I posted that in March it took me 303 games played to hit Legend. April saw Hearthstone fall to my3rd most played Blizzard game with both World of Warcraft and Diablo III jumping to the forefront. As a result I ended up playing only 105 games through the first 29 days of the month. I made a push on the last day with another 62 games played but it wasn't enough. I ended up finishing at rank 3, missing out on Legend, and losing the chance to make that a notch in my imaginary Hearthstone belt.
Most of my play in April was spent learning a neat new deck I saw in a tournament that was widely described as the hardest deck to play in the game. I saw multiple pros fail to finish a critical turn in the minute and a half you're given and lose the game as a result. I won 57% of my 60 games with the deck, which is pretty good, and in almost every loss I saw a way I could have won if I'd played differently. It sure is a deck that takes a lot of practice!
Anyway, it makes me want to really learn the deck and hit legend with it in May. But that hasn't actually gotten me to play much. Less than 2 weeks to go and I've only played 34 games of constructed all month! 19 of them were with the patron deck I'm trying to learn and I've won over 84% of my games with it. I'm not exactly playing good players with good decks yet since I again waited so long to start playing this month, but it's still an encouraging sign. I need to get up to the top and start losing to good players to see what weaknesses this deck actually has!
Monday, May 18, 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
World of Warcraft: Back to Raiding
A couple weeks ago I was thinking about games I'd played in the past that I wish I'd streamed. World of Warcraft was the first one that jumped to mind. Having a recording of how I'd played undoubtedly would have been good for getting better, and it would also be nice to have things like Tribute to Dedicated Insanity up on Youtube to be able to watch and reminisce about years in the future. The very next day Sky put up a post on his blog about differences in recruiting in his current guild and in the one we used to run back in the day.
WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...
{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}
Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.
I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.
I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...
WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...
{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}
Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.
I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.
I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...
Friday, April 10, 2015
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls
Ike and I have been looking for a game we could stream together. I was watching Witwix a couple days ago and he was talking about how he had a 24 hour stream planned for Friday since that was the start of the new season for Diablo III. I haven't played any of the expansion at all yet, so 'new season' didn't mean all that much to me, but it felt like it might be a game Ike and I could play co-op. I suggested it to Ike, he tested to make sure his computer could handle streaming it, and it looks like we're good to go.
As I said, I don't have the expansion, and I wasn't really looking forward to paying Blizzard $40 for it. I did some searching around and found a bunch of different websites that sell keys for games. Initially this feels really sketchy. Have these sites cracked the key generation code and are just manufacturing keys? Did they buy a ton of keys from a country where the game is cheaper? Hack accounts in some way? Are they just scamming entirely?
Then there is the other option, which is that Blizzard is just engaging in variable pricing. Micro economics does say that the seller would ideally like to sell their product for the maximum amount of money to each individual buyer. But they can't well have on their website a button to buy a game for $40 and a button to buy the same game for $20. It's easy to make a more expensive button with a sound track or whatnot, but they'd likely lose more money from $40 people switching to $20 then they would gain from additional $20 sales. What they could do is sell keys to resellers for $20 and then let them mark them up a little bit and sell to the people unwilling to pay $40.
I then noticed that one of the key reseller sites sponsors the pro gaming team Cloud 9, which is my favourite NA LCS team. My favourite Hearthstone streamer, Hafu, is also on Cloud 9, and has an ad on her stream for the key reseller with a small discount code. So they're probably not straight up scammers, I would hope? There's certainly a spectrum of options for how they got their keys and some of them are pretty reasonable to support.
The bottom line is that if I was currently employed I'd just click the button on Blizzard's website and pay whatever they want to charge. But as things currently stand saving $20 is worth the risk of not knowing exactly how G2A gets their keys. So I snapped yesterday and finally picked up the D3 expansion.
I tried playing a bit, but everything is completely changed from the game I used to know. I have no idea what my old level 60 character's build should be, or if the gear she has is useful or not. But that's what a new season is for! Paragon points and stash and crafters and everything is completely wiped out for characters created in the new season.
