The DotA Experiment

To the Team Liquid community:

I have been running a Dota 2 community analysis for the past few days and it was recently suggested that I reach out to your forum to gather more samples.

Just to tell you a little about myself:
My formal research began about five years ago when I studied post-game emotion in players. At this point I was an amateur psychology student with a passion for understanding the competitive phenomenon that is Defense of the Ancients. I played DotA every day during that time (and still do) so I decided to start my own research.

Those statistics gave me power to move onto my following study about my first working hypothesis. I spent a lot of time learning about will-power, so that was my topic of choice. This was an observational study with a post-game question. I.E. "On a scale of 1-10, how confident do you feel?"

Today, I have over fifty pages of notes addressing different trends as well as three working hypotheses. So now I'm reaching out to the community to help me gather enough samples to put together a comprehensive community analysis. I hope that it will help answer many questions addressed by the community.

I have been reaching out to older community members to help me out and I greatly appreciate their insight. However, I am by no means done interviewing/learning. I do believe my questionnaire itself is now primed enough to be sent out to the public. If you would please take your time to fill it out I would greatly appreciate it. Every-single-sample means so much to me.

Anyway, the rest can be found on the questionnaire. It is complex and has to be. It's like studying a planet.

Here's the link: The DotA Experiment

I added a preview of my first submission at the end. All you need to do is click "Complete" on the last page, and it should take you right there.

Thank you so much.

Sincerely,
TheDotAExperiment

TLDR: Please fill out my "Dota 2 Community Questionnaire" linked above. Your participation means everything to me.

Ramong Denmark. July 01 2012 02:17. Posts 941

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I was sad when I could not pick Wisp as my most favourite hero

Then I picked Lich and all was good

"Yeah buddy"

DotA_Experiment July 01 2012 04:04. Posts 4

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Aww, good point. Unfortunately this was made before Io and Luna were added to the roster.

fOrTT United States. July 01 2012 04:20. Posts 105

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Filled it out, didn't expect it to be so long lol

Yurie July 01 2012 04:32. Posts 2093

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Some questions were very similar, I probably voted differently on them since I cared less near the end.

Microchaton France. July 01 2012 04:51. Posts 220

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Wow that's a LOT of "repeat" questions here. Jeez. Interesting survey nonetheless.

Stormy

DotA_Experiment July 01 2012 05:06. Posts 4

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This survey's been through the ringer before.

On it's first release- it got over 1,800 responses. However, the host website dumped all of it's servers and all of the stored data was lost. So I re-vamped the survey with about 15 new questions and a new design and got it back up on a website with stronger servers. Some of the questions on the last version were a little too bland. So in order to touch on every angle of a question i.e. My enemies words strongly influence my in-game behavior... I had to create sub-questions that addressed other sides of the variable, AKA (if were losing, if were winning, etc.)

So that's basically why it's so long/complex. With DotA, I think that's to be expected.

Thank you so much for participating

danl9rm United States. July 01 2012 05:17. Posts 2442

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On July 01 2012 04:51 Microchaton wrote:
Wow that's a LOT of "repeat" questions here. Jeez. Interesting survey nonetheless.

I saw 0 repeat questions, and I read them all closely. Did you?

edit: I did see lots of grammatical errors, though

Last edit: 2012-07-01 05:18:00

"Science has so well established that the preborn baby in the womb is a living human being that most pro-choice activists have conceded the point. ..since the abortion proponents have lost the science argument, they are now advocating an existential one."

Glurkenspurk United States. July 01 2012 05:55. Posts 1843

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"When an ally spends time farming rather than helping the team, I usually get annoyed."

Usually when an ally is farming it is directly helping the team. I'd prefer my teammates to be sitting in the jungle slapping creeps than dicking around mid doing nothing. Not really sure what to put here.

PRIZE POOL not PRICE POOL

DotA_Experiment July 01 2012 13:54. Posts 4

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On July 01 2012 05:17 danl9rm wrote:

Show nested quote +

I saw 0 repeat questions, and I read them all closely. Did you?

edit: I did see lots of grammatical errors, though

Yea, the last page didn't load correctly- so there are many words fused together.

Hopefully the questions themselves weren't too bad.

mordk July 01 2012 14:34. Posts 7012

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On July 01 2012 05:55 Glurkenspurk wrote:
"When an ally spends time farming rather than helping the team, I usually get annoyed."

