Not Your Average DotA Shoutcaster

I don't watch usually watch replays of DotA games, but I have observed many.
 
I am a DotA shoutcaster. I am to DotA what commentators are to soccer. Plus, I often have to do the work of the camera men as well. Because it kind of sucks to have the commentator talk about a goal that wasn't caught on camera. But then again, there's only one ball in soccer to watch, and this is also a horrible analogy.

Cyber-gaming commentators are a new phenomenon, which is pretty obvious, since it has to be newer than competitive cyber-gaming. Yet there are now professional gaming commentators. I am far from a professional gaming commentator, but whatever oratorical skills I lack, I try to make up for with skills in DotA.
 
I'm not your average DotA shoutcaster. The most obvious sign would be the obvious lack of oratorical skills. A less obvious sign is that quite often, I understand more about what is happening in the game then the other 10 players I am observing. This is not an article about shoutcasting. This is an article about what I have learned about DotA players from my experience as a shoutcaster.
 
Around the middle of 2006, Rapture Gaming started having live commentaries for its gaming competitions. I decided that doing some DotA commentaries for them. Chances were that if there was a DotA competition, I would already be there anyway (to play). Now I could have something to do in between games, and also be able to gather information on teams that were possibly threats to my team (by casting their games). Add in some monetary incentives, and providing live DotA commentary was something I could gain a lot from. Plus, it was fun.
 
Over the years, I have provided DotA commentaries for many LAN competitions in Singapore, most notably the various seasons of CAPL (except the most recent one where I was playing and the schedule was more packed then normal), the most recent Alienware Arena tournament in Singapore. The biggest, most intense, and most memorable tournament I shoutcasted was SMM in 2008.

Shoutcasting at SMM 2008. I had to cast from the side of the screen using a projected image

Being a shoutcaster, observing the game from a bird's-eye view, means that I am more aware than the players about what is happening in the game. Being a shoutcaster who also plays competitive DotA, I am able to distinguish between something that was rather inevitable (e.g. getting caught by a blinking Leviathan as the team tank) and an easily avoidable mistake (e.g. running around and getting killed when one could have easily teleported away). I shall now list down some observations about DotA players that I have made from observing and commentating.
 
One. 9 out of 10 times, if someone makes a mistake, he will make the same mistake again within the same game. More often then not, I have seen completely unfair lane fights become even more unfair because the side that is losing, after dying, will return back to the exact same lane with absolutely no difference in circumstance, resulting in them either dying again or being so scared that they are absolutely useless in the lane. Even amongst the top Singaporean teams, I have seen players return to helpless lane situations after dying multiple times.
 
This phenomenon, while commonly seen in the laning phase, is not restricted to it. I have seen Morphlings attempt to backdoor and fail miserably, only to repeat the same action with the same result multiple times, without any variation in method. Many competitive players in fact simply perform actions that work without thinking through them, a result of perhaps having too much experience. However, when an action that they are used to succeeding suddenly fails, many players have nothing to fall back on.
 
Two. Baiting is easy. Or rather, even players that think through things carefully will be easily deceived into pursuing a target they believe they can kill fast, even if the rest of his allies have nowhere else to be but behind him. It is actually more difficult to catch and kill the best players than to lead them into a trap.
 
Often, whether intentionally or not, I have seen teams chasing after a hero they believe they can kill with the next spell. They chase this hero for an unbelievably long time, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of the opposing team is on the way to back up the dying hero.
 
“Now Ant,” you might be wondering, “really, what is the difference between obtaining insights while commentating a game and obtaining insights from watching a replay?”

Actually, there really isn't much difference at all. Except that when I commentate, I do have to actively observe and analyze what is happening, so as to have something to say. Plus, I do intend to bring up the topic of doing DotA commentaries... but I won't explore that here.
 
On to observation number three. Good players are noticeably affected by high stakes. Excellent players are not. Having casted tournaments all the way from the preliminaries to the finals, I often observe a sudden lack of aggression from some players as the tournament moves towards its grand finals. When the stakes are high, many players will take low-risk routes and opt to do things that prevent them from losing out, rather than risking gains. A battle of POTM versus Shadow Fiend can turn from an aggressive battle into one of max range harassment and farming.
That being said, the players that perform exceptionally well for most of the games suffer no drop in aggression. This, unfortunately, does not always pay off. In the grand finals of SMM 2008, ice played his usual aggressive self against EHOME, and was rewarded with multiple deaths. This is actually not unusual of him, but is a scenario that only the most confident of players are willing to accept, knowing that regardless of the stakes, they are willing to risk failure to win the game.

There are many other points I can cover as to my experience with casting DotA games, but as for now, with regard to general observations gleaned from commentating games, this is as far as I go.