First of I just want to say I love the concept you have here, and have met some really awesome people in the reddit noobs channel ingame. However after playing a few inhouses I have one big question, and it is one that has been asked multiple times. How is "noob" going to be defined when it comes time to get to really competing against other teams?

I have noticed two kinds of players in the channel pool. Those who are completely new to the game, and those with hundreds and hundreds of games but are average at best with a lot still to learn. While both are noobs, one group is still quite a bit more skilled than the other.

I have no issue with losing to somebody more skilled than I am, but I don't want to see 90% of the games be absolute crush fests.

To my understanding a person will be considered a noob if they have under "x" amount of wins or under "y" W/L or something along those lines. Since each league match needs to be monitored by a coach/admin/mod it will be quite easy to check each player's dota profile, along with monitoring the match itself ingame. Once the league has been running for a couple weeks we should have better detail of the skill levels within each team and be able to set up better matches or better opponents.

Yeah I think our first few games/brackets are going to naturally be a little rough and unbalanced, but as we continue to play we can refine the way we rank/match-up members to ensure everyone is having fun and learning.

I don't think it's possible to view another persons losses? I might be wrong, but some people can have 200 wins and be less skilled then an old DotA/HoN player with 5 wins. We should probably consider adding some kind of karma/ranking system (maybe your teammates can rate your skill-level after a league game and and this level is used as a basis for team placement?). Pre-made teams would make that impossible/biased though.

But this is great, lets throw out ideas now so we have a direction when we are implementing this.

The only way to tell somebodies losses is to do the math by how many pages there are in their match history. I think there are 7 games per page.
You have a good point about old players who just have a beta, and of course there are those with multiple steam accounts with dota. I know one broadcaster has like 6 smurf accounts.

It is going to be terribly difficult to balance and rely a lot on trust. You could have the coachs/admins watch the games and judge skill levels that way but even then somebody might just have a good game of beginners luck. It might be the most fair impartial method though.

It could maybe be based on user input, like a petition? You register, and get put on the bottom of the league. Once you've accumulated X number of wins [10? 15? 20?] you can 'petition' to be bumped up to the next level. At that point one or more admins/coaches/high-level players? will decide/vote if you should be placed at the next level.

Then we could also have a petition form to lower a users level. Say your on the third level of skill in the league, and you get paired with a guy 2-3 games that just sucks... bad positioning, lack of item understanding, w/e. You fill out a petition saying "this guy should be bumped down a level". If a user gets 5+ of these petitions against them, the system alerts the mods and they can decide to bump down or not?

That way users all start at the same place, the bottom of the barrel, and have to work their way up. And any users who get carried or whatever can get petitioned back down? Might be way to complicated idk, just brainstorming.

Hmm not a bad idea at all. I think a level system with anonymous petitions could work.

Also keep in mind we are going to be running the preseason to work out issues like this. I think we're a bit hesitant to use the current W/L ratio that people have because it doesn't necessarily always reflect the players skill. Most people start this game and naturally do horribly for the first 20 games or so, but then you see a sharp jump in wins as all the complexities of the game snap into place. So a player that is on that upswing might not be a complete noob but it wouldn't necessarily be reflected in his w/l ratio. Once preseason officially starts teams will be playing each other and will be ranked accordingly using their teams preseason W/L instead of using their individuals W/L.

It could also be very useful to base a player off of their playtime as well. I, for example, have only 6 ranked games played, but have almost 70 hours due to bot games and doob inhouses.

I think you make a HUGELY valid point, a lot of time can be spent in this game outside of MatchMaking, and we definitely need to account for that. I really just don't think W/L ratio is a very good basis for skillset anyway.

Unfortunately I don't think this metric is very accurate indicator of player skill. I left Dota running for a few days and now have like 140+ hours played, but in reality its closer to 25.

I think without the ladder system implemented we're going to have to track teams manually.

The initial idea I put forward was just an idea to get the ball rolling. It sort of works in ideal situations, but in reality its not too useful. The ladder system will be the most accurate way to rank people, but the downside is that it will take some time for the ladder equilibrate.