I always enjoy making comparisons where applicable, as it lets you look at things in perspective to see the pros and cons of your situation. BD2L or Beginner’s Dota 2 League is another smaller Dota 2 discord based league that I am sure many of you more average ranked players are familiar with. BD2L was founded around a year after ATDL and the 2 entities never really crossed paths until Mage decided to bring the 2 together.

They utilize their own IHL system, but there are a few key differences. This is the general flow of an IHL game for them: they queue via a discord voice channel. Connect to the voice channel and wait for the queue to pop. Once the queue fills up to 10 people, 1 of the players makes the lobby and then random the players a few times and off they go. That’s the general flow of their IHL system.

Now why do I bring this up aside from the fact that I get to piss Rex off even more by mentioning them or that by posting this with the BD2L name, someone may forward it to Ed and he’ll say a few more colourful words about me? It is because unlike ATDL, their IHL is “alive” so to speak.

ATDL’s IHL has had much higher highs with as much as 3 games going on at once, with extra players eagerly waiting their turns in queue, while the most I’ve heard / seen for BDL is 2 games at once with their queue sucked dry. However their IHL isn’t dead as there are still games going, be it more sparsely than when ATDL’s IHL is considered active, but they still have games actually happening regardless.

Now why is it like this? How have they managed to keep a steady and slow pulse, whilst ATDL acts like the heart rate of a guy who is exercising for the first time in 6 months to try and impress a girl? I think it boils down to the playerbase and what their general community philosophy is.

Their playerbase has a much lower ranked average, being around the high archon to mid legend range. They have ancient and above players, but above ancient players are scarce to say the least. So immediately you can see their level is below what you would expect from an ATDL IHL game, but the more important thing is that the skill range as a whole is lower. This means it’s more comfortable for people to queue without the worry for lopsided games in terms of skill / ability.

A fair number of the lower ranked players in ATDL actually have jumped to BDL for IHL cravings cause, well as mentioned prior, the lower skill range and average means more comfortable games for them.

Now, why do we not just do this for ATDL and tadah! Logistically, we have more players, so without the rank spread it’s as simple as that right? Unfortunately not. As mentioned earlier, the fact of the matter is that we have a much higher average rank amongst our players, so splitting the divisions alienates and essentially fractures parts of the community, which means having to cater to both parties is going an endless tug of war for the population’s attention.

Remember theory 4? This point is actually something I personally think BDL does very well (even if they don’t advertise it entirely well). Whilst their server is technically a public server, and anyone that isn’t banned (◔_◔) can join freely. However, they are really more of a private server, whose server link accidentally got leaked. The reason I say this is that the BD2L community is a rather tight knit one. Yes that comes with obvious flaws that if the head honchos don’t like you, you can expect to be in for a rough time. But once you cross that entry barrier, the games become a lot better and theory 4's issues kinda fly out of the window much like balance did in 7.23.

ATDL suffers from the same problems SIL did. People would be there for the competitive side of things: tournament and IHL, but with more people comes a lot of different personality types. People are bound to clash, and form their own cliques in which they all collectively grow hiveminds / opinions. So in that sense, growing to this size has caused this change in community mentality. I like to think most, if not all of the higher ranked players, are accomodating and nice enough to provide the lower ranked players with comfortable playing environments, but prehaps its the lack of social bridges that is the real dividing factor.