Everybody on ILG complains about Twitch

There was no Twitch thread so I'm starting one.
It started with watching LCS matches live (rel: Do like me and get into eSports because that's how American gridiron football dies), then watching LCS matches live via the Roku in the living room, and then "hey there's no LCS on, what the hell do people use this ridiculous service for, anyway"

I now have an account and am following three random-ass people. One of them is Canadian. This doesn't end well, does it.
Anybody else dabble in this nonsense? What is wrong with us?

Just a bit of fun, let's be cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbYHY_QhiBw

i've been using it sporadically for the last few months. i really dislike the style of most of the streamers. it's probably just because i'm older than most of the streamers but i find them to be so fucking annoying that i want to die. the most popular streamers are a window into a version of dystopia. it's usually a dude who is constantly giving a shoutout to whoever just followed his channel or donated a couple bucks, or glancing off the side of the screen to say "what up Ragnarok420?" or whoever just said hello in the chat channel, only to never ever mention that person again, and meanwhile in the background shit is getting blown up and he's going "FUCK YEAH!" as a teammate in the game yells "YEAH BUDDY!" i am not expressing it well but it's a weird combo of commerce and self-promotion where success depends on the megalomania of the streamer. it's sort of fascinating to watch in small doses. it's also a style of streaming that probably represents only a small sliver of Twitch streamers - these are just the most popular streamers, the ones that have a busy chatbox and have hundreds or thousands of subscribers and stream on a regular schedule. but Twitch obviously wants this sliver to be the face of it. i guess there's no other way to organize the thousands of streams at any given moment other than just putting the most popular active ones at the top, but very few people are watching the vast majority of streams at any given moment.

i guess there's also the option of watching people play games who don't speak out loud. that can be alright, depending completely on the game they're playing, of course. but inevitably after watching someone play in silence for about 10 minutes i am mysteriously in the mood to just play a game myself.

every once in a while i find someone who is a little more low key and occasionally says interesting things. in those rare moments i need to remember to click the follow button. these are usually people that only have 0-4 people watching them. i have also had some success watching stuff in the Creative channel. it can be fun to just watch someone play around in photoshop for hours on end, and educational as well. there are also homemade cooking shows, arts and crafts, programmers, etc, so if you have a hobby that lends itself to streaming you should check Twitch to see if someone is working on something.

so i guess i hate it but i'm also sort of fascinated by it. it's tough to recommend Twitch to anyone without qualifying it with a bunch of warnings and caveats. i would never say "Twitch is awesome!" because then the other person would go check it out and likely find 10 horrific streamers in a row, if they made it that far. but there is a lot of good stuff in there if you're willing to dig. i will try to be better about following the better streamers and will post links to their streams on here when i find them, and it would be cool if others would do the same.

it's usually a dude who is constantly giving a shoutout to whoever just followed his channel or donated a couple bucks, or glancing off the side of the screen to say "what up Ragnarok420?" or whoever just said hello in the chat channel, only to never ever mention that person again, and meanwhile in the background shit is getting blown up and he's going "FUCK YEAH!" as a teammate in the game yells "YEAH BUDDY!" i am not expressing it well but it's a weird combo of commerce and self-promotion where success depends on the megalomania of the streamer.

i've been wanting to gripe abt twitch for awhile, this nails it perfectly. i was watching some dark souls 1 stream on there, i think it was a guy who completed it straight thru w/ out getting hit or something crazy. but the whole thing was just completely unwatchable, his body taking up half the screen as he does constant shoutouts on top of whatever graphic/sound effect he has to alert you the viewer that someone just donated $2. and it was just hours of that!

you know who is a good streamer? the guy who recently got some internet fame for setting a new super mario bros. speed run record: https://www.twitch.tv/darbian

his is a little different because he's always working on perfecting a level so he's constantly resetting levels and trying certain sections over and over again. but he doesn't talk constantly and he seems like a real human being.

The ones I follow are basically variety streamers who I found because they were playing some niche game I've been wondering about myself, like Terraria, and giving themselves crazy challenges like "okay this time no armor hardcore expert mode!" with lots of exuberant cursing or yosemite-sam-esque quasi-cursing and only occasional shouting out followers because, well, not many people sub or follow them and there's like 5 regulars in the chat. I like watching how people deal with random disasters, some of these guys have a resilience / commitment to the run that is just beyond me.

