Battle of the Beasts organisational improvements

I've been casting for almost every day for about 9 months. Uber has still yet to give me a gold sticker...

Also, I would have done it for Uber even without it being on my twitch. I'd prefer Uber and PA gets PR over it being all mine or excluding other people.

Messed up formatting.

I actually can prove that casters are being driven away. I have talked to some of them personally and there are fewer casters now, than there used to be.

You continue to miss and ignore my points.

I've had these concerns for longer than this tournament was announced.

OK, fair enough. I think that that is a bit of a mistake. Maybe they'll fix that in future tournament. If they don't put it on their channel, meta is kind of Uber's "official" caster, perhaps they could do that instead. (@metabolical ?)

It's not about gold stickers. It's about successfully promoting PA. Take a look at your average number of views. Take a look at Zaphod's. Check out some of his old SupCom videos with 40k+ views. Do the math man. I'm sure Uber appreciates all of it's casters. But not all of it's casters are going to be chosen for these kind of events. I think it is very counter productive to be having this discussion as it's already leading us into rather unpleasant territory. It's not just about quantity.

The question is, if Uber is only going to promote high profile Casters/Youtubers why should I even try?

I can't match Zaphod's current reach, much less Uber's. With them together what's the point of anyone else casting? Why should any of us put our time and effort into helping PA be even better well known if all of it gets put back to Zaphod or some other "high profile" Youtuber?

That's how you destroy a creative community. That is how you make monopolies, wreck competition and ruin games.

It's what the government does(save the "games" part). Do we really want Uber to be like them(meaning the quite corrupt US government)?

This argument is kind of confusing me.

I might be opening an entirely different can of worms here, but I feel this needs to be addressed.
I never have, nor will I ever understand the need for a growing community of casters for PA.

You see, Zaphod doesn't get many views in the first place, and it's pretty obvious as to why, but in case you don't know let me quickly go through it.

Most people who watch casts of RTS's want to see... well... the fighting.
They want to see constant war of the units, not occasional war of the disappearing unit icons.
It helps that PA has a lot of very large explosions, but only marginally.

Not only that, but more people enjoy the constant fighting of Starcraft in a gameplay perspective, so even IF the casting community exploded, there just won't be as many games to cast as there is for something like Starcraft, or rather, the amount of players won't be as large.

It's the same reason SupCom never really took off in the casting department.

That said, I don't object to a self-contained eSports and casting community, I just don't think the community needs a large amount of casters if it's going to be a small one anyway.

We don't need 50 different people giving their take on the same tournament or whatever, it's just redundant.

I will give credit to Uber for making the Twitch side-bar on the main menu, and I hope that once the game/platform is fully released it does well, for streamers, but I'm not optimistic.

I could be wrong about all this, of course, and to an extent I hope I am, for all I know some random YouTuber with a few million subs will make a video about PA and all of a sudden it'll become the biggest thing since Minecraft.

THAT said, I do think it's pretty odd that the tourney wasn't on Uber's, or at least Metabolical's Twitch.

Actually, what's juvenile and caddy is your annoying attitude.
Not only are you clearly being deliberately ignorant, but your smart-*** remarks were so unbelievably childish it made me question whether you were actually trying to make points or were just an angry fan that can't believe someone would DARE question why Zaphod gets all of Uber's attention.

Erm, what?
How does a casting community effect the game?
This isn't the modding community we're talking about, it's a youtube-video making community that commentates over games.

Wow, that was a long post.

wow that was a lot of mistakes...

Speaking as someone who built his own social media following in a niche industry, you try because you enjoy it. You keep getting better and better every day, connecting with your fans, and putting a consistent product out there. You find your voice and experiment with it. You don't wait for a community leader to come and give you a gold star or to promote you, and you don't demand a right to be promoted. If you build it, they will come. Keep working at it and you won't need to ask to headline the matches. It's absurd to think the only way to 'make it' (whatever that would imply in this community) is to be promoted by Uber. You build a following by building it, day by day. You've got fans here obviously, which means you are doing something right.

I do do this because I like doing it. Actually I was becoming pretty popular in the whole PA Casting/Youtubing field until Uber started promoting Zaphod. After that my views began to drop.

The funny thing with people is that they don't tend to spend too much attention looking for the alternatives. They buy the Big Name Brand as opposed to the cheaper off name even if it's the exact same thing. They prefer the man in the spotlight to the sideshow act.

When someone has that spotlight it takes a ton of clawing and fighting to make it anywhere near there. If PA Matches didn't exist I probably wouldn't even be as far as I am now. Perhaps I'd be one of the many PA Casters who have ceased to cast.

This isn't about me wanting Uber to advertise me or about my jealousy of Zaphod. This is about Uber advertising(dare I say shamelessly?) all that is Zaphod and making it almost seem like he is their "Official" PA Caster.

Treat all casters equally and fair. We all help build PA and advertise it. That's all I ask for. No special treatment necessary.

If you were quoted by my post earlier, you can now see my replies to you.
Sorry about that.

At this point, it might be a good time to create a thread for tips for casting. That thread could cover both the game side (how to cast well), and the community side (how to advertise yourself and gain followers). I think it would be inappropriate to discuss here because it would likely get too personal very fast.

I do think that a lot of casters have the potential to bring a lot of quality and diversity to PA, but there are a few things holding them back.

That guide should include a certain arrow drawing mod.

I am considering starting my own channel when I get my new PC and equipment to boot - but we'll see.

Hopefully Uber can get some more casters involved. Diversity is key to a vibrant community. Suppression of individualism in support of diversity is the key to ruining society.

Did I go too far? I think I went too far.

By diversity, I just mean that different casters bring different styles and ideas to the commentary. It is a lot more interesting to watch different casters sometimes than to only ever get one person's opinions. On the other hand, it can be a lot of fun to have casters build a relationship with the community, which is harder with too much diversity.

I really think we need more good casters, but not necessarily just more casters. That's why I suggested a thread where we can give tips for how to do it well and really engage the viewers.

It would be difficult for me to disagree with this more, depending on what you mean by it. What is 'unfair' about their treatment of Zaphod? Are you suggesting that there's a personal interaction between them that is giving him unfair bias?

The way it has appeared to me, is that they selected the most popular caster, or at least a very popular caster, and asked him to do commentary because he was (apparently) good at it. Isn't that the most reasonable choice, to choose someone who already has a following and some amount of previous experience? Now, if there is some external bias, I'll agree with you, but I haven't heard any charges to that effect.

Very true. But enough can't be said for competition. It really works best when there's a decent sized collection of very skilled people that keep changing things up and improving.

That's what happened, but the argument is whether Uber should also use the other good casters. It was a good choice to good with one of the best and most well known for their first tournament but I'd like to see them expand and bring in some of the others for the next one.

Nah, screw all of us who like Zaphod's casts and wanted to see them for the tournament. We need to promote other casters to be fair regardless of what the people want. It's this damn conspiracy to make Zaphod famous.

You mean, like this?

http://pamatches.com/commentary-tips/

I should expand that page...

Exactly like that, except as a thread that we can all talk in. I didn't start the thread myself because I thought you might have something like that already. Would you start it and link or quote that page in the op?

Do you have a time machine? I mean you're doing a REALLY bad job of hiding it...