I've already played a few games with you guys, particularly FallenElf, but decided to register and say hello officially. I just started with the genre two months ago and have enjoyed playing as well as watching pro games, and I'm slowly settling in to enjoying the support role. Hope to see you guys around, cheers!

Last night's game reminded me how far I have yet to go. We did win, but other than the most epic Roshan ward (we were slowly losing the game but destroyed them 4-0 AND got Roshan) I don't think I did particularly well. Part of that was a lack of familiarity with the hero, having only played Dazzle a few times, but I think the things I struggle with the most are (a) map awareness and (b) getting those little bits of farm here and there to get some nice support items up. Cheers.

I have been in mumble a fair bit, but I don't think I've played with you yet. Cheers!

I should be up for some game about 6:00 EST, maybe a bit later.

Welcome, and even if you don't feel like playing on the US East servers feel free to drop in the Mumble server and have a chat. The main page for dotanoobs.com even has a handy plugin showing who is currently logged in. Cheers!

Hey, cool! I'll take a look at this tonight. Are you looking for any feedback on it?

It was great playing with you tonight, see you around.

I think your play-by-play is getting pretty good. The one thing that I missed relative to other casters was the "big picture" discussion, though. It may be a personal thing, but I like to learn as much as possible while watching streams. Any thoughts on that?

Don't get me wrong, I think your casting is getting really good. It seems like most sports announcers (and esports casters) split the play-by-play and "big picture" or "insight" duties into two different people as much as possible, too. Are you going to keep posting here or should I just subscribe to your Youtube channel?

Wait, we are going to lose FallenElf to D3, too? Noooooooo!

Or in my case a small break from sucking at DotA2. :-D

I only briefly played CS:S, what would you say the learning curve is like? My steam profile is: http://steamcommunity.com/id/unopolak

Haha, this is sage wisdowm... maybe I should forego it, too. :-D

Time for some tough love! I've played quite a few games with you guys, and need to know: what do I need to improve? Should I be practicing specific things or just continue to play and watch streams to gain experience? Cheers!

Thanks, that means a lot.

The tournament sounds fun, but I would suggest we just sign up and then randomize the teams completely. This would give us an opportunity to play with people we haven't done much with in the past. The one distinction I would make is having people sign-up to be either "members" or "captains" to try and distribute the strategic knowledge over the individual teams. The number of teams would be decided by (members + captains) / 5, and the captain for each team would be randomly picked from the captain pool.

In regards to the tournament format, I think it depends on how long you want the tournament to run. A best of three can run anywhere from 1.5-3 hours, so if you are trying to run the entire tournament in one day you could have a team sitting around for 1.5 hours waiting for the other teams to finish. I would suggest a double elimination in order to minimize waiting time. Any thoughts on that?

I just watched another of your pro MM casts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzK4nJ-hR5Y&feature=g-all-u) and quite enjoyed it. Have you given thought to your casting style/niche? At least that video felt like it was emphasizing information, particularly for low-/mid-tier players. You did a good job explaining the reasoning behind things (X did Y because of Z) which I think is ideally suited to casting replays. The "high energy" style of Tobi is great for catching the excitement of a live competitive game, but if you decide to focus more on a "Learning with Love is Dead" theme I think you could really appeal to people getting into the game and wanting to learn. What do you think?

Ok, good to know. It seems like most of the "established" DotA2 casters adopt the high-energy play-by-play during fights, but I wonder if that is actually needed. The reason that I say this is that in RL sports the high-energy play-by-play is usually limited to radio, whereas the TV "casters" are usually much more reserved. I don't know if there is a psychological reason, be it the demographic or culture around eSports, but is this something that you have thought about?

With the addition of the in-game store we now need prizes.

I didn't like it at first, but it has grown on me. Now the Dr. Kleiner announcer pack...