/\ this and when I was playing games yesterday I tried to play a few support heros and tried not to go crazy killing people.When making lobbies we picked teams and I tried to balance the team as much as possible by picking fair teams.I personally do not see the problem with picking teams there was some really sick games yesterday and the day before where teams where picked and they where very close games.1-5 is to small a window but the idea is sound maybe 1-100

Question, can we round our ratings to the nearest thousandth decimal point? I don't want to create confusion.

I think we should try the rating system that essem has suggested, if it works, great! If it doesn't, well ok, we can then try something else.
I like the idea of a 1-5 system, a 0-100 is too diffuse in my opinion.
It could be something like this (shamelessly based on essems text ) :

1 - Few matchmaking games under belt, still trying to figure out basic item builds, last-hitting, etc.
2 - Knows the ins and outs of maybe 5 or 6 heroes. Understands how to ward, beginning to know how to farm consistently.
3 - Understands the basic strategies of dota (4-protect-1, team fight strategy, early push, etc.), good map awareness, consistent positioning in teamfights, etc
4 - Can effectively play a wide range of heroes including the more difficult ones, knows how a trilane works, how to jungle, can solo mid, etc.
5 - Can effectively play most if not all heroes, ability to coach and draft, extensive hero/item knowledge.

My 2 cents on this whole rating system idea…

Shane and I spoke about some of these ideas briefly last night and I thought I’d take some time to throw in my input.
We started this community with the goal of providing a “safe” place to play, where you could come to learn the Dota with a group of like minded folks, without the fear of being made fun of and talked down to. There were always concerns about skill gaps between players and I knew as we played together and people got more games under their belts that we’d probably transition from a gang of greenhorns into a core of average tier players. For the most part that’s exactly what has happened, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. As I see it, DotaNoobs isn’t really a forum for lessons so much as a school where the lessons are held. You can think of our Sunday night games as the Sunday night family dinner, the time where we all get together, play, goof off, and just have a good time with each other. I personally don’t think we need to gum that all up by assigning people stats and grades, but with that being said I do realize the need to have some kind of filtering taking place so we can try avoid the more stompy type games.

So if we can keep up our player numbers perhaps we could transition into something like this

3 Lobbies /Rate Yourself Plan

Inhouse #1 Open to All Players - ALL PICK ALL THE TIME – New Players Directed to these games to start out. More experienced players should avoid if possible but aren’t restricted from playing. Just let the greener guys use this one as their training group. If you do play take a support role, teach, coach etc etc

Inhouse #2 Single/Random Draft – Mid/High Tier players – Generally not for the newest players, make sure people know how it works before joining. Good 2nd tier learning zone, forces you out of that one toon you’ve mastered. Expect to loose, but learn a lot.

Inhouse #3 Captains Mode – This is where the big dogs play, players are expected to know what’s going on for the most part. The green guys are highly recommended to stay away until they’re comfortable with a good portion of heroes and items.

I think allowing folks to rate themselves is a much more realistic take to this whole thing and doesn’t have the sting of a player feeling like he’s being judged in some kind of super secret dotaNoobs player list.

Now what would have to happen for something like this to actually take off?

1. Maintain a decent member activity rate. We need to be on Reddit and the other Dota sites letting people know about us and what we do. We need to actively be growing our player base.

2. We need to setup a system @ starting time to get everyone together to do announcements and just break out to our game in a more organized fashion. We don’t need people bleeding over games into the start times if possible. That fragments the players and makes it hard to get the games going in the correct fashion. It just brings a bit of organization to the process that is needed when working with any kind of large group of people. If you ever seriously raided in WoW you know what I mean. There were start times for a reason.

3. We’ll probably also need to assign some people as Refs/Officers. Folks that we can label in Mumble with some kind of marking so new players know who to go to for assistance and help. These guys would also handle situations where a player isn’t living up to the Dota motto of “Don’t be a dick” by contacting the admins or speaking to the player directly. These guys also would be a the ones that might PM a player and discuss perhaps spending a bit more time in ALL pick mode if they feel like the player might be overextending themselves and trying out Captains Mode prematurely.


Thoughts?

Not going to quote the wall of text.

This sounds like the perfect product of the brainstorming session.

With regards to the points about helping this take off:

1. We should all be plugging the group on r/dota2. Whenever people are asking for advice, help, rage free, etc, one or more of us should be in there giving advice and plugging the group. It might also be a good idea that whenever someone plugs the site (esp. on reddit) that we post here and have a few people go up-vote the comment so it's one of the first few. As for other sites, we should have the url in any signatures we have on dota2 forums.

