Category: Stream

So it’s been a while since I made a post on here.  I guess you could say I completely failed my goal of posting on here regularly and as well as my consistent streaming I had been trying to do.  Hell, I couldn’t even get this post up in a timely manner, it’s been sitting here in the works for over a week now.  I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing the reasons by now because they are the same as they’ve always been.  Work has been killing me in a good way, things outside of work have been keeping me away from games, and there hasn’t been a ton that has interested me lately.

I seem to always be saying work has been ruining my game time but I guess really it’s all for the best.  Since the beginning of the year I’ve gone from a normal software engineer at work, to being a technical lead on one of the core critical systems and most recently a project manager on another one of the sub projects for our massive system overhaul we’ve been working on.  Learning all the new responsibilities that I had for those new projects was a ton of work but has been very interesting and a lot of fun.  The only bad part as I’m sure you’ve noticed is that I haven’t had time to do much else right now.

With all that said, I do hope that I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things again soon.  I’m not going to make any promises like I tried to do last time about my stream schedule or post schedule but we’ll see what works and move on from there.  Hope to see all you wonderful people again soon!

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Not too long ago I listed the reasons why I took a break from streaming. So today I figured it would be fitting to answer another question that I used to get asked all the time; why I ever started streaming.  Now that everyone and their mother seems to be streaming, most people probably don’t care, but back when I started in in July 2011, it was a very popular question.  The reasons I started back then, are also the reasons I have recently gotten back into streaming again.

 

Forever alone no more

Before I started streaming I was in a transition period in my gaming life.  Most of the people I was gaming with at the time  were losing interest or not having time anymore and I ended up spending more and more time playing games solo.  Streaming gave a new way to find new people who had not only the same interest I had in loving games, but also liked the same games I liked.  Some of the people that I still play a lot of games with to this day are people that I met through streaming.

Even when I am not able to play games with the viewers who come into the channel, I am still able pass the time by just hanging out with them and the various conversations that occur.  It can be difficult to follow the conversations sometimes while trying to play the game, but that can also provide some of the fun when I read half of what someone says and make up the rest as I go.  This has turned into one of the things that I look forward to the most whenever I turn my stream on nowadays.

 

Single player with a group

As much as I like single player games, historically they have been nothing but a waste of money for me.  I’ll bu them when they come out and then play them once or twice for a couple hours never to play them again.  It’s not because they are bad games, but because I get bored when I’m playing games by myself.  Although I still spend the majority of my time playing multiplayer games, streaming has turned single player games into a group activity for me.  People can come and laugh at how I get lost in the most linear games possible, rage at puzzles that a five year old could solve faster than I do, or fail at the same point in a level for the thousandth time.

 

Even the trolls can teach

The competitive side of me always makes me strive to get better at any of the games I play.  Streaming has opened the flood gates by letting anyone come in and be a backseat gamer.  Whether a person is actually trying to be helpful or just trying to troll the channel, the advice is always welcome.  Additionally, just like how explaining a process to another person can help yourself find problems, explaining why I do something or what I was thinking can help find problems in my play.

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But Why?

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Since I started streaming again, one of the questions I get asked the most is why I ever stopped streaming to begin with. I’m sure everyone has heard me answer how I got busy and had to stop, and how my computer was overheating so I had to take a break from it. Those are all true for certain periods of time during the break, but there is so much more behind the true answer.

 

The Rise of the Stream

When the stream started, I happened to be in a right place right time scenario.  Twitch had just broken off of Justin.tv and the Team Fortress 2 community was lacking quality streams.  Because of this the stream was able to quickly rise up the ranks to being, at the time, a relatively successful stream.  In a few months it went from having 10-20 views a session to easily getting over 1000 a day.  Everyone was having a grand ole time and things were looking up.

During that time streaming in general was becoming more popular, and specifically in TF2, the community was blowing up where more and more streams were popping up every day.  Soon after streams from popular YouTubers and invite players were started and it was looking like things were going to continue going strong.

 

The Big Mistake

Being the dreamer that I am and the early success of the stream, my mind started racing with different possibilities.  We were on the cusp of hitting a pretty big milestone at the time of average over 100 concurrent viewers, hit over 1000 followers and 100,000 views.  The first failures we ran into were in trying to expand to be more then just a TF2 pub stream.  As I got deeper into the competitive scene, my attention to the stream and the amazing viewers we had at the time started to slack off.  I didn’t realize it then, but one of the major reasons I was having the success I did was because of the interaction with the chat.  Once the interaction started slipping, the viewers started to lose interest and go somewhere else.

The big mistake however, was losing sight of why the stream was started and what it was all being done for.  Somewhere along the ling, I started to think less about just relaxing and having fun with all the cool people I had met, and instead started focusing on the numbers.  When the numbers started dipping I started to get frustrated at the situation and instead of keeping to the regular stream schedule, would regularly skip days between streams.  Over time the overall quality of the stream decreased, and eventually streaming became a chore instead of something I was doing for fun.  It was at that point that I took some time to reevaluate what I was doing and put my focus on something else for a while.

 

The Other Reasons:

The break ended up being a lot longer than I had planned because this silly little thing called life kept popping up in the way.  Here are the other major things that happened to delay the comeback:

  • I left my dream job to take a more secure position in the more boring industry of financial markets
  • Bought a house.  There was significantly more involved in buying a house then I had thought.
  • House fell apart.  I believe it was Murphy who said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.  So of course after I bought a house, everything on the house started breaking causing endless headaches and time to get it all fixed.
  • Computer couldn’t handle it.  When I tried to start streaming at the beginning of the year, my computer started overheating which made it so I had to choose between saving my computer of streaming.  At the time I chose to keep my computer alive longer.
  • I just plain got old.  It happens to all of us, and as it happened to me I had to take some time off from games to focus on other things

 

So now you all know the full story on why I took a break, and why the break ended up being so long.  It’s all better now though because things have settled down, I finally remembered why I started streaming to begin with, and we are back at it and having a blast.  Got anything else you want to know about, contact me or simply leave a comment here.

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