SUGGESTION: Ability to perform a "ready check" for groups before entering the game

[mio]

Hey!

Many players including me are using the different channels where you can ask to join a group or create your own group to play ranked or normal games. One thing I've noticed and it has increased as more players are finding Dota .

Since the groups might be a bunch of random people (sometimes even the language barrier is very high so the communication is more than sub-par) I'd like to suggest adding an ability to perform a READY CHECK before joining the queue. Sometimes people go AFK or they might say that they need a minute but if it's in cyrillic a lot of people don't even understand it and it will go unnoticed.

It'd be great to either have a button to click for the group leader to perform a ready check or by typing /ready and it would pop up a little window where it basically asks if you are ready or not. If all people click "Yes" then the party chat would pop up a message (i.e "Everyone is ready.").

This would reduce the amount of downtime before entering the queue. Of course you click "Accept" when the game starts, but since people don't usually talk before queueing and usually (depending on the time of day) it takes time for the group to get full. This creates the unfortunate situation that the match doesn't start and someone might even have to leave the group.

tl;dr - Create a button for the group leader to perform a ready check or use the command /ready or /readycheck to check that everyone is alert and ready to join the queue to remove the possibility of people being AFK when the "Your match is ready"-notification pops up.

[graystripe]

you can ask in the party chat whether everyone is ready or not.

there isn't a need for such a system at all.

[mio]

Originally posted by graystripe:

you can ask in the party chat whether everyone is ready or not.

there isn't a need for such a system at all.

I understand your point, but try to step on the shoes of a person who doesn't understand anything about the English language except the swear words (like usually English speakers know the swear words in Russian.

As I mentioned a lot of times there might be 4 other players in the group with you and the group might have 5 different nationalities in it. I have faced situations where people can't speak English AT ALL except "yes" and "no" even when they don't even understand the question.

And even if they say "ready" and it's in cyrillic I (and I'm sure many others too) can't really tell what they are saying. Or if they tell me or the party leader to wait for some reason we don't understand anything due to cyrillic alphabet. And did you know that there are over 50 different languages using cyrillic alphabets so there's a chance that they don't understand each other as well.

I think it'd be easier to create a ready check which is of course translated to all languages respectively in the game instead of me learning the Russian language. Catch my drift?

It's easy for us to say, since English comes to many people so naturally, but when you are developing something, or thinking about a feature you want to create, you always have to think how to approach it from the perspective of a total beginner who has no clue what he is doing.

That way you can ensure everyone can try the game and review it based on mechanics and the amount of fun you can have it without saying it sucked, because you didn't understand anything. Trust me, I work as a software developer myself and over the years that's the most important thing to remember -> you are not creating the software for yourself, it's for the client and clients want stuff that is easy to use.

[Cake Sale]

Really seems unecessary. Why make it Valve's problem that you are playing with people you don't know and can't speak their language. Good for you that you've joined some random community of players though.

[mio]

Originally posted by Cake Sale:

Really seems unecessary. Why make it Valve's problem that you are playing with people you don't know and can't speak their language. Good for you that you've joined some random community of players though.

Really mixed opinions on this one it seems.

I talked about this with a lot of people during my annual "It's Christmas so let's play Dota each day as soon as I wake up until I go to bed"-marathon and many English speakers agreed on this one.

There is a lot of people who don't have a group of friends playing Dota and they want to play with preformed groups (many do this so that they can inspect the players profile and get somewhat "ballpark" view of the skill the player might have), rather than joining the match alone and getting a random selection of people. It's fingers crossed at that point. Also it doesn't matter even if you select "English" as the language and set the location to somewhere so you wouldn't have to face people with high language barriers.

The feedback at least from their end was pretty one-sided and they strongly agreed on it. Actually I wrote this suggestion here because at least six people of around 20-30 people I casually asked about how'd they feel if the game had a ready check during the time we were gathering a group in those "Party Ranked" or "Party Ranked +3k"-channels.

But I guess the suggestion is useless then when the reaction is this.

I meant this in no means "a problem"; it is meant as a suggestion to make the experience better and to bring people more together no matter where you are from or what language you speak since communication is the key anyways in the matches, if you want to succeed. A good example is the chat-commands that you can use and since they are translated, everybody knows what people are saying to each other.


P.S. You should try the channels. Just search for "Party" and many will pop up. It's quite fun and if you get lucky you might get a full English speaking group and you even might end up with new Steam friends at the end of +10 games together. Sometimes somebody even throws a Discord-url for you to join and talk through there instead of the in-game voice chat, which isn't the best quality-wise. :)

[Hellno;)]

ty ..