Your record, and the small tools around the draft

Here is a small confession. For weeks your lobby career, your runs, your win rate, your record, only counted your last 100 ranked solo games. If you had played more than that, the earlier games just quietly fell off the edge. Your win rate would drift and you would have no idea why, because the number was silently forgetting your own history. A few of you noticed the math did not add up, and you were right.

In 0.5.0 that is fixed. Your career now counts every ranked solo game you have played, not just the last hundred. The performance splits and your most-played heroes read from your full ranked history too, so what you see is actually the whole story instead of a rolling window. It sounds like a tiny thing, and in code it kind of was, but it changes how the tool feels. A record you can trust is the difference between a scoreboard and a habit.

There is a real Dota idea underneath this. Your record is a slow signal. Any single game is mostly noise, a good draft that fell apart or a coin-flip that went your way, and you only see the shape of your actual play across a lot of games. Cutting the history off at 100 threw away exactly the part that carries the signal. Keeping all of it is the whole point.

Once your own record was honest, the leaderboard needed to match. An MMR number on its own is a little hollow. It tells you where someone sits but nothing about how they got there. A captain on a hot streak and a grinder who has played a few hundred games can land on the same number and mean very different things.

So in 0.5.0 the leaderboard shows each captain's ranked record, their wins and losses, and their win percentage right next to their MMR. Now you can look up and actually read the field, not just rank it. And because your profile can carry a country flag since 0.3.1, the board feels a bit more like a room full of people than a list of numbers.

I am wary of leaderboards, to be honest. They can quietly turn a thing you enjoy into a thing you grind. My hope with showing the full record is that it rewards playing a lot of thoughtful drafts rather than farming an easy number, but I will keep watching how it actually gets used.

The draft screen quietly assumes you already understand why a hero belongs on your team. That is a big assumption. If you are newer, or just newer to thinking like a captain, a lot of the reasoning behind a pick is invisible. You see the heroes, but not the shape of the fight they want.

In 0.5.2 I added a hero draft guide. Each hero page now names a fight identity type, the role that hero wants to play when a teamfight breaks out, along with a sim event reference so you can see the specific moments that hero tends to create inside a match. It all links out from the full Captain's playbook, so the guide and the draft are talking about the same language instead of two separate worlds.

The idea I most want to hand over here is fight identity. Good drafts are not piles of strong heroes, they are a plan for the fight: someone starts it, someone deals the damage once it is chaos, someone keeps the carry alive long enough to matter. When you can name what each hero is for in that plan, a draft stops being a popularity contest and starts being an argument you can actually win.

Some of this update is just about not making the tool tiring to use. In 0.5.2 there are text size options in Settings, Default, Large, or XL. That exists because a tool full of small numbers and dense text is genuinely hard to sit with for some people, and if reading it is a chore you will not come back. Being able to make the text bigger is not a luxury, it is the difference between the tool working for you or not.

Sound got the same treatment a while earlier. Since 0.1.1 you can adjust the music and the draft sound volume separately in Settings, so the ambience is there when you want it and gone when you do not. That release also gave Google sign-in a randomized name on your captain profile, so signing in does not accidentally put your real name on display before you have decided what you want to be called.

None of these are headline features. But comfort is the thing that decides whether a session lasts five minutes or an evening, and I would rather get the boring parts right than ship a flashy feature you cannot stand to look at for long.

The oldest tool in this whole list is the report button. Since 0.1.1 you have been able to flag an unrealistic simulator moment straight from the match UI, and I put that in almost comically early, before a lot of things that arguably mattered more. I did it because I knew something about myself and about the sim: I was going to get it wrong, a lot, and I would not always be able to see where.

The match engine is an approximation. It is a model of Dota, not Dota, and it makes confident-looking mistakes. Kills that should not happen, a fight that resolves in a way no real game would, a hero doing something that makes you go, that is just not right. I genuinely cannot catch all of those on my own, because I already know what the sim intended and that blinds me to how strange it looks from outside. You do not have that blind spot.

So the report button is less a feature and more a confession built into the UI. Every flag you send is a place where the model and reality disagreed, and it is honestly one of the most useful things I get. If you have ever hit report on a match that felt wrong, thank you. That is a big part of how this thing slowly gets less wrong, and it has a long way still to go.