The excitement of The International gets closer every day. The anxiety among talent rises as they question if Valve will hire them or if they need to scramble to find work, just weeks before the event. Obviously, when it comes to analysing esports data, Dotabuff has a lot to improve on. We have decided to improve support for esports series and add functionality for team vs team comparisons. We are also excited to talk about the launch of our Overwatch website, Overbuff.

Series Support

Matches are now linked to the esports series they are a part of, and it’s now easy to navigate from a series page to matches. We’ve collected and analysed every single esports match (in the history of Dota) and grouped them into their respective series using an in-house algorithm. It’s now easy to compare drafts and pick order in a series. Comparing series wins and match win records can better explain how a team is doing in a tournament. It also helps to identify if teams are consistently dropping matches, but winning their series.

Tied into our new series system is an easy-to-use search for specific matches between teams. Head over to our esports home page now and give it a go! You can easily find series between two teams and filter it down to specific leagues if you wish. It’s that simple.

Improving Filters

Esports statistics can now be filtered by team, player, opponent, and other league based filters. Ever wanted to know what the win-rate of Alliance is against Navi? You can also search a team’s games by player (either with the team or an opponent) — while this can get messy if a player was on both Secret and EG several times, it’s a pretty cool way to drill down on games in esports.

You can even view a team’s performance in a league: here’s Secret’s stats as they crushed the TI6 Open Qualifiers. Or how about Puppey’s hero pool in the open qualifiers? We’ve now made available a ton of information at your fingertips. You just need to know where to look.

Introducing Overbuff, Overwatch statistics.

When we first started working on Overbuff, we weren't sure if we would even launch anything. We timeboxed two people with a deadline to explore what was possible in the game. After a little more than two weeks of work (with tons of additional work on Dotabuff), we were were able to put together a site that we think is pretty awesome for Overwatch statistics.

We weren't sure what the response would be like. Dota is a very different game and community from everything else out there, which is a big part of what we love about it. We also didn't want to rest on our laurels and aggressively promote our new site on Dotabuff. First, because it's a bad experience for Dota players who don't care about Overwatch, but it's also a challenge for ourselves. Do we still have what it takes to tackle a new game?

Working on an Overwatch website was in some ways refreshing. It has been awhile since we had the opportunity to approach game stats with such a limited data set, and such a straightforward game. It let us look at problems with open eyes and add some really cool things, like percentiles for KPI's (key performance indicators) such as weapon accuracy, and criticals. I can't wait to take some of the things we did on Overbuff and let them inspire new features on Dotabuff.

We are so grateful to both Blizzard and the community for being so amazing. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we even got DDOs'd in the first few days. We think that means we must be doing something right, right? We have seen strong growth and passionate advocates for our new site. If you like Dotabuff and play Overwatch, we hope that you'll check out Overbuff. If not, then tell your friends who play!