Profile of Maestro Cretella

I've already deleted a finished cast before because another caster -- who did not communicate his intention to cast the game beforehand -- got to it first, so this courtesy might not be as common some of you think. I just didn't complain about it. I didn't complain because:

1) The caster in question is one of the most established in the community, and no one would really care.
2) He just got to it faster.
3) Honestly, I didn't really care that much myself. It's not that big of a deal. I just deleted mine and moved on to the next game.

I decided to cast this:

T34's need improving in some way, at the moment they are useless.

T34 being useless is quite untrue considering it counters the most expensive tanks in the game. It might be more accurate to say it's not good enough at actually fighting.

I know the Clown car and sniper thing, but that's not a balance issue that's just a cheap trick that should be stopped. So what is unbalanced?

what?

I've been casting DoW2 for the past seven months and only just started casting CoH2 myself. The advice I'm going to give you isn't so much directly a critique of your actual casting, but is probably more important for anyone looking to establish themselves as a caster. The basics of casting are:

1. Do it a lot and do it consistently.
2. Advertise your videos to your intended market.
3. Cast good games with good players.

These become more flexible and less important as your channel grows and you've established yourself as a brand, but when starting out they are all imperative. You've already started doing the first step, so good job on that. One of the reasons people will subscribe to a casting channel and follow it is when they can expect it to regularly produce content.

Putting your work out there is essential and it's almost impossible to get a casting channel up without it. The phrase "if you build it, they will come," doesn't apply here, and probably just isn't true in real life. You need to market your work and market yourself. You need to go out and grab viewers. You've already started doing this by making this thead, but judging by the number of views you're getting on your CoH2 videos (which is in negative disproportion to your number of subscribers), it looks like you need to do it more. The videos section of GameReplays is a nice venue, since you can aggressively market yourself in a non-intrusive way, though it's certainly not the only one.

The third piece of advice I gave you may seem obvious, but I can't count the number of times I've found extremely small channels that don't follow it. They sometimes cast themselves in mediocre games, or cast mostly low- to mid-level play, with no recognizable names of good players for their game. There are two extremely good reasons for doing this.

First of all, there's a higher chance that viewers who come to you will enjoy the time they spent on your channel, and thus also a higher chance that they will subscribe and come back. Secondly, when you haven't yet established and branded yourself as a caster, casting games featuring known good players is a way of attracting viewers to your channel on the brand of those good players. More specifically, for CoH2, if you cast games with people like Symbiosis, Inverse, Aimstrong, etc. you're going to attract more viewers than if you cast games of random players.

I haven't watched all of your casts, but I would suggest rewatching the cast of that 16 minute game, and evaluating whether or not that was really a game worth casting.

Now, if you notice, none of what I said so far has anything to do with the actual commentary involved in casting. That's because, at least in my opinion, the aforementioned things are more important than the actual quality of the cast. That's not to say that the quality of your commentary isn't important at all, especially not when trying to jump into a relatively crowded casting market like Company of Heroes, where you will absolutely need to find a way to distinguish yourself. However, those basics I mentioned are more important.

As for actual commentary advice, right now your vocal expression, your tone and articulation are a bit dry. That's not something that's too bad. Inverse is a bit dry, but he offers a depth of commentary that no other CoH caster does (and frankly very few casters do, even outside of CoH). You may want to consider outside activities like Toastmasters and Improv, which are great for improving vocal expression, and the latter is good for spontaneity and on-your-feet thinking.

This goes a bit on what Tycho said, but over time, by doing lots of casting, you can find and develop your own style, which can become part of your brand, so long as you keep at it. This is where your unique appeal can attract viewers, even when others are providing a similar product. ImperialDane has his silly accent and focus on historical tidbits; Inverse is heavily strategy-minded, but is not very dynamic; TFN has a great co-casting dynamic as well as being very strategy-minded. Personally, Inverse and TFN are right up my alley, while I don't watch other CoH2 casters much. That's not to say there's anything wrong them, and the thousands of subscribers they have are a testament to their success.

Lastly...know the game. This is something I have to work on myself as I am just starting CoH2 (but with relevant foundational experience), but it's very important. And when I say know the game, I mean know the hell out of it. Play it a lot, cast it a lot, and watch casts by other casters a lot.