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Well explained. The initial dislike through inconvenience is mostly gone already and with a point of view from behind the scenes it starts to make a bit more sense. I sincerely hope you can realize the plans to bring the options for united calendars and streams true, since that would remedy all of the inconvenience for me and the people I know in a heartbeat.
The biggest issue with the split currently is that where you used to be able to use TL.net as your go-to hub for seeing if any events or streams were up, you now currently have an easier time checking that on twitch if you have an account and some favorites. This was already apparent when the hearthstone site was launched.
On the flipside of things. The dota calendar is amazingly done and feels way easier to read than I'm used to. The united account and login for all the sites is also neat. There's clearly gone a lot of work into this, but it definitely still needs those few features to make sure that the entire TL domain doesn't lose functionality for the veteran users.
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On May 13 2014 03:46 Waise wrote: some people's reasoning is beyond me. people are actually complaining that they aren't going to see content on TL anymore because they aren't going to come to TL anymore? well if you want to see content here then keep coming here?? honestly i think people are just complaining for the sake of complaining about something new, just like how any time a major site redesigns their interface or layout people flip shit for a couple of weeks and then forget how it even looked before
The thing people are complaining about is that they miss the general community on the dota site. Example: People want 1 game of thrones thread for the whole TL community and not 3 different ones on 3 sites.
They don't mind so much that dota2 is split from sc2, but that dota2 is split from the general TL community. This will be fixed though so that's great.
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On May 13 2014 13:27 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2014 05:44 EndingLife wrote: We need more BW content. There are still a lot of us that follow SC:BW and there is still a decent pro-scene around. This is one of the strengths of this move, in my opinion. For SC BW, SC2, and Dota 2. When there wasn't much going on with SCBW, SC2 and Dota 2 were competing for frontpage space. Now that BW is on the upswing, three separate games competing for the front page means a lot of really quality articles get bumped out of the prime spots far too quickly. With Liquid Dota2, their content won't be choked out by two separate SC games and for SCBW, we won't get murdered by the wave of content coming out of SC2 and Dota 2. I understand the nuisance of visiting separate sites, but in this sense at least, I think it is better.
On May 13 2014 15:49 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +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.
I assume you mean a BW page and a SC2 one? If not your first post doesn't really make much of a difference for BW with the filter option and all. Personally, I don't care what you do, as long as I'm not forced to search for BW content in between other games like a few years ago. It's not that I despise the other games (just a little), it's just not interesting.
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If the community forums are on every site and the calendar can be modified to include multiple games, then alright, I can get behind this
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On May 13 2014 18:53 Doctorbeat wrote: 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. I'll be writing a more in depth post about this for the LoL subforums later. I have to point out that the lack of spotlight/tweets is not caused by our intentions, as we have always wanted to use spotlight and twitter for any quality content generated in the community, but more so by a communication gap between the LoL staff and the rest of TL. This is something we've been working on recently and it should be better in the future.
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I thought that LiquidHearth was a great idea and I am glad that with LiquidDota, the traditional TeamLiquid is back on its Starcraft focus.
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On May 13 2014 20:57 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2014 18:53 Doctorbeat wrote: 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. I'll be writing a more in depth post about this for the LoL subforums later. I have to point out that the lack of spotlight/tweets is not caused by our intentions, as we have always wanted to use spotlight and twitter for any quality content generated in the community, but more so by a communication gap between the LoL staff and the rest of TL. This is something we've been working on recently and it should be better in the future.
Thanks for the update, looking forward to your post.
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I understand your point if view, but TL also provides really good community contents I use a lot to find good mangas, random games fun blogs etc. I miss this on liquid dota. is there a way those community things can appear on both sites?
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On May 13 2014 19:03 h0munkulus wrote: 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...
I would echo most of this. I would not be playing dota now if it weren't for the merged site. Creating separate sites is great for pulling completely new people to TL, but the people already using TL are an important source of users for your new content as well. Splitting your sites significantly raises the entry/crossover barriers for that group.
I would argue that existing users are an important group to think for in this, because they contain active contributors who may be drifting away because they're losing interest in (insert game here). That's a natural part of a user's life-cycle here, and you shouldn't underestimate the benefit you get from piquing those people's interest in other games that TL supports. That was the greatest strength of the shared site.
