Can you please rank guides based on timeliness as well as votes?

The timeliness should probably count toward at least 50% of the weight, because a guide could be extremely well written, funny, whatever, but if its not providing information about Dota 2 as we play it today, what is it really worth?

I'm one of the very authors here to updates his or her guides immediately after every patch, and, to be blunt, I don't feel like I'm being rewarded for it. Indeed, I haven't had a comment on my DK guide in months, despite it being one of the most thorough and painstakingly researched guides on this site. Indeed, it is listed after a guide that hasn't been updated in THREE YEARS. Its out-datedness aside, some of the information is just plain bad. Honestly, it reflects poorly on Dotafire, because it indicates that that this site isn't a source of reliable information. Personally, if I'm interested in the best builds for a hero, I'm much more likely to look at the guides on Dotabuff than those on Dotafire.

Likewise, my newly published Lina guide is getting comments only because it is on the front page for a short time due to its newness. I'm sure it will sink into obscurity after that, because, even though its the only Lina guide updated for 7.01, it is listed as #14. How is this a motivation for me to keep writing guides on your site?

Pvgna.com has written to me and asked me to create content for them (for compensation, in fact), they were so impressed with my DK guide. I have only a certain number of hours each week I'm going to spend on guide-making. I have to wonder if Dotafire is really the place I should be invested in the long term. I'm not asking for money, by the way. I have a great job and Dota is just a hobby. But I do believe that most other sites, whether Dota, Reddit, Youtube, etc, have much better systems in place for helping the best content rise to the top and incentivizing their best creators.

Good luck on your web site.

-Alien

After downvoting the 3-year-old guide I was referring to (it deserved to be downvoted, please do not think I was doing this for my own gain), it somehow slipped to a vastly lower position. Not sure how that happened. I'm a little confused by your ranking system, I guess.

Anyway, I still stand by my points: the timeliness should be factored in much more and you all should brainstorm other incentives for retaining dedicated creators, otherwise we might head elsewhere.

Thanks again for reading.

If people think a guide is outdated, then they will downvote it. Isn't that the point of having a vote system?

Unlike some heroes like Riki or Earth Spirit that change a lot, DK hasn't gotten any significant change in the last 3 years, so I don't see a problem with a 3 years old DK guide in principle. It can still be relevant.

Hey Alien!

I fully understand your concern and I agree with what you're saying. We have a ton of great guides that have received a lot of comments and positive votes over time, but they're outdated and they're not as useful now to the people as they used to be in the past.

I always give positive votes to the new guides and also the updated guides for the latest patches, because that means the author really cares about his content and his readers, however we cannot do much about the authors that choose not to update their guides anymore.

We'll think about a way to "promote" the new and updated guides more and reduce the visibility of the outdated guides, if you have any suggestions or solutions please let us know!

Thanks for your concern and also for the great work and time you've put in your guides, your guides are really good and helpful for our community! :)

1. Delete guides with old information. For my own business, I run a web site that contains tutorials and examples for using APIs for mechanical design software. When an API call gets deprecated, I delete or modify the examples with that API call.

2. As mentioned in my title, you could weight the ranking score based on timeliness and not just votes. That would be a really simple way to handle the problem even if you're not going to delete old guides.

3. You could email people who haven't updated their guides and tell them that if they don't update it for the latest version, it could be deleted or heavily dropped in rankings.

Again, I want to emphasize that Dotafire right now is in the awkward position of trying to serve novice Dota players while at the same time expecting them to recognize that a guide isn't accurate. It's a huge catch-22.

I'll add one more suggestion, which would go a long way to promoting quality content:

Give Dotafire guide creators the option of linking their guide with their Steam ID or Dotabuff page, by which Dotafire could parse information like:

• Whether they are in the normal skill, high skill, or very high skill bracket.
• Their ranked win rate with the hero they've chosen to write the guide for.

Again, this would be optional, but a HS or VHS player who chooses to do this would automatically have their guide weighted much more heavily in the ranking system. Maybe even a gold, silver, or bronze star placed by their name indicating whether that player is a verified Very High, High, or Normal Skill player. This would go a long way to allowing us to quickly discern which guides are worth looking at and which aren't.

It can't really be said gently, so I'll just say it: There are a LOT of guides written on this site by people who either wrote the guide for kicks and giggles or because they play in so low a bracket that literally anything is viable. That doesn't make the guide viable if you want to leave that bracket.

Thanks again.

Those suggestions sound great, I'll discuss them with the devs and see what we can do!

Thank you once again, if anything else comes to your mind please let us know. :)

Players trying to learn about a hero, by definition, are not going to know whether a guide for that hero is outdated. That's the inherent problem with the rating system and why its not reliable.

I'll put my money where my mouth is: I personally don't use Dotafire to learn about heroes I'm learning because I know most of its content isn't reliable. Even if I don't know a ton about hero X, what I do know is that most of the guide creators for hero X don't either!

For example, the DK guide that was formerly #1 for very, very long time (until yesterday):

• States unapologetically that Power Treads are inferior to Phase Boots on DK, even though the opposite is true.
• Recommends a dual lane or tri lane for DK and says that DK "can work" in the mid lane. I have never seen a pro game where DK wasn't in the mid lane.
• Recommends Ring of Aquila as one of the early game items, even though no one builds this.
• Makes no mention of Assault Cuirass, which is far and away the most popular late game item.
• Does not recommend Blink Dagger or even seem to indicate that this a worthy DK item.
• Does not mention Silver Edge, a very important situational item, because the item did not exist at the time of writing.
• Recommends skilling Dragon Tail at level one, which will not serve you well in the vast majority of games.

Again, I am speaking from the perspective of virtually any DK player over 3k as well as pro games, where the meta is different from pubs.

Thanks. And don't get me wrong, this is a beautiful site and you all have already performed a great service to the Dota 2 community. I want to see it excel even further.

Happy new year!

We understand, feedback has always helped us improve our website for our users to have the best experience possible.

Thanks once again and a happy new year to you too!

We're always here if you'd like to further discuss, just let us know. :)