GosuGamers's very own Chris "Snuggi3'" Ballentine had the opportunity to have a long discussion with long time SEA caster Jayf "Babael" Soh about how he started casting, the challenges he has faced, and what it's like casting the Road to Blizzcon qualifiers. For anyone looking to learn more about the SEA Heroes scene, or what it's like to be a caster, this extensive interview is worth the read.
How did you get into casting and solocasting?
I was casting, solo casting for a long time. How I got into casting? That was, I think November 2012, I was playing a different game back then, Heroes of Newerth, a fast paced MoBA game, still had some farm elements in it... I live in Singapore, and I was uh, they just built this new swanky stadium back then, and I decided to give it a shot -- mainly because I watched a stream back then and I just realized that maybe this could be something I want to give a try.
So yeah, I applied for the job, I got it and my first gig was at Dreamhack; not flown directly there but casting from Singapore, in the office on a SEA channel for the SEA games. Really to give a bit of extra focus on the SEA teams and to provide the coverage there. That was the first time I casted and it was really good. I think that it was a very good experience and you make a lot of interesting mistakes, but every since then I've never looked back and I really really love what I do.
Why Heroes?
I changed around to Hearthstone a little bit last year on my own for a while. I didn't really like it, although you can still have the analysis and all the stuff going on but, inherently, I am a play by play caster and I've always been a play by play caster. I'm like the kind of guy that sells the hype, I get really easily excited over stuff and Hearthstone just didn't seem like the right game after a while -- it's just a little bit too brainy and the viewers also wanted to have a little bit more insights and analysis, not so exciting there.
Then Heroes happened and I thought I should give it a shot as a game. I tried it, very lucky to be invited to the Alpha, so thank you Blizzard for that. I really enjoy Heroes because there is no downtime and like I said, I'm a play by play caster, I enjoy the action, you go in and you go straight to the action. There's already ganks happening right off the bat and you can see there's so much potential in this game without the need for downtime for laning phases and other stuff.
I really enjoy Heroes because there is no downtime and like I said, I'm a play by play caster, I enjoy the action, you go in and you go straight to the action.
I guess that's what drew me to Heroes; you have so many different ways to play this game, different strategies and as you play this game you realize that it is such a team based game that five people have to be on the same page for this to work out well. It's more than just going for the solo farm and getting those items up and carrying the team. It's not on that level anymore, there's a little more to it, the chemistry, the movement, the positioning. It helps that I'm a big Blizzard fan. I've played Warcraft 3, I've played DotA, I finished all of Warcraft 3's campaigns, I've also played Starcraft, Diablo 2 and 3.
How was solo casting for MSI Masters Gaming Arena and Nationals back to back?
Solo casting for such an extended period of time -- it was absolutely insane man. Solo casting is something that I really really feel like is a huge challenge, because viewers look at the stream and they want to have some banter. You don't really like listening to the same voice for an extended period of time, you get bored after a while -- and it is a little bit weird to talk to yourself for a long time as well. So, I haven't really solo casted for HoN before, I had partners and was training partners for a little bit and I found the right partner for a while. Then, the tournaments started to fade away and we decided we had to stop doing HoN.
To me, Heroes is like a dream come true, because I've always tried experimenting whether two play by play casters can come into play and for Heroes that's exactly what can happen. There's so much action that even the insights caster has to take over sometimes and it's going to look really weird if every single minute you have this guy cutting in and saying, "hold that thought..." I just think it doesn't work in this game. But you have those viewers that want those insights and breakdowns, so I really had to research into it, which I started in about February this year, and I spoke to a lot of players, I actually talked to a lot of people on how to improve my insight casting.
It was really hard to find someone who can actually compliment me as a co-caster.
So, they invited me to streams they did and I started paying attention more to how talent builds are being selected -- maybe also because Heroes doesn't have items, it's all about talents, and there's certain talent paths that are very very interesting. So, for Heroes it's more about composition, it's more about picking the correct talent and about the draft... So that's where insights is a little bit easier for me in Heroes than other games that require learning all the different item recommendations and builds.
So solo casting? Not easy, but I've gotten used to it already.
Why in particular was it the case that you ended up solo casting and do they not have anybody else actually else able to do it in your area?
