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On casting and improvement

Blogs > Aui_2000
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Aui_2000
Profile Blog Joined October 2010
Canada435 Posts
Last Edited: 2021-05-24 19:57:34
May 23 2021 22:44 GMT
#1
Hi everyone, it's been a while. I have a lot of things I want to blog about, but I’m going to focus this one on the experience I’ve had casting. I’ve been invited to attend the Weplay animajor as talent, and I’m really excited for that. I haven’t really left my house since Covid began, and while I’m pretty introverted, I don’t think it’s been particularly good for my mental health. I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to apply myself.

I’ve done some casting in the past, and while I’ve always found it pretty engaging, I’ve never focused on improving my casting. I remember after doing my first couple of DPC casts, some of my friends asked me how casting was. I said something along the lines of it’s easy and fun, which in hindsight was stupid and naive. One of the many things that the great KBBQ taught me about when I worked with him through the TI9 season was the concept of the four stages of learning. You should google it for better understanding, but the gist of it is that you start at unconscious incompetence, move to conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and finally to unconscious competence. There’s a theoretical 5th stage where you can empathize with people at different stages of learning but again, you should read about it from people who have explored it more than me.

One thing that the four stages of learning helps me think about is why improvement is a process. When you’re consciously thinking about something, you have to focus additional attention on it, which results in less attention for other aspects and overall means your performance will be worse. This is counter-intuitive for improvement, because it means that as you learn something, you temporarily get worse. However, once you reach unconscious competence, you no longer need to split your attention and become fundamentally better at whatever you were learning.

Anyways, I think because I’ve never focused on casting, I’ve always been at the unconscious incompetence stage. But as I’ve been casting more, I’ve moved into conscious incompetence. To deal with said incompetence, I’ve been thinking a good deal about what I should improve on, which has led to me overcompensating for certain aspects of my casting and leading to a worse final product. I feel like my first couple casts on the DPC season were ok. The middle of the casts had some better ones, and then some of the later ones were not that good. I’m not trying to make excuses for delivering a subpar product here, rather I'm just trying to think about why it happened.

My current model of the situation is that, at the start, I was purely focused on talking about things that interested me in the game. I was pretty uncomfortable casting because although I've been public-facing as a pro player/coach/dota personality for the last ten years, I’m still really self-conscious and anxious about public speaking (sort of what casting is but not really imo). As I’ve started to become a bit more comfortable, I think my casting has improved. However, at the end, I think I over-indexed on certain points of feedback (the feedback was not bad, but how I reacted and overfocused on it was bad) and my casting became spammy and subpar. I thought I had valuable things to say in the casts, but I would talk more than I should have because I was afraid of silence or downtime. Or rather, I was afraid of not being able to say what I wanted to say. My casting became pretty selfish and it ended up resulting in a bad end product.

I think casting has a lot of parallels to playing on a pro team. The end goal is always to create a product that’s sum is greater than its parts. When I played and coached pro dota, that was always one of my core goals; I’ve always wanted how my teammates and I interacted with each other to boost us to the next level. I think I’ve been really fortunate to cast with some excellent professionals who were able to compensate for my shortcomings to make the end product much better. In particular, I’d like to shout out to Lyrical, who was my main casting partner. Not only did Lyrical make the casting process extremely smooth for me--as did every other person I casted with in the NA DPC--but he actively tried to help me. He gave me valuable feedback and was always willing to talk about the steps I should take to improve. I’ve always thought Lyrical was a really beast caster, and now I can understand why; he puts in a lot of extra work and actively works on and thinks about casting. Apparently putting in the work makes you really good at things. Who could have known.

I didn’t know how much work went into the casting process because as aforementioned, I was stupid and naive. Anyways, I’m probably still at the conscious incompetence stage, but I’m constantly thinking about how I cast and how to improve. I’ve received some pretty valuable feedback from Lyrical and my friend !drew who is poo. I think the things I’m currently focusing on are trying to tie my points into what my cocasters are saying, helping build a storyline for the game, making my thoughts more condensed and cohesive, and not being afraid of silence in the cast so I’m not just spamming the comms.

I’ve written a lot of this blog in a pretty self critical way because that’s generally how I think about things in life, but I’m also very confident in my future ability in casting. I think I have the background to be a good analyst, and I know I will put in the work to improve. I think I'm on the road to a very good product and I just need a bit of time. Honestly I’m really disappointed that the BnY vs. EG series was a forfeit because I think I could have delivered a pretty good cast for that one. I put a lot of thought into how to improve for that cast and was excited to see if it was going to make a difference. There’s always a chance I can’t improve and bomb out of the casting scene, but I’m pretty hopeful right now.