I also sometimes enjoy watching people enthusiastically losing in multiplayer games. Whatever the opposite of "tilting" is.

Yeah speed runners are sometimes fun to watch. Similar to how I got into LCS, once it clicked that I was watching people who not like you and me (ok not like me, anyway) it's a different category of spectatorship. Also somehow I stumbled across two military vets among the first couple of people I started watching - is that weird or what?

twitch is alright, i spend more time on there than i should. i try to find people who operate outside of the site's built-in chat culture/memes since that stuff mostly grates on me

"kappa"

oh god

I had to look that up and then I realized all the stupid faces people keep throwing at the end of their chatroom comments are supposed to be code for stuff and man, whatever, coded tribal languages are fine I guess but wow

I only set up an account to watch Karl Malone streams. I have also enjoyed things like "everyone on twitch plays pokemon" or whatever that was called. Y'know, the ones where chat commands control the game but everyone is trying to do it at the same time so it just turns into a giant mess.

Oh, there was like "my fish plays super mario" or something too, I'm sure that happened.

i didn't see the fish play super mario. but i'm 99% sure that i watched those fish play Street Fighter II turbo

where do I watch Karl Malone streams

twitch.tv/weinventyou but i haven't done one in a long time. though since i have the house to myself tonight i might do one later! i was thinking of doing ninja gaiden (NES) again although SMB2 is always fun too

ninja gaiden, thats giving me nostalgic rage

i streamed some dark souls awhile back to no one except for one viewer who joined only long enough to say "ur gay" in the chat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36323224/blizzard-to-tackle-harassment-on-twitch-after-player-suffers-racist-abuse

He lost narrowly in the final to fellow professional player Keaton "Chakki" Gill.

too much time on ilx

twitch is so, so good rn

So I started watching Flare2V's expert Terraria run on 1HP (using a save editor to force the handicap) and I have followed along for 727 deaths so far. still catching up. Now VG Badger has started the same type of run, I get to compare and contrast I guess. Artificially super-fragile runs are good shit though.

twitch emotes and chat spam are at the top of my 'get off my lawn you kids these days' list of things that I will never understand

If there's a game coming out that I'm interested in, such as the upcoming console release of 7 Days to Die, I like to check out a few well-curated lets plays on youtube to see if it is something I could get into. But I'll rarely watch twitch streams. I want to hear from the gamer about the game they are playing and to learn a thing or two about strategies game mechanics, but twitch streams always seem to devolve into senseless shoutout banter.

Yeah it's amazing how little most streamers talk about the actual game they're playing.

Anyway I'm still catching up after a bunch of work travel, watching Flare do his 1hp run of Terraria and he's now died over 1500 times. The landscape is just completely littered with gravestones to a truly surreal degree. Twitch needs searchable tags for salty masochism, this shit's hilarious.

Now with microtransactions, presumably to get Twitch a cut of the donations
https://blog.twitch.tv/introducing-cheering-celebrate-together-da62af41fac6#.lrume5xvm

Honestly kinda surprised this didn't already exist on Twitch. Once again porn innovating and leading the way for respectable business

tippin on 44s

I .want to turn Flare2V's spear-only Terraria run into a screenplay. where can I find an agent. And/or a therapist

I need to draw a proportional Venn diagram.

1 / 2 = dull streamers playing dull games = easily avoidable, like oncoming traffic
1 / 6 = dull streamers playing entertaining games = the trap
1 / 7 = entertaining streamers playing dull games = the disappointment
1 / 8 = people drawing (incl Bob Ross) = still don't get this tbf
1 / 15 = entertaining streamers playing entertaining games = oh so this is what this is about

i'll go ahead and ask what we're all thinking

that's 1/841th over a full share (841/840, or 100.00119%)

otherwise that's about right, although i like some of the drawing/creating stuff

drawing stuff is easy to understand. regardless of your skill it's mesmerizing to watch someone well-practiced doing a piece

bad games are OK if the streamer is entertaining enough

bad and dull aren't the same, I mean the Awful Games section of GDQ is always my favorite part

don't forget about social eating

that's 1/841th over a full share (841/840, or 100.00119%)

I included the streams that appear to be live but then you click and they're not

lol "bits" are not available for Canadian strimmers

Is this Venn diagram actually a pie chart or?

