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[Anuxinamoon]

damm I liked dotabuff too. Looking at my stats and stuff. Hopefully they can work out a compromise.

 

[PatzCU]

Well I think it's like the other dude said, Dotabuff trying to commercialize their stat tracking probably fucked them more than anything. When you make it commercial, it becomes less about a community thing.

How is that different than people designing items that will be put in-game, creating a revenue stream for themselves? Sure - most of that revenue does go to Valve, but Valve has always been a proponent of allowing the community to make money through their games. Hell, there is even a Steam Marketplace for trade-able Dota items. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

 

[NBtoaster]

We believe there are better privacy alternatives than the one Valve implemented. For example, we had a privacy feature ready to launch today (see screenshots below), which completely removes your profile from our website, while still allowing us to serve accurate statistics to the rest of the community.

Ideally, a player profile wouldn't be on the site in the first place unless they want. Plenty of people don't know of the site existence and wouldn't want people investigating them.

 

[JustinBB7]

For the first time ever, I'm truly saddened and disappointed by Valve. Not a respectable company to me anymore, just a bunch of assholes that shut down, with very little communication, a fantastic community site used by thousands of people for in depth statistics that valve refuses to provide on their own.

Mega douchebag move Valve, hope you understand that nearly every competitive multiplayer game from 2000 on has had some form of personal stat tracking from third party sites or the developer.

Valve didn't shut them down, they gave up them selfs, I'm disappointed too but the wording from DB seems very dodgy. They talked to Valve about everything, why is this suddenly a surprise to them. The Web API is back up and should still give them enough, but they would have to work on something new first.

We'll see how it goes, I hope Valve will release their own version at least. Checking all that shit offline was the best part.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

Ideally, a player profile wouldn't be on the site in the first place unless they want. Plenty of people don't know of the site existence and wouldn't want people investigating them.

I can't disagree with that at all. It certainly can be and has been used as a weapon to bash someone for the duration of a 40+ minute match. I've seen it happen more than once.

 

[Holden]

rip dotabuff.

wtf valve, i thought you guys were nice --;

 

[Tomat]

Fuck Valve, uninstalling.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

If the API becomes anything like the tf2 API, itll be incredibly useful and therough

 

[Igniz]

In my opinion, I feel a bit relaxed now that we are back how we used to be, where the only stats we have are wins, losses, and abandons. I don't mind so much on losing anymore. Dotabuff made me really want to try my hardest to win games for some reason

 

[bounchfx]

I imagine there's a reason, and hopefully they'll make a statement and/or officially integrate it.

 

[Exuro]

So from what I'm hearing, Valve patched the game so they can't gather information in unintended ways and want 3rd parties to use the WebAPI(which is still being worked on?) and DotaBuff just shuts down an hour after the patch?

Seems like a dick move to put icefrogs email on the site for users to mob him.

 

[I H8 Memes]

Btw. what's the reason for my opponent's being 80% Russian?

Are you playing All Pick?

 

[Neki]

Fuck Valve, uninstalling.

Yup, boycotting all Valve games now.

 

[vehn]

Well I think it's like the other dude said, Dotabuff trying to commercialize their stat tracking probably fucked them more than anything. When you make it commercial, it becomes less about a community thing.

except the people who made the site made elobuff.com, which is a commercialized site for LoL and both the site / game are plenty successful

 

[Artanisix]

If they fix the WebAPI and actually make it usable, stats can come back in full force.

It freaking SUCKS that Valve just pulled the plug on Dotabuff with seemingly no warning, but I'm not too worried. We'll have thorough stats again in some time. And while I'm upset at all my stats going into the can, I do feel like Dotabuff is being a tad bit sensationalist with their headlines.

 

[Anbokr]

45 page thread on dev.dota 2 exploded quickly filled with some massive hate. Hope it convinces Valve they are making a mistake.

 

[Kientin]

Had mixed feelings about what Dotabuff was doing. However, I don't feel very good about the way Valve has handled this at all. I'll wait a bit for Valve to respond to this before jumping to conclusions though. Lots has happened in a real short amount of time here.

