The main idea of IHCS was and still is to provide a meeting place for the world's top DotA players. Unlike any other leagues, which often like to speculate about the quality of their playerbase, IHCS has no need for any special descriptions or recommendations here: the word 'top' here is used here in its most true meaning, the league consists of those very players that form the teams of the professional competitve scene.



IHCS started in June, 2006, on Northrend Battle.net server as "InHouse Clan-Scrim League Europe"; the original idea was to provide an environment for high-level inhouse games and scrim matches at the same time. As time passed, the league became focused mainly on inhouse games, and, even though one can easily find another team to practice with in our channels, clan games were never our main concern. The inhouse league was seen as the European version of the North-American IHL league, which was successfully running at that time.



Due to the high dedication and commintment of the original staff members, exposure to suggestions and innovations, and presence of its own game tracking and player ranking system, which was being constantly developed and improved, the league gained tremendous popularity and recognition within a short period of time. One notable thing here is that the league channel became the first and pretty much the only place where all the players that later contributed to the development of DotA as a competitive e-sport could meet and communicate with each other.



During summer-autumn 2006, the development of beta-version of GG-Client achieved the point where it was ready and relatively reliable for usage by the majority of players, offering significant latency reduction in games, allowing a possibility of major improvement in gaming skills and even hosting of trans-continental games, which were impossible on Battle.net. IHCS was the first community that reviewed and adopted GGC as an everyday platform for DotA games.



Even though many people considered GGC bugged and unreliable at that moment, time has shown that its developement eventually achieved success, and until now it has benn arguably the only viable platform choice for DotA games. As i personally see it, the adoption of GGC by IHCS was an important milestone for the competitive gaming as a whole, since it allowed the most active community members to evaluate the new platform and realise that it made big professional tournaments possible.



Also, in autumn 2006 the community chat channel was relocated from Northrend Battle.net to Quakenet IRC server. This is also considered one of the major league's advantages, as IRC is in all aspects better chat platform than Battle.net. As all games were already played on GG-Client, the community had no more need to use Battle.net at all, and the channel on Northrend was abandoned ever since.



In November-December 2006, the league introduced a second division, which offered a ladder for players that wanted to improve their skill and start playing competitively, but had no chance to get into the main division of IHCS. This gave the league another huge popularity and activity boost. Nowadays, even though many top players disregard the quality of the second division, it is still seen as the most skilled league in the world after IHCS main.



Around the same moment, GG-Client improved to the point where Americans could freely play with Europeans without latency problems, and many top American players joined the league in search of better gaming experience. A merge between IHCS and IHL was agreed on, since both leagues shared the same idea and there was no further need for their playerbases to be separated. Even though IHL head administrator, Ucross, went inactive and could not finish the work on the merge, all the competitive North-American players assimilated into IHCS community by the end of 2006, and IHL, despite the attempt to maintain gaming activity under a different administration, was shut down shortly afterwards. Thus, IHCS became a truly international league.



Another significant note is about the game mode development. At first, due to balance issues, allrandom/mirrormatch was mostly used for league games. Then, for a relatively short period of time, players switched to 'voterandom' mode, which is almost completely forgotten by now. Then, finally, a 'Draft' mode was introduced, where heroes are picked from a randomly generated pool. In IHCS, team captains do the picks themselves, in chat channel prior to game start, and the pool has the size of 16 heroes. This mode instantly became the main mode for IHCS games, and due to its success it was later implemented by DotA developers ingame. IHCS is the place for the competitive players to try out new heroes and new hero combinations, and consider their usage in competitive games. Statistics are gathered and passed to the game crew to aid balance development.



During 2007, DotA has seen a lot of big tournaments and became a full-scale e-sport. During this time, IHCS has seen significant activity; most competitive players meet each other in games here on a daily basis; they consider it as training grounds, where they can play games that are relaxing, but at the same time retain the highest quality. The chat channel is also buzzing with discussions and arguments concerning all aspects related to the game. Several teams that started as mixes of IHCS players, gained recognition and secured their place in the top.



For a long time, 'IHCS' was an appelative for personal skill in DotA. Being vouched into the main division is a measure of a player's recognition on the scene, mainly because it can hardly be achieved without serious success in large clan or national tournaments. The second division provides a unique opportunity for ordinary decently skilled inhouse players to meet a real professional ingame.



League staff is looking forward for both discoveries of talented players, and innovations that would assist the game development.