It's much much too loud for air curtains.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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...

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.

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.

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).

> 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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

Uncomfortable for the players if I had to guess

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.