A New Journey
Sep 10, 2016The past year for our team has been incredible.
We started our adventure with a simple Reddit post, surveying the community about a potential remote matchmaking application for Dota 2.
In December 2015, we released NineOuttaTen—receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from the community. However, we soon came to realize our software had many bugs, a poor interface, and in general was difficult to use. We took suggestions from the community to heart and began working to improve both our skills and our product. Within a few months of release, we revamped the mobile app and added push notifications.
Since our launch in December 2015, we've had over 13,000 unique users use NineOuttaTen and over 25,000 queues accepted.
Today is 9/10/16 and marks the day we begin rolling out massive updates for NineOuttaTen and shifting it towards a new direction.
Moving Forward
For the past 8 months we've been developing a real-time hero recommendation engine integrated into NineOuttaTen. Counter picking in Dota 2 is not a new concept. The entire concept of NineOuttaTen came from reading Kevin Conley's and Daniel Perry's work on building a Dota 2 hero recommendation engine. We wanted to take this work to the next level by creating a platform that provides effective hero recommendations with a beautiful interface to Dota 2 players.
Veda: A Dota 2 Hero Recommendation Engine
Veda is a new feature that recommends optimal hero picks using machine learning during the drafting phase. It leverages NineOuttaTen's existing real-time infrastructure. We are serious about making Veda the best it can be and are thrilled to be working with NVIDIA Corporation to deliver a world class product. NVIDIA will allow us to scale our machine learning efforts by providing the most powerful GPU hardware.
We have seen alternative solutions to counter picking over the years, but we were not convinced about the effectiveness of them. Veda is our attempt to answer the question: Which heroes should my team pick to win? With this question in mind, we wanted Veda to achieve these goals:
Veda is easy to use
Veda is performant
Veda's recommendations are straight-forward and believable
Veda is accessible to everyone
Veda unites teammates
Over the next few weeks we will be unveiling Veda.
Thank You
We thank NVIDIA for giving us the opportunity to take NineOuttaTen to the next level.
We thank the organizations who offered to partner with us in the past. We wish them the best of luck.
We thank our users in using NineOuttaTen and providing us feedback for what we could improve upon.
Finally, we thank Valve Corporation for making Dota 2 the greatest game ever.
NineOuttaTen is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Valve Corporation.