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Whilst jogging today I was thinking about where I was a year ago and thought I'd make a blog about what I've become over the last year, and the work I've put in to get where I am today. This is more for myself and just remembering the last year, but if anyone is interested, I hope you enjoy.

Pre SC2

Before SC2 came out, I had some RTS experience playing C&C Generals at a fairly high level, being the China Strategy moderator at cncreplays, now gamereplays.org. I was never really exceptional at the game, mostly due to my inability to grasp proper macro. I went from there to BFME where I won a clanwars.cc title in January of 06 (myself and a player named DMRaider (For those who know their Generals players :P) carried the clan to victory, him winning the individual score, myself placing top 20), but ended up moving from RTS to MMO's for a few years. I only mention my past RTS history as this is where I got my initial casting experience. Back then there was no such thing as a livestream, or even youtube videos. We did casts by creating a MP3 and the user would sync the replay to the MP3 and watch it in game with audio playing in the background. I did a few casts but back then the idea of shoutcasting was new and everyone that downloaded it was so impressed and excited by the new idea that I didn't really get any feedback on how good the cast was.

Fast Forward to 2010, and SC2's release. Up until this point I had been playing WOW and other MMO's and basically wasting time in them, but they were boring to me, the content was easy, and the only difficultly was waiting for the other 24 people to figure it out. I wanted to move back to RTS because it was a genre I had fond memories of, but it wasn't SC2 that I had my eye on, but rather C&C4 which came out a month or 2 before SC2. I was pumped for the launch, played on the beta and such but the game really flopped. They basically abolished all macro mechanics and brought it down to a pure micro game, unfortunately the engine was really frustrating to use when microing as it was unresponsive. The competitive scene stayed with C&C3/RA3 and that was the end of that game.

SC2 Release

So I stick with WOW for the moment, and notice SC2 coming out and really pay it no attention until maybe a week out, where I made the impulse decision to attend the midnight opening (Midnight openings for games and movies are always good, they give you some great stories!) and I drag my friend along and convince a few people from my clan to buy it too. At this point we've cleared ICC25HM and are just farming Heroic LK25 for weapons every week so they were very keen on picking up something to do for the other 6 nights of the week.

So I start playing SC2 as much as I can (whilst still attending 6 or so hours of raiding a week) and work my way up from Bronze to Diamond in about a month or 2. At this point I am completely out of touch with the community and my friends are playing it less and less until i'm the only person who is really putting any time into the game, and I reach a point where I need to either find something to keep me motivated with the game, or jump back to WOW for Cata. I decide to stick with SC2 and find a few tournaments on TL to keep me motivated to play, and I end up quitting WOW when Cata is released.

At the time, there was only 2 events happening on a consistent basis, Yoz's Weekly and the Southern Cross Challenge which was only every second week. I entered these events every chance I got and proceeded to get my ass handed to me week after week, but it kept me motivated to improve. After I finished my games I could sit around on Unstable's Ustream and watch the rest of the event and it was a fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. I especially remember a specific game I played in one event, I beat my first round opponent and as soon as I finished I received a message from Unstable saying something like 'Round 2 game, lets start now' and I was invited to a game on Kulas Ravine against a protoss named 'Pinder', who was an unknown player to me at the time (Although everyone else knew who he was, apparently he had not been playing for a few weeks). This would be one of 3 games that have ever been cast of me actually playing in a tournament (Other 2 was Mezza casting me vs RedArchon and JacziE casting me vs some Zerg), and Pinder proceeded to 4 gate and crushed me. Kinda rough as my first ever game on stream, getting killed in 7 minutes, but oh well. :P

Casting Beginnings

I don't know what motivated me to start casting, but I had Fraps and Sony Vegas already installed (from WOW movies :P) and Livestream Procaster was a free program, so I set it up one afternoon and from then I decided that maybe i'd like to give it a shot. Back then, with only 2 tournaments, both being cast by Unstable (as he was the established caster at the time, I was a nobody) it was VERY difficult to break into the scene. I remember spending a few hours with fraps and a replay just casting it over and over and listening back to it to see how it was. The game was GLaDe vs Matino on Metalopolis, GLaDe 6 pools (back then he seemed to 6 pool once in every Bo3) and Matino Cannon rushed, and GLaDe won in a 15 minute macro game. Something a lot of people don't know is that listening to yourself cast is VERY painful to do, and it takes a long time to get used to it. But despite all that, I managed to power through and I think I improved my casting quite a bit.

Eventually a week came when Unstable was not able to cast the event, and I put up my hand to help out. I remember one thing about my first cast, and it was someone in chat saying something along the lines of 'this caster is so monotone' and 2 things happened, the first was that I was pretty cut, yes I knew what the internet was like, but I wasn't used to people being so harsh. The second was I stopped being monotone, and I realized that despite people saying some harsh or blunt things about my content, sometimes you need to look past it to improve the quality of what you release. Since then I've always had chat open and I am always trying to improve what I do.

After my first cast, i realized that this was something I wanted to do more, but the problem was simply that there were no events to cast, Unstable was the preferred caster (I was just some no name caster at the time) and I needed something to keep me interested. That was when I found this small, weekly BSG tournament on TL. For something like 2 months I would get up on a Saturday and do a 5 hour cast for something like 15 viewers. The games themselves were pretty... bad (BSG and all :P) but it is still some of the most fun casting I've ever done simply because every week it was the same people playing and watching the event, and they all were very appreciative of what I was doing for them. I have learned a lot from this, from improving my basic skills to finding ways to make really bad games entertaining, to even just being more relaxed and casual during casts. Looking back, I don't know how I did 5 hours of solo casting every week and not destroy my desire to cast, but back then I was happy to just be casting events :P (FYI Solo casting is the most painful thing in the world to do, it is physically draining and mentally hard to talk about a game with no one to bounce to).

nGen

I think it was a few months after I started casting, and I was casting a finals between a played named 'Soft' and 'GLaDe', I forget the outcome, but I remember Soft taking a game from GLaDe by chaining contaminate on GLaDe's hatchery, preventing him from making roaches to stop Soft's roaches. After that game I was messaged by Soft saying the team he was forming needed a Caster, and he wanted me to be it.

I was very keen, at the time I still considered myself a player and having practice partners was very enticing, plus being in a cool clan would give me some people to talk to and would hopefully introduce myself to the community. Soft became nGenMaster and I became nGenBenji and joined a clan with a bunch of high level diamond players.

For this next part to make sense, I need to explain how livestreams and viewers work. A casters job isn't to get viewers, its to keep them watching. To get viewers to click on your stream you need a teamliquid event and you need to attach your stream to it. This gives you viewers, its then up to you to keep them watching by being entertaining. If i turn on my stream and attach it to an event I usually get ~400-500 concurrent viewers, but if I cast the exact same thing without an event I am looking at ~50 viewers, despite it being the same content.

I remember a night in nGen, I decided to solo cast some of the nGen in house games, basically 3-4 hours of games for some fun. It was about an hour in and I checked my viewers, and it was ~250 concurrent viewers and without a TL event. I mention this as it was a point in my casting career where I realized that maybe I should take it a little more seriously and start becoming more of a name people recognize. Up until that point, I had been doing it for fun, but after that night I started working a lot more on my streaming and casting, and started putting it ahead of my playing of the game, as well as putting it ahead of some of my IRL commitments.


At this point, its around November 2010, might write some more tomorrow or during the week ^_^