So tonight Ike and I are going to try streaming from 10pm-midnight atlantic time. I'm going to try out the new class in the expansion, crusader, and I think Ike is going to shoot things from afar with a demon hunter. I don't know anything about what classes might be good or not except that Witwix said every 4 person group 'needs' a '0 DPS' witch doctor for some reason. I've never played any witch doctor at all... If I end up wanting to play without Ike then maybe I'll start one of those and try out public groups if those are a thing?
As I said, I don't have the expansion, and I wasn't really looking forward to paying Blizzard $40 for it. I did some searching around and found a bunch of different websites that sell keys for games. Initially this feels really sketchy. Have these sites cracked the key generation code and are just manufacturing keys? Did they buy a ton of keys from a country where the game is cheaper? Hack accounts in some way? Are they just scamming entirely?
Then there is the other option, which is that Blizzard is just engaging in variable pricing. Micro economics does say that the seller would ideally like to sell their product for the maximum amount of money to each individual buyer. But they can't well have on their website a button to buy a game for $40 and a button to buy the same game for $20. It's easy to make a more expensive button with a sound track or whatnot, but they'd likely lose more money from $40 people switching to $20 then they would gain from additional $20 sales. What they could do is sell keys to resellers for $20 and then let them mark them up a little bit and sell to the people unwilling to pay $40.
I then noticed that one of the key reseller sites sponsors the pro gaming team Cloud 9, which is my favourite NA LCS team. My favourite Hearthstone streamer, Hafu, is also on Cloud 9, and has an ad on her stream for the key reseller with a small discount code. So they're probably not straight up scammers, I would hope? There's certainly a spectrum of options for how they got their keys and some of them are pretty reasonable to support.
The bottom line is that if I was currently employed I'd just click the button on Blizzard's website and pay whatever they want to charge. But as things currently stand saving $20 is worth the risk of not knowing exactly how G2A gets their keys. So I snapped yesterday and finally picked up the D3 expansion.
I tried playing a bit, but everything is completely changed from the game I used to know. I have no idea what my old level 60 character's build should be, or if the gear she has is useful or not. But that's what a new season is for! Paragon points and stash and crafters and everything is completely wiped out for characters created in the new season.
So tonight Ike and I are going to try streaming from 10pm-midnight atlantic time. I'm going to try out the new class in the expansion, crusader, and I think Ike is going to shoot things from afar with a demon hunter. I don't know anything about what classes might be good or not except that Witwix said every 4 person group 'needs' a '0 DPS' witch doctor for some reason. I've never played any witch doctor at all... If I end up wanting to play without Ike then maybe I'll start one of those and try out public groups if those are a thing?
Monday, April 06, 2015
ALL the Achievements?!?
I finally found the last two items in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and have now unlocked all 178 achievements for the game. It may come as a bit of a surprise, but this is actually the first game in which I've earned all the achievements. I really like trying to get achievements which is why it seems so weird to me that I've never gotten them all in any game before. Why is that?
Surely the biggest part is that official achievements only came into existence a fair bit into my gaming life. If Krusty's Super Fun House on the SNES had achievements I surely would have earned them all. I likely would have picked up all the achievements in a variety of older RPGs too. The SNES and PSX era Final Fantasy games in particular, but even something like The 7th Saga or Wizardry V I probably would have gotten them all if they existed.
And then once achievements started becoming a thing I spent the vast majority of my gaming time playing either World of Warcraft or League of Legends. LoL has no achievements at all, and WoW has way too many achievements! I have an awful lot of them, including some stupidly hard/crazy ones, but getting them all would have required being really dedicated at all aspects of the game. And ditching my guild for one that ran 25 mans.
I found a website a while ago that tracks Steam achievements. I now have fully completed 1.2% of the games in my Steam library that have achievements. But 47.1% of the games are sitting at 0% achievements! That's sure showing how many games I haven't even gotten around to installing. And that still leaves 51.8% of my library that I started but never finished getting all the achievements.