Personally, I came to TL early in SC2. I started to read the dota articles after TL picked it up, because i wanted to know what the fuss was about and was getting bored with SC2. Eventually, because I kept seeing the articles, kept clicking them and kept learning about the game, I went and got myself a key to try it out. Now I'm a relatively regular poster in the dota forums/Liquiddota. If that had not happened, I would probably be posting here once a week in the general sections after giving up on SC2.
I am happy with the experiment and particularly happy with the look of Liquiddota, but I think you should keep this in mind. At the very least, I would suggest you try to maintain some vehicle for exposing people to content they don't think they care about.
Give people many, many avenues to shift between the sister sites. They shouldn't be islands. If they are islands they will die, or at least become something very different to TL home.
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Poland3746 Posts
On May 13 2014 07:26 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2014 02:45 Yacobs wrote: TeamLiquid was unique with the previous format, now it loses some (a lot?) of that. I really appreciated the fact that there was a lot of different games being covered in one place with a focus on competitive gaming. I will still be a user of both sites most likely but I could easily see myself spending most of the time on the Dota site and at some point basically forgetting about TL.
It sounds to me like there was mostly a web design / organizational / interface issue with TL... why not simply have "filters" on the top that excludes games you don't want to see? Why did it necessitate a fragmented community? The short explanation for this is that we can't make choices based on customization. Customization serves as added value for those who use it, but it can't dictate site-wide choices as the majority of our visitors simply don't use them. Why can't LiquidDota.com and TeamLiquid.net point to the same set of files (so the same website) but with different, predefined set of preferences?
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4713 Posts
Glad that you posted here Nazgul. Personally I really like the change and I kind of know exactly what you are getting at. When I initially made TL my favorite gaming site it was due to SC2, later on I developed a passion for BW but I've stuck to mostly those games. I didn't mind the addition of DoTA2, but as time went on and more games got added it started to feel overwhelming when most of the focus you want is on your favorite game.
I'm quite happy with the way the sites are now, I can still easily click on LiquidDota if I want to read up on the latest regarding DoTA.The one other feature I would love though, and I'm glad you are already considering, is indeed the shared calendar. And the reason why I'd like the calendar the most is, to have a easy way to see the upcomming events for each game, and to know which I'd like to pick and chose for viewing, or which I could juggle trough.
Having some customisability to be able to filter out what games or events would be great, but will probably take some time. For now though I love TL how it is and I'm sure you guys are doing your best to make it even more awesome in the future.
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China6323 Posts
On May 13 2014 21:59 nimdil wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2014 07:26 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:On May 13 2014 02:45 Yacobs wrote: TeamLiquid was unique with the previous format, now it loses some (a lot?) of that. I really appreciated the fact that there was a lot of different games being covered in one place with a focus on competitive gaming. I will still be a user of both sites most likely but I could easily see myself spending most of the time on the Dota site and at some point basically forgetting about TL.
It sounds to me like there was mostly a web design / organizational / interface issue with TL... why not simply have "filters" on the top that excludes games you don't want to see? Why did it necessitate a fragmented community? The short explanation for this is that we can't make choices based on customization. Customization serves as added value for those who use it, but it can't dictate site-wide choices as the majority of our visitors simply don't use them. Why can't LiquidDota.com and TeamLiquid.net point to the same set of files (so the same website) but with different, predefined set of preferences? Everything that involves cookie and cache and numerous access privileges are way complicated than accessing several files.
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On May 13 2014 18:53 Doctorbeat wrote: 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.
We got demoted off the entire website if you want to compare it. I think you'll be fine.
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I just realized that the filters were removed. Before i deactivated Dota,BW and LoL i think. Now we have Liquiddota but i can´t block BW and LoL anymore. Is there any possibility to do this? I don´t wanna see the BW and LoL Threads like before... Hope my english is enough and the word "filter" is the right one. I mean the Buttons at the top right to activate and deactivate the shown stuff.
Greetings
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I like the change, if this "shared community section" becomes real. A shared calendar would also be nice (on a separate page, having only dota calendar entries on the dota sidebar is fine for me, but I'd love some page where it shows me which SC, Dota etch events are going on now).