2. You're completely correct on the start times. A few family members and friends of mine own restaurants. They don't take reservations for any time, they take reservations for specific seatings. One suggestion might be to adopt this idea. Something along the lines of first game starts at 4:00 PM EST/3:00 PM CST, second game at 4:15, third at 4:30. Have the first game be the AP game. The mid-high tier players can jump into channels and help out with starting items, skill builds, team comp, etc. then go on to start their own games.

3. Refs/Officers. This is kind of a must have. I was in Shane's channel when he had the rager in there. It sucked since there was really nothing that could be done about it and the guy ended up abandoning the game after raging at some of the new guys that were playing.

If anything, having some kind of identifier in Mumble to indicate "Go to these guys with questions" is necessary.

Personally, I'm looking forward to spending some time in AP/SD!

Just my thoughts.

I'm actively looking into this on mumble to see what we can do to notate folks like this.

I only got to play one in-house the previous Sunday, but I will admit I was sad the game I played felt kind of stompy with the picks (I am totally cool with all the guys that played tho, its just an observation). I am wondering if there could be a mode for just novices and moderates (I guess on that scale would be 1-3) where it would be AR. This would be a place for people to be forced out of the characters they usually pick, but do so without probably being stomped really hard by the more advanced players.

I feel like one of my big shortcomings (other than not getting to play as often as I would like) is that I don't feel comfortable branching out in the presence of 4-5's, because I feel like I will make us lose by trying to carry, jungle, or mid. I'm also always in the mindset of the Chinese 5 player (aka the hard support who never farms and spends 99% of their money on wards/courier), because for the past 2 years of LoL and HoN that is the role I played in my team and I was very successful. The current metagame of Dota2 doesn't seem to allow for that kind of play, so I need to relearn how to play just for that.

These are my 2 cents and I will probably be able to make the next Sunday game, though I might be an hour late or so since I am working that day.

While I think it would be nice to have an AP/AR lobby, I very much disagree with making captain's mode a "big dogs" only kind of thing. One of the great things about the Doobs inhouses had been that new players have been able to play a "serious" captain's mode game with picks and strategy, etc. and from what I've heard it's been a lot of fun for inexperienced as well as experienced players alike, especially since it's so different from regular match making. I think captain's mode is exactly the kind of thing that everyone can a lot of from, and it's a great mode to really understand a hero's role in a team setting. I don't know about anyone else, but I've really enjoyed playing captain's mode with some of the new players.
I don't think we should aim to seperate people in terms of skill, as that is kind of counter-productive to learning and also counter-productive towards fostering a close-knit community. Instead we could use skill indicators (like essem's 1-5) or player drafting to get more balanced teams, whatever the mode.



1. Totally agree with you on this point.

2. I don't really see a big problem is, but what we could do is have a good channel names so that it's easy to get 10 people to "sign-up" for a game.

3. Agreed.

Overall, I really think we should be careful about elitist tendencies. This is exactly the kind of community where someone should be able to try out being a captain and maybe test some weird strategy that they've thought of, and I think we should encourage this, instead considering whether they are ready or not. I would love to see some of the new people try out their own ideas instead of everyone copying the picks of competitive Na'Vi games.

I would have to agree that I have enjoyed playing with the more experienced players. Shane had some unique strategies last night, but it was very light-hearted and fun. I have also been able to play with FallenElf, and he literally walked around with me to show me ward spots. That was very helpful.

I think one of the problems about grouping all the new people together is that we....for the most part....have no idea what we are doing. I have no idea when to swap over to the "mid-game phase", or setup ganks for example, so some leadership would be nice in that respect. It seems like if you get a group of noobs together, no one is really going to speak up, because no one is really sure what to do. Hell, i don't even know how to draw on the map at this point.

I guess the above concept would be more of a "Coaching" session, and I am sure not every upper-level player is really going to want to do that every week.

Sorry, I got contacted privately by a few players that didn't have such a great time with this and that's what I mainly was drawing from. Why don't we just allow captain's in the top 2 lobby tiers dictated by the players playing at that time. I don't think the greenhorn lobby should have it though, I think its a bit overwhelming for a truly new player, and we should be equipped to handle such a person if one ever comes along.

It makes sense that people may not have gotten as much as they could have out of it. That's mostly on those of us who have been around for a bit.

Some of us have been playing together for the better part of a year so might screw around too much or just not help out since we know each other's strengths and weaknesses pretty well. I agree that AP is probably the best mode for a total newbie to play since it let's them play whatever they want. I do think that it might be a good idea to have 1 or 2 of the better players (i.e. not me) in their respective lobbies helping out with team comp and maybe starting items, potential item progression. Guides are great, but having someone help out in the beginning of a game is pretty helpful.

Something else I was thinking of might be to do a "showcase" game every week. What I was thinking is a note could be sent to 10 people, skills ranging from awesome to totally new (maybe 2 experienced player with 3 new) and having LoveisDead or someone else cast the game and post it on Reddit and joinDota the next day. It would be pretty fun to have Shane and Gambit each leading a team with say Suicide and Bear as #2s. It would be a good way to get new guys into CM and get more exposure for the group.

