My Dota Diary And The Dotabuff VIP Experience
For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.
— Anne Frank
Diary writing has become somewhat passe in an era of screens. We’re oscillating between our phones and our computers—when is there ever time to document our thoughts?
Diaries are often eclectic. They can be part rant, part polemic, and sometimes just plain trivial. We may not keep diaries but we still write about ourselves. It’s just no longer in solitude.
My Life is in Shambles ... xD
— EternaLEnVy (@EternaLEnVy1991) March 22, 2015It’s been common advice for players reaching for higher MMR to take the game less seriously. More precisely—try to improve what you can about yourself and forget about the frustrations that you can not control. It’s stress management 101. There’s no use in flaming, in wasting time typing out profanities, when instead you can be more mindful about your own play. Expressing ourselves in whatever medium has its own form of catharsis.
FYUCKJ
— Artour (@Arteezy) March 24, 2015At Dotabuff we realize we have immense resources that aid the community in revisiting old memories. All our matches can be viewed at a glance on the page. We can see our K/D/A, our impact, and whether it made any difference in the win or loss. What we’re missing is what’s behind these statistics. How did we feel about our match? And did it have any lasting influence on our performance?
We suspect that it’s this kind of introspection that can help us improve at Dota. Diary writing has become a lost art, but today it has taken a new form, and it presents us opportunities to help us grow. At Dotabuff we’ve taken these concepts and implemented a new metric. Can your mood really impact your gameplay?
Introducing My Dota Diary
Our first change is a new statistic on our match overview page to assess player mood. Similar to Valve’s question of enjoyment of a match, we’ve built on this concept and established a baseline survey that will reflect overall player happiness. You will see these now on your match page. Here are a pair of examples:
Dotabuff Plus subscribers can rate each match from their dashboard:
Using this data we have also implemented a new trends graph. We are better at giving other people advice than giving ourselves advice. This trends graph gives us distance, allowing us to criticize ourselves in a more objective manner.
This is just the beginning. While this feature is still in beta, we are eager to examine our first wave of results on player mood vs performance. There are tremendous possibilities and implications. Was your unhappiness with your teammates in that one game a factor in your losing spree? Did your feelings about your team’s Techies pick derail your performance? Rate each match today so that you can re-live the agony of it all later!
For now, what these features offer is a collection of our experience. We may look at it and cringe, like reading an old teenage diary entry, or we may realize how far much we’ve grown, or not at all.
Dotabuff VIP Experience
Today we'd also like to present a new offering, especially with the rise of TI5 fever after last week's ticket sell-out. Though the pertinent details for Valve’s VIP experience haven’t been released, what is clear is that the general public will no longer have the same access as they had last year. At Dotabuff we would like to take this chance to give back to the community by offering our own, Dotabuff VIP experience. Here are the details:
We will meet up with you at the event, enjoy a lovely fast food dinner together, answer your questions, then sneak you into the event using the "badge in a bag" technique. (Must provide own travel and accommodation. May receive a $100 travel voucher if you allow a Dotabuff intern to sleep on your floor.)
A grab bag filled with an assortment of swag, including some or none of the following: stickers, t-shirts, Dotabuff Plus redeem codes, a paper bag, and a coupon for a meet and greet with Oliver Snith, renowned Chen player and SingSing’s friend.
Play a game of Dota with our staff. Must play a hero among the top 10 win rates and must be over 5k MMR.
A personal escort to the end of the Secret Shop line, where we will then provide you with a list of items to be purchased.
A seat inside the Dotabuff VIP suite, located in a vacant row held reserve by interns who stayed in line the previous night. Snarky live commentary to be provided by staff members of unknown MMR.
We hope that this package will satisfy our fans by offering a host of goodies, unprecedented access to Dotabuff staff, and a peek at what we do behind the scenes. We’re looking forward to meet everyone (Dotabuff VIPs) at TI5. See you there!
Pretty nice, but not much useful at all.
I like different asks on different heroes :)
April the first isn't for another day...
This April fools joke, as well as the personality test were a bit too soon.... its march 30th.
I am interested in this VIP Experience. Would I be able to obtain this package for less than 499 US dollars?
You guys are a day early. And Buttlet I am fairly sure the price is $322 US.
It's actually April 1st on EU West. Reported.
Lol @NahazDota
How do I get a Dotabuff VIP membership?
Using an Anne Frank quote in an April Fool's joke could be considered pretty tasteless.
You rolled in the april fools too early, 1/5 potatoes
April first isn't today yet ;-;
it's still March 30th here
a) march 31st not march 30th
b) in EUW its already april 1st
how in the world, if i may ask, does these trivia questions coherently reflect game satisfaction/quality/whatevs
Are we bidding for the VIP package?
nowhere in the world is it april 1st... guys, march has 31 days FailFish
Great stuff, but weird questions. Consider just a global item: How much did you enjoy your last game?
Edit: They use these weird questions, but really mean the one I just stated. Check out your trend page.
DID YOU ALL CHANGE THE HERO RANKINGS?? I DROPPED FROM 61ST TERRORBLADE TO 91ST AFTER WINNING A GAME WHAT THE FUCK
http://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks
Ayy lmao what a yoke
(nice yoke tho)
Vẻy funny :)) its march 31st here though
"How many kills did u steal" is a bad question, cuz for some players its positive, and for others its negative, and thus it doesn't relate to the overall match quality.
Pls, it's near enough to the 1st, the details are soon going to be announced, but its information was not a detailed one, wrapped with curiousity of players who really wanted to know more about this event. Eventhough this event won't be a real one, at least I enjoyed the April Mop rumour LOL :D
cool that u guys are improving your website but fuck these reviews, i am not gonna spend time on them, honestly i don't see a point in reflecting on games via this diary thing. it's enough for me to look at my games and remember how seriously i played and how good i played and what i needed to improve and look at my trends and see if there had been improvements already, but if i was fucking around in a particular game or wasn't carrying about the outcome then what's a point of rating it? :P
it asked me if my supports placed wards as morphling but i was playing support morphling
dumb dumb dumb
if any of dotabuff stuff read this: please, can you add an warning or alert on main player screen if one of my heroes in top 100 of Dotabuff :)
I would like an estimated win rate considering only the heroes in the pool and the matchups. I <3 my techies and even better when I win against minesweepers like Furion and Zeus.
badge in a bag ^^
escort to the END of the line. Did I read that right?