The Sound Proof Booths of Silence | Hacker News Reader

The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

dota2.com

243 pointsnamiwang192 comments

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.

I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!

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.

Very similar issue in CS. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbcdzWQx6WM

A certain player who used to get accused of cheating a lot learned this trick way before everyone else, but in recent years everyone's been doing it and it can really swing games in a way that's not fun to watch as a spectator.

Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's much much too loud for air curtains.

It's not going to make it any worse. They just need to reduce noise levels enough to make the noise cancellation more effective, so they could keep the open booth + headphone setup instead of a soundbooth.

They also add some pink noise from the air and motors which might help.

In any case, just an idea, data on their effectiveness seems hard to find.

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?

You may be thinking of pre twitch/YouTube. These players sell out coliseums for $100s of dollars per ticket. The fans want to at least physically see them play, even if it’s through a window. once you rely on webcams then you may as well be watching on twitch for free.

Specifically, this year's TI finals tickets are $699+fees for the 3 day pass.

The former Westinghouse Electric Sharon Transformer Plant is a 58-acre facility located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. They built substation transformers there. To test them the rolled them into a sound proof room, on a rail car, to listen for hum. Lose windings would vibrate causing hum and generate damaging heat. When I was there I was told that if wanted to rent it, they would fix the 440V door system (someone took the cooper).

To give you a size perspective of this place, our tour guide, from the balcony, said "See that toy truck down there? That is a full size 18-wheeler." It took us a 20 minute walk to reach that full size truck that looked like a child's toy in this MASSIVE room.

thats awesome, what were you going to rent the space for?

I just thought it would be cool to see how long people might last in such a room. It was not in my budget. So far at least.

Here is the Worlds Quiets Room, as of 2018:

https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-q...

That the players can see each other also allows for some mindgames, for example “the paper” https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared

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?

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.

Thanks for that context! That explains

Wow they went as far as multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them!

Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?

Yes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of glass flying everywhere.

That's a different kinda spectator sport.

Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?

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.

Argon is more dense and inert.

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.

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.

It's inert, it's abundant and it's the gas of choice in windows so it's probably simply the cheapest choice.

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.

In general, denser materials are better (and faster) at transmitting physical waves sound and worse (and slower) at transmitting electric waves like heat.

> 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?

I'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent sound transmission.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

Starcraft has the same problem and also uses "soundproof" booths, fwiw. I believe the practice started under SC:BW

Oh for sure, please don't read my comment in a demeaning tone - very much the opposite.

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?

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.

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.

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.

There are vacuum insulated units [1], they need tiny plastic 'microspacers' in them to keep the glass layers apart.

1. https://www.pilkington.com/en/global/products/product-catego...

And those spacers are rigid, which will remove a lot of the acoustic gains you'd otherwise get from using a vacuum.

It's worth noting that, although the page you linked says “good acoustic performance”, the vacuum windows they offer aren't mentioned on their noise control product page, nor listed in their sound simulator tool.

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.

The insulation part has a nice handwaving explanation [1]:

Heat is transmitted because gas molecules bounce back and forth in a box, picking up energy on the hot side and leaving it on the cold side. The kinetic energy in any gas molecule is proportional to the temperature, and is

E = 1/2 m * v^2

solved for v:

v = sqrt[ (2 * E) / m ]

Faster gas means faster transmission, so the rate is proportional to 1 / sqrt(m).

I don't have a good intuitive explanation for the sound attenuation. The acoustic impedance for an ideal gas is going to depend on the mass of the molecules, and having very different acoustic impedance for the two gasses at an interface will minimize transmission. So I would expect Argon to reflect more sound, but I don't have as cute an explanation as the one for thermal transmission.

[1] Also completely made up, would love to know if I'm wrong.

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.

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.

Valve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work. Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed volunteer translators, others not so much.

Another small northern European language here that got an (hopefully) auto-translated version. Completely unreadable. Even if done by a human it is pretty much translated word for word with no feeling for the target language at all.

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

some information can be viable for longer than that, there are some extreme cases where 2~3 minutes would not suffice

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.

translation: gank = ambush, farming = collecting resources without engaging against the enemy team

I'd have considered 'gank' a fairly known/used term.

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

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.

Unlikely things happen all the time :)

I don't play mobas specifically, though

Not for people who’ve never played MOBAs.

The term predates moba, it's early RTS, early MMO stuff, around late '90s, early 2000s.

