WhatIsHip: 'Casting is what I do right now'

Greg "WhatIsHip" Laird

Currently doing a six-month eSport intern

Studying at Northeastern University Boston

Started casting at the Collegiate StarLeague in Starcraft 2

Joined GosuGamers casting crew this spring

Working hard on improving his knowledge on the game

Appreciates all the feedback from his viewers

Would love to see BarCrafts for Dota more frequently

How did you come to Dota 2?

My dad always played RTS games, when I grew up. Red Alert, Command & Conquer, all of those games. So I kinda grew up with the RTS game genre. When I was in middle school, I played a lot of console games, FPS games on Xbox, also Call of Duty. I actually was pretty good at Call of Duty. A little bit before I started playing on console, before Xbox 360 came out, I used to play DotA 1 a lot. But that was a really long time ago. I never really played it super-heavily, I was about in seventh grade, so I didn't have the same insight in strategy and things like that. But I remember really enjoying it and I played it a lot. Maybe it was the game I played the most since Starcraft: Broodwar.

Moving forward, in High School, I didn't game that much, except occasional console gaming with my friends. But then I got to College when Starcraft 2 came out. I played that game a lot, it was probably the game I invested the most amount of time ever before Dota 2 came out. I casted a little bit for Collegiate StarLeague, CSL, which is a University-based league in the US. I played for my University and also casted a little bit. So that is how I got my start at casting. Then I got a Dota 2 beta key and I was really pumped about that and remembered how much I enjoyed DotA 1. That was about in late November of 2011. Then I pretty much immediately started playing it, and at the same time almost immediately stopped playing Starcraft at all.

Around January or February, I got in touch with JeeSports, I talked to them for a little bit and they wanted me cast some games for them. I ended up casting for them for a little while. I did the entire season 1 championship and almost the entire second season. At the end of season 2, I wanted to extend my horizons and I came in touch with GosuGamers and talked to Angel, and eventually ended up being in the GosuGamers team. Since then, I have been casting a lot more, and actually for the next couple of months, I'll be casting almost full time. So that is my short history of gaming.



You are living in the Boston area. What does 'almost full-time' mean, then?

Right now, I live in the middle of Boston, at a Student appartment at Northeastern University. It's a school with around 15,000 students, so I think it's a really big school. One of the cool things about Northeastern is that we have full-time school with six-month internships. I was looking for these internships at like a law school or IT. Pretty boring, but paid pretty well. So I was thinking about the money and also having a part time job. But I was thinking, this isn't great, and it was at the same time when I got in contact with GosuGamers, and I remember casting some games which were pretty big and I had a pretty significant amount of viewers. So I wondered if I could actually do this for the next six-months, as I really love it. It is way cooler and has way more stuff than sitting behind a desk. I talked to my adviser and he loved the idea. I'll launch a website, which is mostly done and I got some community show in the works as well. I'm doing that for the next six months instead of the internship. It's not completely full time, because I still have a part-time job in retail, but that is at night and on the weekends, so it doesn't really conflict with the European times. But it's mostly full-time, I would say.


Photo Source: Northeastern University

What do you count as 'pretty significant viewer numbers'?

I was coming from JeeSports, where I had a match, it was one of the earlier matches I had, and it was Absolute Legends against Western Wolves, and I remember it exactly, I had 1265 people watching. That was the biggest number I had ever gotten at JeeSports. Usually it was hovering around a hundred, or maybe 300 to 400, for a bigger match. But, when I got to GosuGamers, I had to make a new Twitch account when I came over, and I saw I had 40,000 total pageviews on my old channel and on the new one in like a week I got around 50,000 pageviews and I had around 2,000 concurrent in my first couple of casts. I thought, the chances are, these numbers are only gonna go up, and they mostly have.

