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The Preseason has started! Join us!
Aight, so I've just been enlightened that I'm a massive dummy and we need to have a major discussion about TLIHs, 'cause there's clearly some demand for it and some of it ain't of the kind one could dismiss on the basis of seasonality of interest in the endeavor. I'm just gonna list some issues alongside a few theories about them and/or my proposed solutions to them, all scrambled in between random thoughts. I'm gonna be trying really hard not to come ahead as a cynical twat, but bear with me anyway please. Parts of this will inevitably turn into a rant on various subjects, but I'm trying to provide some food for thought either way, so if you feel something can be put in a better way, go ahead and talk about it.
Some intro (hi)story. So we have this inhouse league, right, where people are supposed to play Captain's Mode/Draft with other players they somewhat recognize, in a friendly, competitive, but a rather chilled out environment. It's been there since forever as far as I know and I had a great pleasure to join it around last year when it was flourishing the most, a few months before TI3. It was a superb experience - everyone knew each other, we had some enjoyable games (and some #roadtotlih3-worthy) practically every night, the group was tight and its fact of existence was generally accepted as A Good Thing™. It started dying out as soon as the first matches of TI3 began; I remember people watching the first clashes together and trying to get some games going in between/after matches, but the interest in playing started waning as the time frames of broadcasts overlapped with, or should I say completely covered the usual playtimes of inhouses. So fuck it, it died and everybody said, it's always been that way and it will come back.
Now, waiting for it to come back ain't just gonna cut it when apparently even when you try to play just a few games and then the next day you aren't there, it means there will be no games because there's no one to host a lobby, even though there's like five people asking about it in this thread. So here's issue one - EU players seem to be the only ones that are intelligent enough to set up a proper lobby for an inhouse and write a post about it willing to spend some time to sit in a lobby and wait for it to fill up. I don't know why this is even the case, but such seem to be the statistics and during the last iteration, less than a month ago, Firebolt and Alurr were like the only people setting up successful lobbies. I can imagine why people don't wanna start this on their own - the risk of wasting time in lobby, the risk of wasting time in the game, bad experiences, lack of friends, whatever - but in order to get a game going, some commitment has to be made and while I know it's easier to just stop trying, the alternative is to whine about RMM in the QQ thread, and that ain't an alternative to me. A proposition arises - I'm gonna be hosting a few (at least two, three) games each European evening until and a few weeks after TI4, starting next week. I'm also gonna be looking out and asking for people willing to pick up the process with me and keep the inhouses alive and thriving. If I don't show up on a given day without an advanced mention, I'll have to donate a rare for every such day to a cause I'll think about (you're welcome to suggest stuff). Not much, but I'm rather poor in that department anyway.
Jumping straight to issue two - TLIHs ruleset. Or rather a rule. TLIHs had only one single rule everybody interested in playing had to follow. Don't be a dick. It's gone. What happened to it? Why is it gone in the first place? It needs to be brought back as soon as possible.
Honestly though, while I understand this is supposed to be a chilled out environment, you guys wanted to promote it and open it to everyone, yet you've handled it just like AOL in September 1993. There's literally nothing good ever coming from an unregulated popularity, especially on the Internet, so if we are to make it a thing that is supposed to grow in numbers, we should make sure there are certain guidelines for everyone to follow, as strict and tight as needed but as loose as to not make everyone worry about breaking them. Along with that there would be a need for officers that would actually care about making sure the atmosphere isn't being poisoned by random trashtalk or some twats jerking around, doing fuck all when the rest of the team is actually playing to win. Aside from the general atmosphere-related rules, there could also be guidelines regarding the goals we want to reach with TLIHs, netiquette, the format of inhouses and so on.
