With WCA 2014 in the books and ESL ONE New York just around the corner, now seems like the perfect time to release our inaugural Tier List. For Dota fans who want to follow the upcoming action, but haven't had the time to keep up with the Meta recently, this is your chance to catch up!
Basically as long as eSports has existed, competitors and observers alike have sought to build a systematic understanding of the competitive values of different variables, be they weapons, strategies, or, most frequently, characters.
In very few games is this endeavour more important than Dota 2, because Dota players do not specialize in one Hero to the exclusion of others (as is the case with characters in most fighting games, or races in Starcraft), but rather are expected to learn and play any Hero in the pool as the meta demands. This means that tiering of Heroes gives insight more valuable than whether and to what degree the game is imbalanced; it constitutes the crux of all strategic decisions in arguably the most important part of any match: The draft.
The Fountain's Tier Lists do not pretend to measure the objective value of Heroes (nor, I would hope, does any Tier List for any game). Such a value most likely does not exist and, even if it did, would almost certainly be impossible to quantify.
What we can measure, however, are the Hero preferences of pros for a given period of time, or, put more dramatically, which Heroes are the strongest during that period given the cumulative knowledge of the best players in the world.
Our Methodology:
All Heroes picked or banned in at least one professional game in the past month (from the 5th of the previous month to the 5th of the current month) are ordered according to the number of games in which they are either picked or banned (i.e. Appear in the draft)
Heroes picked/banned in less than 5% of the total number of games in the past month are discarded
Remaining heroes are ordered according to Win % + Ban % (Wins / Games + Bans / Sample) or "WpB"
The top 20 Heroes (the number of Heroes that appear in a draft) are categorized "Tier 1," the next 20 "Tier 2," and remaining statistically significant Heroes "Tier 3"
Why WpB?
Statisticians and statistics enthusiasts are by this point recoiling at the offensive crudeness of the primary organizing metric of our Tiers. They can be forgiven. Win % and Ban % are rates that explicitly do not even share a denominator. Adding them results in a number which is no longer meaningfully a rate.
The statistic was inspired by another with which numerically-inclined baseball fans will be well familiar: OPS. On-base plus slugging is calculated by simply adding On-Base Percentage (Non-outs / At-bats) and Slugging Percentage (Total bases / At-bats). While the two values that go into calculating OPS do in fact share a denominator, this does not save them from the problem that failing implies for WpB, weighting two indices equally without any mathematical justification (1.00 non-out is not necessarily equal in value to 1.00 base, just as 1.00 win is not necessarily equal in value to 1.00 ban).
In spite of its apparent lack of mathematical rigor, OPS has turned out historically to be consistently either one of the most directly correlated statistics with runs scored or the single most directly correlated, depending on the time period examined. Statistical indices are a tool. We calculate and track them to gain insight that we otherwise would not have. OPS, laughably simplistic though it may be in construction, tells us about the offensive production of a baseball player or team with an accuracy that no other metric does. We argue the same is true of WpB and Hero value.
What WpB allows us to do is to track how powerful Dota 2's Heroes are according to the information available to the best players in the world (either being picked or being banned in a match require that players do not ignore a hero entirely), while correcting as much as is possible without obfuscating meaning for the possibility that the pros know more than they think they know. What we mean by this is that it is incredibly common, almost to the point of being a rule, that Heroes' winrates drop below 50% for a not insubstantial amount of time before they stop being commonly picked or banned.
This is simply because *strategies in any competitive endeavour begin to fail before they need to be replaced.* This is the force behind meta shifts in any game. Simple Pick/Ban % fails to tells us about the Viper with a 69.5% PB, but only a 46.2 % winrate between September 5, 2014 and October 5, 2014 because pros have learned to play against him but continue to pick and ban him with above average regularity until they are absolutely certain he is no longer effectual and decide on an alternative. This is a crucial omission if one wants to get anywhere close to discerning which heroes are "strong" or "valuable" in the current meta. We correct for this by considering Win rate and Ban rate simultaneously.
Conclusion:
All this said, we are not infallible. While we believe we have achieved a level of clarity in ordering Hero value that nobody else has, we recognize the importance of additional commentary or criticism. Any statisticians who have input on WpB or our methodology at large are welcome to contact us at [email protected] with their concerns.
And to all our valued readers: Thank you for your time. We hope you enjoy our analyses.
Kate "Damiya" von Roeder killed herself at approximately 2:00 PM PDT on October 1, 2014.
A software engineer who had worked as a technical analyst for Riot Games until September, 2013, as well as a one-time caster for BeyondTheSummit, von Roeder released her suicide note to the public yesterday, reporting that she had purchased a shotgun and was about to shoot herself with it.
Von Roeder, a trans woman, briefly discussed her struggles with the transition process in her note. "I shouldn't have done it. Not because I'm not trans, but because I didn't have a fraction of the personal strength to succeed at it, unlike some of the amazing trans people I've been privileged to know," she wrote. "But paragraph after paragraph of whining seemed like a poor way to go out; most of you have had to deal with enough of my bullshit."
"I've been an albatross around the neck of a lot of people I respect and enjoy. To those who tried to befriend me and whose friendships I abandoned and allowed to wither and die, I'm also sorry. I wish I knew how to be a friend, but I just wasn't wired that way," she closed. "For these sins and more, I'm sorry. I'm just not a good person."
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide prevention hotline. Contact them at +1-800-273-TALK (8255)
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