Soooo dumb question here.....would "casting" the game or 'CM'.....would that essentially be watching a replay of the game with commentary?

It can be done from a replay, but I was thinking more of a live thing. CM is short for Captain's Mode, AP is All Pick, AR is All Random, RD is Random Draft and SD is Single Draft.

Random draft is when the pool of heroes is cut down to only 20 and both teams must pick from there, one or 2 at a time.

Single draft is when each player has only 3 heroes to choose from, randomly selected by the game.

I've skimmed through the thread and would like to chime in. The vision of a DotaNoobs being a "safe place to play" is one that I agree with completely, and to be explicit I think this should always take precedence over the "competitiveness" of games. With that in mind, maybe we should split Alverez's lobbies into intent rather than skill as follows.

The AP lobbies are intended to focus on the basics of the game and should probably include at least one regular sitting in a broadcaster slot to try and facilitate. This may be one of the most important and difficult positions to fill, since these regulars will need to (a) give advice in a constructive and forgiving way and (b) able to gauge people's willingness to hear advice. Shane and Gambit are quite good at this, and I think fallen and I could do this with lower levels of advice. I agree with fallen's earlier post about learning a lot from actually laning against and having your mistakes be punished by talented people, so maybe playing in the games but holding back would the (c) attribute for those people.

The SD/RD lobbies would be focused on broadening each player's DotA experience, forcing them into different heroes and roles. These lobbies should be mostly self-sufficient, and any inter-personal problems dealt with by contacting an officer. The main issue here will be keeping the teams fairly even and I don't have much advice there.

The CM lobbies would be focused on learning and practicing the broader strategy of a DotA game. Labeling it for "big dogs" goes against the "safe to play" vision in my opinion. If we do want to have a more competitive series of CM inhouses maybe we should just have a different day and leave Sunday as the "come join us and learn" day? The competitive inhouses could offer a good opportunity for the casting, too, although I would suggest having two people cast the game together. Thoughts?

Personally, I think 3 types of lobbies is a bit much, and I'd much rather see it reduced to 2 kinds, AP/SD/RD and CM, then again I am a bit biased since I like CM for inhouses. I like the idea of broadening players horizons though.

First of all I think UnoPolak really hit the money here with his revisions to Alverez' system. While I absolutely love Captains Mode and I agree that even newish players should be exposed to that, an actual NEW player is in no way ready to be put in a CM situation.

I played in one CM game last Sunday, and each team had a player on it with less than 8 wins. That's next to nothing. Already probably confused trying to get assigned to a game and into the right channel/lobby, now the game starts up with the CM ban draft phase, and you have no idea what's going on. In that game one of those players was in the captains seat, and while it worked out ok that won't always be the case.


Now I think we all agree that games should always have a few experienced players in them, and that one of our biggest concerns is balance. It's hard to say "we should have 2 or 3 lobbies" when our turnout might be small or huge on any given week. I believe we can use the Mumble server a little more effectively to help organize games, here's what I have in mind:

At 3:00PM when we start the Mumble server should be reduced to Main Lobby/Admin Channel/AFK, get rid of all the in-house, matchmaking, and tournament rooms. Once we get everyone into the main lobby on Sunday, we create a [New To The Game/Seeking Help] channel, and kind of like the rating system have anyone who feels they should be there move on down. Because our ultimate goal for Sunday nights is to provide a place for newbies to learn, they always need to come first even at the expense of fun.

At this point the staff needs to do some math and figure out how many games we can handle, mixing 2-3 newbies per team with 2-3 of the users still in the main lobby (i.e. everyone else). Now we create a channel for each game one at a time. Let's say we have enough players for three games we create one lobby with the password in the title. A staff member in both the newbie and main lobbies will direct the appropriate amount of people to join the lobby hopefully giving us a nice balance (depending on user honesty I guess). Once that lobby fills we create the next one and do it all over again.

I just think having a Mumble server full of channels and having one of us shouting out names gets really confusing. By eliminating all the channels and creating one lobby at a time, filling it, and moving on I think we can make it a little less intimidating for new players.

Another good point. It might be a good idea to have people who have been around a while in the channel 15-20 minutes before we start so Alverez/Binary/someone can assign who is going to be "staffing" each channel.

You know we could probably use the ICE API to lock down all other (dota) channels on the mumble and move everyone into the lobby at start time but that would require you and I getting that working.

We can do a lot more with ICE. We can have the team randomizer automatically move people into appropriate channels, we could have users sign up for games on the website to fill lobbies, all sorts of shit. Lets sit down and figure that shit out one night this week.