Anyways, I hope I can deliver a good product at the Animajor. I don’t exactly know how much casting I will be doing there compared to analyst desk stuff, but I will work hard to do well. One thing I do know is that Weplay has put on some of the best events in Dota 2 history, and from what I’ve been told about the event, I expect this one to be even better. Lastly, I want to say that I’m incredibly grateful to the community. I don’t think I would have been given the opportunity to attend the major if I didn’t get a positive reddit thread. So thank you, it means a lot. Positivity and shoutouts mean a lot in the scene both on a personal and professional level. With that said, I think Lyrical should be a caster at TI. He’s one of the best casters I’ve watched and worked with, he’s put the work in, and I hope it gets recognized.

If you’ve made it this far in the blog, thanks for reading. I’d appreciate it if you would leave me casting feedback in the comments here. I’ll read them all. Please be constructive and nice because I’m fragile. I’m already aware I spammed too much in some of my casts so no flame too hard thx.



Anyways I’m done talking about myself and casting, but I wanted to apply the four stages of learning to something in the pro scene. I think the NA scene is weak right now excluding the top three teams. I’d love for the other teams to prove me wrong but I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the mentality of a lot of the tier 2 teams. When you play on a Dota team, there suddenly becomes a lot of feedback that changes your unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. While you are working on a myriad of issues, your performance will worsen as you focus on improving. What this means in the NA scene, is that a player in the process of improving will get kicked; all the time and effort that has been invested from both the individual player and the team has been wasted. It’s an awful cycle that makes the scene worse.

Imo, there are very few good reasons for a player to be kicked from a lower-tier team (these concepts apply less to the very top teams, as they are not as focused on improvement, but rather results--although oftentimes the two are related). The reason you are not as good as EG is not because one of your players is weak; it’s because all of you are worse individually AND as a team. You need to have a process where you build each other up and learn and grow if you want to reach tier 1--Rome wasn’t built in a day. Every time you kick someone, you are only creating a scapegoat, and it’s incredibly bad for the team’s development. The process of learning takes time, and tier 2 players especially need to know that they have to put both the effort and time in.

In particular, I’m calling out team SIMPLY TOOBASED here, although I think this happens in a lot of NA teams. This is a team that was in the process of improving. I could see it from game to game. I went over a replay with this team for free because one of their players asked me to, and I thought they were all pretty cool humans and I wanted them to succeed. They are not a tier 1 team right now, but they probably could have learned a lot together and built each other up to get there. It’s incredibly disappointing to me that after accomplishing their stated goals for the season (compete in the upper division and maintain their slot while improving), they kick one of their players. Sadge. Anyways, I hope they prove me wrong and succeed but I’m less hopeful now based on the mentality they’re currently displaying.


Thanks for reading don’t forget to comment like subscribe. 1 YouTube video every 2 years

edit: i made related yt video on this subject:

follow @aui_2000 // www.twitch.tv/aui_2000
anceint
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 00:22 GMT
#2
really great write up, it’s really evident how much work you’re putting into to perform at a high level. best of luck with the major and hope to see you and Lyrical at TI!
Leeoku
Profile Joined May 2010
1617 Posts
Last Edited: 2021-05-24 00:30:41
May 24 2021 00:25 GMT
#3
Aui, I just want to say you are one of my favourite analytical casters, similar to Synderen or Purge and also one of my fav support players when you played. It is insightful and refreshing to hear the perspective or mindset of a pro player's thought process or what the team is trying to achieve. It is quite difficult to capture sometimes why a team decided to make a specific macro play for a certain objective or goal. While interesting it may be, the depth and passion for this analysis can rant on for a long time and I do see you have improved by keeping it brief.

Just want to say keep at it and I think you will find the happy medium of depth and word simplicity
hellothisiswilson
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 00:37 GMT
#4
where sn0_man at
GodHumbler
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 01:28 GMT
#5
Some quick feedback:

I watched maybe 2 or 3 games when you were casting.

I thought overall you did really well with talking about the draft, about the the individual players play styles and how their teams might synergize. I thought your perspective on those things added a lot to the commentary and helped me understand what was happening and what might happen better.

Where I thought things felt awkward for me were when you kind of just were saying everything you were thinking as if you were playing and many times made a wacky prediction that ended up being wrong or not totally right. I'm not a pro by any means lol but as a fan and as someone who wants NA dota to grow and thrive I think I'd like more of the player research and team synergy / strat talk. I feel like the best casters are sowing a narrative each game and narrating essentially a story to you.

All that said I think finding what your preferred casting style is and leaning into that is best. The casters seem to have distinct personalities so maybe it's kind of cliche to say "be yourself"?

