Scientists proved that DOTA 2 is less demanding than Counter-Strike in terms of reaction time and accuracy

Esports department of Russian State University of physical education, sport, youth and tourism (SCOLIPE) in collaboration with an esports platform Click-Storm.com showed that tournament DOTA 2 players, when tested on the reaction trainer, compared to Counter-Strike players, showed less reaction time, hit less targets and had less accuracy.

The research was using data obtained from Click-Storm.com esports tournament platform, a startup, that aims to measure cognitive abilities of esports players with the set of specially developed cognitive trainers and compared them to esports performance.

The uniqueness of the research is that for the first time the raw esports tournament data, that is generated on the tournament platform, on a large scale, was compared to the placement of the players in the tournaments on the platform with the results of native cognitive trainer.

Authors of the research (A.S. Talan PhD, M.S. Talan) developed a reaction trainer, that is claimed to also test cognitive flexibility and field of vision, and launched it on Click-Storm.com.

The trainer writes down hits, average accuracy and average reaction time. For the research was taken data of the tournament players who used reaction trainer for at least three times. The most successful attempt was used for comparison.

In total there were obtained 1455 results of Counter-Strike tournament players (564 results) and DOTA 2 tournament players (891 results) for the period of 2016-2018.

The results of the research was first announced on a conference “Applied aspects of esports” Moscow, Russia on 22nd of February, 2019 and sent to the sports science journal.

An important thing we want to highlight is that, as shown on the graphs, there is a strict correlation between number of target hits, accuracy and reaction time, and the placement of Counter-Strike players in Click-Storm tournaments. While for DOTA 2 the correlation is present only for the reaction time.

Authors claim that such researches can potentially show the difference of impact esports disciplines do on one’s cognitive abilities.