[InsideLounge] Heartless

The last couple of times at Inside Lounge we already started to introduce some of the teams of Heroes Lounge to you. However, Heroes Lounge is not only a place where amateur teams can play Heroes of the Storm more competitive, but also a place where people can get involved with something, use and develop their individual skills, helping the community to grow and the Heroes of the Storm amateur scene in general. Thus, there are a lot of people organising, administrating, programming, writing, and - of course - casting inside the lounge. Read now about the head of Heroes Lounge caster team - Heartless. 

You are with Heroes Lounge since the beginning, have casted a lot of games already in Season 1 and now you are the head of the casters team. How did that all started out? 

I have been wanting to get into casting for a while now and have actually started on Chair League, but it was quite harsh on me, time zone wise, since they are NA based, but it gave me the initial experience I needed. I also applied to cast a few small tournaments, and was accepted, but they were eventually all canceled, so no luck there. Eventually I saw Comics’ post on Reddit and asked him if he is looking for casters, he said yes and, well, here I am. 

Obviously, you are putting a lot of work into Heroes Lounge. Much of that is left unseen for the majority of Heroes Lounge followers. Tell us a bit about it! How much time do you invest into Heroes Lounge? 

As head of casters and stream manager I'm trying my best to make sure we have good production value (Epixors), which means that with all our new casters, I've spent a great deal of time setting up their stream and making sure it's to my satisfaction. I'm also constantly watching their stream to see what can be improved on, though, to be honest, they are all doing a fantastic job so far. As far as time spent, at least an hour on a chill day, on days like Super Sunday, can be as much as 4 hours, though it's usually spread between the days since there is a lot of preparation going on for that.

Our casters team is doing a great job in casting most of the games. Tell us how many casters do we have, how many co-casters! 

We currently have 9 "home" casters Epixors, GOAFTY, Halloween, Nera, VenoM, Ruini, Reynaerdus, Fictional & myself and on top of that we got Khaldor, Jowe & CavalierGuest who's helping out casting on their channel. And we got 9 CoCasters: Carvisjocker, Tetsu, Skylore, Robb, TyphoonHawk, Junglesiege, Jabroni, Froge and Badkitty. 

On Super Sunday 2 the main channel was in the top 10 of Heroes of the Storm streams on Twitch. A huge success. What is the feedback like which you got? How would you describe the development of the casting/streaming part of Heroes Lounge?

The overall feedback that I've gotten was that it was a lot of fun, nothing constructive that we should focus on to improve. As far as the development of the casting and streaming goes, I will address each one separately: In streaming, I think we have come a long way since the early days, and a big part of it is thanks to MacDino, who came up with the idea to unify the OBS overlay for all casters and of course was the one to design it. For the casting part, we did not have nearly as many casters in Season 1 as we got nowadays, but it is not just about the numbers. Every caster we got now went through an interview with me where I just gouged his personality (to the best of my abilities) and decided if he fits or not, hopefully, I did a good enough job and the viewers enjoy the new line of casters we got in Heroes Lounge. 

Since you are casting a lot of the games, you certainly have great knowledge about all the teams and players at Heroes Lounge. Tell us for which team are you cheering, which impresses you at most and for which team should we look out for?

in Season 1 the team that impressed me the most, was Water Dragons, sadly, they disbanded, and their players are now spread across other teams, but their aggressive playstyle is something I will never forget (and they were successful with it), in Season 2, the team that impressed me the most so far is Chirand, they are only Div3, but they have some fantastic coordination, something I haven't seen in a while in Heroes Lounge so look out for them! 

How much Heroes of the Storm are you playing by yourself? Which roles/heroes do you like most and how good are you?

I have played Heroes of the Storm since Alpha, so quite a lot, granted, I wasn't too active back then, as I really got into the game only during the Pre-Season. I play a fair amount, I would say 2-3 hours a day, less on weekends (weekend HotS DansGame) I enjoy playing mostly tanks, as I am a fairly aggressive player in nature, so being able to initiate is something I enjoy doing (and less chance of being punished), otherwise I enjoy playing any role so long as it is not support. My favorites heroes are Tychus, Thrall, Alarak, Kerrigan, ETC, Muradin, Sylvanas, Abathur. How good am I? guess I am decent. I was rank 1 in the Pre-Season, Masters in Season 1 and Masters in Season 2, still got lots to improve on though. 

What are you doing besides your work on Heroes Lounge?

I am a partner in a YouTube channel (I am the one who manages it) which gives me the freedom to work from home which is why I am almost always available.

In about 20 minutes we have a lot of @BlizzHeroes action for you! We start with last seasons winner No Trick Ponies: https://t.co/HBakeXGw6b pic.twitter.com/TMK369mey7

— Heroes Lounge (@hotslounge) December 18, 2016

Super Sundays tell us that it’s going to be really hard to cast all games in future! Tell us, will we need to have a fixed schedule? Maybe fixed time slots for teams to assign their matches to with only max. 3 games per time slot or something?

This is actually a good question and something we discussed between the mods, and the conclusion is that in the end of the day this is an amateur league and that means that the players here have other things going on that are quite time consuming (work, family, school, friends, memes in discord, et cetera), so we do not want to limit their options as far as schedule goes. It will be ideal for us casters and organisers, but very much not so for the players. Thus, we decided that they are the priority and not the stream and if that means some games won't be cast, so be it. 

How do you value cooperation’s with other casters like Cavalier Guest, Khaldor or Jowe? 

I think any other answer than "highly" would be incorrect here. They have done immensely for the league and we are all very grateful for them! They have brought professionalism, exposure, viewers, players and many other things for the league and are an important part of its success. 

Some advertisement or shoutouts you want to share? 

A big shoutout to all the players, viewers, mods, casters & organisers in Heroes Lounge! You have all made this happen! 

Thanks to Heartless for the time. If you liked what you just read, make sure to leave him a Follow on twitter. Any feedback or suggestions for what's next on Inside Lounge? Contact us within the Heroes Lounge Discord or via Twitter or Facebook.