About Fresh Meat: data and methodology
Fresh Meat is a fan-made statistics site about one Dota 2 hero. Every number comes from public match data, is shown with its sample size and update date, and is left out when the data is missing or too thin. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve.
Last data sync: .
Where the numbers come from
- OpenDota public matches — Pudge's win and pick rate by rank, matchups against every hero and how often items are bought in each game phase. Synced daily.
- Our own match sample — public Pudge matches collected from OpenDota one by one, used for the skill order and item win rates once a number reaches the sample threshold below.
- Daily snapshots of the synced numbers, which make the trend charts and the weekly meta report possible. Trends start from the first snapshot; nothing is backfilled.
- Game data (ability and item values, Aghanim's and talent text) as published by OpenDota from the game files.
INTERPRETATION
OpenDota's statistics are not filtered by patch. The patch label on each page is the latest one OpenDota lists; the numbers behind it can include games from before that patch. Pages say so next to every statistics block instead of calling them "patch win rates".
How to read the numbers
- 95% intervals. Win rates come with a Wilson score interval. A difference only counts as real when the whole interval is on one side of 50% — that is how a hero becomes a counter, not by a hand-picked cut-off.
- Sample threshold. A matchup page is indexed only with at least 93 games (at that size the 95% interval of a 50% win rate is about ±10 percentage points). Thinner matchups stay visible in the tables but are not offered to search engines.
- Freshness. Data older than 14 days is marked stale and the page drops out of the index until the next sync.
- No copy-paste pages. Matchup pages are compared with each other; pages too similar to another one are held for review instead of being published.
- Items. OpenDota reports how often an item is bought, not how often Pudge wins with it. Item win rates come only from our own sample and describe final inventories, which favours items bought in long or winning games.
- Draft odds. The draft tool shows a number only after its model beats a no-draft guess on matches it was not fitted on, and labels it as an estimate.
How guides are checked
Guide claims about mechanics are checked against the game data above and against community wiki pages (Dota 2 Wiki, Liquipedia) found through web search. Corrections are made in the text when a claim does not hold. The checks were not done in the game client, and a guide is published only after its review. Advice is marked as advice and kept apart from data on every page.