The Sound Proof Booths of Silence
243 points by namiwang 1 year ago | 192 comments- ricardobeat 1 year agoI 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.
- pstrateman 1 year agoIt's much much too loud for air curtains.
- ricardobeat 1 year agoIt'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.
- ricardobeat 1 year ago
- seanthemon 1 year agoI think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!
- bspammer 1 year agoThat 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.
- cmcaleer 1 year agoVery 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.
- cmcaleer 1 year ago
- TheAceOfHearts 1 year agoThere 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.
- furyofantares 1 year agoIt 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.
- jfim 1 year agoPlayers have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.
- duskwuff 1 year agoIn 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.
- sundarurfriend 1 year agoIt 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.
- duskwuff 1 year ago
- wnevets 1 year agoThere 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.
- bspammer 1 year ago
- pstrateman 1 year ago
- xvedejas 1 year agoIn 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?
- reidjs 1 year agoYou 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.
- ace32229 1 year agoSpecifically, this year's TI finals tickets are $699+fees for the 3 day pass.
- ace32229 1 year ago
- reidjs 1 year ago
- rpaddock 1 year agoThe 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.
- Aeroi 1 year agothats awesome, what were you going to rent the space for?
- rpaddock 1 year agoI 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...
- rpaddock 1 year ago
- Aeroi 1 year ago
- brainzap 1 year agoThat the players can see each other also allows for some mindgames, for example “the paper” https://youtu.be/ymWj2brfZlA?feature=shared
- Aachen 1 year agoSorry, 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?
- pototo666 1 year agocontext: 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.
- Aachen 1 year agoThanks for that context! That explains
- Aachen 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- pototo666 1 year ago
- Aachen 1 year ago
- Synaesthesia 1 year agoWow they went as far as multiple layers of glass with argon pumped between them!
- bri3d 1 year agoThis 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.
- dguest 1 year agoThe 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.
- dguest 1 year ago
- flangola7 1 year agoWouldn't a vacuum between be better?
- h2odragon 1 year agoYes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of glass flying everywhere.
That's a different kinda spectator sport.
- flangola7 1 year agoThen how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?
- flangola7 1 year ago
- jccalhoun 1 year agoArgon 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.
- nativeit 1 year agoSounds 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.
- nativeit 1 year ago
- Synaesthesia 1 year agoI'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent sound transmission.
- abdullahkhalids 1 year agoThis [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...
- fennecfoxy 1 year agoArgon 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
- pbhjpbhj 1 year agoI'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?
- abdullahkhalids 1 year ago
- h2odragon 1 year ago
- bri3d 1 year ago
- holoduke 1 year agoA 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.
- roughly 1 year agoIt 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.
- AndriyKunitsyn 1 year agoValve uses volunteers for the majority of translation work. Some languages are lucky to have competent and committed volunteer translators, others not so much.
- eCa 1 year agoAnother 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.
- roughly 1 year ago
- ateng 1 year agoCould 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
- xxs 1 year ago5sec 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.
- eterm 1 year agoThis 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).
- tetha 1 year agoThis 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.
- callalex 1 year agoI 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.
- callalex 1 year ago
- tetha 1 year ago
- dubcanada 1 year agoNo, 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.
- CyberRage 1 year agosome information can be viable for longer than that, there are some extreme cases where 2~3 minutes would not suffice
- xxs 1 year ago
- Dowwie 1 year agothis photo from the article amazes me: https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c...
that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
- pyreko 1 year agoSimilar 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.
- JCharante 1 year agoThat looks like a small stadium compared to one used in 2017 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lolesports/38160463331
- JCharante 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- pyreko 1 year ago
- pluijzer 1 year agoI 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.
- langsoul-com 1 year agoIt's crazy that the booths cost $200k, like how is it even possible they cost THAT much!
- falcolas 1 year agoSoundproofing 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.
- falcolas 1 year ago
- leetrout 1 year agoActual title:
"Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence"
Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?
- VoidWhisperer 1 year agoAccording 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
- VoidWhisperer 1 year ago
- lijok 1 year agoThis 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.
- jwatzman 1 year agoLeague 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).
- NelsonMinar 1 year agoMy 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.
- kang 1 year agoOne solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so it becomes more like a squash court for example
- kang 1 year ago
- NelsonMinar 1 year ago
- VoidWhisperer 1 year agoAccording 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
- 1 year ago
- jwatzman 1 year ago
- wincy 1 year agoIt 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.
- __s 1 year agoTI 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...
- bspammer 1 year agoTo hammer it home even more: https://www.esportsearnings.com/players
21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)
- alargemoose 1 year agoWow, Not only are the top 21 dota 2 players, all but *4* of the top 50 earners are dota 2 players
- alargemoose 1 year ago
- kleinsch 1 year agoThis 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.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 1 year agoFascinating. 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...
- Huppie 1 year agoYou'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.
- namtab00 1 year agoThere you go:
VanEck Video Gaming and eSports UCITS (ESP0)
http://www.investing.com/etfs/vaneck-vectors-videogameesport...
