Profile of TychoCelchuuu

Barton is joking.

If HtD forces munis out of Ostheer for free then that's pretty sweet for the Soviets.

Hey there, I've watched some of your casts - great to see more casters! I was thinking about giving feedback, but then I decided I would just write a "how to cast" article at some point, but since you asked, here is some advice. Obviously I'm not some sort of expert or anything, so take everything with a grain of salt, but I've been casting for many years now and I wouldn't be where I am if plenty of the old CoH casters hadn't given me advice back when I started, so I figure I might as well try to help, whether or not I actually am helpful.

I like how you call the Victory Points "Stars" - that's endearing

Often you'll say something is "interesting" but you won't say why. I think one reason many people watch shoutcasts is to understand the game better, so if there's something interesting going on in the game, it often helps to comment on why you find it interesting. That helps explain the game to people so they know what they are watching. Just saying that something is interesting, and not adding anything else, doesn't really add much, in my opinion.

It's a little hard to tell how you're using "brilliant" sometimes - in America it just means "smart" but I know in other parts of the world it's also slang for something like "awesome" - but it seems to me like sometimes you're calling something a player does "brilliant" to say that it's an innovative tactical choice they've made, like when Cataclaw sticks his Guards Rifle in the Scout Car. Since sticking Guards in the Scout Car is pretty much old hat, I'm not sure that counts as brilliant, so I was thinking maybe it would help just to watch even more replays to get an idea of what's popular and stuff. I wouldn't call using an MG-42 to suppress people "brilliant" since that's bread and butter CoH 2, for instance, so for the same reason I wouldn't call putting Guards Rifle in a Scout Car "brilliant." But then again you might just mean brilliant in the sense of "awesome" so maybe I'm totally off-base. I just found it a little confusing personally so I thought I'd let you know.

My old-fashioned proclivities are probably showing, but unless you get a lot of viewers when you livestream, you might consider casting the traditional way by recording footage locally then uploading it. You get better video quality and you can skip the loading screen, which right now I guess you have to wait for because people in your stream have to wait for it, so you end up talking on the screen and then people have to watch that on YouTube.

Really, though, that's all small potatoes. Here is the big tip (and the reason I was mostly saving my feedback for the article I'll probably write at some point). Try to figure out where your strengths as a caster lie and focus your casts on that. Right now, you casts are quite a bit of play-by-play. There's nothing wrong with that - some of my favorite casters, like Rogers n Pounder or Yoink (or Ami) do a ton of play by play.

And in fact most casters start out with play-by-play because that comes naturally. But not everyone sticks with that forever. Some casters are more tactically-minded: they spend more time analyzing strategies and build orders and making predictions and extrapolating from what has happened and pointing out features of the map and the game so far and so on. Inverse is like this, my casts are often like this, and so on.

Other casters focus more on telling jokes and generally being entertaining - this is what Thirsty Thursday does - less play-by-play, less strategic analysis, more making people laugh. A lot of my old CoH casts were like this.

And of course you can mix all three (which is what I say I do) or co-cast with someone and get a mixture that way.

So the idea is to find out which of these (1, 2, or even all 3) you want to focus on in your casts, and then focus on them. People who do mostly play-by-play make it really exciting or otherwise entertaining: Yoink has a sexy voice, Rogers n Pounder yell at each other and get super excited, and I talk really fast. Right now your play-by-play seems pretty basic - I think something to spice it up would really help. Alternatively you could throw in more strategic stuff, or more jokes, or both. One issue with just straight play-by-play is that if it's not exciting, there's not a lot of reason to watch the cast instead of just downloading the replay yourself.

So, hopefully some or even all of that is helpful. We've got some casters here and most of them have been casting for years (I know Rogers has been casting for longer than me, at least) and we're all happy to share advice.

Oh please don't act like you've forgotten how I sent all those MP3s on carefully labeled USB drives to Relic over the months leading up to release. I was under the impression my stomach rumbles would be used for the campaign as part of the HungerTech™ system and I was very disappointed to hear them reappropriated for automatch.

Nope, same exact issue.