What do you think about .Arank 3.0?

[cibes]

Hi everybody,
.Arank 3.0 has been running for some weeks now and I have had some pretty good games already. The hostbot system is kind of a compromise because there won't be a good, bugfree client in the next months - but it is giving good results in my opinion.
But what do you think about the new turn of dotarank? Feel free to give any feedback :)

[J0su]

Hi,

I agree, even though it still has its faults(but honestly you dont find perfect things ;D) and I am sure that things will sort out someday.

I have to say that most of my games were totally lagfree(for me and other), sometimes spikes, but all in all, im really satisfied.

We can be happy that there are poeple(long live Sir-Rogers :), Long live Arank :)) who spent their valuable free time on projects like this.

Greetings,

Yoshi.

[roterTeufel]

I have got the same opinion as yokr has, sometimes it a bit spiky but all in all its really nice to have Games with skilled, mannered(most of the time) ppl and to be able to enjoy Dota again. Since i know Dotarank i have never made a pupblic Game anymore, its just awful to play with Leavers and ppl who cant control their manners.
I would also like to become part of the admins, to help having Games with ppl who like skilled playing!
So thx alot to you for this nice Bot! Also he isnt that constant atm.
I love Dota
Kind regards Inge

[QuickDeath]

"The hostbot has been somewhat a compromise to a bug free client"

I cant agree more. Lets try to develop a bug free application. Like hmmmm ggclient (oh wait is full of bugs). No no, we need more money and resources to ensure a bug free system like Windows (oh wait that multimillion project has tons of bugs and exploits). Well hmm i cant think of any, But yea lets not compromise anymore. Lets make a client that any x,y random guy with x,y manners and x,y connection can host a game until another x,y idiot develops an x,y exploit to abuse the system.

The integrity of the new system built on strong foundations aka dedicated server, non exploitable rank submission and responsible moderation have been, are and will be the success of this community.

Without deep foundations i can not see any height, but is the height itself that will allow me to comprehend the width of acceptance. Dotarank has achieved in dt time to ensure lag and leaver free yet skill full games. In that context any reference to a client would be a step backwards.

If there are 200 players that combine decent skill, manners and consistency dotarank is for them, For the rest there is Div-League, god bless them.

I do not care about the width when i possess the height.

[cibes]

There have been quite some changes to the bot and to the staff since I started this topic. Arank is constantly and quickly improving at the moment and I am very happy with that. As a GM I don't have the problem that there are not enough games hosted anyway ;)
There might be some downturns of the bot and some nice new features and it seems to be working ever better. But I also think the ideas of a bot and a client are very different and hardly comparable. So now we have taken the road to moderated games - let's enjoy and improve that. I'm looking forward to it!

[Phi]

Hey, so lets give some feedback.

I rly like Arank 3.0 for obvious reasons, it's slowly but constantly getting bigger, better (at first there were many botcrashes and spikes, now it crashes allmost never and we can enjoy playing without delay or lag) and confronting every player with a big pool of other players/playstyles, some pretty darn good ones among them. For that reason it is interesting for the casual player but also for guys going competetive and searching for a playground to try out new strategies, builds etc. Since I found out about the bot I only played pubs when I wanted to stomp, before that I very often had no other games to join but inhouses, where one has to wait a very long time until all have gathered. I can imagine many other players were having this problem too (since SIG and GGC are both blessed by ridicolous "1337proz"), so with Arank 3.0 we just have to annoy our GM's for a few seconds ("marlmarlmarlmarl.... :) " ) and voilá, allready we can join.

The only problem I see is how to get new players (and stay on that standard of quality at the same time) + the channel doesn't have an infinite number of slots. Still, this is only the beginning, maybe we have 3 channels in a few months. Well, let's see.

Conclusion is: very good job, I like Arank 3.0 and it's concept, keep up the good work.

cu all

[Sir Rogers]

Hey, so lets give some feedback.

I rly like Arank 3.0 for obvious reasons, it's slowly but constantly getting bigger, better (at first there were many botcrashes and spikes, now it crashes allmost never and we can enjoy playing without delay or lag) and confronting every player with a big pool of other players/playstyles, some pretty darn good ones among them. For that reason it is interesting for the casual player but also for guys going competetive and searching for a playground to try out new strategies, builds etc. Since I found out about the bot I only played pubs when I wanted to stomp, before that I very often had no other games to join but inhouses, where one has to wait a very long time until all have gathered. I can imagine many other players were having this problem too (since SIG and GGC are both blessed by ridicolous "1337proz"), so with Arank 3.0 we just have to annoy our GM's for a few seconds ("marlmarlmarlmarl.... :) " ) and voilá, allready we can join.