I went from around a steady 200 when anything else was going on and now it's around 700 when anything else is going on. So, it's going up pretty quickly and I have peaked at over 4,000, so it's pretty decent. I've been really happy so far. It's cool to have people appreciate things you do, no matter what it is. Broadcasting completely aside, it's cool to see people saying nice things in the chat. I've been pretty lucky so far and haven't been majorly flamed, which is pretty cool. But, I'm expecting that to come down on it anyway.



What is most important for you concerning feedback, is it the live chat on Twitch? Or is it the comments?

Live chat is only marginally important for me. I only rely on chat when I want to see that I have done really dumb. I have a bad habit of keeping my picture overlay up for the first minute of the game. I rely on the live chat for that. Like I said, I haven't really gotten flamed anywhere yet, which is decent. Ok, occasionally someone says something like "wow, that guy is the worst person that ever existed", but that happens to pretty much everyone, right? But occasionally I get a message from someone like "I know you are brand new, and I think you are doing an awesome job." That encouragement is really, really cool. Someone that you don't know, probably that you will never meet, takes a minute out of his day, saying that you are doing great. That type of encouragement goes a long way, for anyone, big or small. I'm sure Purge and Toby get a lovemail everyday, but you can't really discount those things.

Are you afraid you might get used to these kind of things?

Oh man, I hope I never get used to it, because it is so cool. I hope I never get to point when I think 'ah, ye, just another person that likes to thank me', I hope it never gets there. I hope I always take it for how awesome it is.

What is your aim for the next five or six months, the time of your 'internship'?

That is a good question. Ultimately I think everyone's dream is to cast some sort of LAN. That would be the coolest thing. We are still pretty small in the US, we don't have an active scene over here as Europe has. Probably ECAL is the only real American tournament. But I want WhatIsHop.com to be a Dota content provider, beyond casting. Like I said, I'm working on a couple of community shows and basically one of them is sort of a normal community talk show. Talking about recent things, talking about patches, new heroes, tournament results, all the crazy stuff that goes on in eSports. The other one would be playing with pro players, streams, asking questions from the chat, doing trolly pubs. We'll see, I don't really have defined goals, honestly. Six months is still a pretty hard time to measure in eSports. One of the only things you have to look out for are hard metrics, like page views, like favorites, I guess. We'll have to define success down the road a little bit, but I guess developing personal skills, meeting people and having a good time for six months are the most important things.

Let me rephrase the question: What would have to happen, to make you extend the six months?

Getting picked up by some sort of major tournament, that has a very reliable pay structure. Or getting signed by a major LAN or something like that would be huge and completely game changing. Right now, I can only cast limitly. Right when I started at GosuGamers, I was still in school, so my hours were pretty limited, I was trying to fit in casting between sleeping, classes, homework eating food, and work, so my options were limited. But if I was ever at a point where I get picked up by some huge organisation where I could stop working part time, I absolutely would do that and just do just school and casting, which is pretty doable, a lot of people do that. That would have to happen, or something huge in Dota 2 concerning money, that makes casting a little bit more sustainable for more people than just the very top two or three, like GoDZ, Purge and Toby.

Concerning the community shows: What is your time schedule for that? How soon do you want to start?

I would love to launch one of them by the end of July or the beginning of August. I've talked to some people about it and and I'm working on getting graphics figured out. Because, that stuff actually takes a lot of work and a lot of time for all graphics and overlays and making yourself look decent on stream. A pretty reasonable timeline would be some time until the beginning of next month, that would be great.

You then want to talk about the crazy things which go on in the scene. What you say then, what is the craziest thing happening, at the moment?

The meta game is pretty much changing at the moment. A couple of new heroes have made a pretty big impact. Chaos Knight has changed things a little bit, because he is not a great pusher, obviously. He is good with Phantasm, but he has that midgame strength, once is around level 11, when he is pretty strong and can get ganks pretty well. Naga Siren coming out, is going to make a difference in the scene as well. So, gameplay wise, I think the change in metagame is pretty interesting, because it is developing according to the heroes that come into the game.