No, I think that actually for this game, it's a very new game. We had some people asking around for casting, they were looking for a co-caster for a periodic time -- but uh, I guess for myself, they don't have anyone that can really suit co-casting, I think it's because SEA is not really an English dominated region. You have Tagalog from Philippines, and Thai. You have some Malaysians that can speak English but the majority don't really speak English well. So, in that sense, SEA is not really a region that has got talent for casting in English, and given the fact that this game is really new, it just launched, it was really hard to find someone who can actually compliment me as a co-caster. Basically because I was kind of focused on play by play, and they wanted to find someone to help me with insights and to really just interject with information but as I waited for a co-caster, I just decided to start doing the insights myself instead, since I'm doing solo casting, so why not?
What is your background, exactly? You speak English very well and you said you live in Singapore -- tell me a little bit about yourself.
I come from a very average family, uh, Chinese. So, we have a bi-lingual thing in Singapore, so you pick up your mother tongue, whichever race you are -- if you're Malay then Malay, if you're Indian you pick up Tamil and if you're Chinese you learn Chinese. So we have the primary language as English -- I think that I grew up pretty well actually. I was very much interested in speech, I was a debater in school and I started doing some public speeches in school as well. I guess that I just really love talking, I really just love to share and to go through what is in my mind and I also love just being on a big stage, or rather just any stage really. Whenever you hear the crowd laughing at your jokes, or just being entertained, that's a very very good feeling.
Tell me a little bit about what it's like to be participating in the SEA scene right now? The qualifiers are going on right now, how is the scene taking advantage of that?
The scene is growing quite well -- we've got a really tight community here in Singapore. We have had quite a few events already, since Alpha and the same people stayed and pulled their friends over. You have Arrow Gaming from DotA coming over to the Malaysia qualifiers, and you also got some of the really good League players in SG that just decided to -- they are retired by the way, these are retired League players, they also now play in the SG qualifiers.
For Thailand, it's just very interesting, they have about 19 teams for this first season; and for a country like Thailand in which they really predominately speak Thai, not everyone in Thailand understands English, so the market there is a little bit weird, but I think they are doing a very good job getting everyone in the community to go together and just being very tight.
But, SEA, they really love the team fight.
In Malaysia is, I saw a lot of competition. I saw a lot of people coming in and playing and people were just like, "Hey! This game is fun!" So they are just competing and, in terms of competitive spirit, I like Malaysians. They have that spirit inside them, although the level of play may not be there. But, they are definitely improving and I think that they'll get to Tier 1 really really soon. The team that just won the Malaysia National Finals, they are a team that came from Alpha: SALT Gaming. They are a team of nine players, from all of SEA. So you've got players from Indonesia, players from Philippines, players from Singapore and some even from Thailand. So that's a very interesting team.
How are teams handling the SEA Road to BlizzCon qualifiers?
The Road to BlizzCon has very clear rules that you have to have three members on your team to be from the same country to take part in the host country's qualifiers. So we're only hosting this across four countries, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand; and because SALT Gaming is a team that's all across SEA, they have to create subdivisions and that's what pull people back in. Malaysia SALT Gaming is all Malaysian and I think that they've improved a lot over the last three weeks. And for SG, the captain of the SG squad just came back into the game after a stint in competitive DotA, so he just came back in to Heroes again and is now playing. I think he had good results, finishing in the semi-finals before losing to latency issues. But really it's a very very different scene as compared to the other MoBAs where you have predominate toxicity and lack of communication, the scene for Heroes in SEA is very bonded.
We have people flying from SG over to Malaysia, and we've got Malaysians coming down for the SG finals. Everyone's just playing with each other on the same servers, so I guess that kind of bonds people together. As for the Road to BlizzCon, it is very competitive for SEA. We get only one seed out of eight seeds in the America Championship and we don't even have a direct qualifying process that brings you to BlizzCon. So when the news first came out, the scene was first disappointed because they thought that hey, they have to compete in Americas and what's the chances like? You have one out of eight and only two slots. So you have to be really on top of your game to do that, plus we don't really have the bandwidth to play with NA, because while we are on the same region, we don't have good ping when you play against American players -- and that has been a predominate issue since the launch of the game.
A lot of the players here in SEA watch the NA scene. They are very inspired by the way Tempo Storm plays.