It has me wondering if maybe I should work on completing some more games? Having some direction could help with forcing myself to stream more, too. Maybe spend a day or two per week solely streaming achievement earning runs of things? It would also be a good excuse to replay some very good games, like Alan Wake and DmC. But I don't know that achievement farming would make for terribly interesting content...
But hey, at least now I can say I'm a REAL platinum god!
Surely the biggest part is that official achievements only came into existence a fair bit into my gaming life. If Krusty's Super Fun House on the SNES had achievements I surely would have earned them all. I likely would have picked up all the achievements in a variety of older RPGs too. The SNES and PSX era Final Fantasy games in particular, but even something like The 7th Saga or Wizardry V I probably would have gotten them all if they existed.
And then once achievements started becoming a thing I spent the vast majority of my gaming time playing either World of Warcraft or League of Legends. LoL has no achievements at all, and WoW has way too many achievements! I have an awful lot of them, including some stupidly hard/crazy ones, but getting them all would have required being really dedicated at all aspects of the game. And ditching my guild for one that ran 25 mans.
I found a website a while ago that tracks Steam achievements. I now have fully completed 1.2% of the games in my Steam library that have achievements. But 47.1% of the games are sitting at 0% achievements! That's sure showing how many games I haven't even gotten around to installing. And that still leaves 51.8% of my library that I started but never finished getting all the achievements.
It has me wondering if maybe I should work on completing some more games? Having some direction could help with forcing myself to stream more, too. Maybe spend a day or two per week solely streaming achievement earning runs of things? It would also be a good excuse to replay some very good games, like Alan Wake and DmC. But I don't know that achievement farming would make for terribly interesting content...
But hey, at least now I can say I'm a REAL platinum god!
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Hearthstone: Blackrock Mountain
Tomorrow brings with it the release of the new adventure for Hearthstone: Blackrock Mountain. The way adventures work in the game is you get a bunch of challenging AI opponents to play against that emulate different dungeons/raids from World of Warcraft. Beating the opponent gives you new cards to use in constructed, including some potentially awesome legendary cards. Loatheb and Kel'Thuzad came from the first adventure, for example, and those cards are in my current constructed deck! Along with some of the commons and rares from that adventure too. Owning that adventure isn't really optional when it comes to playing constructed and I suspect the same will be true of this one too.
So then the question is... How to buy it? There are 5 wings to the adventure and they're going to unlock one per week. You can pay 700 in game gold for a wing, or you can pay $7 for a wing, or you can pay $5 per wing for every wing you don't own. I think the $7 for one wing is a little silly. You have to buy them in order and you need them all if you want all the cards. So buying one wing at a time with cash feels just wrong. So the real question, assuming you have gold to spend, is if you'd want to spend $5 to get 700 gold or not. Personally I'm sitting on 2190 gold so I could buy 3 wings with gold easily. And it's certainly possible that in the next 3 weeks I'll make 700 gold to get the 4th one too... But I do need more classic cards, so spending gold on packs is a real thing I might want to do.
Assuming I was willing to spend $25 on packs, how many would I get? 40 packs would run me $50 so you'd think $25 would get 20. You get a bulk discount so I'd probably only actually get 18 or so, but whatever. Spending 3500 gold on packs would get me 35 packs. So if one was going to spend cash, spending it on the BRM adventure would be about twice as efficient as spending it on packs.
I do think this is a pretty sensible way for a 'free' game to make money. Sporadically put out extra content you can buy efficiently or can grind in game to earn. It makes it easier for someone like me to justify paying them some money without feeling too much like it's just a pay to win scheme. Though as a CCG it certainly still has aspects of that.
I bought Naxx because I didn't have any gold at all. I want more classic cards enough that I think if I was currently employed I'd have no qualms at all about plunking down the $25 for BRM. But I don't have a job, and I do have gold sitting around, and I certainly have constructed viable decks without buying more packs... So I'm going to spend the gold I have on BRM wings.
