Dota 2: Valve to bring back soundproof booths for The International 2023
The International's iconic soundproof booths were expensive and a hassle to set up, which played a factor in Valve Software's decision to not use them in 2022.
With The International (TI) 2023, this year's Dota 2 world championship tournament, just over a month away, developer Valve Software has finally begun revealing more details about the event. For one, TI 2023 will see the return of the iconic soundproof booths for the tournament's main event.
Valve announced that TI 2023 will once again feature soundproof booths in the 'Between the Lanes: The Sound (Proof Booths) of Silence' blog post on Tuesday (12 September).
"We’re happy to bring back the “classic” TI5 soundproof booths out of storage in Kent, WA to once again grace the main stage at The International 2023," said Valve.
The soundproof booths served to prevent players from overhearing anything from the crowd or casters that would give them an unfair advantage in the game.
Due to how important they are in maintaining competitive integrity at TI, the soundproof booths have been a fixture of the tournament since its inception back in 2011, when Dota 2 was first revealed to the public through a US$1 million event held at Gamescom 2011 in Cologne, Germany.
The soundproof booths would be featured in all succeeding iterations of TI until last year's tournament in Singapore, when Valve elected not to use them and instead had the players play in a setup that was open to the arena.
With that said, the lack of a fixed soundproof booth did allow Valve to use a rotating set of PCs to help the players easily plug in their own peripherals and warm up before matches — something which the pros apparently appreciated.
"By the time we arrived at last year’s TI in Singapore, we had accumulated a decade of experience with sound dampening, and this gave us the confidence to try a new approach. We decided to eliminate the booths entirely, and solve the sound problem with noise-canceling headphones, earbuds, and the acoustic design of the arena," Valve said of their decision in the blog post.
"This meant we could maintain the competitive integrity that the booths provided, while optimizing for all the things that the booths historically made difficult."
A factor that may have influenced Valve's decision to not use the soundproof booths in TI 2022 was the cost of shipping them from the United States to Singapore and the labourious task of quickly setting them up in between games and matches.
Valve explained that adequate soundproofing was not the only requirement for the booths — they also needed to have air conditioning for the players while also being well lit and transparent for the crowd and cameras to see through them.
By TI 2015, the soundproof booths even featured multiple layers of museum-quality glass with argon gas in between each layer. All of that meant that the booths were, in Valve's own words, "a huge pain in the ass to assemble".
"As the events got more elaborate, so did the challenges, and that meant more advanced techniques in booth design," said Valve.
"By the time we’d perfected the booths for TI5, the total price tag for each one was over $200,000. (All that argon wasn’t cheap.) The irony is that, over the course of six Internationals, we’d managed to engineer an essentially perfect sound booth… which we then had to put in dry dock, because it turns out they couldn't be shipped internationally."
However, Valve added that "sound-dampening is simply too important a trade-off" and that they "underestimated the difficulty in bringing the sound-dampening up to our standards" in TI 2022.
While the developer said they are still open to hosting a soundproof booth-less TI, they ultimately decided to bring them back for TI 2023.
"Do we think a boothless event is an experiment worth pursuing again? Absolutely. There were real advantages, for the players and the spectators. But not until we have absolute confidence in our success," said Valve.
"What matters is that we’re heading in the right direction: Towards something better, faster, more enjoyable for the pros competing, and more exciting for us watching."
While Valve's announcement of the return of the soundproof booths for TI 2023 is welcome news, the developer has yet to announce the tournament's prize pool and how it will be set up.
Since TI 2013, Valve has provided a base amount of US$1.6 million to the tournament's prize pool, which was then grown through crowdfunding from the community through the TI Compendiums and Battle Passes.
Last year's tournament, TI 2022, had a US$18 million prize pool. The distinction of the biggest pot in TI, and all of esports, belongs to TI 2021, which had a massive US$40 million prize pool.
However, Valve said back in June that they will be moving away from the Battle Pass system and that crowdfunding for TI 2023's prize pool will be done through a TI-themed update releasing sometime this month.
TI 2023 will be hosted across multiple weekends from 12 to 29 October in Seattle, the United States, featuring 20 of the best Dota 2 teams in the world battling for the right to claim the coveted Aegis of Champions and the lion's share of the still unannounced prize pool.
The participants are comprised of 12 directly-invited teams and eight squads that earned their spot through the regional qualifiers last month.
This year's tournament also features a revamped format split into two distinct phases, called 'The Road to The International' and 'The International' itself.
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