[HN Gopher] The Sound Proof Booths of Silence
___________________________________________________________________
The Sound Proof Booths of Silence
Author : namiwang
Score : 213 points
Date : 2023-09-16 07:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dota2.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dota2.com)
| donatj wrote:
| I don't really get esports or regular sports for that matter, but
| this seems like overkill? How much of an advantage could they
| really get from someone yelling at them in the audience? With a
| decent audience they are rarely going to hear anything other than
| a din anyway.
|
| Doesn't seem like much more of an advantage than people yelling
| things at baseball players?
|
| Seems like it could just be part of the calculation of the
| competition rather than working so hard to avoid it.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Enough to give pause. In StarCraft there was a trap set and a
| fan favorite was about to walk right into it. The audience went
| wild. And then he stopped all units, and retreated. When
| interviewed he said he'd stopped because the audience went wild
| when they shouldn't have. (They cleared the stadium for the
| next match)
|
| Baseball isn't a game of hidden knowledge. The audience mood
| can give away details about the other team.
|
| Think poker. If another player bluffed and the audience gasps,
| you know something notable happened.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I did some more digging and found this post
|
| https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12
| doikor wrote:
| > Doesn't seem like much more of an advantage than people
| yelling things at baseball players?
|
| The baseball equivalent would be the crowd knowing signals
| between the pitchers and catcher and yell them out so the
| batter always know what pitch is coming. (this is pretty much
| the only hidden information in baseball)
|
| That would pretty much ruin the game (in some players/fans mind
| at least). And in fact this is something the MLB is actively
| trying to solve by providing encrypted signal communication
| devices so players don't have to rely on finger/etc signals
| that can be decrypted by the opposing team.
| andy81 wrote:
| The noise is a common giveaway in pro League of Legends despite
| similar efforts.
|
| Usually when a player is walking up to a hidden enemy the crowd
| changes in a noticeable way, even on the stream. It's not an
| individual shout so much as the overall noise.
| donatj wrote:
| And what I am saying is why is this a bad thing. Just make it
| part of the competition, seems way more fun.
| ufo wrote:
| A baseball analogy would be if sign-stealing were allowed.
| Aachen wrote:
| The competition is about playing the game they came there
| to compete on, not a different metagame. If you find that
| fun, that's okay but your tournament is in another castle
| dillydogg wrote:
| My thought as to why that isn't good is because the game
| you play to get to the International (often online and in
| smaller venues) is a different game than the one you would
| play in the finals. As a viewer, I think they should be
| playing a higher stakes version of the game I can play, not
| one with different rules because of the crowd. Either way,
| I don't care so much, but I fall on the side of the sound
| proofing being good.
| spatulon wrote:
| Two problems that have occurred in recent times when Dota
| tournaments have not used booths:
|
| - the crowd whistling to tell their favourite team that the
| enemy team is making some kind of secret play (e.g. taking
| Roshan, or using a smoke).
|
| - clearly hearing the play-by-play commentary that's being
| played to the crowd over the arena's loudspeakers, which can
| also give away information about what the enemy team's doing.
| OhSoHumble wrote:
| Dota players have ears that are trained for keywords. For
| example, the game has a minimap. Players can buy items to keep
| the minimap revealed and to see the movement of enemy players.
| The enemy team can buy an item to make it so that they aren't
| revealed on the minimap while they move around. This is known
| as "smoking" - as the item is a smoke that explodes over the
| team before they make their movement.
|
| If a caster yells out "they're smoking" and the entire audience
| hushes in anticipation then one team knows that the other is
| trying to make a play and can either group up or avoid the
| fight.
|
| The International is a tournament where the prevailing team
| wins millions and millions of dollars. Sound isolation is
| really important to provide an even playing field.
| nivaldoh wrote:
| A yelling crowd can be a dead giveaway that the other team is
| about to make a risky play under the fog of war, and give the
| defending team enough time to prepare.
|
| For instance, if certain characters from one team are not
| showing on the map for the opponents and they suddenly hear a
| crowd yelling, they could anticipate that the character is
| about to do a surprise gank, attempt to solo Roshan, etc, and
| shut down the attempt more easily.
|
| It can be heavily bias the decisions that players might make
| under certain circumstances, so it makes sense that Valve would
| go to great lengths to prevent that.
| ufo wrote:
| Dota is a game of imperfect information with "fog of war".
| There is a large playing field but each team can only see the
| area immediately surrounding their characters. Players will try
| to ambush the enemy, or group with their team to sneak in a
| side-objective while the enemy doesn't notice. Audience noise
| can disrupt this.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial
| installations are at a point where you have this silent,
| completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some
| degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a
| floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling
| headphones.
| pstrateman wrote:
| It's much much too loud for air curtains.
| seanthemon wrote:
| I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain
| supreme!
| furyofantares wrote:
| It would be less chaotic, not more.
|
| Think of it this way: any time the audience starts going wild
| about something one team knows about but the other doesn't,
| they're doing so in anticipation of dramatic moment when the
| other team learns what happened and must adapt while the
| first time is trying to exploit it.
|
| If it's given away instead, the anticipated event never
| happens or is muted because the enemy is not caught off
| guard.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| There was once a big StarCraft 2 tournament where one of the
| contestants walked out mid-event because he couldn't pull off
| any cheeky tricks due to the audience giving him away.
| wnevets wrote:
| There was a recent dota2 LAN without soundproofing and the
| audience would ruin surprise attacks (aka smoke tanks) or
| surprise objective taking (aka rosh), it made the gameplay
| worse.
| bspammer wrote:
| That would encourage a much more boring style of gameplay.
