Why Community Fortress needs their own casting team.

[shdw.puppet]

Whether this is a moot suggestion (due to constraints in staffing or otherwise) I think that communityfortress, as an organization looking to push forward their coverage of North American TF2 and other goals (see below) needs to have their own group of dedicated casters. This doesn't have to be a super professional group, or even people with set ups like the one Schetter has (if you are reading this, oh my god man, envy), but a couple guys who are willing to cast matches from the tournaments run here and stream video with some recording and subtle editing would go a long way to increase the legitimacy of commft as an organization.

I think commft seems to be going in a direction that suggests several goals, on top of the one regarding excellent coverage of the north american tf2 scene.

1. Produce excellent competition in the form of tournaments and (maybe?) a league in the future.

2. Generate ROI for the sponsors of the tournaments. I think it would be a lot easier to get and keep sponsors if you have a media product with reliable viewer counts and at least a small degree of professionalism. This will probably come in the way of small advert movies or shoutouts throughout the cast and possibly edited in banners for the vods and other projects.

3. Generate direct revenue that can be used to cover server cost, tournament prize pools, team sponsorship abilities and expansions. This also gives the casters an incentive to do marketing, sponsor finding and generating as many viewers as possible if communityfortress says that so many percent of direct (as a result of payback through services like blip.tv or other) profits can be taken home by them.

These are just ideas and obviously some of them are longer term goals that can be worked towards, but with the impending start of the 6v6 tournament, I think you can definitely put together a hodge-podge team of people who cast the important matches and even some of the lower end ones, with the sponsor shoutouts etc. If you show that to Zalman with viewer numbers, they will be more likely to sponsor you in the future and increase the amount of sponsorship given for tournaments.

Obviously the problem is that a project like this would mean adding a few staff members and while it is (in my opinion) a great goal, I am not sure how feasible it is, especially considering the activity level seen by writers and coverage staff as it is.

Thoughts? (note I am not writing this from the perspective of someone who does writing or work for communityfortress, but as a fan that hopes it sticks around and does really well.)

[Free]

We already do: eXtelevision is the partner of CommFT in all casting duties. Hence why all eXtv Moments of Glory are produced by eXtv and uploaded to the CommFT Youtube channel.

I would, however, like to expand the enterprise even more. Since eXtv is so damn good, we don't really need in-house casting. But it would be nice to see more known, trusted people working with eXtv to cast more and more matches across the board in the name of both organizations; joint eXtv and CommFT coverage never hurts.

It would be especially nice to see a breakdown according to expertise. If you had, say (and remember, this is just an example, not an actual proposition), Persons X, Y, and Z covering Highlander, Persons A, B, and C covering 6s, and persons D, E, and F covering miscellany, more personality branding could be leveraged to each distinct casting crew and production.

[shdw.puppet]

the problem with extv is that, while professional, experienced and entertaining for sure, they dont carry the commft branding that sponsors are going to be looking for. In addition, while I am not trying to take away anything from extine and crew, they seem to have their sights focused on ESEA and do commft on the side as a "when we have time between real matches" sort of thing.

[Gaamoo]

I think a CommFT casting team is a good idea but it gets confusing having too many different places to search for broadcasts. I think that an eXtv "B-team" along with CommFT branding might be a good idea. That way we get one location to go to and also the stuff you mentioned.

I agree about casters being for certain types of games, too - you know what and who to expect when you tune in and it creates more brand loyalty, i.e. repeat listeners, channel followers, facebook posts, etc.

[Ewrawr]

. I think that an eXtv "B-team" along with CommFT branding might be a good idea. That way we get one location to go to and also the stuff you mentioned.

For the love of all that is holy, NOT invite level broadcasters :3

[Gaamoo]

For the love of all that is holy, NOT invite level broadcasters :3

Not exactly who I had in mind :wink:

[Free]

For the love of all that is holy, NOT invite level broadcasters :3

I assume you mean Invite Level Spectators? ;)

Agreed. Casting isn't easy; it takes years to get good at it and develop the skills to consistently make casting interesting and dynamic. It also takes a certain kind of personality. There's a reason that eXtine is a great caster, and it isn't simply because he knows the game and has paid his dues casting. Major props to all the folk out there who take a swing at casting, but bad casting can actually do a lot of harm.