Usually when an ally is farming it is directly helping the team. I'd prefer my teammates to be sitting in the jungle slapping creeps than dicking around mid doing nothing. Not really sure what to put here.

This is asking you for a situation X, in which your team could potentially benefit from having all team members in the same spot doing the same thing, but an ally is farming. Key here is the assumption that your team could benefit from having the farmer with them.

For example: Enemy team is pushing mid lane 2nd tier tower, your team is trying to defend but a team member is farming bot lane.

In this case the question is wide, since it doesn't specify which type of hero is doing the farming, so it's extremely relative. I mostly don't get annoyed by anything in games so for me it's easy to answer though.

Last edit: 2012-07-01 14:36:06

"I haven't prepared anything in particular. I'm naturally good at everything. I'm good at eating too, so that's why I can't lose weight. I'm thinking maybe I'll dance as a ceremony, a dance that's popular lately" MC - discussing GSL grand finals

wihlborg Sweden. July 01 2012 16:23. Posts 43

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Sadly too many questions where I had to put a 5 out of 10 because it all varies from game to game and situation to situation. When can we see the result of the survey? Would be very interesting to see how many who have played DotA Allstars

I LIEK CHOCOLATE MILK

mikell Australia. July 01 2012 16:38. Posts 347

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This is actually a very interesting study. You will most likely conclude that people generally have negative feelings about other random players, but think highly of themselves. Looking forward to you posting some actual results, haha, would be an interesting read.

drone hard

Maand July 01 2012 17:46. Posts 209

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@ mikell
What you are talking about is called "being better than average" term (loosely translated) comes mainly from social psychology. It is interesting because it applies to so many areas of life :D.

Interesting study nonetheless. But lack of Io and Luna breaks my Heart of Tarrasque ;P

Edit: Effects proper name is illusory superiority or above average effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
Edit2: Tip to DotA_Experiment. When you scale questions on 10 you give people hard time deciding. If you want to have middle option, use 5 answer scale. 4 is good, when you want them to decide on one side of the spectrum. Having many options leaves your data really spread out and it's hard to tell what 3 or 8 really mean. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean. If you find people in your study that choose only 1s and 10s exclude them from statistical analysis. Will help get more truthful results.

Last edit: 2012-07-01 17:52:30

Appendix Sweden. July 01 2012 18:26. Posts 597

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It is very hard so summarise many of these questions into a number between 1 and 10. I generally don't mind killstealing, but it really depends on the manner in which it is done. Did someone hold back his nuke, making the kill much harder than it had to be? Yes, then I can get a little bit annoyed, not so much for the stats or gold, but because it is bad play.

In the same way, do I mind if a support farm? If a CM has spent most of her early game money on wards, chicken, dust and such, it's really no problem if she wants something to help her stay alive or for whatever reason. It might even be more beneficial with the farm on her instead of the carry, if the "return" on the farm is keeping her alive in the fights. On the other hand there are of course situations with the opposite scenario.

"My team members are usually responsible for a lost game."
It is a five man team, if four out of five carried none of the responsibility it would be weird. It is also a bit weird to answer such a binary question with a value between 1 and 10.

Anyway it will be interesting if you find anything.

Fishgle United States. July 01 2012 18:54. Posts 1577

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yea for the killstealing, i'm unsure of how to answer it because there's different interpretations of kill stealing. For me kill stealing is kill "Stealing" -- as in a qop wih a haste rune runs into the fight and saves her nuke just to grab the kill, maybe even letting you die in the process. Or an earthshaker that saves his stun until the hero is at 5% instead of initiating with it. etc. obvious KS from players who dont care about the team and just their own e-peen / the ability to blame teammates because "hey, my K/S is positive." ... so really, i dont care about the killsteal, i care about the attitude of the player.

However, i rarely see trollish KSing. (only once in dota2 so far). In the end it doesnt really matter who gets the kill since its a teammate.

questions like "do you get annoyed when a carry farms" .... it really depends. Sometimes that's the better choice, even if it means losing a tower. so yea, agreed. Things are never set in stone.

"my team members are responsible for a won/lost game"
i voted a 1 on this one. Why? because there are 10 players in each game, each equally important in deciding the outcome.

Last edit: 2012-07-01 18:54:57

GMarshal United States. July 01 2012 20:03. Posts 20817

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no survey threads.

TL isn't the place for people to do their thesis research.

"life of lively to live to life of full life thx to shield battery" The measure of a terrible day is when you go to bed thinking "man, I wish the zombie apocalypse would start already"

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