|
| If you can't launch a surprise attack because the audience
| will give it away, the best strategy would be to slowly and
| incrementally build up a gold and experience advantage.
| jfim wrote:
| Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to
| do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.
| duskwuff wrote:
| In some early tournaments, the casters would have to avoid
| looking at Roshan fights, because the other team would
| inevitably hear (or feel!) the bass-heavy sound effects
| from Roshan's attacks and movement.
|
| Later versions of the client added an option to mute those
| sound effects, for precisely this reason.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| It especially screwed over pre-siren Roshans (which don't
| seem to be much of a thing anymore). But yeah, there's
| still a lot the sounds can give away, like a Roshan play, a
| sneaky smoke, enemy tormentor attempts, etc.
| pdpi wrote:
| Even without knowing much of anything about DotA 2 in
| particular: for any game with asymmetric information, the
| crowd reacting to what your opponent is doing is _always_
| going to be a major tell. At least in LoL, managing that
| information asymmetry is an important strategic element,
| can 't imagine it being any less of an issue in DotA 2.
| leetrout wrote:
| Actual title:
|
| "Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence"
|
| Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's
| funding?
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| According to the text under the first image:
|
| "... a blog feature where we let members of our development
| team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and
| occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game
| as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The
| International."
|
| It appears to be from their team's experiences with setting up
| 'The International' up till now
| langsoul-com wrote:
| It's crazy that the booths cost $200k, like how is it even
| possible they cost THAT much!
| falcolas wrote:
| Soundproofing requires mass. A lot of it. It also requires
| careful control of airflow to remove paths the sound can
| travel.
|
| Museum quality glass and argon are both fairly expensive.
| Especially in quantities sufficient to fill the mass quota.
| Zathu wrote:
| I don't understand the problem this solves - why not put the
| players in noise cancelling headsets?
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Two theories: 1. Noise cancelling headphones don't cancel
| everything 2. They needed to be able to use mics, which don't
| work well with a lot of ambient noise.
| npace12 wrote:
| would that work? that's like wearing noise canceling headphones
| to a concert.
| lijok wrote:
| Uncomfortable for the players if I had to guess
| etskinner wrote:
| Read the article; The last couple paragraphs talk about how
| they tried that and it didn't live up to their standards
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Have you ever tried using ANC headphones? They'd be better
| described as noise- _reducing_. They can also be uncomfortable
| to some people when worn for long durations, and you presumably
| _do_ want to let players in the same team communicate to each
| other.
| __s wrote:
| In starcraft when they'll go with headsets it works by playing
| loud whitenoise. Not conducive for a team game
| [deleted]
| Twisell wrote:
| Maybe reading the article you are reacting to would have
| helped:
|
| - It is a retrospective and the first edition held place in
| 2011. At that time noise canceling in harsh conditions was not
| a solved issue.
|
| - They actually tried the noise canceling, no box approach at
| the 2022 event. They reverted to boxes for 2023 because it
| still need tweaking to drop the box altogether.
| [deleted]
| doikor wrote:
| They don't cancel well enough. You can still hear some noise.
| You probably can't identify what it is but it is enough of a
| signal to react to (spoiling your surprise play/ambush)
| xvedejas wrote:
| In Age of Empires tournaments, they simply put the players in a
| different room from the casters/audience, with live streaming
| cameras. Maybe because live audiences are relatively rare in
| these tournaments, there's less of a demand for players to be
| physically in the same room as the audience?
| brainzap wrote:
| That the players can see each other also allows for some
| mindgames, for example "the paper"
| https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared
| Aachen wrote:
| Sorry, but what's this showing? Someone walks with paper in
| their hands, that's what you're referring to, but did this have
| an effect in some way that was noticeable later in the
| tournament that isn't shown in the clip?
|
| It seems like a joke to bring a stack of papers to a computer
| tournament, not something to trick the other team into
| thinking... what, exactly?
| [deleted]
| pototo666 wrote:
| context: at Ti8's final, Team LGD played against Team OG.
| During the draft phase, OG players had some paper, which were
| statistics of LGD (I guess). Somnus the player said: Ceb is
| holding a bunch of paper. https://youtu.be/abEDXaPyIOE?t=15.
| In that final, LGD almost won but they lost at the end. That
| final is arguably the best final in Dota2 history. The moment
| when Somuns taunted OG was captured by True Sight, which is a
| documentary for every TI final. LGD players surely watched
| the documentary or at least the clip many times.
|
| The first clip you questioned about is from Ti9, a year after
| Ti8, where OG and LGD played again. Notail the player took a
| bunch of paper (way too many for drafting analysis purpose)
| to remind LGD their tragic loss last year. Hence the mind
| game. Btw, LGD lost again.
| Aachen wrote:
| Thanks for that context! That explains
| wincy wrote:
| It was definitely an interesting article but the first sentence
| of the article proper really grabbed me.
|
| The weird thing to me about the world is you can have an event
| that literally millions of people watch around the world, and if
| you had asked me "what's the International" five minutes ago I
| wouldn't have had any idea, and I'm a very online person! I play
| video games, even, and at one point played DOTA2!
|
| The internet has totally fractionated our culture to subcultures
| within subcultures, to the point where when people meet in person
| they have nothing to talk about. Down with the monoculture and
| all that.
|
| It's astounding how much money and thought and effort went into
| building the booths too! This is the least surprising part: there
| is a lot of money sloshing around in the world. The amount of
| talent to build soundproof booths so people can comfortably play
| a video game in front of a bunch of people is wild.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Everyone being in different sub-cultures doesn't mean people
| have nothing to talk about, it makes conversation way more
| interesting if you're just willing to step out of your bubble
| for a bit. Some of the best pub conversations I've had have
| been chatting to someone about things I'd never even heard of
| until that moment, and finding out about fun niches that I'd
| probably still not know about otherwise.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Also, world got a lot bigger (more people) and smaller (a lot
| of news instant and online) at the same time.