The only problem I see is how to get new players (and stay on that standard of quality at the same time) + the channel doesn't have an infinite number of slots. Still, this is only the beginning, maybe we have 3 channels in a few months. Well, let's see.

Conclusion is: very good job, I like Arank 3.0 and it's concept, keep up the good work.

cu all


You adress a very few critical points, which I would like to elaborate on:

1) Getting new and good players
We willl have autohosted public games and do advertising in the right places or something similar planned for the future.

2) Limited channel slots
We will definately have a client in the future, for social purposes such as chatting channels with unlimited size. The games would still be hosted on the bots I believe. But the client is a long shot off. The first thing on the to-do list is multi-server support, especially on servers in the US and the eurobattle server.

[Gruufhai]

So, I've played a few games with 3.0.

What I missed (maybe someone could clear me up) is the relation to DotArank. 3.0 appears to me as user as another hosting tool like LC or GHost. There was nothing regarding latency or spikes I could complain about, all fine.
But where is the ranking part? Looking at the statistics of the players, I had to doubt that there exists any selection of players based on leave statistics.

Nevertheless, the games were good, less, partially much less leavers than in public games, and the overall skill level appeared to be noticable higher. So far a good think would you think. And yeah, it is a good thing. But I don't think that it is because of 3.0 or DotArank.

It seems to me that the reasons for the good things are the community, and not the system. I recognized a lot of names during these games, and I bet my name was recognized by others as well. Seems to be some sort of rather small group of people, mostly knowing each other by name. I know they're playing quite well and are unlikely to leave. But I do not know so because we're in DotArank 3.0 now, I know because I remember those people.
This knowing-each-other is probably the best method out there to prevent leavers. If you might lose your face (literally by being forced to recreate accounts), you will mind what you're doing. But if they're nobodys and you're nobody, why should you care?

So, if I'm right so far (no leave statistic based player filtering, rather small community regularly playing together, standard quality hosting tool), let me say some things:


First, it's not bad at all what we've got now. More skill, less leavers, no lags, fine. Keep it up.
But that's nothing new. There are many of these rather small groups out there, each one trying to get new players and trying to keep themselves leaver-free with varying methods. dota.pickup is one of these groups, for example.
When I understood it right, DotArank originally wasn't meant to be something like that. It was meant for the wilderness of public games, it was meant to give an idea about how likely it is that this or that guy will leave or not. This was revolutionary, a great attempt, which no other community had to offer.

Remembering this, DotArank 3.0 was no advance, no stepback either, just something different. And not bad.
There is one reason why I'm here and not in some dota.pickup forum, and that's because I really like the idea of DotArank < 3.0.

I don't mind if it develops in a way that it stays just another small community playing DotA. But it would be really sad if the original intent of DotArank would get lost over it, which was to get some history of leaves and stays about as much players as possible, which probably means the need of a reliable client being good enough to be used by numberous public hosts.


Still patiently waiting for the "real" DotArank 3.0,
Gruufhai

[Ryooka]

well all i can say to this is, the !rank command is disabled for the moment to provide crashes of the bot. The ranksystem counts in the backround so u gets +1 for staying all the time and u gets ure -10 ( or -5, dont know whats up to date) u play a dotarank game or leave it. if the new bot works good and dont crashes after a few games the rank will be shown again.

so far from my side

ryo

[cibes]

Hey Gruufhai, finally somebody who understands my point! :D
Agreed, in pretty much all points. There are some leavers but as they're are instantly banned they don't get anywhere near the community. So most players are from a rather exclusive circle at the moment. This system works to have nice games.
I still ask to keep the original idea in mind, maybe sometime there will be the possibility to work on this again.

[QuickDeath]

It seems to me that the reasons for the good things are the community, and not the system. I recognized a lot of names during these games, and I bet my name was recognized by others as well. Seems to be some sort of rather small group of people, mostly knowing each other by name. I know they're playing quite well and are unlikely to leave. But I do not know so because we're in DotArank 3.0 now, I know because I remember those people.


