Introduction

With my 1000th post here on our fourms, I'd like to introduce something new for our users. We know that Team Liquid has become a popular place for Dota 2. We have a forum that is slowly gaining activity, and an IRC channel that is filling up. People have been playing In House games, that have started firing off regularly, occasionally enough to have multiple games going at once.

It's to the point that we would like to help the process. To that end, we have set up an IRC bot to make this entire process easier, one that will keep track of not only who is able to play, but that will keep track of statistics and help with making teams.

The purpose of this is both to help ease of use for you, and to help us with moderation to make sure everyone's experience is as good as possible. This is one step towards making things more officially involved with TL, and as such things such as excessive bm or insulting behavior can have consequences on the forums.

First and foremost, this is an environment where we're hoping to allow people of all skill levels to play. While TLers are generally very skilled at the games they play, this won't be an area just for the most seasoned of pros and go into it with appropriate expectations. Sometimes there will be those with heroes they aren't amazing with, and occasionally people will need help with builds or items.

This is a place for all of us to have fun, learn, and improve through the beta and into release. We want this to be a place for all of us to have fun with other members of a fantastic community.

IRC, Internet Relay Chat

As some of you may know, we've recently started up our DotA channel on IRC; #tlnet-dota. This place will be the future of strategy talk, having fun with fellow Liquidians and inhouses. As we're setting up a bot to host inhouse games on a more serious scale than people just creating lobbies in-game, I think it's in its place to give you a little guide to IRC.

The web-based client
We're located on the Quakenet server on IRC and they have a web-based client that makes it easy for you to login. All you have to do is go to http://webchat.quakenet.org/ and fill in your details and voila. You're there. It's like magic.

Nickname: Your choice, but if you're going to participate in inhouses, please keep it to the same as in-game.
Channel: tlnet-dota

The stand-alone client
I prefer to have a stand-alone client where I can have all my settings stored, automatically join channels and have it running outside my browser. The most popular choice of clients to use IRC is mIRC (http://www.mirc.com/). Download the latest version, install it and open it up.

Once you've open up the client, you should have a pop-up with some settings that looks like the first of the two pictures below. It's fairly simple and easy to understand what to put in where, but where some people might go wrong is with the servers. You have to choose a Quakenet server to be able to find us here. Go to the server-tab, find Quakenet and then choose the serverlocation that is closest to you for the lowest pingtime. It is not region-based, so you can choose whichever one and be fine.

The second picture is one of the features that make me like it more so than using a web-based client. The perform feature. The commands you choose to perform is some commands that will be performed on start-up (..if you remember to tick the box in the top, haha). The perform function can be found under the third tab called "Options". Put in your variables (/j means join) and you're good to go every time you open up your mIRC client.


Quakenet authentication
In order for Quakenet to authenticate you in their service bot "Q", you'll need an authentication. The authentication will enable the options of channel owners to give you difference modes in the channel (some channels might even require that you're authenticated to even be there).

Besides the official Quakenet authentication, our bot that will host the inhouse games will also use your Quakenet authentication to remember you and store your stats. This is a must-do thing to play our inhouses, but it really only takes one minute to do.

When you're connected to Quakenet, you will have to say hello to the Q bot and it will register you. The command to do so is:

/msg Q HELLO youremail@address.here youremail@address.here

If the account creation is successful, it will tell you so and you'll receive an e-mail shortly with a verification link and a password in that link (it will tell you if the nickname is already in use - however this name does NOT have to be the same as your DotA2 in-game name). When you've obtained your password, you will be able to login to Q with your client. This command is a little trickier, but it can be saved in perform as well:

/msg Q@CServe.quakenet.org AUTH username password

If you're not sure you've been authed, then you use /msg Q whoami to check. As mentioned above, you can put the long login command to auth yourself into your perform list as well. This is a good idea if you don't use other servers on IRC than Quakenet.

The Bot

In order to make everything a little easier, incorporate skill and get more balanced in-house games, we've acquired ourselves a bot that can do all of this for us. All the text in (parentheses) is optionable additions to certain commands.

The commands
Available lists

• default - Default list (no need to specify)
  
• New lists might be added later on

Available modes

• ar - Random Heroes
  
• ap - All Heroes
  
• cm - Captain Mode (default mode)
  
• cx - Captains Mode #2 (This is captains mode for teams - if not used, teams will be made by the bot according to rating)