So then the question is... How to buy it? There are 5 wings to the adventure and they're going to unlock one per week. You can pay 700 in game gold for a wing, or you can pay $7 for a wing, or you can pay $5 per wing for every wing you don't own. I think the $7 for one wing is a little silly. You have to buy them in order and you need them all if you want all the cards. So buying one wing at a time with cash feels just wrong. So the real question, assuming you have gold to spend, is if you'd want to spend $5 to get 700 gold or not. Personally I'm sitting on 2190 gold so I could buy 3 wings with gold easily. And it's certainly possible that in the next 3 weeks I'll make 700 gold to get the 4th one too... But I do need more classic cards, so spending gold on packs is a real thing I might want to do.
Assuming I was willing to spend $25 on packs, how many would I get? 40 packs would run me $50 so you'd think $25 would get 20. You get a bulk discount so I'd probably only actually get 18 or so, but whatever. Spending 3500 gold on packs would get me 35 packs. So if one was going to spend cash, spending it on the BRM adventure would be about twice as efficient as spending it on packs.
I do think this is a pretty sensible way for a 'free' game to make money. Sporadically put out extra content you can buy efficiently or can grind in game to earn. It makes it easier for someone like me to justify paying them some money without feeling too much like it's just a pay to win scheme. Though as a CCG it certainly still has aspects of that.
I bought Naxx because I didn't have any gold at all. I want more classic cards enough that I think if I was currently employed I'd have no qualms at all about plunking down the $25 for BRM. But I don't have a job, and I do have gold sitting around, and I certainly have constructed viable decks without buying more packs... So I'm going to spend the gold I have on BRM wings.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Godhead Unlocked!
If you take a look at the screenshot you'll note it took me over 54 minutes to beat the boss rush. Now, you have to start it in under 20 minutes so that means I spent a good 34 minutes actually beating the boss rush. That seems ludicrous. Especially once I tell you that I actually didn't get a single damage up item until the devil deal at the end of the 5th floor, and even then it wasn't a very big one. I barely killed Mom's Foot in under 20 minutes! So what did I do?
I combined the item 'gnawed leaf' which makes you immune to damage as long as you don't move and the passive damage sources 'guppy's hairball' and 'lil haunt'. Any enemy that touched the hairball behind my character would take a small amount of damage. Any enemy that came really close to me would aggro the haunt who would then follow them around doing small amounts of damage. So with only a couple exceptions (enemies who never came close to me) I just watched Hafu play Hearthstone without touching my controller and waited to win.
What a stupid solution to a stupid challenge. But now it's done! (Beating 5 floors with no damage increases is actually pretty darn hard, so I don't feel too bad for cheesing the ending. Turns out holy mantle and stop watch are really good for not dying!)
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Hearthstone: March Legend!
From my post it took 266 wins last month to get to legend in Hearthstone. I just hit legend for this month this afternoon and it took 174 wins in 303 games. Part of the difference is going to be starting from a higher point this time around so I needed to earn something like 14 fewer wins this time around, but a much bigger part would have to be my winning percentage. I have 414 games recorded from last month before I hit legend and I didn't log the first couple days! I was winning about 53.6% of my games that month. This month I won 45.5% of my 22 games with hunter, 56.4% of 78 games with mage, and 59.1% of 203 games with paladin. I'm still learning hunter and know I threw some of those games away with obvious mistakes, let alone the subtle ones, so I'm not saying hunter is bad or anything. Just that I hadn't practiced it before while I had played the other two.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my opponents over the course of this month. I'm not super in the know with how to classify decks so I'm going to use the rough categories of aggro and control. Mech decks, zoo warlocks, face hunters, and a few misc weenie decks got classified as aggro. Pretty much everything else is control, even if 'control hunter' is still a pretty aggressive deck. Anyway, 28% of my games were against aggro decks and 72% were against control. The vast majority of the aggro decks were hunter (36%), mage (32%), and warlock (13%). Control decks were much more varied, with hunter (17%), druid (16%), mage (15%), paladin (13%), and rogue (10%) all showing up.