Anyways I've been a fan since you were on C9 and fully support you as a caster! Keep it up and thanks for making this space!
Syndar
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 04:17 GMT
#6
Hey Aui, my friends and I are always really excited when you're a cocaster, you bring a lot to the role. Really cool insights here on where you think your areas of weakness are, but I would just add; while trying to improve, try to avoid second guessing yourself too much. One of the things I enjoy most about your casting is when you get really excited/passionate about a point, even/especially when its nerdy minutiae like an item build or a minor piece of decision making. All that to say, while you're right to think about maybe condensing your point a bit or working on tying it in to what your cocaster is saying, don't be afraid to go off on those excited tangents when something really grabs your interest, because it brings us all along for the ride. Good luck at Weplay!
Owo_GaNk_owO
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 04:49 GMT
#7
I love your casts Aui! Your insight and understanding is probably the best in the scene right now. I think your biggest weakness is your ability to get out your great ideas with good rythm and cadence. Maybe an hour with a speaking coach would give you some more confidence. Good luck with everything!
Broodweiser1
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 05:16 GMT
#8
Great self reflection. I really appreciate your casting and look forward to WePlay!

One aspect of your casting I enjoy is your authenticity and ability to be yourself. While you're working on improving your casting, please don't lose that authenticity!
Azizxoxo
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
May 24 2021 08:36 GMT
#9
Legendary visage
BtG_cast
Profile Joined May 2021
1 Post
Last Edited: 2021-05-24 15:21:45
May 24 2021 14:15 GMT
#10
Hey Aui! Thanks for taking the time to write out this post and give us all a window into the process. It's helpful for fans of the scene, players in the scene, and everyone else familiar with it to be able to have a fuller understanding of how everything fits together and what goes into creating the final product we all see.

I've been a fan of yours for some time and when I first started seeing you on screen as opposed to playing, I was DELIGHTED to hear the extensive thoughts you had to share about the game. As you mentioned yourself, and as I'm sure we're all aware, you do have a tendency to... filibuster a bit. But most times, I'm okay with it. And I'm not trying to flame and I know that's something you're working on. Just be sure not to overcorrect. I'd hate to watch a stream hoping to hear some in-depth Aui_2000 thoughts and end up just getting limited, clipped insights without the explanation behind it.

I would like to propose an idea though. I understand how much work goes into casting and I certainly understand that this idea I have might just be too much to take on... but...

I would be VERY interested in like... standalone Aui "recasts". So imagine you're casting a game and you're trying not to talk over everyone else but by the end of the game you feel like there's SO MUCH MORE that needs to be said about that game. Some time after the game, hours/days/whatever, you could replay the game and cast it yourself (possibly with one other person who is there to help facilitate your analysis as well as keep you on topic or whatever and/or control the camera, etc.). Doing it this way, you could slow down important moments so you have the time to talk about what you want to talk about as well as speeding up moments that don't need additional analysis. Then you post that "analyzed recast" to whatever platform makes sense. This way you're able to analyze what you want to analyze, at the speed you want to do it, without the fear of taking time away from your cocasters.

Again, I realize that this is a LOT of extra work and maybe I'm alone in wanting this, but I think it would result in a valuable product that people interested in the scene would appreciate. Even if you just did these analyzed recasts of "important matches" (TI finals, Major finals, etc.) or matches where unique strategies were employed or exceptional performance was showcased. Whatever the case may be, your insight is HIGHLY valuable and I think people would love to get a sort of... uncaged version of your thoughts on matches.

That being said, I want to thank you again for taking the time to write your post AND to invite feedback from the community. You're a wonderful person and a joy to watch (playing or casting or whatever) and I'm excited to see you shine in the future.
plasmidghost
Profile Blog Joined April 2011
Belgium16168 Posts
May 24 2021 16:26 GMT
#11
Great blog, Aui! I don't follow Dota 2 anymore but I am absolutely cheering for you to succeed in your casting career!
Yugoslavia will always live on in my heart
TheVideoGameGuy
Profile Joined May 2015
India211 Posts
June 06 2021 19:02 GMT
#12
you're great on the panel, NA entertaining + real insight
Thy dendemic fools completing thy generic life processes
StePanda-
Profile Joined July 2021
1 Post
July 11 2021 13:43 GMT
#13
Hello! Sorry I don't have much feedback on your casting. I usually watch the game without commentaries and just watch it from player perspective. That being said, I wanted to mention that I really like to hear your talk about dota!!
I'd imagine casting is different from analyzing plays and decisions. I did try to listen to your casts specifically because I wanted to know your perspective. And like you noticed, at times you were talking about a point but then you had to hold that point because there's something happening in the game (I thought you did that smoothly btw). So yeah I guess it's hard to be in-depth while casting. So my thought is to pick some things you'd like to focus on in each game. That way you'd have sort of an outline to follow.
I have no experience in casting but I wanted to try to help and give my thoughts haha xD
I'm sure you have great mentors that will help you become a better caster. Also, now that you're consciously learning, try to think about one aspect of casting and listen to a good caster and see how they approach it.
I do hope you keep analyzing games and maybe... post some replays on youtube? :p
Good luck!
Nursinghomestat
Profile Joined August 2021
1 Post
August 14 2021 22:56 GMT
#14
hi
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