From a replay file to one thing to change.
Four steps, none of which need anything from you after you link Steam once.
We take the replay apart
When you finish a game, Hindsight fetches the match from Valve and downloads the actual replay — the same .dem file the in-client watch tab plays. A Go parser walks it and pulls out roughly 36,000 events: every hero's position about once a second, every combat-log entry, every ward placed and destroyed, every item bought.
That number is the whole difference between this and a stats site. “You died seven times” comes from a match summary. “You died 1,400 units from your nearest ward with four teammates on the other side of the map” only comes out of the replay.
What we can't always get
Valve keeps replays for about two weeks. Past that the file is gone and nobody can reconstruct it — so a very old game shows the summary-level detail and says plainly that the replay expired. Everything degrades rather than failing: a game without a replay is still a game you can read, just a shallower one.
We group the deaths that share a cause
One death is variance. The interesting question is whether several of them were the same death happening more than once. Hindsight reconstructs each one — where you stood, who was near you, what vision either side had, what your team did in the ninety seconds after — and looks for the pattern across them.
That's also why a single number is never the finding. Dying five times while alone, all before the fight opened, on a hero with no escape, is a habit. Habits are the only kind of mistake worth a coaching report, because they're the only kind you can practise out.
12345678910111213141516A coach writes the read
Everything above is deterministic — the same replay produces the same reconstruction every time, and it's free. What a credit buys is the read on top: which findings actually cost you the game, ranked, argued from the events, and written in the voice you picked.
The coach never changes a grade or a number. All five voices deliver the same verdict — they differ in register, not in judgement, and you can re-read any report in a different one.
Here's the pattern the replay coughs up: you step in on beat one instead of beat three.
Your next games grade it
This is the part nothing else in Dota does, and the reason the report ends with exactly one assignment instead of a list of five things.
Every report names one measurable target — say, deaths-while-alone under 30%. That target is tied to a specific number in the metric record Hindsight already writes for every game you play. So every later game scores it automatically, free games included, and the assignment stays open until the number moves or it becomes clear it was never the problem.
Why one target and not five
Five things to work on is a list you read once. One thing, checked against your actual games, is a thing you change. The next assignment opens when the current one closes.
What it costs
Steps 1 and 2 are free on every game you play, forever — the match detail, the death reconstruction, the ward and vision maps, the replay scrub, your per-hero trends. Steps 3 and 4 cost one credit per report.
- Free carries no credits — it's the whole deterministic layer, not a trial.
- Hindsight is in closed beta: an invite comes with a report allowance, and that's what a coached report spends.
Read one before you decide
The fastest way to know whether this is worth anything to you is to read a real report on a real game. There's one here, no account needed.