Seems like a good idea

wouldn't there be potential for cheating? I know it is silly, but you could potentially ask the casters what the other team is doing through steam or something.Not saying it would happen, but hey, people have been caught hacking before.

Could probably try and talk to Valve about a broadcaster channel for servers with tournament enabled, kinda like the way Dota 2 is set up. Then you could have the broadcasters casting live and hear it over the STV possibly while still having the independence of watching any perspective while still hearing the cast.

But then again. It's Valve.

that's not really hacking, just cheating

Three biggest issues I see:

1) ESEA. This same idea has been brought up before, and afaik it won't ever happen with ESEA. Supposedly, there is actually a private STV put up for every match, but ESEA won't even give that to casters, so I see no reason they would actually allow casters into the real match server (which are, btw, all 12 slots, so it would require even more work on their part).

2) By using a 90 second stream delay, it will actually take 90 seconds before the streamer realizes any issue with the stream. Also, stream chat will be 90 seconds behind what the casters I seeing (only an issue if the caster decides to read stream chat).

3) There is no more potential to alert the camera man of upcoming plays. He's watching in real time, and has no chance to get messaged about something big happening.

There is already the "potential" for cheating with teams being on the broadcaster mumble and having their comms relayed by a bot. Thankfully the premiership teams seem to be open-minded enough to put their faith in the broadcast orgs wanting a fair contest.

You've kind of answered that yourself. We can never depend on Valve.

maybe this is being incredibly ignorant but would having more people in the server be more work for the server and in turn put out a lesser gaming quality. Although i don't really think it would matter with only 3 more people. feel free to correct me i'm just guessing.

In terms of visuals the streamers have a preview window that they can check to make sure everything is composed correctly. As for lag etc, it's usually a problem with twitch and not the streamer. Sorry John.

It would make it difficult for real-time giveaways and so forth, that's true.

That's a good point. As well as that, unsigned plugins such as Blue's outline spec tool wouldn't work.

i haven't worked with it much, but this theoretically COULD be possible with a server plugin.

That's a good point actually. Maybe Blue's plugin is possible as a server plugin for spectators. Client-side plugins are basically the same as server plugins afaik.

You can do it in a server plugin, but AFAIK you can only enable it for everybody, including the players, or nobody; you can't easily say "I want to modify this player entity but only for the spectators"

Although if someone wants to take that as a challenge, be my guest :D

I enjoy casting from the STV server, and I don't see a problem with using it.

Still, minor problems include:
1. Spoilers, due to delay on STV but not on ESEA website or steam game info.
2. HUD broken after pauses.

Blue's advspec more than outweighs these issues. Casters also cannot react to stream chat in real time.

I think you'll have a hard time convincing ESEA to let you sit in server, as they are consistent with their policy across games. Not sure about EU though.

Casting from STV ensures absolutely no interference from spectators. Even casters could potentially ghost for a friend or team. Needs to be eliminated especially when money is involved. A fair game is a good game.

Not only that, but you actually have a much more complicated setup. You have to delay mumble comms for a mumble cast (if people don't want to watch the stream but want to listen to the cast and watch from STV).

Matches can't be played on 12-14 man servers as many casting teams use 3 people. This could cause delays. Also more players on the servers potentially cause additional lag, even if it's fractional. Probably more importantly, what happens if 5 different commentating organisations wish to commentate the same match, each with three man crews. It simply wouldn't be possible so some teams would have to go onto STV anyway.

There are advantages as you've mentioned and many more, such as being able to move directly to specific players with that go to command, however I don't think they are such a big deal and it's good for the scene to have consistency in the casting, whether it's the big casting organisations, or just some random casting on their own stream.

See post #7.

No different to the delayed comms setup used now, just in reverse.

Server load is mainly caused by model movement and entities such as projectiles, as far as I know. Spectators do not contribute to this, obviously.

Well it seems that right now most if not all organizations are happy to cast from STV anyway, so I don't see much cause for complaint if some people have to be left out.

Didn't Valve do something like that for Dota 2, or does that work differently?

It doesn't help that you can't change the colors with a server-side plugin yet, although we did file that feature request in the Valve tracker.

This is currently the standard over here in the Australian scene, because as greaver would say, casting from STV is "balls".

I guess the realtime log parsing such as Arie's live stats might be the best overall compromise.