General Discussion

General DiscussionHow many alternate accounts have you made?

How many alternate accounts have you made? in General Discussion
Relentless

    In dota 1 I used 5 or 6 different accounts, but in dota 2 there seems to be no real advantage to doing this so I only have this one.
    In dota 1 I know some people had a huge number...some over 100, but I did not expect it to be common to have many accounts in dota 2.

    Now I am questioning that assumption. Dotabuff has over 130 million accounts...but only 6 million or "unique users" play at least 1 game per month. Suppose half of all dota players play at least 1 game per month...and people who play less than 6 games a year, can they really be considered to be dota players?

    So does this mean that 90% of dotabuff accounts are duplications? Does the average player have 10 steam IDs? Or does this mean that over 100 million people played dota 2 one or two times and quit? Some of both? Other options? What do you think?

    Ok, going back over the list I actually had 13 accounts in dota 1...:p forgot about most of them.

    TikTok Uncle

      I have a total of 2 Dota 2 accounts , this, and my new account.

      Sherlock

        2, only made the other one when I got muted.

        NooBThaNYoU

          2 so far, 1 for me and 1 standby for any friend who play in CC but don't have account.

          Mia

            1. i dont like smufing and like my hats

            Ples Mercy

              3.

              1 -> main account
              2 -> playing with scrubs
              3 -> test/soloqueueaccount in case main is muted or something (yes i flame alot)

              Just(wiNner

                i have 4

                Inev

                  2, this one, and another if this one ever ends up in LP. (I have unstable internet)

                  6_din_49

                    In dota 1 I had one main account and 3 for backup, because from time to time my windows was crashing and for each leave I was getting banned for 5 days something (I was playing on eurobattle).

                    On dota 2 I have 2 accounts: this one, and this one: http://dotabuff.com/players/124976596
                    I'm not really using the second account, just playing solo from time to time.

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                    Lee Schau

                      I got 2 accounts as well. 2nd one was mainly intended to be an account to practice and to play during the time i had a bad inet connection (http://dotabuff.com/players/123958336)

                      Vix

                        2, use other if i get in low priority on this one

                        SalaciousCrome

                          On Dota 1 there were different things I had accounts for

                          >battlenet
                          >dotalicious
                          >iccup
                          >garena
                          >gameranger
                          >RGC

                          Dota2 just the one account, should probably make another I just can't be arsed, with this account having so much tied to it.

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                          Fakovnik

                            0 in Dota 1 - Garena times, "more lvl = more pro"
                            0 in Dota 2 - same acc. for practice, for trolling, for playing with newb friends, for serious games,

                            problem ?

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                            Silvers

                              I have just the "original" account, no alternate accounts at all... Was thinking about creating a new one though, just before the game was released. Dota 2 is my first and only moba game i have ever played so i had to learn everything "the hard way". Decided to keep my loyalty to this account. since there are people who actually are not smurfs on low lvls and i just want to avoid an overwhelming number of idiotic builds and decisions ( on my lvl its just..."whelming"- i, myself, make sometimes retarded plays as well).

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                              Yoshi

                                just made a 2nd one couple days ago. I've decided to use one to play with "competitive" friends, and one for casual gaming.
                                Since i've got a lot of friends who dont even know how to push buttons but are my kind friends, i play with them anyway.

                                considering i like statistics in general, i feel just a little bit bad to ruin them, so i decided to make this secondary account, otherwise i dont feel the need for multiple accounts overall

                                Kidades

                                  This and an alternate one which I use for playing with my RL friends who are mostly low skilled so that I don't destroy my MMR.
                                  I also made a smurf once but abandoned it since I found smurfing to be boring.

                                  In d1 I had 5 or 6.

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                                  Totentanz to The King: M ...

                                    Only this 1.

                                    jimmydorry

                                      I have about 11. My main, my alternate one I played a few games on... and the rest have 1game each but are used for running servers and for their API keys.

                                      Vermi

                                        This is my main acc. I have another account (with 400 games) that I use to play with my low-skilled friends or to play on EU (read: with a lot of russians) in the morning when i'm working from home.

                                        Relentless

                                          It seems like most people just have 1 or 2. If that is representative there must be a huge number of players who played a couple games of dota and quit.

                                          What is the advantage of having extra API keys?

