Noticed some "headlines" with a quote of me saying that "analytics in dota is dead" and "dota is dead now", using one of my previous tweets as a source. The choice of words here was not ideal, and I made a Telegram post about this topic the other day, sort of restarting the discussion in the Russian-speaking Dota analytics community.

Well, discussion is a stretch, as everyone seems to be on the same page regarding the Immortal Draft change. And I already said it before -- I think it's a change for the better.

I don't think it will help against the meta being stale because of the "death of stats" and "plebs copying pros", this is just a stupid argument. And I think it's unfortunate to lose the stats for these public ranked matches.

But I also think that analytics on the dota 2 pro scene was harmed by this Pro Tracker Obsession Syndrome of sorts. Multiple teams had an analyst only providing pub stats on opponents, and at least two teams fired their analysts since the update (and at least two more are considering it, as far as I'm aware).

And from my experience, some pros are too stubborn to listen or make an effort in preparations -- because of that more often than not any experimental or breakthrough ideas had to go through the coach (because coach has authority and reputation, and the players are more likely to believe him than numbers).

At the same time, same players were obsessed with D2PT stats, blindly repeating trends (the same trends that usually started at 6.5-8.5k, I had a couple of blog posts about that since ~2019), maybe also trying to find any "potential abuses" to use at the official events.

Funnily enough, at the same time anything lower than 8k was usually seen as "subpar" and "garbage data" -- which was simply not true, the stats for full Immortal and top-20%/10%/100 were within the margin of error and also helped to discover a lot of things ahead of the trends (I've done that, my friend Degaz (currently Tundra analyst) has done that, and Sikle (TSpirit analyst) all have done that).

And I think this obsession was harmful for the scene. Not for the meta, or the game, for the the competitive scene as a whole. The Immortal Draft change is practically killing this "high mmr pub analytics", essentially forcing the teams to start doing the actual prep work with analytics for once. Which I think is much better for the healthy competitive environment.

Some teams (as mentioned above) learned the wrong lessons here. But there are teams which were not relying on that to begin with, and I would expect to hear more from them in the future.

(I also had the pleasure of sharing my insights and mentorship with analysts of some of these teams in the past year and a half, and there are some young folks with some real potential -- they were already getting enough room to grow and prove themselves, but this sort of paradigm shift will surely help them to show their true potential, which I am really excited for)

Not even sure who I am writing this for, but anyway I have a lot more thoughts on this on my Telegram, but usually it's the "random thought while doing something" kind of posts, so writing translation for every single thing doesn't seem worth it. But maybe I should do it more?