5 spheres: "entertaining streamers," "entertaining games," "dull streamers," "dull games," and "art?" with different sizes (and differently sized overlaps) computed according to my rough proportions

http://www.wired.com/2016/08/why-i-watch-lets-plays/

I tend to watch them the way I watch other sports: in the background, not necessary to pay too much attention, occasionally entertaining. But I kind of get the point the author is making.

I used to lend the older kids quarters so I could watch them play gunsmoke in the arcade.. been watchin other people play video games my whole life, son

severe technical difficulties are funny.
All the streams appear to be dead and this is the account currently featured on the front page: https://www.twitch.tv/undefined

Given that my options are a sport that I hate, a debate I can't watch because it's a japanese horror movie, and some other stuff that I don't care about, Twitch is more important than ever right now

People with Amazon Prime can now watch Twitch ad-free, get a free sub to a channel every month plus skins and other digital flotsam.
https://twitch.amazon.com/prime

lol looks like people are giving their free subs to whoever is streaming at the moment, meanwhile a lot of streamers are attending TwitchCon and missing out on the free loot (as far as I can tell Amazon still passes on the usual cut to streamers)

this is pretty nice, i picked a good year to finally try out prime

best Twitch channel http://www.twitch.tv/bubblepuppets

Desert Bus for Hope 10 is on.

https://www.twitch.tv/desertbus

lol

https://twitter.com/BadLayouts

twitch is cool for poker streaming too

https://join.slack.com/t/poxyfule/shared_invite/zt-csm19k0n-P_w0mauC3_sXUXus~TI0mw

(that's not Sic-bait, that's real)

ok, it's finally happening

i'm playing Aerobiz.com
https://www.twitch.tv/weinventyou

ninja gaiden now, predictably

i went bankrupt

Figured this might be the right thread to ask, since some of you guys already seem into the process.
Thinking about pulling the trigger and buying the hardware and such to do streams/game capture. Particularly retro capture for short form videos, but it seems like live streaming is what people mostly do nowadays. Working with an iMac. Is it worth biting the bullet and buying a juicy PC?

Seems like a lot of opinions and options, from my googling. What's the good hardware/software packages - streaming, editing, recording, mics, cameras, etc - for this sorta thing in 2020? A lagless HDMI passthrough box? Etc etc. so was looking to hear from people who have done it.

1. https://obsproject.com/

i have a macbook pro, and have used OBS to attempt to stream on twitch (ask anyone who has ever had the misfortune of watching me try to stream an emulated NES or SNES game). i have horrible luck, insane bugs, bad and inconsistent performance. it seems optimized to work on a PC, not a mac, and pretty much all the online help/troubleshooting you can find is PC-specific.

oopa, meant to put that sad parenthetical after the second sentence

I bought a 4K capture card (4K60 S+) from ElGato and then realized it doesn't work with MacOS. So I installed bootcamp/OBS (shrug emoji), and it works fine. It also lets you capture video straight to SD card, which is fine for capturing gameplay, but doesn't work for streaming.

I emailed ElGato to see if they planned to support MacOS in the future, but the CS agent didn't know, and of course doesn't have any access to their roadmap.

thx for the input, some stuff to chew on

4k60 would probably be a good target for next gen consoles

My favorite rimworld streamer discovered terraria and is now on hour 23 of his hardcore stream

Logic retiring from music to be a 7-figure Twitch streamer is definitely a weird development and probably some kind of harbinger for something or other
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/20/21327589/logic-twitch-signing-deal-exclusive-partnership

Can say with some inside knowledge that a number of big-name artists reached out to Twitch as the pandemic hit to start streaming. The team that runs Twitch Music was going pretty nuts about the prospect, at the cost of supporting many Twitch Music creators that have been on the platform for years. There are a couple voices in the company doing the right thing and trying to use these these artists as opportunities to boost some of the dedicated Twitch creators that have been around a long time.