Outside of the game, just the teams and players in Dota 2 are hilarious. Some of the things going one behind the scenes and not really behind the scenes, are really funny. The Russians losing Vigoss in Kiev, is one of the funniest things I ever heard in my life. "It's OK guys, we just have a $6,000 USD tournament going on, we'll find him now, I promise." These things are funny and worth talking about. I'm definitely closer to the thing which I call 'The game with fame', the thing with pro players. That is the kind of show which will probably come up first.

How would you describe your style of casting?

Right know I'm working a lot on the knowledge and insight side. In the beginning of my Dota 2 casting, I had pretty limited knowledge, of course I knew how everything worked, I knew the heroes and their abilities, but Dota is not really about the single hero. It's a 5v5 team game, it's about how they interact. During that beginning time, I worked a lot on my play-by-play. I've always been trying to learn as much as I can about insight, but now I'm trying to either cocast with some pro players, or at least talk to some pro players or play with pro players. I have cocasted with Blitz a couple of times and played with him a bit. So, I've been trying to gain a lot of insight through that, but I've also been training a lot of solo casting lately, because I think if you can solocast, you can do anything. Solocasting is infinitely harder than cocasting. Honestly, if the games aren't great, it can be a little bit less enjoyable than casting together with someone.

However, right now the scene is so unstable, and the tournament times are still so not-fixed, that it's hard to arrange a cocaster. My daily schedule during GosuLeague season looks like this: I get up at like 8:30 am in the morning, almost every day and I go on skype, look at the GosuLeague Skype chat, figure out what games are today, what needs to be covered, and sometimes I go back to sleep for an hour or two, if the games are not right then.

That makes it really difficult to find a cocaster for those games, because sometimes the games are being scheduled right at that last minute. It's like 'Oh, there is a game in an hour, I hope someone can cover it'. It's getting better, nevertheless, we have a much more fixed schedule now, at least for GosuLeague, much more fixed rules, so teams will show up on time, so I hope that we can get some reliable structure of cocasters. It's the same way for Purge. I have been cocasting a lot with him, just because I'm available, I'm around all the time, because this is essentially what I'm doing now before nighttime starts. So when I'm not around, and Sheever is not around, but Purge wants a cocaster, then it's like going through his Skype list: 'Hey Wagamama, hey Bulba, are you guys around in 20 minutes from now?' That makes it really difficult.

I've been working on my solo casting, I've been working on my insight, I think my play-by-play is pretty decent. When big team fights happen, honestly, that is the hardest thing about Dota. Identifying what is happening in those huge teamfights that are very quick, even remembering what heroes are on which team occasionally can be a big thing.

You can easily say something really stupid and eventually find out: Wait, that guy is actually not on that team, so that didn't matter. Then everyone is fast at shouting and flaming, and you think these guys have no idea. That is why solocasting is hard. If I can get good at it, I can be good at anything. My knowledge has definitely increased in the last couple of weeks. I've been talking to a lot of players, trying to find out what they do and why they do that. After the Copenhagen Wolves game, I talked to Henrydickenson for like 20 minutes about his draft and why he chose which hero and if he thought he got outpicked and one four-man black hole basically cost them the game. And I talked with him about that. In my mind, Copenhagen Wolves is a team that is really good, they just switched captains, Henrydickenson is the new captain, he is the new drafter for them as well. Their play was so good, really, watch their games and you'll learn from them.

You are trying to improve your casting by cocasting with pro players and talking to them. How can regular players improve their game?

Watch Blitz. All honesty aside, he is hilarious, but he is very good at explaining what he is doing and why he is doing it at that sort of mode, and when they are scrimming, it's really interesting to watch. Watch streams like that. Go into DotaTV, you are not getting good over night like some god, you need to expand your knowledge. You need to watch a ton of games. Go on DotaTV, watch the top ranked games with top MMR, you can bet that players in the top probably do something right, you can watch and learn some stuff from them as well. You can get some good base level knowledge by watching streams, DotaTV, Purge's videos, he is putting up tons of content these days, at least when YouTube upload is not broken.

