We had the pleasure to talk to Alan “Nahaz” Bester on the second day of the group stage at StarLadder ImbaTV S5 Invitational Minor. It was the first day after the 7.13 patch and we didn’t miss the chance to ask Professor Nahaz about his opinion on all the changes. But before we got there, we actually talked a little about his starting days as an analyst for the game and what was his Dota 2 hook.

Hello, Nahaz, we are close to the end of the second day of the event, here in Kiev, how do you find it so far?

I love it! It’s fun to come to these StarLadder events because they have a very good streamlined setup, of course, they do, they’ve done a tone of events, so everything feels very worked out. It’s also very nice to see that at this point of the season the minors finally start to feel like minors. The stories are more about these up and coming teams, and it’s good to get to talk about all these teams’ improvement rather than have to talk about the same big four teams at every event. And to be honest, that is giving me a lot of optimism going into the next year with the Dota Pro Circuit.

I think that we all knew from the beginning that this year is going to be a little like a transition phase. Certainly, there are some problems with the system, problems that have to be addressed but, overall, I think that most of the fixes are very clear and very easy changes to make and I think next year will look a lot better.

I know everyone is expecting from an interview with the master of stats that we would talk about the new patch and how it will influence the game, and we will get there. But before that, I’d like to talk to you about how you actually started your Dota 2 journey. How did the economics professor Alan Bester discover Dota and when and how did you decide to invest time into analytics for this game?

I’ve been a gamer for all my life but I played far more single player games than multiplayer ones. I was hugely into Everquest but I quit that to finish my PHD, and actually, my wife has pretty much forbidden me to play any other MMOs. Dota is the only MOBA that I played for this much time, like thousands of hours. I got into it at first mainly because I have a brother in law who is much younger than me and I was looking for a way to get to know him.

It happened that both of us got our Dota 2 beta keys at the same time and he taught me the game. He was a DotA 1 player while I never played Dota before. So, I liked the game and it got me hooked in.

By pure coincidence, it was actually during the StarLadder StarSeries season 5 where I was watching Sheever streaming the regular season games. I was in her twitch chat and I sort of started posting stats there. Before Dota, I was a huge fan of Baseball and Basketball stats thingy for many-many years. I did that as a hobby, I actually spoke about it at a couple of conferences, but I kind of got tired of that because it felt like those were already saturated. All the interesting problems have been solved.

So, I was in Sheever’s twitch chat one day and I started posting stats, very much like you would see for Baseball. A couple days later she literally hunted me down, she had a bunch of her subscribers hunting for me online. At that time I was out of town and I came back to like 10 emails. The idea of stats was just put in the game and Bryan “Kpoptosis” Herren who’s done the stats for her in StarLadder season 4 moved to Beyond the Summit. So, Sheever asked me whether I wanted to take his place for Season 5 and I was like why not? It also just so happen that in that semester I had a morning class and an evening class, so the times when the games were usually played, was in the afternoon in US, so I was “Sure, why not do this?”. And from there on, it kind of snowballed out of control.

My first LAN event was MLG Columbus where I decided to go as a spectator and before going there I tweeted at a couple of the joinDota people. I did that the weekend before the event would start because I’ve met some of their staff at TI4 but didn’t see Tobi for instance, ever since. So, I tweeted at them saying, “hey guys, I’m thinking to drive by and visit you in Columbus”. Adam Apicella who is the CEO of MLG, saw my tweet and said, “hey, why don’t you come down and come on the panel?” and I was “alright, yeah sure, I’m driving there anyway, I just want to watch the games.” And so, I was on the panel for almost the entire weekend. I was with Soe and Blitz and I had so much fun.

Wow, that’s pretty interesting and it’s super nice to hear that StarLadder was your starting point. I guess they didn’t know it.

No, they didn’t. I told them a couple of years ago when I was at my first LAN for them, and they were surprised to hear it, they had no clue at all that they got me started.

Alright, so everything snowballed out of control from there, as you said. Last year you actually decided to put your Academic work on hold and dedicate to esports and Dota 100%. How is that turning out?

There were a couple of things that happened at once when I decided to do this. My wife got a job in Washington DC and we moved there. It happens that Washington is the place where her family is, and that’s been a tremendous help for us because we have a 4 year daughter. Having my daughters’ grandparents able to help us was extremely important in this decision. I was at the point where I needed a break in my career because I ran an Academic program at my last institution I was in. It was a great experience but it was very draining, it was a lot of investment, both in time and emotional. Right after I finished that, me and my wife took this decision together.

I’m happy with how it’s gone so far. The biggest thing is that I do events, I do a little bit of consulting on a side, and as in any field where you go consulting, most people when they start an agency in this business, they start in a firm because as a solo consultant it’s really hard to build your own book. And that for me means I’m working with some developers, with some media companies that are looking to break into the esports field. Finding the initial client contacts it’s been challenging but you know, we are starting to build that up a little bit.

Obviously, I greatly enjoy doing these events and sometime between August and December this year me and my wife will sit together and evaluate all that happen. We made this decision, of me leaving the Academia for a year together, and together we will decide if it’s worth continuing like this or not.

