Where scrims actually live right now
For most teams, the honest answer is: nowhere in particular. Some replays are in the coach’s downloads folder. Some are in a Discord thread that has since scrolled past the search limit. A few are on a shared drive with filenames like `scrim3_final_REAL.dem`. The ones from the bootcamp two months ago are wherever the analyst who has since left the team put them.
This is not a tidiness problem, it is a competitive one. Scrim data is the most valuable analytical asset a team produces, because it is the only data that describes how *you* play against opponents at your level — and it is the only data your opponents cannot buy, scrape or look up. Treating it as disposable is throwing away the one edge that is genuinely yours.
Roster-only, enforced where it counts
Everything uploaded lands in a vault scoped to your team. There are no public match pages — not unlisted ones, not hard-to-guess URLs. A match belongs to a team, and access is checked on the server for every request, so a link that leaks is a link that does not open.
That matters more for scrims than for anything else. A scrim replay contains your drafts, your ward patterns, your Roshan timings and your responses to specific pressure — it is a scouting document written about you. Public analytics sites are built on the premise that match data is public, which is a reasonable premise for ladder games and a completely wrong one for a private lobby against a team you will meet in a qualifier.
- Team-scoped access
- Visibility follows roster membership, checked server-side rather than hidden in the interface.
- Encrypted at rest
- Stored encrypted; the raw replay file is purged after thirty days while the derived analytics are kept.
- Per-team records
- A scrim is one match that both teams may have uploaded. Each team keeps its own record of it — which side they played, who the opponent was, their own notes — and neither can see the other’s.
The scrim nobody can name
A subtle thing about scrim replays: they carry almost no identifying information. A private lobby has no team names attached to the two sides, so a raw parse gives you "Radiant" and "Dire" and leaves you to remember which one you were. Two weeks later, nobody does.
The vault fixes this by letting each team record its own context for a match — the side you played, who the opponent was, and any notes. Once that is recorded, every view stops saying Radiant and Dire and starts saying your team name and theirs, and the result stops being "Radiant Victory" and becomes Victory or Defeat from your point of view.
Colour still carries the side everywhere — green Radiant, red Dire — so renaming the labels never costs you the orientation you need to read a map.
This is also why the same match can look different to two teams. Both sides may have uploaded it and both keep their own row, with their own side and their own notes. Neither reads the other’s, so both get a workspace that describes the game from where they were sitting.
Tags, blocks and comparing across time
Scrims are only useful in groups. One game against a team tells you very little; the eight you played against them during a bootcamp week tell you what they do under pressure and what they think about you.
Grouping by opponent, bootcamp block or tournament run turns the vault from an archive into something you can ask questions of. What changed between the block before the patch and the block after? Did the thing we fixed in review actually stay fixed across the next ten games? Which opponents consistently beat us in a way our other scrims do not predict?
Analytics stay pinned to the patch a game was played on, which keeps those comparisons honest. A game from three patches ago should not be silently averaged in with this week’s, because the game it was played in no longer exists.
Deleting is per team, on purpose
Removing a match from your board drops your team’s link to it — not the match itself, and not the opposing team’s record of it, because they may hold their own link with their own side and their own notes.
The confirmation says exactly that rather than promising a deletion that does not happen. It is a slightly longer sentence than "are you sure?", and it is the honest one.
What this is worth over a season
The value of a scrim vault is not visible in any single week. It shows up when a team plays an opponent for the second time three months later and can pull up everything from the first meeting in ten seconds — their drafts, their timings, the specific thing that beat you and whether they still do it.
It also shows up in roster changes. When a player leaves, their knowledge leaves with them unless the analysis lives somewhere the team owns. A vault is how a team accumulates institutional memory instead of restarting it every time the line-up moves.