Overall when it comes to class mix hunter lead the way with 22% of my opponents. Mages made up 20%, with druid (13%) and paladin (10%) being the other classes to break the 10% mark. So if you were trying to hit legend this month having a deck that could hold up well against those classes would be a good idea. My paladin deck crushes druid (70% win rate) and holds up quite well against the other three popular classes. (59% against hunter, 56% against mage, 63% against paladin!) It has a rough time against rogues (44% win rate) but was better than 50% against every other class. Some of the games could go rather long so I wouldn't be surprised if mech mage would have been faster even with a lower win percentage.
I slotted in at 652 on the legend ladder, which is far off of top 50 or top 100. With only 3 days left in the month I'm not sure if it's worth trying to win my way up or if I should use this time to play other games. Or maybe to get more experience with hunter?
I've included an image of my current paladin list. If I owned the cards I would want to test out using Sylvanas Windrunner and Harrison Jones instead of Piloted Sky Golem and Kel'Thuzad. More than half of my opponents played decks with weapons in them! Maybe I should think about putting in an ooze until I get a Jones...
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my opponents over the course of this month. I'm not super in the know with how to classify decks so I'm going to use the rough categories of aggro and control. Mech decks, zoo warlocks, face hunters, and a few misc weenie decks got classified as aggro. Pretty much everything else is control, even if 'control hunter' is still a pretty aggressive deck. Anyway, 28% of my games were against aggro decks and 72% were against control. The vast majority of the aggro decks were hunter (36%), mage (32%), and warlock (13%). Control decks were much more varied, with hunter (17%), druid (16%), mage (15%), paladin (13%), and rogue (10%) all showing up.Overall when it comes to class mix hunter lead the way with 22% of my opponents. Mages made up 20%, with druid (13%) and paladin (10%) being the other classes to break the 10% mark. So if you were trying to hit legend this month having a deck that could hold up well against those classes would be a good idea. My paladin deck crushes druid (70% win rate) and holds up quite well against the other three popular classes. (59% against hunter, 56% against mage, 63% against paladin!) It has a rough time against rogues (44% win rate) but was better than 50% against every other class. Some of the games could go rather long so I wouldn't be surprised if mech mage would have been faster even with a lower win percentage.
I slotted in at 652 on the legend ladder, which is far off of top 50 or top 100. With only 3 days left in the month I'm not sure if it's worth trying to win my way up or if I should use this time to play other games. Or maybe to get more experience with hunter?
I've included an image of my current paladin list. If I owned the cards I would want to test out using Sylvanas Windrunner and Harrison Jones instead of Piloted Sky Golem and Kel'Thuzad. More than half of my opponents played decks with weapons in them! Maybe I should think about putting in an ooze until I get a Jones...
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Streaming Hours
Back at the end of last month I told myself this month I'd put more hours into streaming. You never know how things will go unless you actually just try it out, right? A lot of the advice I've heard on random streams I watch has to do with just putting in time at the start to see what works for you, but you need to actually put in enough time to give repeat viewers a chance to come back. And at the start of the month I actually had one guy who was showing up every day. Pretty much because I was the only English speaking person playing Isaac while this kid was getting ready for school, but that's at least a start, right? I haven't actually seen him in a while. (Turns out he unfollowed me at some point?) But since I haven't really been streaming lately I can't really say I blame him...
I have started tracking hours put in, and I have 3 weeks worth of data now...
So on only 3 days in the last 3 months did I put in even close to a 'full day' of streaming. People talk about streaming 12+ hours a day every day for months in order to build up a viewer base. These three weeks are clearly nowhere near that level so it really isn't surprising that I have a total of 18 followers.
The question now is... Can I do better? What things were keeping me from streaming more this month and what can be done to overcome them?
The first is health related. I went to the doctor on the 13th and he doubled my Paxil dose. When I first switched to Paxil in January I ended up sleeping a lot and being rather lightheaded for a couple weeks. (I believe this was a large contributing factor to my collapsing in the hospital shortly after the switch.) So it isn't too surprising that doubling the dose has caused me to feel pretty similar. I've been sleeping a lot the last couple weeks (probably closer to 12 hours per day instead of 8) and have really not felt up to doing much of anything but sitting in a chair vegging out most of the time. Putting in effort to talk about what games I'm playing hasn't really been something I've felt up to doing.
