My Friend Henri

Introduction

Henri is my friend. We love to play the online video game DotA 2 together.
DotA 2 is an online multi-player strategy game that pits two teams of five players against each other. The objective of the game is to destroy the opposing team’s ‘Ancient’, whilst defending their own. Each player controls one of the game’s 123 ‘heroes’, each hero with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game is extremely rich in statistics and data.
OpenDota is a third party web service that accesses and compiles data collected from the Steam Web API, the platform DotA 2 is ran off. Using this web service, I will investigate if Henri’s proficiency in DotA 2 has increased since starting the game in 2018.

The DotA 2 matchmaking system has 3 broad skill levels it categorises matches as. The categories are ‘Normal’, ‘High’ and ‘Very High’. ‘Normal’ represents the lowest skill level whilst ‘Very High’ represents the highest.
The data for 2022 for this statistic is not available.

Getting a ‘kill’ in DotA 2 is akin to scoring a ‘point’ in a sport like basketball. In general, a higher amount of ‘kills’ is indicative of strong performance.
Mean ‘kills’ in the box plots are represented by a red dot.

Getting a ‘death’ in DotA 2 is akin to conceding a ‘point’ in a sport like basketball. In general, a lower amount of ‘deaths’ is indicative of strong performance.
Mean ‘deaths’ in the box plots are represented by a red dot.

Each DotA 2 player has a percentile ranking for each of DotA 2’s 123 playable ‘heroes’. That is, how well a player performs when playing a ‘hero’ relative to the global player base. For example, being in the 99th percentile for a hero means that player performs better than 99% of the player population.

From his humble beginnings, my friend Henri has statistically proven he is one of the top DotA 2 players in the world, no small feat for a game that has 446,670 concurrent players (SteamCharts, 2022). His improvement since starting the game is astonishing and he should be proud.