- Huppie 1 year ago
- fragmede 1 year ago1st place in 2022 got $8,518,822! Nice!
- bspammer 1 year ago
- jon-wood 1 year agoEveryone 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.
- dubcanada 1 year agoThat'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.
- TheDong 1 year ago> 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.
- dubcanada 1 year agoThat'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.
- ufo 1 year agoAnd 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...
- Unfrozen0688 1 year agoMobile games are not real games.
- flangola7 1 year agoNo self respecting gamer calls mobile apps true games. No one who gets excited about video game development wants to work on candy crush v400
- dubcanada 1 year ago
- usrusr 1 year agoNever 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.
- fragmede 1 year agoI 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.
- taneq 1 year agoI'm guessing that was muscle memory sneaking a 'World of' in there. ;)
- taneq 1 year ago
- IggleSniggle 1 year agoThat'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.
- ncphillips 1 year ago> 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.
- amelius 1 year agoAnother datapoint here: I didn't know about the event either.
- dubcanada 1 year agoPerhaps 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.
- dubcanada 1 year ago
- fomine3 1 year agoI'm too used to ignore irrelevant ads so I've never noticed it on Steam.
- TheDong 1 year ago
- NikolaNovak 1 year agoThing 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).
- jack_pp 1 year agoWell, 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..
- Cyph0n 1 year agoThat’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
- thaumasiotes 1 year ago> 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.
- walthamstow 1 year agoI'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.
- 1 year ago
- Cyph0n 1 year ago
- raincole 1 year agoBy Joel Spolsky: when I say "no one" I mean less than 10 million people.
- jack_pp 1 year ago
- walthamstow 1 year ago> 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.)
- Keyframe 1 year agoAlso, world got a lot bigger (more people) and smaller (a lot of news instant and online) at the same time.
- __s 1 year ago
- exabrial 1 year agoAging 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.
- matthewaveryusa 1 year agoThey've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games between 15 and 30 minutes!
- sundarurfriend 1 year agoSince 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.
- adamrezich 1 year agoif it weren't for Turbo I probably wouldn't still be playing 11 years after beta. Turbo is great.
- sundarurfriend 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- matthewaveryusa 1 year ago
- rtpg 1 year agoValve 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?)
- solardev 1 year agoMy 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.
- adventured 1 year agoYou 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....
- adventured 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- solardev 1 year ago
- hyperman1 1 year agoI 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.
- batshit_beaver 1 year agoValve 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.
- 1 year ago
- batshit_beaver 1 year ago
- kzrdude 1 year agoUnfortunately, 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.
- Aachen 1 year agoOh, 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...
- december456 1 year agoYou sure about the machine part? While a surprise, it was one of the better localizations i have experienced in the world wide web.
- kzrdude 1 year agoI'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.
- teshigahara 1 year agoIn the Japanese translation it was extremely obvious and I had to switch to English. The tone is completely off
- ascar 1 year agoGPT translates incredibly well.
- kzrdude 1 year ago
- 1 year ago
- Aachen 1 year ago
- ilyt 1 year agoWell, according to many complaints over time, the answer is "not very well".
Oh, well, 12th time the charm
- Zathu 1 year agoI don’t understand the problem this solves - why not put the players in noise cancelling headsets?
- Twisell 1 year agoMaybe 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.
- etskinner 1 year agoRead the article; The last couple paragraphs talk about how they tried that and it didn't live up to their standards
- Nullabillity 1 year agoHave 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.
- janosdebugs 1 year agoTwo 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.
- __s 1 year agoIn starcraft when they'll go with headsets it works by playing loud whitenoise. Not conducive for a team game
- 1 year ago
- doikor 1 year agoThey 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)
- lijok 1 year agoUncomfortable for the players if I had to guess
- npace12 1 year agowould that work? that's like wearing noise canceling headphones to a concert.
- 1 year ago
- Twisell 1 year ago
- WhereIsTheTruth 1 year agoMust be super boring to not hear the crowd, perhaps why I found watching dota esport to be super boring
- none_to_remain 1 year agoCtrl-F "stink": 0
Ctrl-F "stench": 0
Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell
- eastbound 1 year agoI 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.
- redder23 1 year agoIs 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.
- donatj 1 year agoI 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.
- Forge36 1 year agoEnough 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.
- Forge36 1 year agoI did some more digging and found this post
- Forge36 1 year ago
- nivaldoh 1 year agoA 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.
- andy81 1 year agoThe 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.
- donatj 1 year agoAnd what I am saying is why is this a bad thing. Just make it part of the competition, seems way more fun.
- dillydogg 1 year agoMy 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.
- Aachen 1 year agoThe 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
- ufo 1 year agoA baseball analogy would be if sign-stealing were allowed.
- dillydogg 1 year ago
- donatj 1 year ago
- ufo 1 year agoDota 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.
- OhSoHumble 1 year agoDota 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.
- doikor 1 year ago> 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.
- spatulon 1 year agoTwo 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.
- Forge36 1 year ago