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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is the Worlds Quiets Room, as of 2018:
https://www.soundacousticsolutions.com/blog/2018/04/05/the-q...
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's a different kinda spectator sport.
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.
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).
that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
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.
Museum quality glass and argon are both fairly expensive. Especially in quantities sufficient to fill the mass quota.
"Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence"
Is this actually by Valve employees? Or just with Valve's funding?
"... 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
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).
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.
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.
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...
21 dota players at the top before you get a different game (Fortnite)
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...
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.
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.
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 think you’re illustrating their point. I’m no stranger to internet or video game culture but I’ve never heard of The International.
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..
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.)
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.
Would love to see more about what they’re doing and how they’re organized recently (an updated employee handbook?)
They're that rare tech company from the 90s/2000s that I still adore today.
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...
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, well, 12th time the charm
- 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.
Ctrl-F "stench": 0
Ctrl-F "smell": 1 hit but only for hot insulation smell
- 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.
Sorry, not impressed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