Now, taking care of dickheads should be a priority when most people playing in TLIHs are hardworking people who cannot be arsed to deal with some pubbies going on a venting spree because whatever. I know this is kinda counterintuitive, since this is DotA and dicks were humongous since the dawn of time around these parts, but we're living in light-hearted times and we don't want anyone to feint from a smallest negative remark now do we*cough* Anyway, I'm pretty sure some got strongly discouraged from committing their time to games knowing there will be people there that are unpleasant and tough to get along with. I wouldn't be bothered much in a usual case, but this refers to pretty much the majority of the core members of the group, and that's just fucking unhealthy in the long run. Like, if this is ever going to get bootstrapped, we have to make sure every player taking part will enjoy their time there equally in social terms, otherwise there will be no one to play with and RMM level of trashtalk always stings weaker. Simply keep it civil.
ixmike's also created a small shitstorm around the subject by posting Spit-Wad's original post from nadota about the future of IHLs in Dota on Reddit of all places. This has brought a massive influx of negativity upon him, ranging from yada yada mean people on the internet to yada yada terrible admins. While some points were valid, it was mostly people whining about each other's attitudes in the open leagues of IXDL. Now, I couldn't care less about all that if it wasn't for a certain point he brought up in the post, the one about the reasons for lack of interest in IHLs, which was attributed to the introduction of RMM. Whoo, shiny number, another to my collection, gonna grind it as high as possible. We all know how that has ended in the majority of cases, but digressions aside, the incentive to organize an inhouse was gone. You've been given an access to a system that can automatically, nearly instantaneously (compared to regular mechanisms) team you up with four other people relatively the same skill level as you, against other five people with similar attributes, with just a click of a button. And it also tells you how good you are! What's not to like? Of course, it turned out that the 'organization' part was lacking heavily and while it was supposed to provide you with better quality games the higher you go, it was rarely working that way in reality. For a lot of people, games are meaningless up to the point where it increases or decreases your epeen-o-meter, so instead of a team game, we have a slugfest where everyone is just worrying about their own ass. I don't have enough experience to say how it looks up high in the 6k bracket, but you can certainly imagine the trench in that regard.
In this case, to survive, we'd need to provide people with something regular RMM doesn't. Basic (planned) features have already been mentioned, but they won't create enough of an attention to pull people away from the queue, simply due to the issues of accessibility and reasoning behind the endeavor. There's also another level to this - if one has to choose between wasting time in a lobby in order to play with a bunch of lowbies or just plain idiots for half an hour and just playing with idiots, the choice is a rather easy one. If people are running around like headless chicken, it won't much differ from an average RMM experience, but the latter doesn't involve potentially waiting twenty minutes for a retardedly imbalanced game. Obviously they can be instructed and tutored, but not everyone has the time or desire to teach 'the basics'. I see that this stands in a stark contrast to some of aforementioned ambitions, but we also gotta think about limiting the player pool in such a way as to allow everyone to enjoy the game instead of having the experienced players grind their way to victory carrying dead weight for fifty minutes. You know this is how it goes and how games can be decided in very early stages just based on the disparity in teams' average skill, so I believe we should address this somehow too, even with a resounding 'it's supposed to be everyone for all and we gotta keep it that way while reaching to better players using other ways'. There's also a matter of just how casual these inhouses are supposed to be; we've always been trying out extraordinary drafts and strategies, with mixed results, but the goal was simple - to win and have fun. My personal goal would be to keep it exactly that way, without removing either of these aspects - winning without having fun leads to exhaustion and waning interest, careless and pointless fun leads to further doubting the reason behind all of it. It can be regulated with appropriate rules or guidelines, but how to formulate them?
There has to be some obvious stuff I missed during writing this, but I'm extremely sleepy right now and since it was on the top of my head for a while now and writing it down and only then thinking about it wouldn't make it any good, I went on with it. I wanna read your thoughts on the subject.
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My take on this is pretty similar to yours, in the sense that it takes forever to get a TLIH running, sitting in lobbies waiting etc. If the waiting didn't pay off(ie a game starts), you wonder what the hell were you doing wasting your time here. That is the major reason for failure imo.
