Dotabuff shuts down, back up [updated] | News

posted by Sun_Tzu,

With the latest patch to Dota 2 Valve introduced a privacy setting intended to allow users greater control over how third party websites accessed their public matchmaking information. As a result of this change as well as changes to the API interfaces, Dotabuff have come to the conclusion that they are no longer capable of continuing their operations, and have chosen to shut down their website, leaving in its place a message to Valve and the community.

Update:

Dotabuff is back up but is at this time unable to acquire new data. They are however working to see if they can solve their problems and return to normal service.

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There are two conflicting views involved, an opt-in and an opt-out approach to feature design. Dotabuff is advocating an opt-out solution which hinges on players knowing about the service, having privacy concerns and knowing that they have the option to remove their information from the service in question. On the other hand, Valve seems to have taken a stance that this is too great of a burden to put on players, and that rather than opting out of a service, those who wish to use it for tracking their personal statistics would be able to enable the sharing of their information from within the client.

This comes on the heels of the Dotabuff Rating feature, a means of attempting to add a rating for players based on their performances, an attempt to provide a public alternative to the hidden matchmaking rating which Valve uses. This decision sparked up quite the controversy, not only for the privacy concerns involved, but because the MMR had been publicly available early on during the Dota 2 Beta, but Valve had made a conscious decision to hide this rating from public view.

The practice by which Dotabuff has been acquiring the information used for supporting their website is known as "scraping", extracting information from the Client API (Application Programming Interface, a means by which information is transferred between applications). This API is not intended for use by third party websites, however Dotabuff states that the WebAPI which Valve had intended for third party websites to use was insufficient and not available for a long period of time, which was the reason for them making use of the Client API instead. As Valve closed this option off along with the patch, Dotabuff felt they did not have the time needed to migrate their services over to the WebAPI, and that their business model was severly hurt.

Dotabuff has said they will honor refund requests from Plus Users or credit accounts for downtime if the service is revived. Refunds can be requests by emailing support@dotabuff.com.

Users wanting to express their opinions on the Developer forums have been asked to confine themselves to this thread.

An excerpt of the statement by Dotabuff can be read below, with the full statement available in the sources:

As of 2013-01-25 09:30:00 UTC, Valve has completely taken away our current method of gathering data. This means we are no longer able to get new matches, download replays, qualify aggregates, or properly calculate any other stats (like hero winrates).

While we understand the privacy concerns Valve might have with all data being publicly available, we believe the approach they are taking now is completely wrong. They are trying to force us to use the WebAPI, but there’s some serious downsides to it.

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We have invested a lot of our time and own money in trying to make Dotabuff one of the best sites out there, and we are absolutely devastated.

If you would like to express your opinion about this situation, contact Valve and let them know how you feel.

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