How can this be fixed? Well, presumably my body will eventually adjust to this dosage and I'll be back to sleeping 8 hours every 26 hours. That'll free up more time each day which could help. I could also stop worrying about being 'on' when I stream and just turn my mic off some of the time. I'm not sure if that would be a net positive or not, but it would certainly help bump the hours number up. And while just inflating the numbers may not be a good thing it could well lead to good things in the long run. It's like when I was really working on getting better at League of Legends and focused just on last hitting. Even if I was worse in those games in the short run I ended up locking in a skill that could be used later on.
Next is how much time I spend watching streams instead of streaming myself. One comment I've heard from multiple streamers is how rarely they actually get to watch streams. People keep asking them for advice about other people to watch and they can't really say. When you're spending 12 hours a day playing The Binding of Isaac you probably don't have much desire to watch other people play it. And even if you did, when would you do it? You need to eat and sleep and maybe interact with other people every now and then!
I do think watching some streams is still very important for me. I watch for entertainment, but also to see how different people do different things. I'm also learning how to be better at Hearthstone in particular by watching top tier players who explain what they're doing some of the time. Even just being able to watch how different matchups play out without having to own the decks myself is quite helpful.
On the other hand, I've been spending a fair amount of time lately watching Hafu play League of Legends and that isn't really helping much at all. She's one of the best Hearthstone drafters in the world with a really popular stream so watching that has been a big net gain I think. But she's about as good at LoL as I was when I played a lot, and she rarely explains anything about what she's doing. There's certainly still entertainment value in it, don't get me wrong... But if I'm looking at time I'm spending on not-streaming that I could easily convert to time spent on streaming these hours would be a good place to start.
And then there's the pro streams I watch. The LoL LCS regular season, IEM tournaments for LoL and Starcraft 2, random Hearthstone tournaments, Vintage super league... Stuff I watch because I really like watching people who are trying to be the absolute best at something. I don't want to cut that stuff out, though I have realized lately that I actually do a lot of gaming while watching those streams. I killed Mom's heart on hardmode with all the characters while watching LCS. I'd pause and watch during interesting stuff, but when a game got out of hand or when it was talking heads I could just play Isaac and listen in the background.
If I could figure out a way to stream a game without streaming the audio from a stream I'm watching then I could keep doing the same sort of thing. But otherwise I just need to prioritize what I watch to not take up 8+ hours in a day. That shouldn't be that hard? Maybe?
I've also been a little leery about what I stream. Games I know reasonably well, sure. But what about completely new stuff? Why would anyone want to watch me learn to play Terraria? Well, why would anyone want to watch me play anything?
The answer here really is that I don't need to know why anyone wants to do anything. Just do some things! I'll never understand people with my current level of knowledge, so trying to figure out things from ignorance is a silly thing to do. Just trying things can only result in more information to possibly make better decisions in the future.
There's also some data issues with my chart because I stream at weird hours and I'm assigning the entirety of a stream to whatever day Twitch archives assigns to the video. So on days when I sleep in the middle of the day it's possible that if I started streaming at 11:50pm the previous day that the day would have no hours even if I went 12 or more. But realistically that would just make the previous day huge and I could just run weekly averages to help deal with that. Clearly this isn't what's actually making my numbers low, it's just a way for perfectionist me to get bitter and give up. Bad perfectionist me! Bad!
Anyway... More things to think about, but I think the core thing is to just work on mindlessly watching fewer streams and just stream more random stuff for a while and see what happens.
I have started tracking hours put in, and I have 3 weeks worth of data now...
So on only 3 days in the last 3 months did I put in even close to a 'full day' of streaming. People talk about streaming 12+ hours a day every day for months in order to build up a viewer base. These three weeks are clearly nowhere near that level so it really isn't surprising that I have a total of 18 followers.
The question now is... Can I do better? What things were keeping me from streaming more this month and what can be done to overcome them?
