[lijok]

This is a great article and I understand the need for the booths, but to me personally, they look horrible. It looks as if the players are sitting in a kiosk. Surely it would make for a much more enveloping experience for the spectators if the players were in an open space.

[jwatzman]

League of Legends (a similar game) does this -- no booths, only noise-cancelling headphones, for its large tournaments. There have been several major tournaments where the players have complained afterwards that they could not hear anything during big late-game fights due to crowd noise (since the crowd is also super excited at the big fight). Players need to be able to hear not just the game audio but also communication from their teammates and, despite noise-cancelling headphones, the crowd just drowned everything out. I'm honestly not sure why League of Legends hasn't moved to booths like Dota uses.

I'm not sure if you've ever watched one of these tournaments, but they get super noisy, and noise-cancelling all of that is not an easy problem (as the article says).

[NelsonMinar]

My understanding is LoL productions are still trying to make it look like you are watching actual athletes do a sport. If you lock the away in booths it puts too much of a distance between the audience and the players.

OTOH crowd noise giving away what's going on in the game has been a problem since their broadcasts start. It doesn't ruin the game but it's definitely a factor.

[kang]

One solution could be to standardize the "esport booth", so it becomes more like a squash court for example

[NamTaf]

That doesn’t account for the fact different esports demand different requirements, just as a squash booth isn’t used for tennis.

CS for example is also Valve but does not use booths. I think a major part of that is that the delay between audience reaction to an event and the event unfolding is much shorter, so the crowd can’t give as much away as quickly.

[VoidWhisperer]

According to the article, they tried this this past year and unfortunately weren't able to get the sound dampening up to an acceptable standard, so for the time being they are going back to the booths