentially paying to download an unlimited number of matches to analyse, which I am not currently doing.
What do the graphs on each page show? - Graphs show a visualization of the winrates of the top 15 heroes of each metric. For example, the niche heroes graph shows the top 15 winrates of niche heroes. The overrated heroes graph shows the winrates of the top 15 most popular heroes who do not have good winrates.
Are there any results for items? - Item data is available in match data, but this website currently only shows hero data. A page for item winrates may be added, as well as popular items on each hero and their win rates when buying said items.