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For this web log, allow me to explain some of the programs I use online and how they work and what they are used for. In the process of writing this log, I have determined that the flavor of this post will be slanted heavily towards "teams" and not so much the other things.
Steam. Not the stuff in the kitchen. Because this is the name of a game downloading service, a browser, a friend-based chatting service, and a company that sells games and in-game content for free-to-play games as well as the non-free-to-play games.
I remember when I first started using Steam. It was only because there was only one game on there I was interested in playing? Wait, nope...that's actually not when I first started using Steam. I am pretty sure although I don't remember it clearly, that I started using it as just a chatting service rather than anything else. Yeah, because it's super popular and sometimes your online contact just wants to communicate on one of their most-used communications services.
Does that mean Steam is a great service to use for chatting? No, not at all. It's okay. It has some dark mode chat as default and many programs do not, so it has that going for it. People that spend a lot of time on computer games will be able to appreciate how easy and quick it is to read messages with Steam's default chat mode. So, there's certainly nothing in particular that's wrong with it. But it's just an extra, important and necessary service attached to what Steam is primarily used for, and that's a place where you can go to play various games.
But how's the Steam community? IMHO, very terrible. The vast majority of Steam players are very rude to put it mildly and even a relatively calm and sensible person may eventually transform into a hostile person from too much exposure to what many of you may know as either 'toxic players' or 'bad association' or perhaps you have your own term for it? In any case, due to a pattern of bad behavior from immature people on those servers, I mostly just play either single player games or 1 vs 1 games on Steam nowadays. Long gone are the days where I would regularly serve as a diplomat with little to no thanks for my efforts in a game where teamwork was important? Well, no, that's not entirely true, because Steam isn't the only platform where I can play some team strategy games!
Riot Games. They only have one game ironically enough. They don't really pride themselves on proper English and you don't have to look any further than their company name to figure that out. However, one thing that I've noticed over the years while studying video game companies is that they excel at communicating. They have a general idea how important communication is, so they make some efforts to control their players in that regard. I won't get into details about that because this is a blog about communication rather than punishment. In any case, the only game service they have available is their team strategy game, League of Legends.
I believe it's still the most popular game in North America when it comes to team strategy games. And I believe the primary reason for that lies in the general toxic mindset of the average United States citizen. Such behavior is not welcome on Riot's LoL servers, and as such, the game serves as a bit of a safe zone, where someone like me can practice their diplomacy skills and not in vain. I've received recognition for my efforts on a regular basis, even though it hasn't been public recognition, but from individual players and from the game itself when it passes along feedback about statistics of being honored by players.
Their chat services are very similar to Steam chat services, although I will comment that even though LoL supports voice chat in game, Dota 2 has superior voice chat enabled for the Steam platform. Although I will mention that there are much, much better services for voice chat than Dota 2, it's still a decent starting point of comparison. Both games allow tags or nicknames in case you would otherwise have difficulty remembering a player appropriately through their username and/or the rest of their profile. And both games have emotes in place, although I have to admit that in Dota 2, they are definitely steering towards the obnoxious with how they are being implemented. Furthermore, Dota 2 literally has ads while you're playing the game, as well as gambling as a side game while you play, such as predicting the winner of the game and they also support a subscription-based matchmaking which they didn't in the past but throughout its history, they have tainted their own product with favoritism. League of Legends has different issues however.
So, what's wrong with LoL? To be honest, I haven't given it that much effort to figure out yet. I think one of the biggest things they struggle with is transparency in showing their players what's going on that could be improved on. There's a lot of 'ear-tickling' to players, doing their best to reward everyone with acknowledgement of their job well done performances, no matter how helpful their teammates were that may have influenced those performances. To fix that wouldn't have anything to do with changing their communication style, but rather to more accurately assess team fight contribution and honestly as I know, there are no team strategy companies actually in any kind of race to do it.