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On May 13 2014 23:34 EXRNaRa wrote: I just realized that the filters were removed. Before i deactivated Dota,BW and LoL i think. Now we have Liquiddota but i can´t block BW and LoL anymore. Is there any possibility to do this? I don´t wanna see the BW and LoL Threads like before... Hope my english is enough and the word "filter" is the right one. I mean the Buttons at the top right to activate and deactivate the shown stuff.
Greetings You can still customize your sidebar, remove tournaments & strategy and add sc2, and you should only have sc2 content.
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I'm happy about this. I find all MOBAS extremely uninteresting to watch or play, with low mechanical skill and largely decision based play they're no different to sc2arcade lane pushing type games to me. It frustrates me having to log in to filter out all that alien jargon and hype around surrounds them, I feel like I accidentally wandered into the room the table top games workshop nerds have set up in. These are not my nerds... TL is losing traction as the Starcraft hub, I feel this is at least in part because its pushing games the organisers find more fun/easy, it isn't why I'm here. It's a good move for folks like me.
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Quick question: When you say LoL streams will no longer be shown on the sidebar, do you mean everything or only player streams? For example will the LCS and other major LoL events still be on the calendar and sidebar. I don't watch LoL player streams but I watch plenty of league content and it's convenient being able to view it from TL.
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I feel like I'm the only person ever to look at all these changes and not care a bit.
I've always followed the SC2 scene (BW was doubtlessly epic but I didn't get on that train) and TL is the go-to site for that. TL also does a fucking AMAZING job at it to. It's >really< easy to know exactly what tournaments are going on, when they're going on, who is in (liquipedia is also amazing) and everything is covered so well it's hard to believe that the writers aren't paid (^^). Since TL does such an amazing job at covering the SC2 scene (indeed, are there actually other SC2 sites? lul) I have no need whatsoever to go anywhere else to get my SC2 fix. Having all the relevant streams listed and whatnot is also huge. TL basically makes it very easy to follow SC2.
TL also has a community that lets you discuss dangerously touchy subjects as long as what you post is reasonable. That's something you don't see on other sites. TL moderation has the reputation of being harsh but as long as you aren't actually posting stupid shit it's very easy to post on TL about most topics. I'm starting to get addicted to the tech section even though I'm complete shit at tech stuff.
I don't care about either Dota 2, LoL, hearthstone or Smash. Just throwing that out there. However I had a year long fling with LoL, where I followed the scene and was voyboy's fan (still am actually just I don't ever watch LoL ^^"). During that year, there was no other site that covered LoL like TL covers SC2. So that was annoying. Just goes to show. I respect all the games mentioned in this paragraph though. I just don't follow them.
So some might have a problem with the changes that have come and gone. First TL started covering Dota2, then hearthstone, then both got seperate sites. Pretty sure most people complained during every transition. I didn't give a fuck because TL never stopped covering SC2 as well as it still does today. That's the gist of it.
I can understand people who are interested in both SC2 and Dota2/HS/etc being annoyed with this change. perhaps a possible compromise for this would be to take the links at the very top of the site (which link to liquiddota, etc) and instead put them in the right-hand sidebar and then also spruce them up a bit so that they're a bit more visible. the seperate sites and still seperate but it's easier / more visual to jump between them. If you keep the layout the same between every site it makes people even cozier
idk lul
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On May 13 2014 23:54 et wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2014 23:34 EXRNaRa wrote: I just realized that the filters were removed. Before i deactivated Dota,BW and LoL i think. Now we have Liquiddota but i can´t block BW and LoL anymore. Is there any possibility to do this? I don´t wanna see the BW and LoL Threads like before... Hope my english is enough and the word "filter" is the right one. I mean the Buttons at the top right to activate and deactivate the shown stuff.
Greetings You can still customize your sidebar, remove tournaments & strategy and add sc2, and you should only have sc2 content.
I swear the old bar i am missing was at the top of my picture below. Even if i change the profile settings i still have LoL and BW Streams at the left side and LoL Threads at the right...
http://www.directupload.net/file/d/3621/2sp66zaq_png.htm
Greetings
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