First off, let me just say a big THANK YOU to all who responded to this survey. I got well over 5000 responses so far, but I’ll keep the survey running for a while longer. Today I’ll give you some high-level stats from the survey as I know you are just wanting those charts! I’ll dig deeper into the material during the weekend, and during next week. So please be patient about more results. But enough text, let’s get to the good part, the results and the graphs!

So, who responded to this survey? Even though I tried to reach out and get more responses from people in the lower levels of hours played the results are heavily biased towards the group with 1k+ hours played. Please keep this in mind while looking at the results. They do not show a representative selection of the average Dota player, more than 85% in this survey has over 500 hours played and 67% has more than a 1000. Are the results perfect? Of course not since they are heavily biased, but some of them at least I find quite interesting. I believe most responders come from either Reddit and LiquidDota and both groups are players with an above average interest in this game and therefore also will have a lot of hours played. This can be both good and bad as it is interesting to look at results from experienced players as well, as this surveys results are to a big degree.

There is clearly most responds from the United States, and the western scene in general, After the United States there are five other countries who stands out in responding and that’s United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Canada and Australia. The age of the responders are mostly between 13 and 30, they actually account for around 97% of the responses with a peak on the 19-24 year olds interval. In general players do seem to spend a lot of time on this game, just under 10% spend 40 hours or more on Dota 2, equivalent to a normal working week where I’m from.

Some of the more interesting question in my eyes are how people look at their own skills and how their MMR relates to this. Again, this post is purely about high-level results, I will dig deeper into this material later. Keep in mind, the responders mostly have a lot of hours played when looking at these results. I’ve come to realize that the question “How would you rate your current skill in Dota 2?” might have needed a couple of more alternatives, but let’s look at what we got. Most people see themselves as “Above average” or “average”. Around 10% see themselves as being just below pro-level, which to be honest is quite a lot as the number of pro players is not that high, but there might be a “troll-factor” in these results from people trying to troll the survey.

Now, do everyone think their MMR actually reflect their current skill? I’m glad to see that for the majority they feel like the MMR is correct, but as much as 40% does not think their MMR is accurate, and out of these 93% believe their MMR is too low. There might be several factors working on this and some off it is probably people overestimating their own skill. But this is a complex game with a lot of factors so there might be other reasons as well. For some their placement matches might actually be wrong and the MMR is adjusting to the actual level, some might be on a winning streak and therefore feel like their MMR is wrong, but hey, we’ve all have had some big win streaks and loss streaks which basically balances out big variances in MMR. Being on a win streak does not necessarily mean that your MMR is too low, there many factors in this game which might lead to a big win/loss streak. But it is interesting to see that players still do not have full faith in the current MMR system. The next graph might be able to convince some more people that Valve’s MMR system is working.

So what are we looking at below? MMR intervals with 1000 points steps. Now these intervals are quite large, I know, but I was quite happy when I saw this result. The MMR is perfectly placed on a normalized curve! (The column furthest to the right is unranked) Clearly the MMR system implemented at this point is working as intended with the peak of players being between 3000 and 4000 MMR. Yes, there might be differences under each interval shown if we broke it down more, but overall most players seem too lie in the 3000-4000 MMR level, and remember most responders are experienced players with a lot of hours played!

I was quite surprised by the next couple of results as well. As you can see below players actually find themselves playing support a lot! Now, yes there are two supports on a balanced team and only one of the other roles so this should be kept in mind, but at least among the people responding to this survey, they clearly shows that the “my team always has four carries” might not be correct. Keep in mind though, the results are still heavily biased towards players with a lot of hours played and it seems like they step up and play support whenever it is needed because this graph does not look the same as the graph of what role they enjoy the most to play.

Which role do players enjoy the most to play? We saw that support is the most played role, but support is actually the role the fewest responders enjoy playing, where offlane is coming out on top, but overall these results are quite evenly spread out among all roles.

So the roles the responders like to play is quite evenly spread, does this affect the responders favorite hero? Rubick and Invoker stands out in the results so far as the crowd favorites with Windranger coming in on third place. I’m not really that surprised about Rubik and Invoker as both heroes have some very interesting mechanics. One thing I am more surprised about is that Mirana and Pudge is not higher up on the list as I would expect as they have alsways seemed like a crowd favorite. However this result would probably have been different if the results didn’t have a big bias towards experienced players with many hours of play.

It is also interesting to see that players clearly get frustrated while playing Dota 2. Most responders have said they get a bit frustrated, but there are almost as many that has answered “No” as players saying “Yes, very much”. This means that all in all over 80% of the players find themselves getting more or less frustrated while playing.

This is really turning into a huge wall of texts and graphs. Im going to end this part of the results with talking a little about the results on the thought experiments questions. In the first one “Would you kill an innocent person if you thought it might mean saving a dozen other people?” the answers are absolutely split in half. Which I’m not going to use a lot of time trying to explain why, but I do find it interesting the results are so close. The other question about an ok vacation you will remember versus the best vacation you have ever had, but will not remember once it’s done there is a clear trend towards being able to remember the vacation you have had. Now, there is no correct answer here, but it does imply that people might undervalue what they are experiencing in the moment and that it has no value if you can’t remember it and think back about it.

Again, a big thank you to everyone who participated. If you did not answer yet the survey is still up and running. You can find it here: http://dotaplayersurvey.azurewebsites.net/pages/1_Welcome.aspx I will lock myself in a room and dig deeper into the answers in the upcoming days and I’ll try to keep posting smaller updates instead of few big ones, but I will need some time to order and group them correctly Hopefully I will be able to give you more stats about the players after studying the results closer. The results will come at some point so no need to send me threats on the internet!

I have included graphs of almost every question below so you can see all of them. (I’ve left out the ones with A LOT of possible answers as they would be hard to read in the program I’ve used to visualize the data).