When you are extremely new, like my roommate, who had not touched Dota 2 before he met me, now he plays Dota 2 almost every night with me and my friends. He gets stomped, usually, but he really likes the game and he has learned a lot really fast. Try to play with players who are better than you. Even not pros. I'm certainly not a pro, my skill level is not nearly as high as a pro, not even as high as a top player.

However, I have some thought about the game, so when my roommate plays with me, and he asks 'Why did I die there', I can tell him: 'Well, you are in the middle of the map, without support'. Play with people who are better than you, watch good streams like Blitz, don't ever watch SingSing and Dendi and try to do what they do, because chances are it will go terribly wrong, because usually when they are streaming, they are just trolling around. Watch high level players and try to learn what they are doing, There are a couple of them out there. Blitz is definitely one of them. Just because he is an American, he streams when it is convenient for me. DeMoN even occasionally does a very good job on that one, at least when he is not trolling, which he usually does. Even read stuff, Dignitas did a good warding guide. 'Welcome to Dota, You Suck' by Purge is also very good. Read those introductory guides and then go and watch the games. I have 620 hours in that game now since around December and its only going up now that I do it full time. Put the effort in.

The International 2012 is coming up. Do you expect BarDota, or however you might want to call it, to be a major thing for TI2, as there has been the world's first in Munich at the DreamHack weekend?

I don't expect it to be a major thing. That being said, I expect it to happen. There was this one in Munich for DreamHack. So maybe, that could be a thing for Dota 2, I actually hope so. In Boston we have a BarCraft for Starcraft 2 and I have been there a couple of times and it's a bunch of fun. I would love to see that for Dota for The International. Let's have a look at the quick history of BarCraft. It started at Seattle, actually, at Chao Bistro, basically where The International is being held this year. So I would say there is a good chance it could start there during The International, but I suppose if you love Dota and you live in Seattle, you will probably go to The International itself. So that might not be true. But at other places, like New York, maybe at Legends Bar. Maybe it could happen and I would love to see that. I don't know if it's likely, just because Dota is still expanding a lot, and a lot of it's popularity is going to come when they open up the game completely, when you can just sign up and play. Maybe for the next DreamHack, in Winter, there will be more Dota BarCrafts. I think it's more likely to come then rather than for The International, although I hope it does, because I love BarCrafts.

The Northamerican Dota 2 scene is small, you said that, but still, you have two teams at The International. What can we expect from the Americans in the next months?

I hope a lot. Evil Geniuses look pretty promising, if they can get their crap together, basically. They have been sort of disorganised, and they have had issues with training schedules. But they can be really good. Maelk is a really good leader for them. Their gameplay is pretty innovative. They occasionally like to use Batrider. I wanna say, they almost always lose in these Batrider games.

Like anyone else does...

Yeah, but they try things at least. They try to make them work and I think that is really good and important for the scene to have a team like that. The same goes for compLexity. A little less now that before when they were Fire. At that time, they were a little more innovative. I think, almost anyone that goes to The International could win, given the right circumstances. Na'Vi, right now, especially after StarLadder, is a pretty obvious favorite, they look unbelievably good. Zenith and LGD are probably the other two strong contenders, but anyone that is going can win. Looking at aL: At DreamHack, they did good. DK, always great. Orange is good. EHOME, obviously second place last year. Just going through this list: Every team is very good. mTw's play has been really good lately although, I guess, a bit predictable. Same with mousesports as a backup team.

GoDZ lately made a statement, that concerning time investement and the strength of the Asian teams. He said, basically the Europeans invest the same amount of time into the game, but the Asians are much more structured: They watch replays instantly, they stick to their schedule and the Europeans are more focussed on playing as many scrims as possible every day. Do you see a difference there between some teams?