| __s wrote:
| TI is a bit notorious because it's prize pool is massive
| compared to other esports. Winning TI puts someone's prize
| earnings past lifetime earnings of most other top player's
| career prize earnings in other games
|
| https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International#Tournaments
|
| https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Portal:Statistics/Player_earnin...
|
| https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winnings
|
| https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Portal:Statistics/Player_ea...
| fragmede wrote:
| 1st place in 2022 got $8,518,822! Nice!
| bspammer wrote:
| To hammer it home even more:
| https://www.esportsearnings.com/players
|
| 21 dota players at the top before you get a different game
| (Fortnite)
| alargemoose wrote:
| Wow, Not only are the top 21 dota 2 players, all but *4* of
| the top 50 earners are dota 2 players
| tym0 wrote:
| And the top 5 earners for CS:GO are all Astralis players.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Fascinating. This isn't a space I follow, but the data is
| eye-opening. To contextualize it for myself a bit more, I
| checked out _annual_ earnings [1] instead of lifetime and
| compared it to the overall global list [2] of athletes across
| all sports.
|
| One interesting takeaway is that it looks like eSports are
| still a couple orders of magnitude away from breaking into
| that rarefied air -- the top eSports athletes earned ~$1.8M
| over the last year, while the cutoff to make it in the list
| of top 50 global highest-earning athletes is ~$45M. It
| wouldn't surprise me to see eSports start making it up there
| over the next couple decades, though.
|
| The second interesting takeaway is that, for many athletes in
| the global top 50, their off-the-field earnings are a _big_
| part of their total. By contrast, endorsement deals for
| eSports athletes don 't seem like much of a thing nowadays,
| other than the occasional team-up for a gaming
| mouse/keyboard. This seems like it'd be a growth area for
| eSports over the next couple decades, too.
|
| TL;DR: I wish there were some way to buy some ETFs or stake
| some athletes in the eSports space. It seems like it has a
| lot of growth ahead of it still.
|
| [1]: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players/highest-
| earnings-las...
|
| [2]: https://www.forbes.com/lists/athletes/
| Huppie wrote:
| You've probably missed that the former website only lists
| winnings and does not include the player salaries and other
| income like from streaming.
|
| The numbers are significantly higher for the top players,
| but sure enough still a lot lower than 'regular' athletes.
| kleinsch wrote:
| This is only prize earnings, important to keep in mind that
| Dota heavily weights prizes from tournaments. Highest total
| prize earnings on that chart is $7M, Faker pulls in $5M/year
| in salary alone.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Thing is, millions aren't what they used to be! with world
| population at just over 8 billion, the viewership of 2 million
| makes it pretty obscure. World cup final had 1.5 Bil viewers
| apparently (TIL).
| jack_pp wrote:
| Well, can't really compare a fairly complex computer game
| where you need to actively play in order to even understand
| the stream with a.. checks Wikipedia.. 2000 year old game
| with simple enough rules that you can watch without any
| knowledge.
|
| Football also has the advantage of a fixed rule set. I've
| played over 4000 hours of dota in my life but none in the
| last 12 months. I've tried watching it on twitch and the map
| layout changed, probably new heroes were added or old heroes
| changed..
| Cyph0n wrote:
| That's why I'm of the opinion that CS is the best spectator
| esport out there. The rounds are short and the overall
| barrier to entry for a viewer to enjoy the game is low, yet
| the skill ceiling is extremely high.
|
| Edit: If you're not familiar with CS, try tuning in to the
| ESL stream and see how much you understand:
| https://www.twitch.tv/eslcs
| matrss wrote:
| Makes sense. Trackmania would fit that bill as well: it's
| just racing, but most often without the burden of
| following real-world physics too much, which can make it
| very entertaining.
| [deleted]
| walthamstow wrote:
| I'd read that article about association football again if I
| was you. 1) just because kicking a ball is 2000 years old
| doesn't mean soccer is and 2) offside and backpasses have
| both changed in my short lifetime, completely changing how
| the game is played.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Football also has the advantage of a fixed rule set.
|
| I'd tend to agree that video games are ensuring they can
| never stick around by constantly throwing the rules in the
| garbage.
|
| But if you're going to claim that soccer is 2000 years old,
| you can't also claim that it has a fixed rule set. It
| changes at a slower pace. The slower pace of change is an
| improvement over video games. But it still changes. There
| is not even continuity between an attested 2000-year-old
| game and soccer.
| raincole wrote:
| By Joel Spolsky: when I say "no one" I mean less than 10
| million people.
| walthamstow wrote:
| > where when people meet in person they have nothing to talk
| about.
|
| Not true IMO. My friends are all nerds with widely varied
| interests, there is no one single interest that we all share.
| Only one of us is into model trains, for example, but he still
| talks about it and we still listen and ask questions.
|
| (For reference, we're late 80s/early 90s millennials.)
| dubcanada wrote:
| That's strange, The International is a very well known esport
| event, the biggest in it's hayday, it's certainly dropped off,
| but at one point there wasn't a way to open Steam without
| seeing details about the International.
|
| While I agree with your premise, The International was heavily
| advertised on Steam products. Which is the biggest gaming
| store. Outside of that, there was minimal but anyone who
| watched esports saw TI stuff, it was always #1 on twitch during
| its week playoffs/tournament day.
