Dota 2 is a numbers game and one of the reason why so many people love it is the number of variables it has. Where there are variables involved, there are stats and analysis on how change in a certain variable affects other variable. When it comes to Dota 2 stats, there is no name bigger than Ben ‘Noxville’ Steenhuisen. VPEsports had the chance to catch up with the stats man and talk with him regarding his journey into the world of Dota 2, his work at LAN events and opinion on the current meta amongst other things. Here is how it went:

Hello Noxville! How have you been? More specifically, how was the experience at the recent GESC Jakarta Minor? All the talent was raving about the treatment.

Hey! Mostly good. Quite tired since getting back from Indonesia – very busy at my work. At GESC, the talent treatment was very good – probably the best I’ve had outside of a Valve event. We had dedicated people to help us through immigration quickly in a private line and a police escort us to the hotel from the airport; which saved a lot of time after an already long journey. Our hotel was nice and close to the venue (100m), the food was great, and our talent manager (Pimpmuckl) put in a lot of hard work (he wasn’t supposed to be doing it, but filled in at short notice since GodBlessMali’s passport went missing in Hong Kong).

Always nice when organizers go the extra mile. Let’s go back a little. When did your tryst with Dota 2 begin?

The other day I was trying to work out which patch of DotA I first played on. I believe it was around 6.05 or 6.06 – just before Gambler was removed from the game. A bunch of us friends went into the computer lab at high school one Sunday and played it the whole day. DotA was always secondary to Counter-Strike 1.6 in my friend circle – I must’ve played 10k+ hours of that over the years! During my time at university I started playing more and more DotA though and a lot of my newer friends were DotA players. Dota 2 started with The International 1. Only a few people within my friend circle (who were all super DotA crazy) in South Africa had decent internet to watch streams back then, so we got together at my apartment and watched the entire tournament over the few days it was on. This tradition continued until TI 4, but ended since I worked at The International 2015. Before TI5, I’d only done in-game stats for The Summit 3 and a few other games in various qualifiers and online events. Myself and Anthony ‘Scant’ Hodgson started making a series of ‘Stats Bibles’ for talent going into events, since their preparation (especially for smaller/less known teams) was quite poor. Our goal was just to make them more prepared and confident going into events.

Approaching go time, ready to rumble. pic.twitter.com/syjmmAbEtx — Ben Steenhuisen (@followNoxville) February 20, 2018

That is a really long time ago! So it has been quite the love affair. When did this affair move to the statistical side of things? And what made you go there, were you a Math Major or Engineering Student?

I mean, let’s be serious – there’s very few actual ‘statistical’ things that are essential in doing computer game statistics (at least, for now). I was initially studying actuarial science (as a commerce degree) at university, but changed over to computer science and mathematics (part of the science faculty). Most of the skills required for doing Dota statistics are being able to collect large amounts of data, process and manipulate it, and search through it finding interesting tidbits. Both, traditional statistics and machine learning (which is an overly broad name) are useful tools at various stages of these processes – but it wasn’t essential to get into it. There was a lot of learning along the way.

I guess you’re right. It’s more about finding the right data and interpreting it correctly. At what point did you envision Datdota? And knowing that you are from South Africa, how did you end up in Germany?

It all started in 2013.An American with the nickname ‘Martin Decoud’ started Datdota in 2013, not too long after a bunch of decent replay parsers came out. The idea was to have a well maintained and curated dataset of professional matches – and to expand and enhance it. Since I used the website a lot, I ended up requesting like a million features to make it better and more usable. At some point he told me he didn’t want to run the site any more, and so I had to redo most of it (he wasn’t experienced as a software developer so a lot of the site was falling apart). This took up most of my free time for a good nine months, but since re-launching, we’ve increased the overall data stored per-replay by an order of magnitude. By TI 8, we should have complete feature parity with the old website (there are a few old pages not in yet – either because they’re quite complex to get right, or because they just weren’t used that much), but also have a huge number of newer features that the old site never had. In 2016, I had been working as a Software Developer in South Africa for four years, and only started working on E-Sports related stuff just a couple of years before that, that too in my spare time. At some point, the E-Sports work point where I couldn’t do both. Fortunately at a similar time, I got a job offer from a company in Germany (Dojo Madness) who are in the E-Sports industry. It seemed like a great fit, so I accepted the offer and moved to Germany. As a side effect, it’s also cut the travel time to most events down drastically. It took me around 26 hours to get from Cape Town to Seattle!