That said, eXtv should be focused on ESEA and such. 6v6 is the competitive standard for TF2 for many reasons, and CommFT isn't a league. Even with all our recent tourney activity, we're just one of several big-name contributors to the community, and while I can't speak on behalf of eXtv, I believe that they have to try and focus the coverage on the best, high-skill matches they can. It's like choosing between broadcasting the local intramural or the NFL game: a no-brainer.

More coverage would be a good thing. I'd love to see eXtv have the staff to take on UGC, ESEA, CEVO, and other tournaments and cover them with increasing frequency. I suspect they'd need more staff and skilled volunteers, and the TF2 community could use a lot more of the latter.

If any eXtv peeps are here, pipe up.

[dubel_07]

I think part of the lack of CEVO coverage is the, well, lack of CEVO activities, but the fact still remains that CEVO doesn't get the same respect and attention other leagues do. We're working on season 8 currently so expect for us to be starting 6's in the near future.

[extine]

The goal of eXtv is to be able to provide the high level of media production that the TF2 scene needs to entice and promote sponsors by forming a coalition of staff and producers.

I know that people always like to strike out on their own, but really working together is what we need to do.

eXtv is the production partner of Community Fortress. A separate Community Fortress streaming effort would hurt that relationship. We pimp out Community Fortress as a website and while streaming the Community Fortress tournaments we certainly push the message. If there is something missing, the tourney admins need to communicate that to me.

I'm definitely all ears when it comes to complaints - eXtine@eXtelevision.com The CommFT scheduling has been a little difficult, which is an important part of planning casts.

People are welcome to advertise other stream efforts on CommFT, and I'm not trying to hate on that, just saying that eXtv can offer a lot of eXposure to people wanting to help due to the structures we have already built.

We're definitely willing to work with anyone who can achieve high quality streaming and smart commentary. It takes a lot of computer, and a lot of bandwidth to be able to get good results, but if people are capable we'd like to work with them and get as much stuff covered as possible.

I recently registered a second Justin.tv account so that we can even schedule double coverage of overlapping matches.

Frequency of casts comes down to how many cameramen and casters we have. We're going to be more aggressively recruiting and organizing staff soon but of course are always talking to people willing to help.

Duder is going to be doing some Open casts, we're going to continue to stream the highest level of TF2, and we got plans in motion for introductory content for new players.

[extine]

If any CommFT writers or Mentors want to produce "CommFT Brand" programming on our live stream or YouTube channel, I'm definitely all for that and willing to facilitate that as best as I can.

[shdw.puppet]

I think the message here has been taken a little wrong, extine, I think what you and your staff do is amazing and, though I usually dont watch the casts myself, I know they are really high quality and a great asset to the community that almost no one is even capable of matching right now.

That being said, the evidence in sponsored videogaming points to the more diversity in streaming options, the better. (I mean come on, look at SC2, and while this game is not and never really will be comparable to SC2, the point can still be made that there are streams for most leagues, user streams, indie streamers, mentoring streamers etc).

Im not saying that commft needs to get their own casting organization and that eXtv needs to back the hell off, far from it. I see no reason why working together to provide more content at all levels of play cannot happen if the two organizations communicate about what matches are going to be casted by eXtv and what matches are going to be picked up by the other team. Maybe I am naive, but I don't get why that should "hurt that relationship"

I guess I see the problem as not enough coverage of everything because there are relatively high barriers to competition in the market (mostly social. casting isnt easy, but we are really critical to a point of not offering advice, but being derogatory towards people who are trying). But there are two solutions. One, more casting organizations or two, bigger casting organizations that can handle the load of tournaments and leagues that need to be casted.

For the record, I am willing to start casting again, the only reason I ever stopped was because the management of people, stalking and hounding players for their match times and dates, not hearing about reschedules.... when you have a team to lead and a life to live outside of tf2, that is the last thing you want to spend an hour every night doing before you can even get to the fun bit of casting.

Players need to make a conscious effort to work with community organizers and casters to try and get matches scheduled as early in advance as possible and make that information as available as possible so that casters dont have to hunt them down. Casters themselves also need to be highly motivated because it is a team effort in every way. I did some black ops casting in the offseason of tf2 for a friend and it reminded me of how fun casting can be if everyone is motivated and has the same goal.