The 2nd thing is inhouses are just going to be unbalanced. At least RMM has a rating system that "somewhat" mitigates that issue(you wont be playing against a 6k as a 2k), but there's no systems that avaliable in TLIH. Therefore, i think TLIH should be for fun only, competitiveness be screwed. All random deathmatch please volvo.
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There needs to be an incentive. A reward for the highest ranked players at the end of a 3 month period or something. Separate it into regular tier <5k mmr IH and a high tier >5k mmr IH. If it gets popular enough, add more divisions like sc2.
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On June 23 2014 11:49 Kishin2 wrote:
There needs to be an incentive. A reward for the highest ranked players at the end of a 3 month period or something. Separate it into regular tier <5k mmr IH and a high tier >5k mmr IH. If it gets popular enough, add more divisions like sc2.
Well how would you regulate the MMR? I could just leave an account at 4.9 and never play on it except for TLIH. I don't play on TLIH but nothing stops somebody else doing that.
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On June 23 2014 14:08 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2014 11:49 Kishin2 wrote:
There needs to be an incentive. A reward for the highest ranked players at the end of a 3 month period or something. Separate it into regular tier <5k mmr IH and a high tier >5k mmr IH. If it gets popular enough, add more divisions like sc2. Well how would you regulate the MMR? I could just leave an account at 4.9 and never play on it except for TLIH. I don't play on TLIH but nothing stops somebody else doing that.
I suppose this would be covered by the "dont be a dick" rule.
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On June 23 2014 18:11 BobMcJohnson wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2014 14:08 Yurie wrote:On June 23 2014 11:49 Kishin2 wrote:
There needs to be an incentive. A reward for the highest ranked players at the end of a 3 month period or something. Separate it into regular tier <5k mmr IH and a high tier >5k mmr IH. If it gets popular enough, add more divisions like sc2. Well how would you regulate the MMR? I could just leave an account at 4.9 and never play on it except for TLIH. I don't play on TLIH but nothing stops somebody else doing that. I suppose this would be covered by the "dont be a dick" rule.
If someone tries to hide their identity and actual MMR, it's not easy to realize stuff like this is happening, but should we regulate them based on MMR, then your point is correct, the edge cases would be dealt with based on the premise of having balanced teams.
ALTERNATIVELY, we can commit a bit more time and go with player draft, which in the beginning will be highly skewed due to people not knowing each other, but after a while, once the group is tighter, everybody will know each other's extent of skill, which I'd love to see (in the long run, if someone commits, it creates another incentive to play well, 'cause you might recognize the better captain/team in the future and want to be picked into it), but we gotta adapt.
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Going to give my two cents here as I was an admin at the "original" TLIHs, with an IRC channel with a bot, ranks and stuff like that. I came into the experience with the same mindset as you: to create a familiar place for people of all skill levels with a friendly attitude, basically a "don't be a dick"-rule was the only rule in place. Turns out, it's fucking impossible to maintain.
It all started out nicely but the longer the IHs were open the more assholes came in. And you would not believe the amount of shit people will throw at you for banning them. To give you an example:
Guy joins a game, harasses his teammates. One of his teammates takes screenshots and reports him via the report feature. I give the guy a 3 day ban (which was standard with first offenses). The guy then starts harassing me in PM via IRC, calling me names and accusing me of banning him only because I was friends with the guy who reported him (had never even talked to the guy who reported him). He kept on going and going about how his team was worthless and was just as bad as he was, but he has no way of backing it up. After a while I got fed up with his attitude and told him that if he did not lay off I would permaban him. He kept going and after being more then patient with him again I permabanned him. He then proceeds to post quotes, out of context, in the IRC channel with "nazimods" and so on.
Keep in mind this was one ban on one day. I'd say we had atleast 3-4 bans, varying in length, each day. This was one of the worst cases, sure, but still nothing really out of the ordinary. The reason why the TLIHs are "good" now is because the community is small and everyone knows everyone. If it's made official, again, I'll bet you that the assholes will once again return and find ways of fucking with you.