I'm a musician. That is what I originally came to school for, for music business, and I have played instruments for a really long time. There is a difference between practicing and having good practice. You can keep scrimming or playing random crap as long as you want, and honestly it's not going to help you as much. You can spend half the time doing something very constructive: Watching replays with your team, working on one specific thing. I know the Chinese do lasthitting for like two hours a day, something insane like that. But that constructive practice is way more conducive for good results.

If you look at the Koreans in Starcraft 2: Their practice instructions are not nearly as strict as they were in Starcraft Broodwar, but they are still extremely structured. They have coaches, they have basically player handlers, that help determine their training schedule. I think replay analysis is a really important part and I don't understand why a lot of the foreign teams aren't doing it more. I know a lot are, and maybe even all of them are doing a bit, but watching a replay and figuring out exactly why you lost is unbelievably important, even if it is a little bit demoralizing watching your team crumble under pressure, making one wrong decision that just kills you. I think you have to do it and I have heard that the Chinese, they play a tournament and immediately after they load the replay and watch it again. That is probably the right way for teams to be practicing. I have some feeling that there are foreign teams who are doing it. Na'Vi comes to mind, with Puppey's drafting being pretty insane, for him not to have watched lots and lots of his opponents.

But you also have to watch your own games and figure out your mistakes. Like, if you were an opposing team, what would you draft to draft yourself out. And going into the later parts of the game: Even games that you win, what could you do better? Dota is a big game of making the best or better decision. There are a lot of good decisions, but good decisions aren't gonna win The International. Best decisions obviously are. For that it is important to watch more replays and I hope more teams do it.

Which playstyle do you prefer when casting games?

When I am casting, I love watching really aggressive games. Maybe not as crazy as that one Darer-mouz-game with 90 kills in 20 minutes, but I like aggressive game plays. They are much more enjoyable than just watching teams sit back and let their carries farm up, because there is so much dead space in those games. Even with a cocaster, there is only so much time you can talk about when you say 'Oh, he is now going to buy a Monkey King Bar and eventually he is going to be huge'. That kind of game is pretty boring for me. I'm a much bigger fan of way closer games, action-packed games with tower pushing, quick raxes. A good example: Darer versus Wolves, which I casted, both games were really good in my opinion. These were the kind of games which I enjoyed casting.

You can tell when a caster is not loving the game. Usually, in really long games, you can kind of tell who is going to win after the first thirty minutes, based on the carries. Obviously, when those games get turned around, that is when it also gets exciting and you really enjoy casting them once again, but usually the really long games are just snore fests. So I would say shorter, action-packed games are my favorite. I think I perform a lot better and my energy levels are a lot higher in those cases, and I think the viewers appreciate and enjoy it when the caster has fun. That is what it comes down to, if you are having a great time, when you cast those action packed games, it's cool.

Does that mean, you like the idea of using time rating for two-way-ties in The Defense group phase?

It's not great. When it is a two-way-tie, they should just play each other once a gain in like a best-of-one. It doesn't take that long. For three-way-ties, I sort of understand it, because there is not really a good way to settle three-way-ties, as you'd have to make like a mini-round-robin tournament for it, something ridiculous. With the two-way-tie, I think it's a little unnecessary. I'd rather see a team play a Bo1 game for who is advancing, because that is when you get the sick games. When something is at risk.

Back to casting: There has been a dispute in the Starcraft scene mainly, partially made public by an article from ESFI about TwitchTV revenues and how they declined and about how people can't really fill their ads. Can you say something about that from the Dota 2 side of view?

It's a pretty new thing and I saw Incontrol's tweet about it. A lot of the problem, honestly, might stem from the fact that for a while their ads were so bugged that people were starting to get frustrated and starting installing adblock. And people installing adblock is going to stack up and obviously prevents Twitch from providing ads, prevents streamers from getting revenues. The thing which I don't understand about this point is that Twitch just got the partnership with CBS Interactive, so if anything, they should be going up. From what I have read, and I have talked to a couple of people about it, they are going down a little bit. Blitz and GoDZ are saying you get a much lower return based on your viewership. I think it's true, but I'm not sure which fault it is, but it sucks a lot.

