Let’s try quantifying the split-push of teams

So how do we measure it?

We define the level of ‘splitting the map’ as the average separation between players on the team (See Fig 1.).

Fig 1. Calculating average separation for both radiant and dire. Red circles are dead or ignored hero locations. We never use dead hero locations. The bottom-left red circle is around a living Treant Protector, but he’s too close to the fountain to be included in our calculation.

We do not include fountain heroes, partially because we noticed Tinker makes frequent trips back to the fountain after he buys boots of travel, automatically leading to absurdly high separation values. In Fig. 1, radiant has only two heroes to consider, so their single separation is the team’s average at that time. For dire, with 3 living heroes, sum the distance between each hero pair, then divide by number of pairs to form an average.

The method for defining separation follows that used in a scientific paper on Spatio-Temporal Team Behaviour in DotA 2 (a thoroughly interesting read on team separation and movement between lanes/zones, across different DotA 2 skill levels).

The implementation from that article assumes a team is either split-pushing or 5-manning to some degree, as if they were two sides of the same coin. Assuming a team must be doing one or the other is an oversimplification.

There is a tertiary option; your team are all separately farming the jungle. With no lane pressure this cannot be considered split-push. Yet you are not 5-manning either. If this happens too often, you are probably just losing!

We have recognized this issue. Despite this, all modern pro players understand the massive impact of lane equilibrium on the game (an old, yet still relevant and insightful post from current OG-coach 7ckingMad demonstrates this. See the section on Outpush Lanes). Therefore the situation described above is very rare among teams of this caliber.

So what did we find from measuring the separation of teams at TI7?

The first thing we found out is what stage of the game will always have the highest separation: the laning phase. While seeing 5 people hugging mid 3 minutes into a match can be witnessed at lower MMRs, it’s rare to see at the most prestigious DotA 2 tournament in the world.

Only when transitioning out of the laning phase do we see the most meaningful shifts in team positioning. When a team GG’s after only 20 minutes, half of that game was the laning phase. This likely guarantees the match to have a high average separation. We want to know how a team behaves in the mid-game, without their short matches biasing the separation values we analyze.

Therefore, we split the game up into 10 minute sections, and will be inspecting each section individually.

While writing this introduction we had no idea what we’d learn from the final results. Here goes!