The first is health related. I went to the doctor on the 13th and he doubled my Paxil dose. When I first switched to Paxil in January I ended up sleeping a lot and being rather lightheaded for a couple weeks. (I believe this was a large contributing factor to my collapsing in the hospital shortly after the switch.) So it isn't too surprising that doubling the dose has caused me to feel pretty similar. I've been sleeping a lot the last couple weeks (probably closer to 12 hours per day instead of 8) and have really not felt up to doing much of anything but sitting in a chair vegging out most of the time. Putting in effort to talk about what games I'm playing hasn't really been something I've felt up to doing.
How can this be fixed? Well, presumably my body will eventually adjust to this dosage and I'll be back to sleeping 8 hours every 26 hours. That'll free up more time each day which could help. I could also stop worrying about being 'on' when I stream and just turn my mic off some of the time. I'm not sure if that would be a net positive or not, but it would certainly help bump the hours number up. And while just inflating the numbers may not be a good thing it could well lead to good things in the long run. It's like when I was really working on getting better at League of Legends and focused just on last hitting. Even if I was worse in those games in the short run I ended up locking in a skill that could be used later on.
Next is how much time I spend watching streams instead of streaming myself. One comment I've heard from multiple streamers is how rarely they actually get to watch streams. People keep asking them for advice about other people to watch and they can't really say. When you're spending 12 hours a day playing The Binding of Isaac you probably don't have much desire to watch other people play it. And even if you did, when would you do it? You need to eat and sleep and maybe interact with other people every now and then!
I do think watching some streams is still very important for me. I watch for entertainment, but also to see how different people do different things. I'm also learning how to be better at Hearthstone in particular by watching top tier players who explain what they're doing some of the time. Even just being able to watch how different matchups play out without having to own the decks myself is quite helpful.
On the other hand, I've been spending a fair amount of time lately watching Hafu play League of Legends and that isn't really helping much at all. She's one of the best Hearthstone drafters in the world with a really popular stream so watching that has been a big net gain I think. But she's about as good at LoL as I was when I played a lot, and she rarely explains anything about what she's doing. There's certainly still entertainment value in it, don't get me wrong... But if I'm looking at time I'm spending on not-streaming that I could easily convert to time spent on streaming these hours would be a good place to start.
And then there's the pro streams I watch. The LoL LCS regular season, IEM tournaments for LoL and Starcraft 2, random Hearthstone tournaments, Vintage super league... Stuff I watch because I really like watching people who are trying to be the absolute best at something. I don't want to cut that stuff out, though I have realized lately that I actually do a lot of gaming while watching those streams. I killed Mom's heart on hardmode with all the characters while watching LCS. I'd pause and watch during interesting stuff, but when a game got out of hand or when it was talking heads I could just play Isaac and listen in the background.
If I could figure out a way to stream a game without streaming the audio from a stream I'm watching then I could keep doing the same sort of thing. But otherwise I just need to prioritize what I watch to not take up 8+ hours in a day. That shouldn't be that hard? Maybe?
I've also been a little leery about what I stream. Games I know reasonably well, sure. But what about completely new stuff? Why would anyone want to watch me learn to play Terraria? Well, why would anyone want to watch me play anything?
The answer here really is that I don't need to know why anyone wants to do anything. Just do some things! I'll never understand people with my current level of knowledge, so trying to figure out things from ignorance is a silly thing to do. Just trying things can only result in more information to possibly make better decisions in the future.
There's also some data issues with my chart because I stream at weird hours and I'm assigning the entirety of a stream to whatever day Twitch archives assigns to the video. So on days when I sleep in the middle of the day it's possible that if I started streaming at 11:50pm the previous day that the day would have no hours even if I went 12 or more. But realistically that would just make the previous day huge and I could just run weekly averages to help deal with that. Clearly this isn't what's actually making my numbers low, it's just a way for perfectionist me to get bitter and give up. Bad perfectionist me! Bad!
Anyway... More things to think about, but I think the core thing is to just work on mindlessly watching fewer streams and just stream more random stuff for a while and see what happens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)