One of the primary sources of income for casters is going to be that live stream. Some really successful people are using YouTube and are making a little bit more reliable money from that, like Purge, he is definitely getting more reliable money from YouTube than his livestream. I'll be willing to bet this is the case. For some people like Blitz, his summer job is streaming. And if that starts to dry out, we might see people switching to Own3D, which I hope to god they don't. The biggest thing is, their VODs system is just so bad. It never seems to work correctly. If they fix that, it might be diffent. I just hope it does not get worse. Twitch has said that they are getting all-time high numbers, they are installing all these new servers. I thought the amount of ads they have to deliver was the reason for the partnership with CBS, but to be honest I don't know too much about how all this stuff works. I just know that a lot of players and a lot of casters have been saying that they are getting much lower return on viewership per ad. So I hope, if you guys are reading this and you have adblock on: Please, don't do that, it sucks, turn it of for streams.

Considering the difficulties to determine league schedules, because of the teams' timetables: Do you think there would be enough space for more tournaments?

I think there is room for another tournament or two. The biggest thing is: a) teams have to communicate with organizers if they have a conflict and b) tournament organizers need to communicate with each other. I know The Defense and Gosugamers, there are sort of competitors to each other, but it shouldn't be like that. They are both supporting the Dota scene, they are both providing good content, they have pretty similar features, and I feel there is no reason they should be competing with each other when they have their tournaments. When they talk to each other just a little bit and maybe swap schedules even, it would be so much easier for just anyone to make appointments. At the same time, I know there is a huge lack of accountability from a lot of teams. That is a huge issue.

This is my thing where I am most aggravated right now: When you are casting a game and there are 1,500 people on your stream, waiting for your game to start and it's 30 minutes late and you have to say 'actually, this game is not gonna happen, sorry', then that is the worst thing on the planet. I then feel like I personally just pissed of 1,500 people for something that is completely out of my control and something that should have been resolved like hours beforehand. That really aggravates me. I think, GosuLeague is doing exactly what needs to happen and I have noticed that The Defense has started to be a little more strict and I hope that all tournaments stick by their guns together. This way, teams can't be like: 'Well, they are not doing it this way'. I hope all tournaments stick to it and say: 'No, you guys are going to be on time or that's it.' I think that is completely correct.

At least, if it's for no good reason. It's different, of course, if they are still playing a 90-minute game somewhere else.

There are always going to be those small exceptions. But, when there is a team that basically doesn't show up then your game just disappears, although it has been scheduled for about a week.

Do you think there are teams which solve as good or bad examples?

Given the last couple of weeks' events, Moscow 5 has been a pretty shiny example of what I dislike between teams and administration. They left the GosuLeague because they got a loss for being late and not explaining properly why. Then they lost a player in Kiev. Things like that are examples of what I'm not a fan of. A lot of other teams have been doing fine, like Darer and Na'Vi, they are almost always completely on time. And they are huge teams, when they can manage to be on time, damn it, everyone should be able to.

Could a sixth player be a suitable solution for some teams? Have a standard standin player, who is also allowed to play in every competition, because he is not playing for another team, might improve scheduling problems.

I think it might still stay at five for a lot of teams. I do, however, think we do see some teams better pick up a sixth player. If you are a mostly online team then almost always, there is going to be a time when it is at least slightly inconvenient for one of your players to show up at this time on this day. Having a sixth player is a really good way to be more flexible. The only problem you run into with that is: How do you practice with six people? You have to do almost twice as much practice. This way, having six people could be an issue. But I hope teams do figure a way to make it work, because it will make their lineup much more stable in the long run.