If you feel like you're up to taking this kind of harass, feel free to start it up. but I would never in a million years put myself in that situation again.
And yes, we did have two "leagues". One "pro" (for players over a certain ranking) and a regular one. Did not help at all.
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On June 23 2014 18:41 Julmust wrote:
Keep in mind this was one ban on one day. I'd say we had atleast 3-4 bans, varying in length, each day. This was one of the worst cases, sure, but still nothing really out of the ordinary. The reason why the TLIHs are "good" now is because the community is small and everyone knows everyone. If it's made official, again, I'll bet you that the assholes will once again return and find ways of fucking with you.
I had exactly the same impression the moment we switched to IXDL client and my opinion just screams against opening it to the public, yet alone advertising it, but maybe this is what we need. On the other hand, I could just start surveying people personally about whether they would be interested in a closed group and we'd just stick to it if we had a stable pool of interested players. All in all, there are people wanting to play and I'd love to try and make TLIHs a regular thing again, to the point where I'm willing to put up with all the dickheads, although I can't quite guarantee I'll be as patient.
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I really enjoyed playing the tlih's but when you switched to the IXDL client I couldn't play anymore. I never got the client working. I kept getting some weird crash everything I tried loading it up. I've only been part of the inhouses for a few months at best but it was one of the most fun i've had in Dota. I didn't even mind waiting 20 minutes for a game to start up.
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Lalalaland34492 Posts
Jumping straight to issue two - TLIHs ruleset. Or rather a rule. TLIHs had only one single rule everybody interested in playing had to follow. Don't be a dick. It's gone. What happened to it? Why is it gone in the first place? It needs to be brought back as soon as possible.
Wait when did this happen?
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On June 24 2014 00:52 Firebolt145 wrote:Show nested quote +Jumping straight to issue two - TLIHs ruleset. Or rather a rule. TLIHs had only one single rule everybody interested in playing had to follow. Don't be a dick. It's gone. What happened to it? Why is it gone in the first place? It needs to be brought back as soon as possible. Wait when did this happen?
The modnote is gone. Besides that, I'm pretty sure not everyone can/wants to tell friendly and hostile trashtalk apart.
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If there arent "famous" ppl like Firebolt, Alurr or Rocketbear its impossible to get a game started.
if you got the game started, the other team will be like 4k 4k 6k 6k 6k, while your team will be sth like 5k 5k 3k 2k 2k.
not needed to say, your team gets stomped.
its not the MMR but the experience of the games which realy killed TLIHs for me (and a certain person who was a dick 90% of his time but obv to famous to get punished). there was no chance for the "bad" players to get better and be rewarded for it.
even if you manage to learn some new stuff because the skillgap is so high, its not helping you to win the game because the other team is still way more experienced and organized because of their longer time spend on dota.
so the little players will become sth like a ward-dispenser on the map and the rest have to deal with a 4v5 situations.
(and atm im not even getting the relation of dota-xp <-> real dota-xp into this, or even smurfs)
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Nothing much to contribute besides some of my personal experience.
I joined TLIH on and off roughly 2 years ago and started playing regularly around 3-4months before TI3. The experience was amazing despite me being a complete retard in-game with 400ms ping and playing half asleep at 4am. Everyone was really helpful and friendly. There were some rages every now and then but often time resolved quickly. The hallmark of TLIH during that time was the perfect mix of tryhard and relax plays, where people throw friendly banters and continuously exchange remarks during the games after big plays.
Then iirc, there was a few days when most of the regulars didnt participate, and there were a massive influx of new people joining (DISCLAIMER: i have nothing against newcomers, everyone is welcome, heck I was a newcomer once so..). That was when nobody knows anyone and the games felt very quiet, and rage/flame/trashtalk happened a lot more due to unfriendliness and lack of "important" regulars like Firebolt to moderate. so some of the less regulars like me left for a while while the more regulars also didnt come back.