There are two aspects we have to look at when we make that decision.Let’s just say this: Merlini and LD stepping down is no accident. The industry is growing up, no doubt about it. The Dota talent, we are growing up a bit as well, and it’s really hard when you are around that age when you want to start a family. It’s hard to be traveling as much as the scene is demanding right now. The events are very fun, Dota is where you passion lies but it’s a lot of travel for the amount of money you make. That’s what I’m looking at: is it worth financially to stay on this kind of travel schedule for the compensation. I hope that the answer will be yes because it is a lot of fun.

Well, I hope we will have you around next year as well. But speaking about the travel schedule that comes with this job, and about how Dota scene is growing, I’m wondering: do you think that having the pros reaching an age where they start to prospect the retirement option will change a bit the panels, should we accommodate them from now, and have more pros joining the desks? I mean, look back at what just happened at DAC with Kyle. In my opinion, he was a great addition and I’m sure a lot of fans would like to see that repeated. What do you think, about pros joining the panels, are they a feature to look for at the analytical or commentator desks?

Yes and no. There was a big push on reddit last year to have more pros on the panels but I think we should take a couple of examples to better understand this. So let’s take TI7 and then take Kyle at DAC. What you see looking at these two examples is that the combination of great game knowledge and the ability to communicate that in a broadcast setting is very rare. PPD and Kyle certainly have this ability.

Throughout my academic career, I’ve seen so many people who excel in their field. There are two types of students. One type of student is that he is ridiculously tooled up, he knows all the math, all the stats that you would want him to know and usually this kind of guys are saying I want to take more math classes, more stats classes. What I always say to these students is why don’t you go and take a public speaking course, because the combination of great technical skills and great communication skills is extremely rare.

Of course, at the other end, you have these people who are great speakers, but they are like “oh, but I don’t know math.” What I say to these people is that you don’t have to be a wizard, you just have to know the basics and be able to combine your knowledge with management skills. The exact same is true with Dota. There are skills that can be developed over time, I don’t want to make it sound like magical, but its’ not like you can take any pro player and put them on a panel as it happened at TI7.

What happened at TI7 was nice in some aspects but you know, pros when are not on the panels, they are not producing content, they are playing Dota. They are going and finding themselves a team, they are going coaching, they do all sort of stuff that’s needed for the competitive field. They are not that kind of people that are producing the other kind of content. And I’m seeing more people talking on redddit and other places about the lack of content creators. And let’s just be honest, we don’t have a lot of content being produced, and why is that? It’s because nobody pays for that, youtube doesn’t pay you and right now the reward for producing content is getting invited to the events, and particularly to TI.

I do think pros bring something valuable to a panel, I’m always very excited when I get to work with one of them but I think you have to understand that having only pros in a panel, where are going to be the people that are producing you content for the rest of the 50 weeks of the year?

Right, this sort of leads me to the next question, and here is what you love to talk about the most, stats. I’d like to hear your take on the new patch because I think a lot of things will change with the status resistance removal and with the reduced bounty from buildings.

The attribute changes I think are really good. First of all, I have to say that I really disliked the status resistance as a concept. Spell timing, ability timing in Dota is one of the fundamental things you learn as you start with this game. And it feels very awkward if you have an AOE disable like Ravage, the idea of that spell having a slightly different duration for all five heroes on the enemy team it’s just really hard to understand for a beginner. It also makes the game harder to play even for the pros. It’s fine that Tiny has status resistance, like a special thing for one particular hero or Aeon Disk for one particular item.

The other thing that I like about the changes is that all the heroes now receive the secondary benefit from all attributes. All heroes now receive magic resistance, not status resistance, all heroes now get movement speed from agility it’s just that heroes with that attribute as primary, get 25 more than the rest of the heroes.

In my opinion, the patch is a pretty big buff to the Agi cores because they are the sort of the heroes that tend to build the most plus all stats items, like Skadi, and Linkens etc. They are also the heroes that at least in the last four-five patches have got the least out of the plus all stats thing. The movement speed bonus from agility felt dramatically less powerful than either status resistance or the magic resistance that INT heroes got from intelligence.

It’s important to realize now that when you build a Skadi on Terrorblade for example, you are getting extra magic resistance, extra spell amplification, as well as the movement speed, you just get less of it than a strength or an intellect hero would.



Thanks a lot for clarifying and making all these things easier to understand to all our readers. At the end of our interview I would like to ask you who would you say are the strongest teams here at StarLadder, who do you see in the grand finals?



I liked the idea of OpTic and Fnatic in the grand finals even before the tournament would begin and certainly OpTic looked convincing on in their series against VGJ thunder. Fnatic, looked a bit shaky but I think it was just the first day, where they learn. VG J Thunder is the other teams you would talk about and place them in the grand finals but as it happens with the Chinese teams around this time of the year, I think they got figured out. We go through this cycle every year with the Chinese teams. In early February they have the Chinese new year break then by mid March there’s a couple of teams that start to win some games, they look good and then they get figured out and they are in a bit of a slump, but then they always come strong for TI. VGJ Thunder is a classic example for that. They brought a few new ideas with the safe lane Death Prophet for Sylar, some of the rotations they were running. Teams figured them out and now they have to make some adjustments. But I think this event is where they are still working on that.



Understood, thanks a lot for your time Nahaz.

You’re very welcome

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