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Honestly Naz, I've been lurking on TL since 2008 (I actually visited a few times in 2005), followed BW religiously before deciding to register in the SC2 beta period (cause of Boxer of course), and throughout it all, the most exciting thing for me was your decision to add Dota as an official game. I've played Dota since the days of Euls, and I've long wanted a TL equivalent to what Dota-Allstars was for me. The decision to split the site is, I think, the correct one, and the most logical one, because while several fans and vets overlap, the games are really inherently different. Moreover, the absolute mess of information (and the non-use of the filter options) would be incredibly bad when we get to, say, The International. Pure SC2/BW fans would hate the flood of Dota news.
I also love the design of LiquidDota because as a community, I think Dota is a bit less "intellectual" (pardon the use of the term) and is comprised more of the "free spirits," in the sense that they (we?) prefer more flashy stuff, less strict moderation, and a less tense atmosphere.
I know the feedback was initially negative, but you just rocked the boat a bit. Once things stabilize, everyone will begin to appreciate the necessity of the split.
Re community threads: that's definitely the best way to go about it. I was also thinking (if it would be feasible), a very notable link or tab to Dota 2 on TL, and vice-versa, so that we don't feel completely disconnected from each other. What I envision is a design that has a tab (kinda like browsers, but in the page itself), that you can click to bring you to the other site, but doesn't open a new window (kinda like how focus mode happens in the articles).
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Netherlands4641 Posts
For a long time I was pissed off by all the SC2 content mixing up with SC:BW.
On the calendar they shared the same race icons, making it hard to keep events apart.
One of my suggestion back then was to have SC2 race icons be different to BW to keep them apart easier.
I felt like my suggestion was regarded as just another hater comment and thus ignored.
But eventually, with the arrival of customizable sidebars and then streams,
TL truly felt like 'home' again!
+ Show Spoiler +However TLPD is still a mess with BW/SC2 stuff being mixed up at some parts.
On May 12 2014 23:04 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:
Going forward we're going to make TL a dedicated hub for StarCraft again.
What is StarCraft? It is so confusing. Is it StarCraft II, is it StarCraft: Brood War or is it both?
Please don't mix BW and SC2 again. If you do then please keep the site customizable for us.
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Canada11199 Posts
What is StarCraft? It is so confusing. Is it StarCraft II, is it StarCraft: Brood War or is it both?
Well don't get too confused. SC2 and BW will carry on as before on TL. So yes, both.
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I don't really know what people are complaining about, LiquidPoker has been a different community for ages
edit: and you still have to add the LiquidDota link to the TeamLiquidPro site 
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thx for claring things up! i was on of the (many) unhappy users, but now i feel a lot more positiv about the changes. looking forward especially to the shared community functions.
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On May 13 2014 17:11 Tufas wrote:
I don't really know what people are complaining about, LiquidPoker has been a different community for ages
Yes, but Liquid poker has been a thing since 2005, I'm not sure there has ever been a poker forum on TL, but that was before my time.
If dota had been a separate site from the start I would probably watched and been involved alot less with dota than I am now, and I defiantly wouldn't have cared that it was separate.
Furthermore, while the situation sucks for me (following 2 websites instead of one, not rating the cosmetic changes, appreciating the new calender somewhat), its not the end of the world, alot of people seem to like it, Naz and co are looking into ironing some of the issues, (I would really dig an opt in shared calender - I come to TL mostly to see if there is anything cool to watch, read about cool things to watch, and occasionally, if the feeling takes me, type "so good!!" with more exclamation marks than necessary.)
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Shared forums for community/other games/blogs is a quantum solace for yesterdays disapointment. I was seriously sad/mad and felt betrayed. As soon as all non-starcraft2 related forums are linked to Liquiddota.com I will give that site a chance and hope it can become my new to-go-to website.
On this point I will also say goodbye to Starcraft2 completely, which I, up to now, at least kept watching for big games, when I saw them up on the streaming section. I also rediscovered readmore.de for multi-esports coverage and my mood lightened up overall.
