Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right. -Henry Ford

I started this blog just for fun. My day-to-day work involves software and data and it was fun and low-risk for me to transfer some of my skills into eSports. I was honored when Pwnt asked me to be GankStars’s first analyst and I’m grateful everyday for the positive feedback I get from the VG community on Twitter and Reddit.

We don’t get paid to be Analysts and that’s part of why I enjoy it so much. When you work with other talented people on projects that you find interesting, magic happens. Passion (intrinsic motivation) helps you grow as a person, whereas extrinsic motivation often only helps you do things you don’t want to do. Of course, GS leaders want to compensate analysts in the future as they build a business (because they are good guys), but that’s not what this post is about.

E-Sports is one of the fastest growing new markets today. Over 188M people watched eSports last year and the market is expected to grow from $800M to $2B in 2 years. I believe it will be bigger than sports in the future and for me that’s great for industries that are heavy on math and sciences. eSports can have an extremely positive influence on our youth and give them valuable analytical skills.

I don’t know much about other eSports Analysts Teams. I have to admit, I’ve invented the values and processes we use to be a value-add to our players. Nonetheless, our goal is to create the greatest eSports Analysts Team in the industry. We’d love to know how other team do things, but we’re even more focused on being the best we can be and treating ourselves like the biggest competition.

We push each other extremely hard on math and accuracy on our analysts team. We try to figure out every fine-grained detail of how the game works. For this we use Google Spreadsheets and have our own custom workflow for completing analyses. But you know what’s even more powerful than spreadsheets? Software. Spreadsheets are like a Ferrari for the analyst’s mind, but software is like a G6 jet plane.

Spreadsheets are amazing for iterating on your work. They allow you to build from one calculation to the next. They keep everything organized and allow you to work backwards if you need to check your work. Software allows you to do all this and more. With software, you can do an analysis for one hero and then immediately duplicate it for every single hero in the game. If it takes you one week to analyze an entire hero with spreadsheets, software will save you 4-5 months of repeated effort to analyze the rest.

I’ve been building software for more than 10 years but really got good at the backend myself in the last 2 years. Both Vyzeox and Wavernot have recently picked up Ruby on Rails (honestly, an analytical person can get good at RoR in less than 2 months). Xelciar is guiding us as our pro in residence. Together, we aim to build tools that help players answer almost any question in the game. We are also interested in how data can apply to coaching and individual players.

Why are we doing this? For fun. To do it just because. Because we know it’s possible and if we get the right people in the room, great things will happen. The journey for us, is the destination.

We’re adding more analysts to our team in the future, but for now we’re looking for two specialists. One in Database Architecture and one in Data Visualization. If you are interested in either role or know someone who’s a good fit, please let us know!