 

[SteveWinwood]

Dotabuff had their plans changed and instead of rolling with the punches threw a fit and put a bunch of valve emails up telling everyone to complain to them. Valve didn't do shit, they just put all their eggs in one basket and then couldn't handle it when things weren't the way they wanted it to be.

 

[CarbonatedFalcon]

Hopefully there can be some compromise resolution. Even without DBR or any of the new features, there were still plenty of useful/interesting stats, like the records (e.g. highest GPM, longest game) as well as game impact, etc. that weren't available in-client or any other way (unless you tediously recorded things yourself.)

 

[Ikuu]

Dotabuff used some secret method to access the dats and should have expected it to be closed at some point with Valve having the WebAPI in place for pulling data. Not exactly the soundest business decision.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

except the people who made the site made elobuff.com, which is a commercialized site for LoL and both the site / game are plenty successful

again, several Team Fortress 2 trading and stat websites are commercialized.

Commercialization was likely not the reason for this. The MMR/quasi-mmr development is the mostly likely culprit. Especially given the aforementioned shots fired before yesterday and them pushing forward anyway.

45 page thread on dev.dota 2 exploded quickly filled with some massive hate. Hope it convinces Valve they are making a mistake.

At the very least, a blog post explaining their position and why.

 

[ksan]

ihl? I want to try casting once

 

[28 Posts Later]

The title of that Dotabuff post is pretty misleading. Makes you wonder if they're exaggerating anything else.

 

[Anbokr]

Dotabuff used some secret method to access the dats and should have expected it to be closed at some point with Valve having the WebAPI in place for pulling data. Not exactly the soundest business decision.

The WebAPI was broken and disabled for 6 months?

 

[Ikuu]

The title of that Dotabuff post is pretty misleading. Makes you wonder if they're exaggerating anything else.

They're obviously going to make themselves out as the victim and try and generate as much support as possible.

 

[Ikuu]

The WebAPI was broken and disabled for 6 months?

The wait for it t be fixed, the game is still in beta and some features are going to break at times. They were using some reversed engineered method to grab the data and they should have expected Valve to do something about it at some point.

 

[SteveWinwood]

At the very least, a blog post explaining their position and why.

"We are constantly evolving and changing our tools for third party use and will be examining things like data proliferation and ranking systems so that they serve our player base well."

 

[balladofwindfishes]

again, several Team Fortress 2 trading and stat websites are commercialized.

the tf2 sites all use a tos binding API that valve completely controls.

Dota buff was scraping data unofficially

 

[Tomat]

Yup, boycotting all Valve games now.

Yup. Closing my Steam account for now. Gonna stick to GMG, Amazon, and Origin.

This move is going to put a dent Valve's business.

 

[Uriah]

Listing Icefrog's email to spam isn't going to make Dotabuff any friends at Valve.

 

[SamVimes]

Yeah, putting the roots of your website in a fundamentally flawed method (download every replay and then analyze them? seriously?) and then bitch and moan when it's patched sound a lot like sound business.

 

[Archie]

Yup. Closing my Steam account for now. Gonna stick to GMG, Amazon, and Origin.

This move is going to put a dent Valve's business.

Valve is going to miss all those games you buy but don't play. RIP in peace.

 

[JustinBB7]

From Cyborgs twitter:

Cyborgmatt

Putting the blame completely on Valve seems pretty unfair to be honest.

At the end of the day a lot your data gathering "methods" were not very conventional or TOS friendly so I figured that something like this would end up happening.

I know that Valve already worked on improving the performance of the API, have given dedicated resources to it and want to work on improving it.

I just think shutting down an hour after the changes are put into place seems like a hasty reaction. I doubt you're being ignored on purpose, I was actually hoping you would be one of the main sites pushing the ideas for further development to the WebAPI etc.

So much Valve staff on the dev forums now. Even Robin Walker is present. Along with other admins/valve staff/mods

There's even a guide on how to get data from the Webapi posted half a year ago http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=47115

 

[SteveWinwood]

Robin Walker will save us.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Get back on the tf team robin, I miss you

 

[Anbokr]

From Cyborgs twitter:



So much Valve staff on the dev forums now. Even Robin Walker is present. Along with other admins/valve staff/mods

There's even a guide on how to get data from the Webapi posted half a year ago http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=47115

The Webapi has been broken and useless for 6 months. Even in the last few days when it came back online, people interested in extracting stats from it have complained to Valve that it's awful. The webapi was and is broken period. Valve even said that the reason they shut down the Webapi was because it was affecting their servers in a negative manner. The extracting of stats from replays was more efficient and had zero impact on Valve's servers.

