Took me a while, huh?
Got to admit, if Dota is not your job, it isn’t exactly clear how to manage the time for your passion projects. And with all the different things going on with my other interests, passion projects, work and IRL stuff, it kind of leaves no time to work on Dota things. Including blog posts.
That’s pretty much the reason why I became way less active on Patreon, too. When Dota was my full time passion job, there was enough time to follow the scene, write in the chats, do constants updates to the projects and data mining inbetween. Now there isn’t enough time to even follow the scene regularly, and sadly, I’m struggling to keep up with the chats-blogs-platforms, etc. Way back in the day I had plans to make videos regularly and maybe do vlogs, but not there just isn’t enough stuff to write about, and isn’t enough energy. (hell, as I’m writing this, I realized that I still haven’t updated everything to the latest patch haha)
Can’t say I’ve forgotten about it all, and it didn’t even become less of a priority. But, well, life happens. One thing makes me happy though: as I’ve been less active in the scene lately, there popped all sorts of people who openly expressed that they were inspired by my prior work, and they filled the now empty niches. As I did (and still do) things for the community just because I love the community, seeing that someone can continue doing the work (and even give a shoutout once in a while) warms my heart.
This blog post should have been finished in the late December, but it took me a while to catch up with all the things to get to that. So without further a-do, let’s get to it.
What’s been done
Admittedly not as many improvements as before, but I’m hoping to change that this year. And mostly this year can be described with one word: maintenance.
In terms of events there were PGL Wallachia seasons 3 to 6, The International 2025. I hope to work at more events this year, but considering how many things are on the agenda right now, it’s hard to say.
Along with that came our community events: Spectral Scrims and even a LAN event. Spectral Scrims function as a fun and relaxing way to unwind from meta, while also testing experimental features for the stats hub.
One big thing was of course Dota Rewind. This project was on my to-do list for a long time now, but I was never able to find the time to do it. After working on the concept for some time on and off throughout the year, I rushed it to release in December as an xmas present.
Another feature of this nature was a small update to Nerds Hero Builds section. While on the surface it doesn’t exactly look that different, there was actually a sizable rewrite for the web view, moving it to HTMX.
This allowed me to introduce dynamic load, additional interactive navigation features and search. Along with that, some additional usability features were added to make navigation easier, like small build previews or role stats and author in below the build’s name.
Along with that came additional backend optimizations:
starting items and items stats renormalization
updated WebAPI for the stats hub for easier maintenance and automatic docs generation (and swagger support) – it’s not out yet, but I’m planning to merge this branch in a week or two
internal analytics optimizations
SampleText improvements for text rendering, subsections, user blogs and other stuff (which is mostly in the internal testing, but it all should come together soon enough).
also since I started writing this blog post there are now template expressions, custom syntax for forms and gallery dashboards, template params, custom preloaders for pages and some minor adjustments. These are all in a separate branch and all these changes aren’t likely to be seen in the public part of the site just yet, but hey
As for the stats hub, I finally able to finish and release Starting Items and Consumables feature (or rather the UI for it). Admittedly, it’s not that widely used as the most value from it might be seen by the pro players and researchers. But the main goal for it was to be used with the builds section. Another part of this puzzle is Skill Builds stats (with Ability Draft support), which is still in the works and even has a complete prototype, but I didn’t have the time to finish the UI for it yet.
With it also came the never-stopping maintenance for the Interactive map. With the introduction of river streams and other peculiar map changes, it had to be adjusted too.
Other experimental features that came out closer to TI2025 were MVP and Performance Points (which are kind of like fantasy points, but not really).
…and Series View, along with Series Records and streaks.
My favorite feature of the bunch was, however, "player targeted bans estimation": basically deducing what bans were probably targeted at a specific player on a team and recalculating bans for draft tables based on that. Looks fancy, and it also gives an insight into how the opponents see the player.
The funniest little bit this year was another idea from the past, that took a bit too long to implement, but was a very fun linguistic challenge (another passion of mine): Emoji language translation.
Future plans
Most of the plans for 2025 migrate to 2026 without many changes.
Skill Builds and Ability Draft support – this should come soon enough
DBL rewrite and reworked reports engine – a lot of tedious work, I kind of don’t don’t want to start working on it, but hopefully I’ll finish it this year
Meta Levels, Hero Tier Lists – the most exciting features, which also don’t really require much time and effort, compared to everything else
Meta Section – this will pretty much be the same as a simplified Reports Lurker, just a clean and fresh meta overview
Match Stats Explorer – mostly important for “lost matches” and scrims, partially implemented in the Guame tool for teams already
Players and Teams ranking – this is probably one of the more interesting ideas that was on my checklist for a while, but I’m a bit scared to start working on it
Heroes Archetypes
GSI and Live Stats recorder
Less of a priority and more of a fun thing
Turbo/Herald stats – I still want to do it, but have to completely rewrite the data fetch loop now
Replay Hunt – Still working on it, but architectural things take priority for now
Artifact match logs parsing and stats hub – Still on my agenda, but it will require some time to research the logs format and parse them
Minimap Generator – That too is more of a fun side project. Maybe I’ll get down to it sometime this year, maybe not
Redesign – Kind of unnecessary, but it will come naturally with the backend updates and DBL rewrite
Features Showcase page – probably good to show off all the cool things I have, since a lot of people told me that certain features are hard to find
Server migration, bots protection optimization, a mirror – These three came out of Cloudflare quirks and the fact that both my current hosting provider and Cloudflare are blocked in Russia. This is not THAT big of a deal since everyone who wants to use it probably knows how to get around it anyway, but this sort of starts to become headache with time
Funny bits from the analytics
This year’s analytics report was a bit cleaner than last year. Though I sort of broke the analytics tool for a bit there, the nature of the bug didn’t affect the results. That said, the human vs bot detection was adjusted throughout the year.
First of all, one could clearly see the surges in bot traffic multiple times throughout the year, as well as the points when I decided to make the cloudflare protection more tight.
Funnily enough though, the biggest natural surge happened with the Dota Rewind release.
You can even see this on the requests per project chart, where Rewind took 3rd place, while being available only for about a week before the end of the year.
The most popular reports were, as expected, Immortal Ranked reports, TI2025, but also ESL Bangkok qualifiers and Dreamleague Season 25.
The most popular heroes were Tiny, Monkey King and Nature's Prophet in the reports, while Visage, Earthshaker and Queen of Pain were leaders in the builds section.
Neta 33, Sneyking and Cr1t are still the most beloved players in the spectral reports, with Yatoro and Ame coming in shortly after that. In the teams section, however, there were quite a lot of shifts this year. Team Spirit came with the 2nd place in popularity, LGD fell off, BB Team and Tundra joined the top-10, and EG/Shopify still remain in the top-3, even after the team was disbanded.
The not-so-surprising thing was the requests from Russia falling off: after the blocks became even stronger, about 70% of users reported issues with accessing the main site. That said, the percentage of users with ru locale chosen decreased not by much, likely meaning that most of the users are using VPNs or similar technologies. Uniquely, 215 unique users were using Emoji locale (which is less than 0.01%, but hey!)
Closing words
Hopefully there will be a lot more exciting stuff and even more time to work on it this year.
While it sure is troubling to keep up with the scene (and, oh, don’t get me wrong, I would love to make it my full time job if it would make sense), I will do my best to keep doing all this stuff.
After all, isn’t the life about having fun and passions?
Have a good year, spectral fellas.