                                          Nara

                                            I have 2, but wish I kept it as 1, then ide have 1000 wins =(

                                            Autism is great

                                              around 30
                                              most of them used till 1st loss :-]

                                              one paw in front of the o...

                                                2. Switch to alt if I get low prio (my connection has this tendency to go out a few times a week) or if I run out of reports, because I love getting flamers muted.

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                                                Relentless

                                                  So it seems the solution is there are just a lot of gaps in the dotabuff numbers....so there are not 130 million accounts. Maybe only 13 million....or who knows. The gaps don't seem consistently spaced. Maybe part of the number is assigned by a timestamp when you made the account. They are in chronological order of starting date anyway.

                                                  Monkeh

                                                    Made one. Played 2 games on it. Decided it was one of the worst things ever. Stuck to this account and it's crappy stats. Happier.

                                                    I WANNA BE THE VERY BEST

                                                      More than 10. New accounts to pawn noobs

                                                      Ky.Rikka

                                                        Contented with this account and another account. one for solo queue, the other for playing with friends.

                                                        SalaciousCrome

                                                          If that guy is the one who is doing the signature generator then understandably he would need the various accounts to cross reference too or to test or use different elements of the API.

                                                          You are the one doing the signature biz are you not?

                                                          [Lk].Zano

                                                            Two in dota1. One was my main, the other one was a main one too...when I forgot the password for the first.

                                                            Only this one in dota2. I'm thinking about making another one though. Sometimes my friends like to play retardedly bad on purpose when we are pubstomping or after we ended up pretty much being stomped in the last game...they do so with their own second accounts, so they don't care, but I do ¬¬

                                                            Yes, I need a second account.

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                                                            Pandamonium(You Died)

                                                              2 accounts, one for playing solo/with reliable people
                                                              second to teach noobs/real life friends/have fun

                                                              mwsqz

                                                                can u guys stop talk on such useless topics pls ? you are making my topic go down

                                                                Totentanz to The King: M ...

                                                                  Bump because fuck that qsudfhqozkdsq guy.

                                                                  jimmydorry

                                                                    Lol. Well you need a few accounts for:

                                                                    * Keeping Dota2 dedicated servers up to date (D2Ware).
                                                                    * Every function I am grabbing at close to the rate limit.

                                                                    The signature generator does not need an API key as it just leverages DotaBuff, although if I wanted to take the performance hit, I could use my own DB.

                                                                    This may mean something to people interested in where the keys are going: http://i.imgur.com/AMnM1Mp.png

                                                                    And maybe this: http://i.imgur.com/B7qfjzA.png

                                                                    And what the hell, here is something else: http://i.imgur.com/LNOmcTr.png

                                                                    Let's just say that dota2.stats.tf does not have the largest or most up to date database, and that mine has only been running for 3months. ;)

                                                                    jimmydorry

                                                                      Also, what number where you basing your 130 million accounts on, Relentless? If you are talking about the 32bit steam ID that the API uses, and DB just passes along... then yes... there are massive gaps.

                                                                      Relentless

                                                                        Oh, that 130 million number is definitely wrong. It's just from the dotabuff ID number of players, but I failed to recognize that they are skipping a lot of numbers when they assign IDs. I think maybe the last digit is a timestamp. There are probably more like 10 million +. 10 million or so would make sense given the number of games played and the time period.

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                                                                        Safe Base

                                                                          I've got 2, mostly only use this one. The other account have about 20 games only.
                                                                          I like my "hats" as another user already said, so I don't really like to use an alternative account. Not much point to it anyway.

                                                                          jimmydorry

                                                                            @Relentless
                                                                            I think you would be surprised if you knew how many unique users there actually were (in total and on a monthly basis).

                                                                            I have considerable reason to doubt the number in the client.

                                                                            The DB team are more than free to correct me, or give their estimate... but I believe Valve are seriously fudging the numbers, or purposefully being deceptive in how they display them. Refer to the 2nd picture above, as it shows the stats over the last 4months.

                                                                            Relentless

                                                                              What do you think the numbers mean?

                                                                              If there were 800k unique users over 4 months, how does Valve get to 6.3 M/month number? And what do the 10 million IDs and 30 million "anon" in total mean?