| fragmede wrote:
| I played World of Warcraft I and II on an IPX network, but I
| stopped gaming around when Quake 2 died out in favor of CS. I
| have steam installed on my MacBook. I used Twitch a lot in
| 2020 and 2021; less so these days. I spend way too much time
| on HN; I'm not ill informed about other things.
|
| Probably saw an ad for it sometime in the past but I can't
| say I remembered its name or anything. The attention economy
| is real. There are huge swaths of culture that I'll hear
| about from friends of friends and it's astounding how much is
| out there and the conventions they have for it.
| taneq wrote:
| I'm guessing that was muscle memory sneaking a 'World of'
| in there. ;)
| amelius wrote:
| Another datapoint here: I didn't know about the event either.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Perhaps I over estimate it's reach, I don't know. I just
| find it strange that people don't know much about a esports
| even that is the largest prize pool in the world, and has
| been going on for over a decade. It's not like the viewer
| numbers are low.
|
| But I will say it's like watching chess, some matches can
| take 1 hour or longer. It's certainly not for everyone and
| you need deep knowledge of the heroes and items to fully
| understand what is going on.
| amelius wrote:
| Reasonable points, but I don't think prize pool size has
| anything to do with it. I mean some lotteries have crazy
| prize money but many people in their right mind couldn't
| care less.
|
| I think that the age of the internet has brought us the
| effect that everybody can just mind their own thing.
| There is not just a few TV stations dictating what
| everyone should watch, like in the old days.
| TheDong wrote:
| > The International was heavily advertised on Steam products.
| Which is the biggest gaming store.
|
| The biggest gaming store is almost certainly the Android
| Google Play Store's gaming section. It also wouldn't surprise
| me if the nintendo eShop is larger than the steam store, but
| at the very least I'm very confident in Google Play and iOS
| app stores being larger than steam for games.
|
| I think the majority of gamers have never played a PC game or
| watched esports. The parent post only said "I even played
| games", and you jumped to "watching esports" and "twitch".
| Watching esports is a tiny niche of gamers. Watching twitch
| also is.
| flangola7 wrote:
| No self respecting gamer calls mobile apps true games. No
| one who gets excited about video game development wants to
| work on candy crush v400
| ricardobeat wrote:
| You might think that, but the "not self respecting"
| mobile and console gamers out there outnumber you 3:1.
|
| Some of the most popular games have been PUBG, Fortnite,
| Rainbow Six, Roblox... I don't play on mobile myself but
| you can't deny this new reality.
| Ntrails wrote:
| The growth of mobile gaming in regions that used to be
| dominated by LAN cafe based gaming is super interesting.
| Most of the previously buzzing gaming hubs died during
| covid. PC Gaming equipment is extortionate, even in
| higher net worth areas, phones are ubiquitous anyway
| danhor wrote:
| High-end equipment certainly increased sharply in price
| in the last few years, but few people gaming on PC spend
| anywhere near that amount of money. If you just went to
| play most games on a reasonable framerate (30fps) a Steam
| Deck for 400$ is perfectly fine.
|
| For those with high-resolution screens and 144fps the
| equipment is not affordable to most but not necessary.
|
| But an already existing phone is cheaper for sure
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Don't just sneak "console gamers" in there, that's
| disingenuous when the GP didn't say anything about them.
|
| Anyways, statistics aside he's right. Mobile games aren't
| the same thing as console/PC games. They are, almost
| without exception, thinly veiled monetization machines
| designed to be _almost_ fun but not actually fun, just so
| you will pay money. They are literally _designed to be
| less fun_ as a business strategy. There are games on real
| gaming platforms which are just as exploitative and
| poorly designed, but they are the exception. With mobile
| games they are the rule.
|
| Given that the nature of the markets is so wildly
| different, it's perfectly reasonably to say "no, these
| are different things".
| ricardobeat wrote:
| You also seem to be thinking of Candy Crush style games,
| whereas I was pointing out that in recent years some of
| the most popular mobile games are FPS, RTS, also things
| like Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact and other
| action games. On the other end, desktop games have also
| become monetization machines in the same fashion -
| Fortnite, Apex, CS:GO, OW, Minecraft, Roblox are massive
| money-making machines. Any judgement about mobile games
| being 'less fun' or 'less serious' is entirely
| subjective.
|
| This thread started because someone though Steam stands
| as _the universal entrypoint_ to gaming in general, which
| is absolutely far from the truth.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| Wouldn't be gaming without a healthy dose of gatekeeping
| ;)
| ufo wrote:
| And to add to that, Dota e-sports is particularly insular
| among other e-sports:
| https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2015/02/04/visual-mapping-of-
| twitc...
| doikor wrote:
| Dota players play/watch Dota. Similar thing also applies
| to country strike players.
|
| At least this is the experience in my circle of friends.
| Got a couple friends who have pretty much only played
| Dota (or CS) for the last 15+ years and have 0 interest
| in even trying any other game. There is also the crowd
| (including me) who play video games in general but these
| are very clearly different groups.
|
| So this is like saying "football fans are insular to
| football". I mean yeah they are football fans not "sports
| fans".
| Retric wrote:
| Most football fans I know watch other sports, often
| basketball. If for no other reason than the season is
| fairly short.
|
| Dora is insular in large part because it's always
| available.
| doikor wrote:
| I think it also has a lot to do with it being much easier
| to actually play the sport/game.
|
| When the pros are not playing you can just play yourself.
| With football/etc playing the game in a proper
| competitive setup is quite the hassle. In Dota or CS you
| just get 4 of your friends and press a button and in 2 to
| 3 minutes you are playing.
| dubcanada wrote:
| That's the point, if you don't know about any esport, why
| would you know about this one? If you do know about esports
| then you know about The International.
|
| But let's also say that The International was on ESPN, and
| other "sports" TV channels.