[Cash50]

I would definitly be intrested in commentating some matches or possibly streaming them (might be upgrading internetzz). I would love if a core group of people could work with eXtv to produce different levels of competition (ESEA-O, ESEA-IM, ESEA-I CEVO-A?? CEVO-M????????). I would love to see all different levels be broadcasted/shoutcasted/radio casted/streamed and or what ever else it takes to do so. I think having a CommFT Broadcasting team would help the community especially with new players who want to learn about 6v6.

I am going to be attending a meeting with Torbull and some other active players / leaders of the TF2 community tomorrow night. I am going to bring up this issue and see what he and other people think. I don't know what to expect from the meeting, but I feel that only good things can happen. If ESEA wants to expand competitive TF2 then I feel we should follow in their footsteps.

back to this topic to achieve this we are going to have to reach out to some pub communities and just basically get the word out to everyone who is intrested in competitive TF2. I know a few communities that would definitly post STVs and shoutcasts to matches. The more we have the better it looks when asking for a sponsorship. Nahanni and her team at pubcomp.com always make sure that their events are well attended, she gets the communities active by involving them in the seasonal
6v9 events by posting on like 11 million community forums of pub clans to get more viewers. She always gets about 400+ people for the events. If we could get that many for any level match that is during the season I think we could get a lot more intrest in Comp. TF2. More intrest in competitive TF2 equals more willingness to sponsor teams, expand the community, get more league participation, more prizes, more sponsors.

Seems pretty simple, but it's going to be a lot of work.

I would love to help setup / run a shoutcast or cast of any type of match. We should see who is intrested and go from there.

[Hawkeye]

One thing to keep in mind, The majority of the viewers to the 6v9 events is directly related to the Blog posts from Valve when they make them. I think we had 1500+ in one of the 6v9, the last one was sketchy as the Relays were being DoSed as well as the mumble server which caused a LOT of simply drop and not come back.

Valve is pretty open to making posts about casts and things, the issue has ALWAYS been scheduling, they don't really want to post things if a lot of people show to have the teams not play or some other issue, so getting massive amounts of people is pretty difficult if that is the hurdle you need to overcome.

Teams/leagues need to step up and get things scheduled properly and get things moving on-time for a change.

But eXTV is the primary casting at CommFT, I do not agree we need more widespread things unless the crew is going to do something dramatically different. Expanding eXTV to a more crew that have different competitive focuses would be best as it keeps things to only eXTV or CommFt website to get all the info easily, or what I do it hit the Justin.TV site during the evening a couple times to see what is going on, before that was pwnage.tv. That is the easiest way.

[Free]

I want to side with eXtine on this in direct response to Cash and Shdw: eXtv is the premiere TF2 casting brand and other regional casting outfits and such should be funneled through them. TF2 is never going to be the size of SC2, so the idea of consolidation makes more sense: bring satellites under the hood of CommFT and eXtv and do more from that central base of operations.

But Cash brings up a point that Graham and I have been talking a lot about lately, something we're getting ready to act on: community consolidation and partnership. In order to continue to effectively build the competitive TF2 community, we need to outreach to noobs, pubbies, and all levels of competitive players in such a way that the needs and desires of that varied player base are taken into account. I don't think this is as hard as it sounds; it requires intra-community organization and partnership. CommFT doesn't want to compete with Vanilla, MGE, or other sites -- we want to work WITH them in order to help make the community the best it can be. The focus on each site is different and that's good. We want to refine that focus, learn from each other, and partner up for community events and such.

It may seem as if my first and second point are contradictory: consolidate casting but partner with diverse community sites? Has Free gone mad(der)?

Casting is a tricky niche, something that requires a more specialized skill-set than behind the scenes community/site work. When you're a caster, you're a public personality, a name and face that the community recognizes and associates with the game. That's branding at the most basic level and it goes a long way to establishing the credibility of a game and organization; smaller outfits with shoddy equipment, lack of technical expertise, and general inexperience with the difficult aspects of casting don't help the community at all, but fold those folks into eXtv, train them, and solicit the community for donations, equipment, and match access, and suddenly you've got a more powerful, well-known casting brand that can do more and more and more.

[extine]

"For the record, I am willing to start casting again, the only reason I ever stopped was because the management of people, stalking and hounding players for their match times and dates, not hearing about reschedules.... when you have a team to lead and a life to live outside of tf2, that is the last thing you want to spend an hour every night doing before you can even get to the fun bit of casting."