We'll see how it pans out.

i may try to stream Hades a bit tonight, if anyone's interested. my playing ability is in that uncomfortable zone where i'm nowhere close to being "good" at it, but i can get through the game most times without too much difficulty.

last time i tried to stream was a nightmare, though, in terms of the connection and the video quality. streaming from a mac is fucking hard!

has anyone else here streamed a game from a mac? what did you use? OBS? is there anything better? it's always the sound that is the true nightmare - splitting the game audio from the microphone volume is surprisingly complicated.

Happy to see Twitch has listened to everyone who shared feedback and removed the “Blind Playthrough” tag to encourage more inclusive language for our community.

You can still use “First Playthrough” or opt to use it in combination with "No Spoilers" for the same sentiment. 💜

— Aureylian △⃒⃘ (@aureylian) December 4, 2020

Next up: blind spot, blind alley, double-blind, blind date, turning a blind eye, etc.

lame

glad they did that

other than it being uncool because it's p.c., changing the category name has literally zero negative effects on anything

Exactly.

It undermines the credibility of campaigns aimed at furthering inclusive language so in that sense, yes, it does have negative effects. 'Blind playthrough' was never a slur or even a mildly pejorative expression: it's not a 'bad' thing to go in blind when you're starting a new game – on the contrary, it enhances the experience.

They’re “happy to see” that? Way to rub it in

It's actually quite hard to play a video game when you're blind. I wouldn't say it enhances the experience at all.

My bad, I'd forgotten that the word 'blind' only has One True & Literal Meaning.

I dunno, letting your actions be dictated by edgelords and would-be edgelords seems to be a losing proposition twice over: first, you're ceding the moral high ground to them, and secondly, you're letting them dictate the contours of language.

I'd also like to imagine that acts like this might prompt other people to reexamine their own language, too.

But 'blind playthrough' was never the sole province of edgelords, unlike many other gaming-related expressions. If the goal is to pwn the Gamergate crowd (which is fine by mine), a self-pwn is not the best way to go about it imo.

The goal is to honor a simple request by a subset of visually impaired gamers, not to pwn anyone.

Again, 'blind playthrough' does not denote anything negative. Arguing the observe is really stretching it.

Why don't you tell that to visually impaired gamers like @stevesaylor or @stevenspohn. I'm sure they'd be happy to know it's just a misunderstanding.

I hope you realize that not all visually impaired gamers agree.

do you know what subset means

Said subset is not enough to determine whether 'blind playthrough' is acceptable or not.

Like I said, go tell them that

I would discuss this with them in person if given the chance, sure. As it stands, I don't have a Twitter account and am not interested in creating one.

are people with nervous tics not offended by "Twitch" ?

It's reasonable to consider it akin to all the examples under the posted tweet, so I would be curious what those cited visually impaired gamers would say about "double-blind study" etc.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/tech/pogchamp-emote-banned-capitol-hill-trnd/index.html

https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2021/05/21/lets-talk-about-hot-tub-streams/

being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules

whew!

being found to be sexy

we find the defendant to be...NOT SEXY!!

*cries of relief from the family*

i'm painting here now: https://www.twitch.tv/zach_tbd

Not twitch exactly, but does anyone know anything about Discord? I use it for ttrpgs through video and was looking for a bot that would track counters or tokens so that all players on the channel would be able to see the current count(s).

https://t.co/7vTDeRA9vt got leaked. Like, the entire website; Source code with comments for the website and various console/phone versions, refrences to an unreleased steam competitor, payouts, encrypted passwords that kinda thing.
Might wana change your passwords.

— Sinoc (@Sinoc229) October 6, 2021

Annoying. I changed all my passwords this morning.

just a thought - why haven't I received an email from Twitch/Amazon advising me to change my password?

https://kotaku.com/twitch-depp-heard-trial-hasanabi-pokimane-xqc-johnny-am-1848892955

This might be the thing that finally breaks my streaming addiction.

Fuck these people.

The whole Good Guy Johnny Depp internet phenomenon around this thing is some of the cringiest shit it the world.

It’s pretty disturbing and upsetting. I have no idea why people are so fond of this guy.

they liked him in the movies and people think movies are real now

That was a rhetorical question. I know why.

i don't follow the twitch streamer scene at all, and have just barely followed the Amouranth saga. i just think this, in isolation is a funny tweet

I played more overwatch than I did hot tub. That’s NEVER HAPPENED

— Kaitlyn (@wildkait) November 27, 2022