| camtarn wrote:
| I watched Overwatch tourneys on Twitch for a bit. And I
| played a little bit of League of Legends so MOBAs aren't
| entirely foreign to me.
|
| Didn't know about The International - I had to go look it
| up.
|
| The world is stranger than you might believe.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Mobile games are not real games.
| kibwen wrote:
| I assume this is being downvoted because arguments like
| this are usually either no-true-scotsmanning or borne out
| of elitism.
|
| However, what is true is that "video games" are so
| variegated as a medium that it's probably worth splitting
| it up into multiple mediums, in the same way that
| television, short film, and feature film are all
| considered different mediums despite being largely the
| same in many ways. If The Godfather and Caillou are
| different mediums, then Red Dead Redemption and Candy
| Crash can also be different mediums.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| It's not that candy crush and other casual games aren't
| real games. It's that the modern versions currently in
| the app stores aren't games. Original versions of candy
| crush, angry birds, etc. have been removed. What is
| available now are time-gated gem stores. Maybe 1% of
| titles aren't reskinned clones that can be played more
| than 5 minutes straight.
| ncphillips wrote:
| > very well known
|
| I think you're illustrating their point. I'm no stranger to
| internet or video game culture but I've never heard of The
| International.
| fomine3 wrote:
| I'm too used to ignore irrelevant ads so I've never noticed
| it on Steam.
| usrusr wrote:
| Never heard of it and I stare at the steam store frontpage
| more than anyone should. There's a thing called
| personalization and apparently your dataset triggers the
| "show The International content" and mine does not. The days
| of broadcast are gone and whatever you may think is shared
| media experience is most likely not.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| That's an interesting take. I've been playing on Steam since
| HL2, very regularly, and although I remember DOTA2 being
| heavily advertised, I don't think I ever saw an ad or
| promotion for The International. Unlike the other poster,
| however, I never actually installed DOTA2.
| redder23 wrote:
| Is this supposed to be impressive. A company who owns a money
| printing machine is able to build multiple layers of glass with
| argon pumped between them?
|
| Sorry, not impressed.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Must be super boring to not hear the crowd, perhaps why I found
| watching dota esport to be super boring
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Ctrl-F "stink": 0
|
| Ctrl-F "stench": 0
|
| Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell
| exabrial wrote:
| Aging myself here... I played a ton of DOTA on the WarCraft3
| engine... probably when I should have been studying for
| engineering finals.
|
| What amazed me about the game, and probably why it is so
| addictively fun to play is you always have two competing things
| gripping for your attention. On one hand, resource farming
| _demands_ incredible attention to detail (obtaining the last shot
| on creeps for a kill, ergo a gold reward). Then on the other
| hand, you must also be planning your character's build,
| monitoring minimap, monitoring others' builds, and most
| especially watching missing enemy players. It's hard to do all of
| the things effectively... one has to make the farming aspect of
| the game second nature and remove the distraction to be a good
| player. (Which I never was)
|
| I don't have the luxury of spare time to play long DOTA games
| anymore, and largely I've replaced it with building things and
| outdoor sports (MTB racing, Gravel Racing, climbing) but I still
| look fondly at those times and the IRL and online friend group I
| had.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| They've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games
| between 15 and 30 minutes!
| adamrezich wrote:
| if it weren't for Turbo I probably wouldn't still be playing
| 11 years after beta. Turbo is great.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Since parent said they played DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine:
| Turbo mode is basically `-em` (easy mode) from Dota 1 with
| some quality of life improvements.
| [deleted]
| eastbound wrote:
| I don't understand their setup:
|
| - Standard stage/audienxe inclination is 4%, so you'd think
| they'd set it up at 4% or above... Nope, they incline the windows
| towards the ground! To wit, they had to transform the ceiling
| into glass panels, which shows they did have the problem of
| audience seeing from atop, which adds weight which they later say
| was one of their major problem. Talk about solving a problem by
| adding another problem.
|
| - Their entire setup has big white beams everywhere, there's no
| angle where the audience can see clearly. Why not having seams?
|
| - My house has larger glass panels than that, and they are
| soundproof for the highway.
|
| Surely it was possible to ship bigger glass panels, simpler
| design, oriented towards the top so that the roof can be plain.
| lijok wrote:
| This is a great article and I understand the need for the booths,
| but to me personally, they look horrible. It looks as if the
| players are sitting in a kiosk. Surely it would make for a much
| more enveloping experience for the spectators if the players were
| in an open space.
| [deleted]
| jwatzman wrote:
| League of Legends (a similar game) does this -- no booths, only
| noise-cancelling headphones, for its large tournaments. There
| have been several major tournaments where the players have
| complained afterwards that they could not hear anything during
| big late-game fights due to crowd noise (since the crowd is
| also super excited at the big fight). Players need to be able
| to hear not just the game audio but also communication from
| their teammates and, despite noise-cancelling headphones, the
| crowd just drowned everything out. I'm honestly not sure why
| League of Legends hasn't moved to booths like Dota uses.
|
| I'm not sure if you've ever watched one of these tournaments,
| but they get _super_ noisy, and noise-cancelling all of that is
| not an easy problem (as the article says).
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| My understanding is LoL productions are still trying to make
| it look like you are watching actual athletes do a sport. If
| you lock the away in booths it puts too much of a distance
| between the audience and the players.
|
| OTOH crowd noise giving away what's going on in the game has
| been a problem since their broadcasts start. It doesn't ruin
| the game but it's definitely a factor.
| kang wrote:
| One solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so
| it becomes more like a squash court for example
| NamTaf wrote:
| That doesn't account for the fact different esports
| demand different requirements, just as a squash booth
| isn't used for tennis.
|
| CS for example is also Valve but does not use booths. I
| think a major part of that is that the delay between
| audience reaction to an event and the event unfolding is
| much shorter, so the crowd can't give as much away as
| quickly.