Years ago, I tried to get a rank in LoL, I don't even remember what was going on in my life at the time, but I remember enough to know that I had computer troubles. I disconnected and got credit for losing a match that I helped my team win in the end, among other things that went wrong, not that such things necessarily influenced the result by much. Who knows. However, it's worth pointing out that the very popular game streaming service "twitch.tv" is influenced more by a player actually playing ranked than by other things as far as I can tell. So I'm going to start regularly playing ranked LoL and hopefully get some more viewers into my channel from that.
On the twitch scene, the majority of my viewers come to watch me play cards. I know a part of that is those card game communities are smaller, and I have less competition. But I also know that if I was more skilled at such games then I would have an easier time getting viewers.
Let's go tackle the stuff you probably want to know about twitch? Not yet, I'm not done talking about video game companies yet.
First, let me break up the discussion of cards a bit. I was going through computer troubles and because of that, I started playing Hearthstone. What's Hearthstone? It's a free to play collectible card game online. No clutter in your room from cards while deck constructing which was potentially eating up too much time in attempting to keep things tidy. I've been playing card games since I was very small. I remember even in preschool, my teacher had me playing cards and I think perhaps even some relatives were playing cards with me in order to develop my understanding of some things, as well as to train my mind. I was impressing older people apparently, but there's always a bigger fish as Qui-Gon Jinn would say.
Blizzard. Not the cold storm that you're worried about in winter. Because this is the gaming company that makes Hearthstone. This is the third company I'm mentioning in this blog and it will hold a special place in many gamer's hearts, even if they no longer play their games anymore for many reasons. South Korea as a general gaming population turned Starcraft --which is a Blizzard game-- into the first major E-sport. That is, an electronic sport to be played. League of Legends and Dota 2 are both also recognized as big E-sport games.
Hearthstone is interesting in that it actually isn't recognized as an E-sport but is wildly popular. To be honest, I've played card games that were more fun, but this one isn't hurting overall on the interesting game play experience. You can pay money to speed up card collecting or you can do it much more slowly if you're actually enjoying it or have nothing better to do. Given the economy of the game, it's more difficult to invest in it nowadays than it used to be, and there are better options IMHO that you can go to if you have limited time on your hands. But I don't have a good reason to discuss all the various card game options and their pros and cons in this blog post, so perhaps in the next one I will tackle that.
Blizzard's card game has a relatively limited chat experience, and the emotes are very interesting and sometimes very well done, while other times they are generally super cringe-worthy. You can link your Facebook account and get friends over Blizzard's App that way, and you can find out what your friends are playing, whether it's Hearthstone or one of their other games.
Blizzard has WoW(World of Warcraft) that's free to try, then you have to start paying to get past the introductory progression level, which I only played to get myself the Hearthstone Paladin class' alternate hero art, which simply meant bringing a single class to the point where you can't progress any further without payment. The game is actually not interesting and the only explanation I can offer for as to why people play it is they like reading books because there are small tidbits of story that you can unlock while you play the game and complete quests, but in actuality, there's nonsense afoot because the game effectively has no classes. You can make any class do a job that's basically asking for a skill-set/interest from a completely different class. IMHO, it's a very poorly designed game that apparently did some things better than its competitors did, but that's not saying much considering how incredibly boring those games were. I'm more critical than your average person would be however because I actually played a lot of role-playing games, in particular, the higher-quality ones and I can assure you, the only thing this game has over most high-quality RPGs is that it is simply another genre, the massively multiplayer RPG genre. The genre is in my opinion, emphatically inferior. That's not to say that it would be impossible to change that opinion, but this game certainly doesn't change it.
Blizzard has OW(Overwatch) which is their style of a shooter game that I've never been particularly interested in, is a pay-once-to-play game from what I know of it, and it apparently gives special powers to the characters to spice it up and make it more interesting than it would be otherwise. The simplest way to explain it would be "what if all the team shooter players had their own Final Fantasy class flavor?" or something like that. I haven't really been tempted to play this game, but if a twitch viewer ever donated to me with the express wish that I try it, I most certainly would without complaint.