Part of our goal at eXtv is to make everyone's lives easier. We'd like to set someone up as our main scheduler, who is aware of our caster's availabilities, and willing to co-ordinate with the teams and keep everyone up to date.

I'm going to be talking with my business partner, and my staff, and setting up more of a hierarchy so that we can get more things done, and get more people involved.

All it takes is talking to us.

I know that working by yourself is easier than getting a hold of me, but we will be stronger together. I'm about to shut down my computer at this LAN, and attend the raffle. But Holler at me throughout the week. eXtine @ eXtelevision.com

We've been having weekly meetings, which is getting us all in contact with eachother, and vastly improving our planning capabilities.

[Graham]

Since a lot of things have already been discussed, I'll just briefly drop my perspective in the thread.

1. If anything, any new casting services or expansions of existing casting services should be part of eXtv. eXtine is the most recognized face of the current TF2 casting world, eXtv has the biggest pull in terms of regular audiences, and the eXtv crew is top-notch at this point in their development.

2. Anyone who wants to be part of the TF2 casting establishment should join eXtv because eXtine, as far as my understanding goes, is always down for help. Same goes for CommFT in terms of contributors.

3. Any CommFT-branded show on eXtv would be cool but not necessary. I am more interested in a stable, good, and reliable CommFT podcast on CommFT's main site to supplement eXtv's coverage.

4. Everyone wants more coverage of the lower level leagues/divisions but the guys who know those leagues/divisions and give a hoot about those leagues/divisions are unwilling to step up and contribute. Until that changes, believe me, those leagues/divisions won't be covered.

5. I am working with eXtine to smooth out our communications so the right matches are covered at the right times (for our tournies and other events). That definitely is a big priority for the Zalman event so good point there shdw.

[Gaamoo]

I'd like to mention a few things:

1. Salamancer of www.justin.tv/fatmop is very good at casting lower level games and has a good setup, so I will try to get him to combine with eXtv as I agree with eXtine and Graham (no offense shdwpuppet).

2. The "casts" I've been doing at www.justin.tv/gaamoo are not intended to be anything other than me talking to myself while I watch a match I wanted to write about. I'd love to work with eXtine's crew because I understand a lot of different aspects of the game and know lots of the Highlander players; and I have a different linguistic skill set (Even that sentence was just intended to confuse you. See? I can do wonders with words).

I haven't wanted to plan anything consistent because I'm visiting my sister very soon for about two weeks, and my setup is generally unstable. However I'm free nearly all the time and completely interested in helping out in any way possible.

[mrslin]

I'd be interested in live shoutcasting. It's also appealing for me to be associated with extv because I could have the fun of casting and leave the production up to tha crew

I also want to do some streaming but I haven't figured it out yet so if someone knows how let me know.

But I agree with all above points and would say that an association with extv is preferred if not essential. Plus extv already has lots of subscribers and would be a great place to start.

[Scholar]

I know I am reviving a very old thread but I feel like I needed to give my input here. I have followed the sc2 scene fairly closely and while it only differs on size, it is very much like the tf2 scene. How did it grow so big?

1- Casting comes from matches, matches come from replays. One of the best features of sc:bw and sc2 was always the availability of replays. Sc2 has been constantly patched since launch and you can still watch replays from older patch #s even though some newer functionalities are not active. Also, replays are always kept as temporary files, so it does not require you to want to record something in order to have a "memory" of that match. Any improvements regarding this should be forwarded to valve lol I am not blaming this on anyone

2- Once you had replays from these amazing players regardless the country they were from (Korea.....cmon it is sc:bw after all) people would just pick up these games, cast them, and upload them to youtube channels. There was no "I wanna grow the community" or "I wanna have 1000000000x viewers and make ad revenue" ideals behind it. It was a pure feeling that the game and players were really cool to watch and it needed to be done. People needed to know about this.

3- The next step (and I am kinda making a big jump here) was to organize tournaments. Yes tournaments had been going on long before sc:bw media became popular but I want to focus on the word organize, not on the tournament part. I have a $1k prize pool tournament with the best players in X area, the next logical step is to show this games to people at home. So I look for a medium to showcast these games; who do I go to? Well...remember those youtube channels? There.