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| According to the article, they tried this this past year and
| unfortunately weren't able to get the sound dampening up to an
| acceptable standard, so for the time being they are going back
| to the booths
| rtpg wrote:
| Valve seems like such a blank check company, able to jump onto
| projects and apply so much effort to things thanks to their
| resources
|
| Would love to see more about what they're doing and how they're
| organized recently (an updated employee handbook?)
| [deleted]
| solardev wrote:
| My understanding is that they're still privately owned and
| pretty free, culturally, right? Yeah, I wish they'd make a few
| blog posts about how they run projects. Would love to see how
| the Deck, Index, GeForce Now support, etc. all came to be.
|
| They're that rare tech company from the 90s/2000s that I still
| adore today.
| adventured wrote:
| You can definitely see the difference in ownership that Gabe
| Newell brings to Valve, just as Tim Sweeney has to Epic, as
| founders that have been with the companies from the
| beginning. They can do things just because they're
| interesting. They clearly feel free to explore. It's a
| remarkable luxury of their financial success. Mojang perhaps
| had that potential (due to how hyper profitable Minecraft
| was), but, well....
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Wow they went as far as multiple layers of glass with argon
| pumped between them!
| flangola7 wrote:
| Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Argon is commonly used for double glazed windows so I would
| assume that the manufacturer has the experience to do that.
| Vacuum insulated panels exist but since that is for
| insulating properties I don't know if there would be any
| advantage for sound deadening.
| nativeit wrote:
| Sounds cannot pass through a vacuum, as sound is
| fundamentally pressure waves that propagate through air.
| Someone also mentioned the thermal properties of the fill
| gas (argon being less conductive than air) and it's also
| correlated, as temperature is simply a measure of the
| kinetic energy of molecules, so a higher mass molecule will
| require more energy to move, which applies to both thermal
| conductivity and sound transmission.
|
| The more you reduce these problems down to their physical
| fundamentals, the more related they seem to become. It's
| that elegance that got me hooked on electronics engineering
| --our experience of the universe is remarkable in how
| frequently a given phenomena can be described using little
| more than basic principles applied recursively.
| cwillu wrote:
| You can support two panes with a gas in between with a
| strip of soft rubber, whereas with vacuum, I suspect the
| rigidity of the frame needed to support the panes against
| atmospheric pressure can easily kill the gains you make
| in isolation.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent
| sound transmission.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Argon gas does not conduct heat as well as air, so it's an
| excellent insulator. <--- why it's used for double glazing
| in housing, to insulate heat transfer.
|
| Which is interesting because the density of argon is
| greater than air, it does not block or insulate against
| sound other than the general deadening effect you'd get
| from multiple layers (energy loss in kinetic transfer from
| gas to glass to gas to glass to gas again).
|
| Vacuum, He or H would've been better imo
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'd speculate that with it's "full outer shell" of
| electrons the nucleus is more shielded and the repulsion of
| other Ar atoms is higher and so perhaps density is a little
| lower than might be expected?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| This [1] explains Sound Transmission Class (STC) ratings.
|
| > An STC label delineates how partitions and walls
| effectively block sound and reduce noise. Ratings are
| determined by broadcasting a specific auditory tone near
| the material, and measuring dB on both sides. The higher
| the STC value, the better its insulation.
|
| From the table STC=25 means "Normal speech easily
| understood" and STC=50 means "Shouting not heard"
|
| This [2] table has one datapoint comparison of "airspace"
| vs argon filled windows. Both have an STC of 35. So maybe
| it doesn't help.
|
| [1] https://www.dillmeierglass.com/news/stc-ratings-of-
| glass
|
| [2] https://www.general-glass.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/09/Aco...
| mrob wrote:
| I wonder if somebody vaguely remembered the effects of
| helium fill, which actually does reduce sound
| transmission, and vaguely remembered that argon-filled
| windows are a commercial product, and conflated the two
| because they're both noble gases.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| Nothing about the story of this project suggests they are
| top-tier sound engineers, and when you don't really know
| what you're doing (said very respectfully) the
| proposition "we need to fill windows and this is what
| other people normally do when they fill windows" is a
| very positive data point.
|
| They didn't even start with museum-grade glass for
| optimal filming, which to a absolute layman like me seems
| like they just hadn't bumped most of these problems
| before.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| When they started doing these tournaments over a decade
| ago, esports LAN tournaments was barely an industry, and
| crowds were small. Also, MOBAs are unlike many other
| esport genres [1], in that the two teams have partial
| information about the state of the game, and illegally
| getting information a few seconds early can change the
| entire outcome of the game [2].
|
| Meaning there was no one in the world who really knew how
| to build such booths. Moreover, they discovered required
| features of the booths over the years. In such a
| scenario, the early mistakes are very understandable.
|
| [1] Think Street Fighter, or FIFA
|
| [2] I don't think games like Starcraft has such low time
| tolerances on information flow. Even cheers in Dota can
| be enough of a clue.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Starcraft has the same problem and also uses "soundproof"
| booths, fwiw. I believe the practice started under SC:BW
| h2odragon wrote:
| Yes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of
| glass flying everywhere.
|
| That's a _different_ kinda spectator sport.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?
| h2odragon wrote:
| More expensive and sexier.
|
| What gas you fill that space with is far less relevant to
| noise cancelling than how the pane is mounted to the
| others and the floor; but "argon filled!" is great
| marketing bullshit.
