Spectral Wrapped 2021
I already did something like this a year ago, so it’s time to do it again, I guess.
In this blog post I’ll quickly go through all the dota-related things I’ve done throughout the year, what changed and what plans I have for the next year.
Unlike the previous “wrapped”, this will be a relatively short note. More like a list, just to keep track of my own progress.
About support
Before I’ll continue with all the other stuff, I’d like to reminder about the Donations page. I don’t have ads or anything like that, and my “partnership” with teams is purely non-profit (at least for now). So any donation is important.
Also there’s a leaderboard for donors (who didn’t prefer to stay anonymous). Regular donors (and patreon subscribers) get access to the early access chat on Discord with more in-depth information on my current progress and plan (as well as early access links).
What happened in 2021
- By the end of 2020 I released Items Stats section, as well as Progression Trees. In December 2021 I finally released the Item Builds section, which is based on items stats and progression trees
- Also added the “critical timings” section that shows approximate time when the item stops being “beneficial”
- Finished working on “Cytomander”: an internal instrument to create reports-based infographics (I used it throughout the year, and it’s also kind of a test drive for my redesign ideas)
- Made renderers for every single hero (multiple versions for each) to use in infographics and other stuff, and also created a pack of consistently styled big item icons (about 30–40% of which I remade by myself), mostly for infographics and the website as well
- Got Twitch Affiliate (but it’s hard to find any time to play or stream lol)
- Added charts to display changes of pickrate/winrate/banrate by dayin reports
- Added a section with stats about player’s experience with a hero, showing how win rate changes with the number of matches played during the period
- Added stats showing winrate changes with the game duration for heroes
- Made full coverage of DPC Seasons 2021 and 2021/22, as well as results posts after each season
- Left Winstrike (and kind of lost a lot of progress because of this)
- But started working with PuckChamp and REDACTED
- Updated the Donations page (and slightly updated Patreon)
- Had an upgrade for Spectre stickers
- Made reports for every single The International, as well as the big post about TIs stats
- Added reports search to the stats hub
- Got invited to TI10. Been at the event, worked with the English talents and broadcast teams, did my part in making this awesome event
- As a bonus: at the time of writing I haven’t finished it yet, but before the end of the year I plan to release updated “Teams Diversity” metric and “Meta Balance” metric
Small things
- Remade Immortal rank icon for my site, now I have the cool vector version
- Full hero combos stats is now enabled by default in every report
- Social links preview
- League logos
- Many new things in the report Overview
- Bans in Match Cards
- API Variable Repeaters
- Sticky table headers
- Table search
- Hero aliases in metadata (used in table search)
- Tabs on the main page of stats hub, featured reports, search
- “Friends” block and social links on the main page as well
- Team specific heroes
- Unique heroes played by every player of a team (tsunami’s idea)
- Heroes first picked by the team during the event (TeaGuvnor’s idea)
- Picks and bans section for teams
- Best/worst heroes overview of a team and against it
2021 plans
- Simon. Effectively I had to start over after leaving Winstrike (my mistake), but I have some better ideas for it now
- New design and blog integration. Not yet, but I have it in mind
- Kamina as a new design. Nope, but it’s a complete LRG2 overhaul
- Item builds section. Yup. Stats part is there, just have to make some small additions
- Live matches API. Kind of still in mind, but Stratz already did it better
- New approach to collect ranked matches, re-collect all “Immortal” matches played since 7.00, average MMR of the games. The foundation is there, just have to finish my LRG3 overhaul
- Hero Board improvements. haha no, maybe later
- Visit The International 2021…yeah
What’s next?
I also have the “Roadmap” page now, where you can see all my “what” and “when”. But the approximate timings might shift, of course.
By the end of the year I made a scary decision to shift to my Dota-related projects as my main thing. It’s not as reliable and sustainable at the moment, but it’s what I would like to do moving forward. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it going.
Generally speaking, here are the 2022 plans:
- Play more dota, maybe stream. I didn’t have much time to play in past two years, and I’m not comfortable with streaming because I’m not going to perform as well as I’d like to. But we’ll see
- Nerds Hero Builds subsite with all my in-game and off-game builds
- Lurker: an instrument to quickly review high MMR stats and look for matches in specific matchups
- Kamina (LRG 3.0.0) with a lot more data, live matches tracking and plenty of other cool stuff (can’t say everything at the moment, but it will be cool)
We’ll see about everything else.
Gotta keep going with all this in 2022.