 

[Ikuu]

The Webapi has been broken and useless for 6 months. Even in the last few days when it came back online, people interested in extracting stats from it have complained to Valve that it's awful. The webapi was and is broken period. Valve even said that the reason they shut down the Webapi was because it was affecting their servers in a negative manner. The extracting of stats from replays was more efficient and had zero impact on Valve's servers.

Then you wait for it to work properly, you can't just pull data however you want and not expect someone to do something about it eventually.

 

[Green Biker Dude]

valve handled this the worst possible way. it's a good thing people are shitting all over the dev forums.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

The Webapi has been broken and useless for 6 months. Even in the last few days when it came back online, people interested in extracting stats from it have complained to Valve that it's awful. The webapi was and is broken period. Valve even said that the reason they shut down the Webapi was because it was affecting their servers in a negative manner. The extracting of stats from replays was more efficient and had zero impact on Valve's servers.

But instead of working with valve to improve the API, as many a fansite has done previously, they decided to just nuke the whole site from orbit

Whole departments of valve are staffed by people in the community who helped them build steam and tf2 APIs. What dota buff did is hasty and immature.

 

[Anbokr]

Then you wait for it to work properly, you can't just pull data however you want and not expect someone to do something about it eventually.

sorry that there is a HUGE portion of the community interested in personal stats that valve doesn't seem interested in providing.

 

[ksan]

streaming some pictionary shit

 

[snack]

Dotabuff was data mining through a backdoor method. I'm sorry, but when was backdooring anything a smart move?


>At the end of the day a lot your data gathering "methods" were not very conventional or TOS friendly so I figured that something like this would end up happening.

QUOTED FROM r/dota2:

**This is the important part.**

Dotabuff was relying on **reverse-engineered** data scraping. It's clear to anyone with any sort of know-how on these things that you **cannot** expect that to keep working.

Especially not since there exists an API, and there are privacy concerns that they were completely avoiding.

Valve is completely in the right here, they were under no obligation to keep their methods the same and dotabuff should not have made their business on backdoor methods.

 

[PillowKnight]

streaming some pictionary shit

I vote to move our entire d2 community to pictionary.

 

[SteveWinwood]

sorry that there is a HUGE portion of the community interested in personal stats that valve doesn't seem interested in providing.

If they weren't they wouldn't have the web api... Sorry they see getting more heroes out and tutorials as more important.

 

[vehn]

Dotabuff was data mining through a backdoor method. I'm sorry, but when was backdooring anything a smart move?

backdooring as NP is pretty smart when the whole enemy team is pushing down your rax

 

[balladofwindfishes]

sorry that there is a HUGE portion of the community interested in personal stats that valve doesn't seem interested in providing.

It seems people are forgetting this is still very much a beta. Things aren't done yet. Stat tracking is obviously in the works, dota buff just found an unofficial, unsupported way of getting data and then took offense when that information was changed.

Okay, personal anecdote time. At my company a portion of what I do relied on googles unofficial, undocumented, unsupported weather API. One day in August I came into work and all the weather tracking applications were broken. Google had taken down their weather API with no warning or anything. Was I upset, yes, I was, but it wasn't an official API. They never wanted anyone to build businesses around that data. I didn't write an angry blog post saying google shut down my company, and then shut down my company myself, I took the time to sit down, find an alternate API, and restructure the application.

 

[bounchfx]

sorry that there is a HUGE portion of the community interested in personal stats that valve doesn't seem interested in providing.

the game is in beta, holy shit. If the community shows a strong desire for a certain feature they will probably provide it at some point. I imagine they're working on an in-game solution.

 

[fusionedd]

Hi everyone. Is there a party I can join along? :3

 

[SteveWinwood]

Hi everyone. Is there a party I can join along? :3

There's a let's hate valve party going on right now.

 

[bzm]

swedes confirmed for isketch cheaters