| jwie wrote:
| Argon is more dense and inert.
| mrob wrote:
| But wouldn't density make things worse? Helium can be
| used for noise attenuation like this because it's light,
| so you get worse acoustic impedance matching between the
| panels and the gas. Argon is denser than air.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Helium would leak out fairly rapidly, no?
|
| I can see the benefit of impedance mismatching but i
| truly think that for an application like this it cannot
| be worth the effort until you add in the "marketing"
| intangibles.
|
| Why not fill the panels with water? _gloinggg_
|
| edit: IIRC argon filled double pane windows are a thing
| partly because the argon doesn't absorb moisture like air
| does; so there's less chance of condensation happening in
| between the panes. So perhaps they just bought double
| pane panel that were commercially available and ran with
| the sales brochure from that to fill out a press release.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's inert, it's abundant and it's the gas of choice in
| windows so it's probably simply the cheapest choice.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Argon transmits sound much worse than air. I believe it's
| due to the fact that denser gases require more energy to
| compress and decompress, thus dampening sound vibrations.
|
| Even more fancy windows use Krypton, since it has
| superior thermal and acoustic properties over Argon, but
| is about 60 times more expensive.
|
| Xenon would also be a candidate, but it's about 10 times
| more expensive even than krypton, and also has the
| extreme downside of being an anesthetic when inhaled.
|
| Edit: Sorry, I guess it has better thermal properties but
| worse acoustic ones. Helium or Hydrogen would be the
| ideal gasses for sound reduction.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In general, denser materials are better (and faster) at
| transmitting physical waves sound and worse (and slower)
| at transmitting electric waves like heat.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Xenon [...] an anesthetic when inhaled.
|
| That reminds me of a bit of dialogue from the classic
| game Deus Ex (2000), where a biotech office-worker is
| complaining about their job:
|
| > This chemoreceptor patent-proposal is kicking my ass.
| Hundley won't let me down until it's done. Hardly worth
| filing for, in my opinion. Who wants to smell the
| difference between xenon and radon?
| bri3d wrote:
| This is a common consumer product, "gas fill" multi-pane
| windows. Argon is used in this application because it's not
| very thermally conductive (it's also used to fill dry suits for
| the same reason). I found a pretty good "sciencey layman"
| explanation of "why Argon" for dry suits here, which matches
| the reasoning for windows:
| https://www.decompression.org/maiken/Why_Argon.htm .
|
| I'm not sure how much this carries through to sound
| transmission and I couldn't find a lot of good literature about
| it. I'd have loved to see if they did any quantitive testing.
| It makes sense that Argon would reduce sound transmission some,
| but I would expect that the properties of the glass sheet
| itself and the interface between the panes and the frame would
| be more of an issue than the void between the panes.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Unfortunately, they serve a machine translated version of the
| blog text. Well, I don't even know. The language is technically
| correct I guess, but completely without life and using
| expressions that one would use in english. That's not bad for an
| automatic translation.
| Aachen wrote:
| Oh, that's good to know. I was surprised to see a German
| article on HN and, while it's not the first time, I did kinda
| expect it was a translation. But I didn't think it was a
| machine translation: anyone so bad at English that they can't
| read a regular text about a topic they're interested in will be
| used to running pages through a translator, probably via a
| browser extension. No need to serve up a machine translation
| noninteractively.
|
| As a German learner, I take every German text at least somewhat
| as a learning experience and look at the conjugations used. If
| it had said "this is a computer-generated text" above, I'd have
| done that. Now I'm not sure what mistakes I've been using as
| example...
| [deleted]
| december456 wrote:
| You sure about the machine part? While a surprise, it was one
| of the better localizations i have experienced in the world
| wide web.
| teshigahara wrote:
| In the Japanese translation it was extremely obvious and I
| had to switch to English. The tone is completely off
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm sure that this is a very low quality text - I was reading
| the Swedish language version. It has technical qualities
| similar to human language which makes it harder to pinpoint
| the problem, but it does not read like something a proficient
| writer would create.
|
| It is translating too literally, preserving almost every word
| from the original (while adapting sentence structure) and
| that's maybe the thing I can most easily pinpoint. Colloquial
| phrasing like "We also had these enormous PCs that Nvidia had
| lent us" is preserved by translating literally instead of
| choosing an equivalent level of conversational language but
| more natural word choice.
| ascar wrote:
| GPT translates incredibly well.
| Dowwie wrote:
| this photo from the article amazes me:
| https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c...
|
| that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
| [deleted]
| pyreko wrote:
| Similar photo from League of Legends' world finals from 2022
| (Chase Center):
| https://res.cloudinary.com/dxb0ptf6a/image/upload/c_fill,dpr...
|
| If you haven't been paying attention to the eSports scene it
| can definitely be really surprising, but the crowd size and the
| production value of these things is insane to think about,
| especially if you aren't expecting it for just a video game.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, according to many complaints over time, the answer is "not
| very well".
|
| Oh, well, 12th time the charm
| ateng wrote:
| Could you delay the large screens, commentaries, and live
| broadcast by 3-5 seconds (or more) such that any information
| gained from leaked noise would have minimal impact to the
| players? This would make ANS headphones viable
| xxs wrote:
| 5sec would be way too low for anything meaningful. One of the
| more pronounced cases, where the audience reacts, is 'smoke'
| which makes the players invisible until they are close to
| opponent player (or tower), used in a way to initiated a gank.
| The 'smoke' last 45seconds. Killing a big NPC (Roshan) is
| another example as it takes time (and usually more than a
| single player) to down it. Other cases: buying a rapier - very
| high damaging and expensive item but it does drop on death - so
| it's a warning sound, that may take minutes between a conflict
| and used.