And hadn't you wished there would be a way to gather all those people together ? I had :)

They dynamic of this community is that it shapes itself. It is a variable rather than a constant. Dotarank as we speak has shaped into a yes closer community than we expected. Yes, most of the players have played with each other at some point in the past. I think of it like friends meeting occasionally on the street. Now we all got a home. Our channel. In the past i would join a ranked game hoping for no leavers. But regarding manners etc,, i wont bother to make even a reference. And as you correctly mentioned the skill level within this community is dramatically higher than most expected. Yet as you have correctly observed and i have also wrote in another post in our admin section, There are still players or groups out there that they are not aware of dotarank and we definitely want them on board. The constant is the manners and the variable is the skill. There are mannered players and skillfull and yet mannered players that they are in the process of learning the game.

The way i see it, dotarank has to satisfy both parties under a common umbrella of mannered games. Dotarank's initial purpose (or as you say great attempt) in the client days was to provide leaver-free games, thats it. No reference to manners of players the manners of host, The questionable connection on host's behalf, the skill and so on. I can remember endless ranked games full of flaming, custom-kicks, dropped connections and so on. I don't think anyone misses those days.

And at this very time i wonder. Which other community combines [not most or some] but ALL of the following.

Decent Skill
Manners
Friendly Atmosphere
Responsible Moderators
Friendly Staff
Ease of access (No-need for vouching or registration)

Answer the above, and you will get a pretty good idea why many of us have chosen dotarank.

Yet, we all started from somewhere and although the average skill on public dota has increased dramatically, we do wish new players to get a chance to have leaver and lag free games. And in this spirit, we will soon launch few hostbots that they will be able to autohost ranked games with no skill requirements that all those players will have the chance to score and also to !report any player that misbehaved in the game in an effort to maintain the mannered atmosphere that so hard, we have tried to establish.

[Gruufhai]

Dotarank's initial purpose (or as you say great attempt) in the client days was to provide leaver-free games, thats it. No reference to manners of players the manners of host, The questionable connection on host's behalf, the skill and so on. I can remember endless ranked games full of flaming, custom-kicks, dropped connections and so on. I don't think anyone misses those days.

Well, I do, as I like to play public. I don't care much about communities or making friends, I just want to play the game and appreciate the large number of different players.
I use to play games with two people I know for some years, but I'm playing alone too. In both cases, we use a custom tool to check leaver ratios (not ranks) based on the old DotArank database and also the DIV league database.
Although we clearly know how buggy at least the DotArank side is, not only because our LC host got 13% leaves without leaving, we still use it, as it does give a good impression of the leave-likeliness of some unknown player IF you have enough data.

DotArank does not need to work perfect, it is no big deal if players lose connections or get dropped by some fagloser hosts. As long as the numbers become large enough, those occasions won't change the overall picture given about some player.
It is to regret that the number of well-ranked players (say, with 30 or more games rated) is decreasing, and most players appear to have new accounts or something below 5 games, which hardly says anything.

Well, I just want to say that DotArank could well live with a few bugs and bad hosts, as the principle cares about large numbers and not few incidents.
And I want to point out again that the biggest strenght lies within rating public games. No other system, except banlist, which failed in that case, attempted to improve the leave-safetyness of public games, and DotArank would be best used to do that job. Using it for some inner-circle community playing would be a big waste, to tell the truth.

Yet there is no conflict between both. You will and can have the community while becoming loved and popular amongst public players for providing pre-game leave-probability checking.

[J0su]

Hi,

As ucw says, the most enjoyable thing is that people playing Arank can enjoy MANNERD and leaverfree games.

Also Gruufhai is right too, there should be a client soon that is available for a bigger group of people, but that would mean:
-moderated games arent needed anymore, but with more people using a client, the less is the control about manners and people abusing hacks for their benefit.
-people using a client in the future should have to be trustful persons and should behave accordingly to Arank.
->that would mean to me that people hosting with the client, should have a high rank or should be prooved to be trustful.

Example: A xy guy with rank 1, downloads the client, hosts a game and appears to be an asshole:
-kicking people to his advantage or is flaming the enemy team for any unjustified reasons.

What I want to clarify is that, when people join the xy-guys game, they would get a similiar opinion about Arank, like I have about DIV atm.
There is a bot hosting games, but no real control about behaviour and hacks, except that leaver get negative statisctics.

Poeple deserve a nice atmosphere and fair games, thats what i relate with Arank atm, so we should not make the fault to hurry with creating a client, instead we should think really responsible about such a step.
We should keep up the basics like: Mannerd, fair and leaver-free games.

Regards,

Yoshi