                                                                              Why do the backpacks not match any of those numbers? How can a dota account have more or less than 1 backpack?

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                                                                              Yoshi

                                                                                1 word: Marketing

                                                                                jimmydorry

                                                                                  @Relentless
                                                                                  Valve could be doing something stupid like a unique player being defined as a unique account per day per month.

                                                                                  We won't know how many unique users are in those 32mill instances of anonymous users, but we know there are 800k unique users in 10mill stat-sharing users. If we extrapolate, we could guess that there are about 2.5mill unique anonymous users... but it is a guess at best.

                                                                                  3.3million unique users is a far cry short of 6.3million that the client says played this month, but it is within the realm of possibility that everyone plays on at least two accounts regularly. If it were in Valve's best interests, they could should unique players with more than 10 games in the month, and I am sure it will substantially drop.

                                                                                  I will admit that I do not regularly look at the in-game meter (as I don't believe in it), but can anyone honestly say they have ever seen it drop?

                                                                                  Of the 800k users we know about, we have 650k backpacks to look at, and the graph showed the distribution of the number of items per backpack. Yes there are some people out there with 2500 items in their backpack. We can see that the majority of users have less than 300 items.

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                                                                                  Yoshi

                                                                                    @┼jiæ░d▒r▓y┼:

                                                                                    It all makes sense what you said, but lets just remember that this item selling and game overall is a huge gold mine.
                                                                                    People will bend numbers as they see them fitting better for their purpose.

                                                                                    So its not always easy to understand how the estimate their total, for what we know it might be completely something else pulled out from their accounting monkeys

                                                                                    but i see where you are coming from, its possible that your theory also is pretty right

                                                                                    Relentless

                                                                                      I do watch the "unique users/month" number regularly and the players in game. I don't record them, but I do check them pretty much every day and just make a mental note.

                                                                                      The unique users/month number has been going up consistently all year long until this last patch. It recently dropped for the first time I have noticed from a high of about 6.5 M to 6.2 M, but its back up to 6.3 now. This is up from about 3.3 M before TI3 and the "release" of dota 2....and up from about 2 M at the start of the year.

                                                                                      The "players online" number is supposed to be up-to-the minute with that map. It was consistently at 400k to 550k during TI3. After this "first blood" patch it dropped dramatically and was regularly below 150k...but its back up against in last couple days. I think there were significant problems with the "first blood" patch that forced a lot of people to stop playing. I have not been able to get a game without terrible lag spikes since the patch. Players online is currently at over 300k and has been up again recently. Dota 2 is still taking me 2 minutes to load, but maybe I will risk another game.

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                                                                                      Vaikiss`742.

                                                                                        my first main account , this one , one smurf to play with real life friends who moved to dota2 from lol , and few more smurfs to tryhard with tryhard wisp ursa things which are now completely useless

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                                                                                        Monkeh

                                                                                          @ Relentless: Don't do it man, go download the Kerbal Space Program demo instead!

                                                                                          http://store.steampowered.com/app/220200/

                                                                                          :D

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                                                                                          Kanye Best

                                                                                            you have to be next level insecure to worry about nonsense like online stats :) just play the game and have fun :)

                                                                                            Woof Woof

                                                                                              most people that play games are insecure and retarded in rl thats why sites like dotabuff can stay alive to begin
                                                                                              with

                                                                                              Kanye Best

                                                                                                lol, what a bunch of losers :D

                                                                                                jimmydorry

                                                                                                  don't you mean loosers? :D

                                                                                                  After what Relentless has observed, we can at least make some kind of assumption that however they are counting the users is at least consistent.

                                                                                                  Icon

                                                                                                    I have my main account obviously and this is my only other

                                                                                                    http://dotabuff.com/players/122196735

                                                                                                    it's for when I am low pri, I had a phase there like 7 abandons in a row on my alt account. My alt was never intended for crushing newbies or w/e cause it used to be around 65% wr solo Q before i went on abandon spree/loss spree and was higher MM then icon. I strongly am against smurfs but smurfs don't impact the game of dota as much as they do other games like smite and LoL.

                                                                                                    Pilot

                                                                                                      I only have 2.

                                                                                                      This (my main account), and another one which I use for laggy internet, computer shops, testing, solo queuing, etc. http://dotabuff.com/players/128274297