Last words: Thanks for the blog Nazgul. It is much appreciated.
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
There is only one thing that sucks about liquiddota
the fact I am a 1 post user and have no power >:[
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Also I really hope you split BW and Sc2, sending Sc2 to a new site, would be worth it for the jerk factor alone.
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China6323 Posts
On May 13 2014 17:39 Kerotan wrote:
Also I really hope you split BW and Sc2, sending Sc2 to a new site, would be worth it for the jerk factor alone.
You can disable SC2 completely right now using the filter, I don't see what's the problem, I don't like League or Dota so both are filtered out of my TL for the past years and they never bothered me since. Stuff exists, but you can simply ignore it.
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I think this decision will be for the best, although I'm a little worried because SC2's popularity isn't on it's peak atm...
TL!!
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I wouldn't be here anymore if the TL LoL community wasn't here. I'm pretty disappointed in this change, we had some pretty good things rolling in our relatively small community. Getting demoted back to the Other Games section feels like a slap in the face of our hardworking staff and people, we've had to deal with TL treating us as a inferior community from the get go (even though we have our Tournament/General/Strategy sections, they get no attention).
Also the "EVE, Smash, LoL, Hearthstone, Heroes, Mafia, you name it. If good articles are written in these sections we will spotlight them and promote them in other ways.". Yeah right. In the entire time TL has had a LoL section it feels like there has been literally zero support from the central hub. Good articles were written, good content was created. Nothing got promoted.
Anyway, if we do not retain our subforum community with more or less the same structure, I'll leave TL. SC2 got boring for me in 2011.
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I really think this is a big mistake. The biggest problem for content creators is to get regular site visitors that are going to check your site daily, rather than just wait for the interesting articles to be linked on twitter or a content aggregator like reddit. Take ongamers for example, they could never build a strong foundation of regular visitors and most of their traffic came from content aggregators and twitter. After the reddit ban they had significant drops in traffic.
I loved to check out some of the hearthstone stuff that monk and the others were doing at first. It was just a click away and quality stuff even though I play hearthstone very irregularly at best. Since you split them of to liquidhearth I tried to check the site regularly, but after the first couple of days I have not been regularly checking out the hearthstone content anymore.
It's not like you had 100 articles a day and it was getting too crowded on the teamliquid frontpage. If you thought the filters were not good enough for people that didn't want to see certain content you should have improved that system, not split up your community.
If you would really believe in your concept, the logical conclusion would be to also create liquidbw and liquidsc2. In fact it would probably be a great experiment. Keep teamliquid as a main hub as it was, maybe even re-integrate hearthstone and have these sub-websites for with the game specific content only. After a month check how many people actually directly go on liquidsc2 or liquiddota. I am absolutely convinced that the vast majority of the community would still be more than happy to simply go on the main site and have no interest whatsoever in going for the sub-sites...
Especially SC2 and Dota have a great communities with a lot of carry-over, splitting them up is a bad idea in short and longterm. Please rethink your approach and go back to have one big awesome community, rather than small splinter groups that will eventually only be a shadow of the past with the majority of people just getting their content from reddit and twitter...
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Thank you for the well written reasoning, it makes me appreciate the change now. That is IF the community/general sections are shared across the sites, like you plan to. That was indeed the biggest obstacle to this change. I'll stick with the SC section either way, whatever you do 
Gl
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United Kingdom36156 Posts
damn, I liked reading about random Dota things even though I never played it.
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As long as the community forums (and preferable Other Games and Blogs) get shared I'm happy.
Good move overall imo.
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I haven't read the other thread with the responses to TL Dota, but as someone who follows Starcraft and Starcraft only, I think it's a good idea to split the sites.
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this will be much better this way for TL in general
that's really a nice feature to offer the community with different "good looking" sites for each game x_x
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I wasn't a fan of the split at the beginning, even voicing my discontent on reddit, but the reworked stream and calendar for the dota 2 site have convinced me, good job !
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EPT
