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Dota 2 Survey

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Hello fellow doto potatoes,

 

I'm doing a PhD about online social well-being and decided Dota 2 would be an interesting space to investigate. Considering we hear all kinds of good, bad and funny social interactions in the game, it's intriguing to know what the players behind the experiences are like.

 

  • How do players approach the game?

  • How do people view other players?

  • Are players as nice as they think they are?

  • How might MMR and other factors affect this?

 

To begin answering questions like these, I constructed a short 10min survey about player perceptions and Dota gaming habits. The survey will run for 2 weeks - If you would like more information or want to participate, you can head here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/IdleThumbsDota2

 

The survey might feel a bit long but it's important to have good data to work with (your patience is appreciated!). I will post some preliminary results in this thread shortly after the survey concludes (provided there are enough responses for certain types of analysis). If you have any questions or feedback, you can PM me or simply post in this thread. Any and all responses are greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for the help, every response counts!

 

P.S. This post has been sanctioned.

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OK, filled it in. I think there either was no ranked yet when I played or I was not comfortable playing it, so I just put no opinion there.

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Sure thing, that's absolutely ok.

 

Your post reminds me of when I played Starcraft 2: WoL - I would get a bit of ladder anxiety in mirror match-ups (i.e. PvP - it was 4gate hell back then).

 

It's interesting now because I don't get the same anxiety in ranked Dota 2 matches; if anything, I actually relish the competition. Perhaps it's simply the fact that it's a team game which makes things better, or maybe it's because there's no equivalent feature of mirror match-ups like SC2 (the closest thing might be 1v1 mid?). In any case, that's a story/study for another time  ^_^

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I get way less anxiety in 1v1 games than team v team for what it's worth - at least I'm only letting myself down if I lose.

I think a lot of it just comes from some sort of mental shift that I have trouble with, where losses/doing poorly has a different impact.

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Update: Thanks to everyone who participated! There are currently several hundred responses; a preliminary glance indicates I should have enough data to perform some of the more complex statistical analyses. I intend to post the results in two parts.

 

The first portion will be basic stuff like demographics and distributions, which I'll endeavor to have in roughly a week. The second portion will be more time consuming, which I hope to have ready in the next month or so.

 

Stay tuned!

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The first portion of results are up! you can find some graphs here: http://imgur.com/a/Hxs5z

 

I circulated the survey on several sites but the overwhelming number of responses (94%) were from the /r/DotA2 subreddit. As such, the results are more reflective of that online community and generalisability to the greater Dota 2 population is limited. It was a little unfortunate that I didn't get as many responses as I had hoped (low upvotes make me a sad panda  -_- ) though there were also a non-insignificant amount of responses that fell outside the sampling criteria (and/or were troll responses).  In saying that, we can still see some interesting trends that reveal new perspectives, and others that reaffirm established understandings.

 

Firstly, more than 20.49% of participants were over the age of 25. This isn't too surprising if we presume that many Dota 2 players were previously Dota 1 players from Warcraft 3 days. I didn't have any questions asking about Dota 1 so we can only speculate. When it comes to gender distribution, unsurprisingly, most of the participants are male (95.42%) with females accounting for about 3.77%.

 

Almost 50% of participants identify as being hardcore video game players (this is not necessarily specific to Dota 2). What is interesting is that there were almost twice as many participants who identify as hardcore than as casual. I deliberately did not define these two terms because there is no established standard or consensus on its definition as each individual invariably has a personal meaning. The purpose of this question was to determine how participants perceived themselves. There appears to be a significant relationship between weekly play frequency and session duration, but the strength of this relationship is quite weak.

 

In terms of matchmaking rating (MMR), I was quite surprised to see that it was normally distributed. If you look closely, I actually messed up by forgetting to include a '500 to 1000' MMR response range (Thankfully, this small detail won't ruin my thesis). If I had to guess, individuals who belonged in that bracket either reported 'I don't know' or bumped themselves up to '1000 to 1500'  ^_^. To give a bit more perspective, only 3 people reported being above 6k MMR, and another 3 reported being between 5.5k to 6k.

 

The last few graphs show responses on play-style, lanes and positions from two angles; preferred and actual. In terms of play-style, the discrepancy between supporting was much larger than expected (25.14% preferred vs. 44.63% actual). This suggests that players either forego their play-style preferences a) on their own volition or b ) are forced by their teammates in some capacity. I can't determine which one it is, but I can say that the 19.49% of participants who fill that support void get a commend from me  :clap: . On the note of supporting, the differences between preferred and actual lanes is also rather telling, perhaps suggesting a tendency for tri-lanes. Interestingly, jungling does not appear to be all that prominent (at the time of surveying, at least). Perhaps this is a reflection of the current meta/patch?

 

I'm interested to know what you guys think, please discuss!

 

P.S. Dota appears to be the 'waifu' game of choice for 78.81% of participants; Sean need not feel bad about his doto ways.

P.P.S. The second portion of analyses will take a look at the social side of things and will be more heavy on theory. As such, it will take more time but I hope to have some more results in the next 2 months or so, TI5 viewing notwithstanding.

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People want to play support, but they don't want to be a 5 position.  That explains why so many of my games have a witch doctor who can't upgrage courier so he can rush shadowblade or something stupid like that.

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People want to play support, but they don't want to be a 5 position. 

 

I've always understood playing support to be more about buying items that can help the team (e.g. courier, obs, sents, dust, smoke, force staff, aura items etc.) more so than their innate skill-set.

 

I think it's no coincidence that support is played as position 5, as it adequately allows for the aforementioned itemisation to be achieved at reasonable timings throughout a match (unless if the player is complete rubbish).

 

In saying that, I initially learned how to play Dota 2 as a support so maybe my perception is coloured (it's easily my most successful and knowledgeable role).

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People want to play support, but they don't want to be a 5 position.  That explains why so many of my games have a witch doctor who can't upgrage courier so he can rush shadowblade or something stupid like that.

 

in a pub being the door mat support is sometimes really tough on morale - especially when the 1 - 3 spots cant seem to find themselves out of a paper bag

 

With the 10hero challenge i've had to leave my comfortable 2-3 spot and/or offlane position and play more doormats. Sometimes it works...usually not, i went on a 1-4 bottom spot pugna run before being able to close that one up.

 

I am a strong believer that even the 5 spot player needs to get some money and levels - i'm not playing with pro level carries...if the insta-lock PA im safe laning with cant last hit, im going to start taking it - no sense both of us being broke.

 

The worst is the first CS taken at 4.5 minutes in and the flaming starts "WTF PUGNA, IM CARRY".  Usually means time to rotate to a more active lane and make moves - if can even afford the town portal.

 

 

On the WD topic - my brother plays WD mid core2-3 in our 5team.  So i've seen the awesome power of a rapid Aggs and 4.0.4 build - so a rushed aggs or shadow blade on that hero doesnt bother me as much

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Yeah playing a support like Dazzle, who is an amazing super powerful hero, is really rough when you are first playing the game because your carries aren't going to be farming efficiently enough for your lower priority farm to pay off (i.e. now everyone is underfarmed). That's why heroes like Lich or Lion are such game winning supports at low levels, they can have high impact regardless of how the rest of your team performs.

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I play support in shitty pub games because if shit hits the fan, I can just buy sentries, keep vision up, and escape criticism.

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