I feel that what makes TLIH clicks is the friendliness and fun when playing with people you somewhat know. Else it's just similar to pubs but without those shiny items drop and rating pts. We probably need more regulars back to the scene as they have extensive friendlist and can spread the word faster when a lobby is hosted. But I guess people are getting busier nowadays, I am also busy with work that I cant stay up very late to join TLIH during weekdays anymore 
edit: also agree with above. The more new people with unknown skill level we have + less regulars, the harder to balance the team and make it enjoyable for everyone
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Lalalaland34492 Posts
On June 24 2014 00:56 makmeatt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2014 00:52 Firebolt145 wrote:Jumping straight to issue two - TLIHs ruleset. Or rather a rule. TLIHs had only one single rule everybody interested in playing had to follow. Don't be a dick. It's gone. What happened to it? Why is it gone in the first place? It needs to be brought back as soon as possible. Wait when did this happen? The modnote is gone. Besides that, I'm pretty sure not everyone can/wants to tell friendly and hostile trashtalk apart.
Modnote is gone because it was lost during the transfer to LiquidDota.
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On June 24 2014 01:11 Firebolt145 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2014 00:56 makmeatt wrote:On June 24 2014 00:52 Firebolt145 wrote:Jumping straight to issue two - TLIHs ruleset. Or rather a rule. TLIHs had only one single rule everybody interested in playing had to follow. Don't be a dick. It's gone. What happened to it? Why is it gone in the first place? It needs to be brought back as soon as possible. Wait when did this happen? The modnote is gone. Besides that, I'm pretty sure not everyone can/wants to tell friendly and hostile trashtalk apart. Modnote is gone because it was lost during the transfer to LiquidDota.
I know, I mentioned it 'cause I think reminding people of it constantly is a must.
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On June 24 2014 01:00 Rodberd wrote:
if you got the game started, the other team will be like 4k 4k 6k 6k 6k, while your team will be sth like 5k 5k 3k 2k 2k.
not needed to say, your team gets stomped.
its not the MMR but the experience of the games which realy killed TLIHs for me (and a certain person who was a dick 90% of his time but obv to famous to get punished). there was no chance for the "bad" players to get better and be rewarded for it.
even if you manage to learn some new stuff because the skillgap is so high, its not helping you to win the game because the other team is still way more experienced and organized because of their longer time spend on dota.
so the little players will become sth like a ward-dispenser on the map and the rest have to deal with a 4v5 situations.
(and atm im not even getting the relation of dota-xp <-> real dota-xp into this, or even smurfs)
Yeah, this is how I remember it from the few games I played. I felt pretty lost to be honest, literally had no impact the whole game. I was pretty bad at the time (still am, but even I'm aware how bad it was last time now).
Although everyone was pretty chill and friendly when I played, I had no negative experiences at all in that regard. It's just like you said, it's hard to feel good about a game you can't really do anything in, even if no one else says anything.
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Wall of text i could write this thing in 30 words with broken english ofc.First i agree people should show more patience in lobbies and wait more.Second i dont see any dick in TLIH last dick was rynzer but he is not playing now.The skill gap is closer than ever before.The only problem i see is the number of people, we should bring some friends of us to the IH.It is very early for americans too, they are coming in weekends but they cant the weekdays so i think we should lure more europeans we must change the server for weekdays to EU and see if more people come.
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We should just have the modnote display the time of the next upcoming TLIH session. If people can see that it's a confirmed thing rather than just some guy "thinking he might try to host something tonight", theyre much more likely to show. Games would start late EU evening, where atleast one "well known" member is available.
Actually, while were at it, it would be pretty cool if TLIH's could be integrated into the liquiddota site. Like if you could see lobby status/player count somewhere on the site, and add incentives like gaining LD gold or maybe some equivalent to liquipedia coins. However, I'm not sure such additions are justifiable if you consider the waning interest in TLIH's.
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EPT