Blizzard has 4 other 'relatively popular franchises': Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. I don't play Diablo, Warcraft is a dead franchise thanks to WoW --I may have to do a YouTube video explaining why I call it dead as well as a separate franchise from WoW even though the HotS interface considers WoW and the Warcraft strategy games the same franchise-- existing, I don't play Diablo as I consider it boring and weird, Starcraft is a phenomenon that has partially burned out in my mind but is still an interesting game if one wants to be a high-energy player, and Heroes of the Storm is another team strategy game, and since communication is very important in team strategy games and this post is about communication online, I will have to just skip over the big 3 game franchises(even though I had some cool things to mention about Warcraft in the previous blog) for now that I just mentioned as they are not particularly important for the information I'm trying to get across.
Heroes of the Storm. Not related in any way to the precipitation cycle that makes sure all the crops get moist. The storm is a fictional thing, something in an alternate universe that steals characters from other universes, which explains in story why Blizzard is able to bring in characters from all their franchises. Something that actually makes a lot of sense and is something that both Riot Games and Steam have failed to deliver in any particularly sensible way for their team strategy games.
Just talking about its name deserved an entire paragraph. HotS is a game that ironically has been designed astonishingly well, which compared to the amount of effort that has gone into it, has largely been ignored by computer game players. As a result, the player base is amazingly toxic and weak-willed compared to the player bases for Dota 2 and LoL. I'm not currently playing HotS, but if I had reliable friends that are good at strategy games to play it with me, I most certainly would. At the moment, for the average player like me, the gaming environment just isn't supportive of us going solo if that makes any sense. LoL just has more to offer, but I really like this game a lot and wish I could get more out of it.
Like LoL and Dota 2, you can voice chat with people, but it's also something that a lot of people ignore, while in Dota 2 you are defaulted to listening to other people. Meanwhile, in LoL, you only voice chat with people that are in your group. So in Dota 2, people can tell others if they are going to be muting whoever, but in HotS, we just have no information about those kinds of things for the most part. Now in LoL and Dota 2, because of the game's design, you'd think that wouldn't be too much of a problem because there are small moments of downtime in LoL that you can use to your advantage sometimes to send very short messages or slightly longer ones if you have higher WPM typing skills, and in Dota 2 there is actually a pause system which many players don't respect and therefore violate, but the funcationality is there. But in HotS, you don't really have time to talk to other players through keyboard chat. You can sometimes send very short messages, but there's so much constant action that it's honestly pretty easy to either ignore those messages or be ignored yourself.
But I insist that it's not the game design's fault, it's the developers that don't know how to implement a better-working communications system that are to blame. The core problem is they are trying to use similar rules for communicating that LoL uses, even though the game design is very different. IOW, whoever designed the chat in HotS made mistakes and they need to rework or overhaul it. I like a lot about the game and they do a lot to surprise me, so I doubt it's really my place to tell them how to fix that, but I'm sure if they realized just how much of a problem it was they would actually fix it. It's probably just a matter of time. I'm not sure why until now I didn't realize just how much of an issue it is, but it's there. I'm not sure exactly what direction they could take, but I have some ideas although they aren't really all that important for this post.
So, since I brought to your attention the 3 big team strategy games that I've played, you probably are wondering if I'm going to go into more detail about twitch.tv, right? Not quite time yet.
There's one more company that I didn't mention yet that is very relevant, and its game is not on Steam, so it's worth mentioning it even though I'm going to leave out mentioning other games that share a lot of similarity to it for this post.
Pokemon. That's right, the Pocket Monsters. They have a card game. It's online. It's free to play. And instead of the card crafting system that Hearthstone uses, they have a trading system. A lot of the cards you might get are trade-locked, but since you can acquire trade-unlocked cards without spending any money, the progression in this game has an unusual acceleration curve potential for players, especially if they are good or simply have generous friends.
