Welcome to the Era of Achievements

Today we’re excited to launch a brand new feature on Dotabuff: Achievements. Achievements provide a fun and challenging way to measure your dedication and hero diversity in Dota, and are available today for every Dota 2 player.

Most players have heard of the A-Z Hero Challenge, a fun in-game achievement that dares you to play and win a game on every hero in Dota. Learning every hero is valuable for game knowledge and sets a clear goal to work towards, all without forcing you to make in-game decisions that may negatively effect your team. This is the spirit in which we’ve built Achievements: fun, challenging, but above all not harmful or toxic (well, except for this one).

Achievements as Statistics

When we first launched Dotabuff, one of our most requested features was an easy way to see which heroes you have not yet won a match on. Dotabuff Achievements has an extensive Hero Mastery group where you can easily identify new challenges, set personal goals and achieve them.

Dotabuff couldn’t make an Achievement system without additional statistics, right? It’s sort of our thing here. When viewing an achievement, keep an eye out for the little globe icon with a number indicating the percentage of players who have completed that achievement. So, what are your most rare achievements?

Completing achievements give you Arbitrary Points (AP), a fun stat that you can use to compare your achievements in Dota to other players. Of course, there’s an achievements leaderboard. Dotabuff Plus subscribers (you’re awesome) get a few nice perks too: you can see the world rank and percentile for yourself and others, along with a chart showing how your AP has grown over time.

We've also sneaked in some fun achievements under a category called Arbitrary Awards. These include achievements like playing Dota 2 during the alpha, or playing Wisp before it was renamed to Io. Arbitrary Awards don't award AP because new players can't achieve them anymore.

A fun fact for technical folks: Dotabuff isn't just one big website but a large fleet of smaller components (microservices) that perform dedicated tasks, like accurately storing your player statistics or parsing a replay. Whenever we break ground on a new project, we're faced with the task of giving it a codename. Our Esports stats service is named Bruno, hero rankings are provided by Zeus, etc. It didn't take us long to find the perfect name for the achievements service: Lifestealer!

A Community Effort

The initial launch of Achievements focuses on using simple statistics accessible to all players (API stats). Everything is retroactive - if you have a friend who hasn’t had the desire to enable their statistics, maybe Achievements will help them see the light! We hope that those of you who enjoyed the battle pass quests will also enjoy achievements, but with less pressure to do something specific in one game or not make any progress.

In the future we plan to add achievements based on TrueSight replay analysis - things like getting a full 5 second stun on Mirana or getting a perfect Black Hole on the entire enemy team. It’s important for us to do this in a way that gives Plus subscribers more fun and challenging achievements without negatively effecting others. If you'll pardon the sales pitch, Subscribing to Plus today will ensure that we have TrueSight analysis for all of your matches in the future. We don't plan on restricting achievements based on Plus status, but obviously long time subscribers will have a more complete history of Truesight data.

We’d love to hear your feedback on Achievements - please hit us up on Twitter and share your ideas, concerns, and suggestions. Whether you love achievements or hate them, it’s important that we hear your thoughts!