Good to know, but based on numbers, most people would have been exposed to the term through MOBAs.

Most people have never played a MOBA.

We’re going in circles here.. where did I say most people have played MOBA?

Well you said "most people" without clarifying whether you meant that generally (the way the other commenter assumed and so replied) or whether you meant "of people who know it, most of them..."

In internet comments, if you're not really specific with your words it's likely at least somebody will misunderstand your intent, partly because they can't read your mind and partly because with so many potential readers the odds of misunderstandings goes up.

In internet comments, if you can’t follow the context of the thread discussion, don’t reply.

Your comment was not clear even with context. I read it the same way as the person who replied to it.

I played RTSes from the late '90s as a kid but still don't know the term

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aren't these murders for stealing though, like don't you kill the people and they drop stuff. I don't remember the game but I know people used to sell in-game items of high value on eBay then stalk people for a bit and kill them to steal it back. One guy got mad about it and went and killed the people in real life.

It was a heavily used term in early WoW pvp.

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.

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.

It is only ubiquitous in MOBAs which are, frankly, a small niche of the small niche that is multiplayer competitive gaming, which is a small niche of the small niche that is online gaming, which is a small niche of the small niche which is computer gaming.

That's really interesting to me. MOBAs are notoriously new player hostile, just with the sheer amount of knowledge the game demands, and the fact that a team really does rely on its members which is too much pressure for a new player (which can translate into verbal abuse from your team depending on the game's culture).

So what's the MOBA that got you interested even though you're not familiar with the genre?

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).

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.

I live in the hills above a major metropolis and I hear the sound of explosives before I see the reason on my internet stream of live sports. It’s definitely a unique kind of communal experience.

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.

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

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.

That looks like a small stadium compared to one used in 2017 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331

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.

It's crazy that the booths cost $200k, like how is it even possible they cost THAT much!

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.

Actual title:

"Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence"

Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?

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

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.

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

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).

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.

One solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so it becomes more like a squash court for example

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.

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.

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...

To hammer it home even more: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players

21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)

Wow, Not only are the top 21 dota 2 players, all but *4* of the top 50 earners are dota 2 players

And the top 5 earners for CS:GO are all Astralis players.

1st place in 2022 got $8,518,822! Nice!

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/

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.

There you go:

VanEck Video Gaming and eSports UCITS (ESP0)

http://www.investing.com/etfs/vaneck-vectors-videogameesport...

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.

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).

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..

> 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.

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

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.

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.

By Joel Spolsky: when I say "no one" I mean less than 10 million people.

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.

Also, world got a lot bigger (more people) and smaller (a lot of news instant and online) at the same time.

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.

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.

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.

I'm guessing that was muscle memory sneaking a 'World of' in there. ;)

Another datapoint here: I didn't know about the event either.

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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mobile games are not real games.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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".

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.

Wouldn't be gaming without a healthy dose of gatekeeping ;)

> 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.

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.

I'm too used to ignore irrelevant ads so I've never noticed it on Steam.

> 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.)

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.

They've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games between 15 and 30 minutes!

if it weren't for Turbo I probably wouldn't still be playing 11 years after beta. Turbo is great.

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.

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?)

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.

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....

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.

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.

Do they? I got the dutch version as well, and it's full of english sentences translated word-by-word.

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.

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.

You sure about the machine part? While a surprise, it was one of the better localizations i have experienced in the world wide web.

GPT translates incredibly well.

In the Japanese translation it was extremely obvious and I had to switch to English. The tone is completely off

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.

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...

Well, according to many complaints over time, the answer is "not very well".

Oh, well, 12th time the charm

I don’t understand the problem this solves - why not put the players in noise cancelling headsets?

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.

would that work? that's like wearing noise canceling headphones to a concert.

Uncomfortable for the players if I had to guess

Read the article; The last couple paragraphs talk about how they tried that and it didn't live up to their standards

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.

In starcraft when they'll go with headsets it works by playing loud whitenoise. Not conducive for a team game

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.

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)

Must be super boring to not hear the crowd, perhaps why I found watching dota esport to be super boring

Ctrl-F "stink": 0

Ctrl-F "stench": 0

Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell

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.

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.

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.

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.

I did some more digging and found this post

https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/40832-starcraft-audience#12

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.

And what I am saying is why is this a bad thing. Just make it part of the competition, seems way more fun.

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.

A baseball analogy would be if sign-stealing were allowed.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com