|
| Sound proofing however still doesn't solve the issue as it
| doesn't deal with the vibrations in the venue. Pro players have
| commented that if they start feeling vibrations while 'farming'
| alone, they become more cautious - asking a support player to
| cover the gank or move to a safer area.
| ufo wrote:
| translation: gank = ambush, farming = collecting resources
| without engaging against the enemy team
| xxs wrote:
| I'd have considered 'gank' a fairly known/used term.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Not for people who've never played MOBAs.
| xxs wrote:
| The term predates moba, it's early RTS, early MMO stuff,
| around late '90s, early 2000s.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Good to know, but based on numbers, most people would
| have been exposed to the term through MOBAs.
| dzddd wrote:
| Most people have never played a MOBA.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| We're going in circles here.. where did I say most people
| have played MOBA?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| My memory of this long ago is fuzzy, but I believe the
| word itself is originally from LA gang subculture and was
| spread more broadly via gangsta rap in the late
| '80s/early '90s or so (cf. the trend of people spelling
| certain words with "ck" changed to "cc", which was a
| feature of Crips tagging). The earliest documented use I
| could find referred to someone selling fake drugs, but I
| seem to recall that as it spread it turned into a generic
| placeholder for just about any offense from petty theft
| to cold-blooded murder.
| hattmall wrote:
| Yeah it's just slang for some kind of nefarious action.
| It's in a lot of rap songs, west coast origin seems
| possible for sure but been around a long time. East coast
| version is juug.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| In the early 90s in NorCal, we used gank to mean "steal"
| or "snatch", and you can still find this definition
| online. I don't think it ever meant murder until it got
| used in PvP games.
| Aachen wrote:
| I played RTSes from the late '90s as a kid but still
| don't know the term
| doikor wrote:
| MOBAs are from the 90s. But yes the terms are from RTS
| games (MOBAs started as custom maps to starcraft)
|
| Aeon of Strife being the first one from 1998.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| It was a heavily used term in early WoW pvp.
| jlokier wrote:
| I hadn't encountered 'gank' before these comments.
|
| But I had to look up MOBA too :-)
|
| And I used to write multiplayer battle games for a
| living! And my favourite recent game was a MOBA without
| me knowing that was a term! Which goes to show, times
| change, words change, and it's easy to live outside gamer
| subculture, even while playing.
| plopz wrote:
| thats surprising, its such a ubiquitous word in
| multiplayer games. i think i first heard it used back in
| the early 2000s in wc3 or wow.
| Aachen wrote:
| I've never heard it in my life and I play games (not
| Dota) and get around on the internet generally. My first
| association was clank from hermitcraft's decked out, but
| that didn't quite fit. Farming is what I figured from
| context, though
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's such a common term around mobas that I doubt you
| haven't heard it before. Considering the popularity of
| the genre it's statistically unlikely that it hasn't come
| up.
| sincerely wrote:
| Unlikely things happen all the time :)
| eterm wrote:
| This isn't feasible.
|
| Riot tried this with League of Legends and the result was that
| you'd get players jumping up celebrating 30 seconds before the
| audience saw the nexus falling, which was incredibly anti-
| climactic.
|
| Imagine if you were watching tennis and halfway through match
| point you suddenly see the player celebrating.
|
| To be fair, most of the time it's GG well before the nexus
| actually falls, but it's sometimes meaningful, and it still
| ruins the moment to have that sudden de-sync effect as you see
| live players reactions before you see why on screen.
|
| As a result, as far as I know Riot abandonned having any
| meaningful and deliberate delay (There's still some technical
| delay natural to broadcasting).
| tetha wrote:
| This was an entirely weird thing at the last soccer world
| cup, or the one before that: TV via Satellite, Video streams
| and TV via DVB-T had different transmission delays, with up
| to 15 - 20 seconds of delay between them. As such, the people
| across the street started cheering first, then the goal would
| show on our screen and a bit after that the people across
| from the balcony out back started cheering.
| dubcanada wrote:
| No, as another comment said this doesn't work in Dota 2,
| sometimes it can take 15-30 seconds of gathering before you
| trigger an action. And if you know X hero is in the fog of war
| you can easily gain an advantage. Or if you know X hero is
| jungling or stacking creeps or what not. There is just too much
| information you can gather from being able to see the enemy.
| CyberRage wrote:
| some information can be viable for longer than that, there are
| some extreme cases where 2~3 minutes would not suffice
| holoduke wrote:
| A bit off topic. But this site is auto translated? Its in Dutch
| for me and reads like a llm translated piece of text. Very
| unpleasant to read with overly long sentences and weird
| expressions.
| roughly wrote:
| It looks that way, yeah. It's fine in English, but their
| "select languages" list has about 30 different languages
| listed, and I can't imagine they've spent the money to do that
| the right way.
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| Valve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work.
| Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed
| volunteer translators, others not so much.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed
| with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this
| still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are
| missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate
| each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up
| with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total
| gibberish in between. This reads like at least a high school
| student's homework.
| [deleted]
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| Valve uses human translators, not ML. So unless you're talking
| about your browser's auto-translation feature, you are, in
| fact, reading human-produced text.
| jvdvegt wrote:
| Do they? I got the dutch version as well, and it's full of
| english sentences translated word-by-word.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| This one is in the uncanny zone. If it comes from AI, I
| salute the AI. If human, I'd advise Valve to find better
| Humans.
| pluijzer wrote:
| I guess the allure of physical events is twofold, to feel a
| connection with other fans and to feel a connection with the
| players. I wonder if this diminishes the latter. Maybe put the
| players somewhere else entirely and stream it in the form of
| these stage holograms.
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