For the purpose of the following analogy, extine is one of those youtube channels and esea is the tournament organizer. When esea decides to broadcast a tournament and call extv to do the job, they are doing two things: A- guaranteeing that the games shown on real time have a VOD available. B- Deciding, hey! what games would the viewers want to watch? Lets build up our schedule around that. At the end of the day we have a very tired extine (who earns a paycheck for his casting), but the people on the stream were entertained throughout and for the ones who missed it there will be VODS available.

This situation contrasts with esea going through fine and everything, and then a week later extine scrambles for the demos and some VODs are made available for what we thought the best matches were.

4- The more people did this, the more media was available on the web related to sc:bw/sc2. When a random kid would google tf2 *insert name of random awesome player here* he would find a VOD and then he would learn more players/get hooked and thus the community grew a LOT. I have searched my ass off for VODs of some of my fav players with little success. It will be a slow process but tf2 could become something even more awesome.

Thanks for reading

[mrslin]

Hey scholar you make some key points, but a key difference between SC2 and TF2 is that SC2 pubbers play the same game as the comp players. TF2 pubbers play a completely different game than the comp players. For this reason we can never achieve anything close to what they have.

[shdw.puppet]

you make some valid points, but also miss the mark completely in some places, particularly with how esea interacts with extv. I will just tell you that they don't, at all. It is up to us to find, mark, cast, produce, upload and maintain the shoutcasts that we do. The crew is small, so the volume you are talking about is not and can not be there.

bw started off small, but after a certain amount of time, the effort of a single caster or small group of casters started being noticed and repeated. This is the element missing from TF2, the fact that we don't have a community who steps in and does things that need to be done. Instead, as can be seen from the large quantity of "extv, this is what you are doing wrong, lemme be an asshole about it" threads on natf2, we have ourselves a community that feels entitled to having excellent post produced, casted matched of high quality and frequency, but are not willing to go through the effort of getting us there.

Casting is easy mode, show up, do the cast, done within an hour. Marathon casting (as in the ESEA LAN) is significantly harder, but still relatively easy as compared to the time requirement and effort input of getting post produced videos up. That requires getting casters together, getting a working demo, having someone capable of playing the game and recording it at a steady 29.97, 30 or 60 fps (depending on target framerates and how in depth you want the special effects later in the pipeline). Then having that person have the knowledge, experience and time (it takes 2-3 hours to properly edit a 45 minute cast) to edit. Then they have to upload it, which takes great internet.

This stuff is difficult. It is difficult to do with frequency, it is difficult to find the time to get it all in with the busy, real life, schedules of all of the extv staff members.

[Scholar]

I guess I should make my point, since....I kinda didn't. Here is, as I described above, the sc2 e-sports model. Let us tf2 see what we can take out of it.

extv is doing a great job, and I understand the difficulties that they go through. I wasn't aiming my post at them. If commf would be to have their own casters, it would be because they approach a team of casters as part of organizing a tournament. esea should approach extv and open them the door so they can do their job more easily, just as tourney organizers do in sc2.

Now, casting itself can be helped as well. In sc2 is so much easier to follow the action since it is (mostly) 1v1. 6v6 or hl introduce the problem of choosing what part of the action to follow. That is why casters use post production in tf2. Is action missed on live events for sc2? yes, of course! But it is the sacrifice they make in order to show their matches live. tf2 can make the same sacrifice, why not? In sc2, for live events, the casters just stream their own POV and the audio of their commentary and that gets recorded in their justin.tv channel or whatever, making the whole uploading process more easily. I believe this is how Salamander does it.....right? not sure.

Look, there are alternatives. We can simplify the problem and make a lot of stress people less stressed :D

Oh and btw slin, a bronze level player plays a much different game than a grandmasters sc2 player. Hell, even sc2 players following bw who were not part of the original community or even played that game also qualify as viewers. Not understanding competitive tf2 as well should not stop viewers from finding tf2 pro players playing fun. Sure, they do it cause airshots are cool. We do it because solid play, and everyone doing their job looks great and we can all learn from it.

[Zigzter]

Oh and btw slin, a bronze level player plays a much different game than a grandmasters sc2 player.

Ermm no they don't.

It still has the same units, same maps, same everything.

As opposed to TF2, where pubs have no limits on anything, and 6v6 has class limits, player amount limit, and weapon bans.