We are Dota2 players! Chuan from Invictus Gaming, BananaSlamJamma from Summer’s Rift, Dread from HellRaisers, Zai from Team Secret, and Mushi from Team My - AUA!

If you could be a Dota Hero, which one would you like to be and why?

Morphling because AQUAMAN

question for everyone. even you LD. How did you get discovered? or how did you get to where you are now?

I started commentating DOTA 1 replays and submitted a few to Dotacommentaries. Eventually Luminous gave me feedback after a lot of nagging messages from me. He graciously agreed to co-cast a few replays with me, and then I slowly found more opportunities to do live commentary as time went on! It took a lot of persistence and a bit of luck to get noticed, and I'd expect the same is true for most players.

Nice, thanks for this AMA! My questions:

All: Least favourite hero to lane against?

Chuan: How comfortable were those maid costumes?

BSJ: Do you do anything besides DotA? University/work?

Zai: You traveled a lot with EG and Secret. Do you have opportunities to actually do sightseeing? What was your favourite place so far?

Mushi: Do you think the SEA DotA 2 scene is in a good place right now? If not, what would you like to change?

Dread: What do you think you would do today if you weren't a progamer?

LD: Where did you take the courage from to committ full-time to BTS? How much of a risk did you take back then?

It was a pretty huge risk financially, but I have a very supportive family and had saved up a decent amount from my previous work running my own consulting practice. I had a decent work history before I started commentating and a college degree from Dartmouth, so I had more of a fall-back plan than a lot of other people in esports. That said, these past few years have been incredibly exciting and fulfilling, and I'm glad I took the leap back in 2012.

LD do you have any regrets about BTS? What would you go back and change if you could?

I don't have any regrets about BTS, but if I could go back and change something, I think we'd try to do a better job of being transparent about how much work goes into everything we do off-camera. I think 2GD is one of the best people in the DOTA 2 space at showcasing how much he's doing behind the scenes in a positive way that makes people appreciate his contributions. There are a lot of other people who do as much or more, but most of them aren't nearly as good at conveying that to the community in a positive / fun way.

I pretty much work on BTS 24/7, and the same is true for the majority of our people. If I'm not casting, I'm helping build PCs, stress-testing our network / internet, negotiating with talent working our events, booking flights / hotels for players, setting up production equipment for our events, writing rules, collecting paperwork from teams, meeting with sponsors, etc. To be honest, I grew up fairly introverted, and sometimes I don't invest enough time/energy in communicating with the community (partially just because of how busy we are, and partially because it's probably not my biggest strength).

We're still in that transition phase between small startup and full-time commercial business, which is where sometimes our people end up being stretched a little thin with more areas of responsibilities than at a more traditional, established company. It can be tough to navigate, and there are growing pains, but we're working hard to continue growing as a brand and adding value to the DOTA 2 community wherever we can.

To all: How many hours would each of you say you've put into playing dota to get to this point?

I've probably played / commentated somewhere between 10,000-25,000 hours total between DOTA 1 and DOTA 2. Really hard to say for sure, but years of my life as a kid / college student were spent playing like 6-8 hours of pubs a day.

Hey LD, did the whole "WAOW!" meme annoy you when it first blew out?

What most people don't know about that clip was that it was VERY early in my DOTA 2 casting career. I had only been casting for ~4-5 months, and I had never worked a live event before. Since then, I've noticed a lot of the newer play-by-play/hype casters tend to have the same issue I did, where you go a little bonkers at your first major event. While I'm definitely not the only one, I just so happened to debut on a bigger stage, and someone just so happened to made a Youtube video about it, and so a meme was born. In general, I think these types of "overreactions" are just a combination of nerves and excitement coupled with a strange new environment, which is why we generally tend to see them happen most with newer commentators.

It used to bother me a lot, since the clip usually gets cited by people who aren't fans of my commentary as "proof" that I suck at hype and have no game knowledge, when it's literally one moment out of well over 1200 casts. Nowadays, I usually have a pretty good sense of humor about it, though it can be tiresome to constantly hear the same old repetitive joke :P