So, it is an issues with all the other MoBAs because this is a genre that is requires high response time, quick reflexes and when ping comes in performance will drop. I guess that's why so many of the players here feel it's not so good to not have a direct seed, but instead of being negative about it, they took it up quite well after a while. They decided that they are just going to showcase SEA to the world. The good news is we have 100,000 dollars prize pool on the line for the entire SEA championship and that's on top of the money you get in the America championship. So, if you look at the other regions, they don't get as much, and I guess we have sponsors to thank for that, Alienware, Intel, Razer, and I guess the scene just warmed up quite a fair bit after they saw the announcement.
What is current metas for SEA and how is it different from what you see in other parts of the world?
Okay, first up I think that SEA doesn't really have a set meta. Ever since the Butcher patch, they have changed meta already, they are going into what seems like a single support style of drafting. Dual support has been something that we have been working and I think two to three patches back we have a lot of sustain comps coming in. Then dive compositions came in and that changed a lot.
I think that SEA, we've been following the NA meta for quite a bit. A lot of the players here in SEA watch the NA scene. They are very inspired by the way Tempo Storm plays. SEA is just very team fight oriented right now. We had teams coming in with strategies like split push, and we also saw Immunity play that strategy play that against My Revenge for the Masters Gaming Arena. They're just not used to that right now. Teams are more on just team fights. We got players that can really win team fights, I can see clutch plays, great execution, near getaways, and heroes just not dying, really really close shaves -- you can see that the mechanic skills of this place are there. But when it comes to providing an alternative strategy, not so much.
SEA now is slanting towards sustain poke comps, like Kael'Thas which is kind of like in sync with NA, but I think NA plays a little bit more assassins. SEA, although we play a lot of this mainstream team fight clashes, we still have heroes like Azmodan picked up, Nazeebo picked up. Nazeebo is really crazy, I didn't expect him to win any games, but he did. Sylvanas for sure, she's a main damage dealer. The other hot favorite is Zagara. I guess in general there's a lot more specialists played here in SEA as compared to NA where you see predominately assassins getting picked up.
What are the top bans?
Zeratul. I think that is somewhat still consistent with NA. But I think you have teams here that setup team fights really well. It's not like Zeratul's Void Prison is being used for wombo combo only, it's also used to split the fight into two, and they just don't want to deal with that in its current state. Because, like I said, most teams don't have two supports, so when Zeratul does the VP, it's really damaging if the healer is trapped. Zagara isn't so bad because Cleanse in the right moment actually saves someone from Devouring Maw. I guess the players rather trust Cleanse to save a teammate as opposed to a straight out VP that's unstoppable. Jaina is like top Tier 1 pick and people have been saying that there's a lot of Valla popping up in first picks as well.
In SEA, we don't really prioritize warriors; teams here know that there's three Tier 1 warriors, Johanna, Muradin and Anub'Arak. But you don't really see teams playing around those warriors in the draft until the second picking phase. So very very damage reliant, support is secondary and the warriors are third. For SEA, we just want to brawl, we just want to go in and win the team fight and I guess when you avoid the fight these guys are like, "Is this a MMORPG?" Then they start losing lanes and start losing on levels, and they are like "You're playing the wrong game man!" But, SEA, they really love the team fight..
Anything else you want to talk about or you want to add?
Shoutout to the production team that has followed me for MSI Masters Gaming Arena and Nationals and for all that's left for the Road to Blizzcon. We have three more National finals before the Regional finals. Special shoutout to Zenden, as well as family and friends, especially my girlfriend, I think she's been a really supportive partner for me in this shoutcasting journey. Also shoutout to every other aspiring shoutcaster out there, in SEA and the rest of the world. Keep fighting on and I think that as long as you love what you are doing, it is going to be a great pleasure and honor to work in a field that brings your great satisfaction.
And also shoutouts to all the players that follow through the SG and SEA community for supporting me -- I think specifically to My Revenge, really for just playing a great series against ANZ and flying the SG pride in the MSI Masters Gaming Arena. Shoutouts to the rest of the SG team and special shoutout to Bakatora. He has been following my stream since the dawn of days, and copying Babael quotes -- so we've got this really weird hashtag, WhatWillBabaelSayNext, and it's just really entertaining to see the stuff that people are just copying and putting out on the Facebook groups. So shoutout to all of those guys who are still following me and thank you very much for this interview.
You can follow Babael directly on his facebook page or on twitter at @Babaelcast. Check out some of Babel's SEA Road to BlizzCon casting so far, starting with the grand finals match between Relic and and Mahou Shounen.
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