It always warms my heart to hear about an E-Sports story that works out perfectly. This is what Disney should be making movies on. Do you still work with Dojo Madness or is it full time Datdota?

Yes, I still work with Dojo Madness. I’ll complete two years here in May. We have an ‘unlimited leave’ policy, so provided you get your work done, you can take as much vacation as you want! This is pretty crucial for attending a lot of E-Sports events (the 2017/2018 season is going to be my busiest season yet – live at 6 events, and working remotely for 5 others). Now-a-days, I only have time for Datdota on weekends.

Seems like a dream job! But must be quite hectic, devoting weekdays to one place and weekend to the other. Now that you mention going to events, what are your main responsibilities at a LAN event?

It varies quite drastically from event to event. For most of the events, I do in-game statistics as well as working with the panelists to form narratives and to research things (or to give them info if significant records have been broken). Sometimes I work with the host during their preparation for an event. In a few events I work with the production to manage the on-screen historic data (like, DreamLeague and PGL). At ESL Hamburg I had to manage a 3rd party software of the University of York’s Digital Creativity Labs that was doing some of the stats-graphics. Most recently at GESC Jakarta, Redeye (the executive producer for the broadcast) asked if I’d be okay being part a regular segment in with a combination of stats, opinions, and memes. That was an idea him and Aleksandar ‘Bukka’ Bukurecki came up with and thus “Noxville’s Nuggets” was created. A few people got a bit mad at the memes, but most of the feedback I got was that they were funny and interesting.

My feedback: Definitely funny and interesting! Let’s come to the current meta. You’ve played the game for a very long time and have gone through a lot of patches. What is your opinion on the current meta? What would you change?

I’ve played very little Dota in the last 3 months because of a combination of moving apartments (getting German internet installed is honestly more work than getting an American visa), working at events (I contributed to the famous ‘SEA lose squad’ with GoDz, Fogged, ODPixel & Scant in 2 games) and being busy at work. Pub games don’t seem overly awful, or boring. On that front the meta seems fine. In the pro scene, there’s the constant numbers balance going on – Tiny, Chen, Gyrocopter, Omniknight and Death Prophet being picked or banned almost every game; and 48 heroes being picked or banned in less than 5% of the games! Most people expect the big ‘TI patch line’ to come at some stage, which will possibly shuffle things up. I’m not sure if this will happen or if it’ll just be a series of biweekly patches until the game is stable enough for a TI 8, but in either regard the game seems exciting and fun right now. I’m not sure if pro players see it the same way, but for a spectator the current meta seems good. If I could change something it would be patches coming in mid-events. I think it can have a big impact in both, the competitive nature and entertainment side of Dota 2. When the buyback change happened for example, a lot of teams made mistakes in assessing how that’d impact their game plan.

Ahh yes. Mid event patches can really throw teams off their game. But with so many tournaments taking place, there isn’t a lot of time for Valve either. Personally, I like to see how teams adapt. What is the biggest way stats can help professional teams? Do players/coaches often approach you?

I like seeing teams adapt to new challenges, but not waking up in the morning and going “Oh, the game we’ve been practicing for the last few weeks has fundamentally changed and our strategies are way better/worse now”. A bunch of coaches and players poke me at times for obscure stats, or ask about how something specific on Datdota works. My current project at Dojo Madness is actually making specific analytics tools for professional teams. We have CS:GO, Dota and LoL products and we have a few Dota teams on board already. The representation & visualization of stats is always the biggest challenge for Dota 2 data.

What is the story behind the name ‘Noxville’?

When I first started playing multiplayer games my nickname used to be ‘Nox’. There was a cool video game of the same name somewhere around the year 2000. But some RPG I played insisted on nicknames being longer, so it changed to Noxville.

Would you somewhere down the line like to be a live desk analyst?

Being a live desk analyst requires a number of specific skills. It’s not as simple as just standing around talking nonsense. I think there are a lot of people who are really good in that role (and experienced), but few who do the variety of things I do. So for now, sticking with stats seems the like the best way to go. Maybe one day that’ll change. It’s too hard predict anything in E-Sports.

Advice for anyone (like me) who dreams of being the next Noxville or Nahaz?

I think that E-Sports is still so new and growing – your goal should always try to be unique and interesting, and this isn’t something that anyone can really tell you how to do. Along the way there’s the obvious suggestions: work hard, use feedback constructively, continue innovating … and most of all – always ask for a contract!