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Gravelpit is an awesome map. I might add though, I hate playing it, because I’m bad at it.

The problem with this cast, is that when you commentate gravelpit, you have 60 seconds setup time, where you would usually talk about the current setup of the defending team, and anything unusual in the attack. On the stage, there aren’t many game sounds going on, so they will be able to hear us through their headphones, and we can’t discuss anything… which point they are defending, anything different on A, what classes they are using. They could all be CRUCIAL, considering gravelpit is a map where the result can be turned on it’s head with just the click of a button.

So we have 60 seconds where we can’t talk….. Okay fine.

But no…… then we have another 60 seconds, where the attacking team pushes up to A. We can’t even discuss if the medic has stayed in the spawn, or the direction the players are pushing, because again, there isn’t any action, which means both teams can be listening to what we are saying. At this point, we can only hope for a suicide or a spy play or something, and we can’t talk about that until after it happens!

Even after that, there’s a slow walk to B, where we can’t disclose the route of the players, can’t mention if they are running kritz or uber, or snipers. It’s only 2.5 – 3 minutes into the game that we can actually talk through some play by play, and then some post event analysis.

After that, we can’t discuss the ‘re-setup’ we can’t discuss the routes they are taking, because that knowledge can easily influence the game.

The map is AMAZING to cast online, or just from a STV game, because you can really dig into the strategies, you can discuss if teams are unaware of something. It was just extremely hard to cast the map on stage because there’s no action happening, and you can’t talk about the strats. At best, you can either bore the crowd to death with information about the teams, or you can stand up and dance like a monkey, shout and scream. Either way, you’re either going to look like an idiot, or it’s going to be pretty dull.

At least when the team has to beat the time, you have something to talk about (how much time they have left).

Still, hope it was ok!

tl;dr sound proof booths

I actually walked out during gravelpit.

Quoted from atmo

isolating headphones might be *slightly* cheaper, and I’m sure they could get some shitty headset maker to sponsor them

For quake (not 100% relevant since comms are non exsistent in Duel but w/e) they wear in-ear headphones that are then covered by 2nd hand Pilot Headsets to make sure all noise is cancelled (the pilot headsets aren’t plugged in).

You could do something similar for tf2 (perhaps with even just the mic of the headset plugged in and using the in-ear phones for sound).

It was fun to watch, and the last 10 minutes were brilliant.
However, gullywash and badlands were amazing, and I feel that if we’d had 3 cp maps then the final would have been even better. The whole map might have just been acceptable though because we got to see harbleu dying from fall damage jumping off the roof and mackey bombing in to focus the teleporter and failing hahaa.

Arx and Beta did a really great job casting too, especially considering the limitations of that map. Balanced not giving anything away with being entertaining very very well.