On twitch, many streamers will try to promote themselves by offering giveaways to their viewers. I've received most of my donations this way. Which means, not a donation that was given specifically from a viewer to a streamer. However, as a streamer, I've received a few donations from viewers in my channel's chat box, even though as far as I know, they don't watch me regularly. Interesting, isn't it? Of course, it's easy for partnered streamers to do giveaways because they get donated a lot of stuff! You can find out a little bit more about what that's like later on as I will provide a relevant link.
My friend asked me which card game was I playing exactly. So let me explain. Wizards of the Coast made numerous card games, including Pokemon and MTG. MTG is an extremely popular card game that is played anywhere that paying large sums of money for hobbies is popular and card games are played. Pokemon as a card game was developed with a lot of issues, so it's far from an especially pleasing experience overall, but it's surprisingly entertaining compared to Hearthstone simply because it's easier to acquire the cards you want to play with through the trading system. WotC sold their intellectual property which is the card game to the Pokemon company. Which means it has changed a lot about the game to make it more fun and a better hobby to invest in than it used to be. Smaller community, therefore less competition, and it's easier to get noticed.
I think we're at the point where it's time to mention one more company before going into more detail about Twitch. It's technically not a gaming company, but this company like Facebook has been a very big influence in my life over the past decade or so. Facebook has been fantastic, don't get me wrong, it has been amazing and I wouldn't trade my experiences on there for anything, but there's stuff I've got from YouTube that I honestly can't say I would have got anywhere else. I can't even begin to explain how influential it has been not only for me, but upon a huge population of the entire world. So I won't even try.
Instead, let me link you to my YouTube channel's video listing and a few related videos.
Keep in mind I'm aware that the recording quality for some of these videos is not good. Some of them are quite old after all and I am still learning how to record and edit properly, I'm sure there's always going to be more to learn for quite some time more. Also, I'm aware that in at least one of these videos I was being a bit foul-mouthed, I'm trying to improve on that but I've sustained some really frustrating online friendships over the years.
The video directory. (iNsOmNiAcAnDrEw was my old Starcraft username but I changed my YouTube name to GreenRay to match my Hearthstone/HotS username)
A LoL highlights video. (This one is edited to include Starcraft music and some comments about the plays in it, will definitely continue putting in comments, not sure one way or the other about the music)
A sample game from Pokemon cards online. (this game has a rotating standard and expanded format, so some of these videos might be from obsolete decks)
A sample game from another card game called Faeria. (as you can tell from this video, it has balance issues, but it's been fun besides that)
A sample game from another card game called Shadowverse. (it was a draft mode, this is what some people would call the "Japanese Hearthstone" but it's not quite that simple)
A sample game from Hearthstone. (this features Reno Jackson who is famous among Hearthstone players, to find out why you can watch my game, but there's also a music video parody of him you can watch that I had nothing to do with personally but if you like Hearthstone, you should definitely watch it!)
A single highlight from Heroes of the Storm. (this is the shortest video link I have here and it has some music that I was listening to at the time I was streaming)
Now, some of these videos, like the Shadowverse video, show my face with a webcam, or maybe a dancing 'ray avatar' or other things that indicate this was extracted from a live stream on twitch.tv. I can export videos to YouTube directly, or I can download them and edit them further. In the case of that LoL video however, the interface will show that the highlights came from the game's highlight function. So, it was not necessary for me to record the games live on twitch.tv since there's replay functionality in the game. Finally, you've arrived at the point where I'm going to comment on the online television service.
Twitch. Not a jerking or convulsive movement. This is a streaming service intended for gaming. Many players are able to generate a lot of money using it. Even though I don't have a job at twitch yet, I spend a lot of time on their website watching other streamers and learning how I can do better work as an entertainer. Yes, I'm attempting to entertain people online through more than just YouTube! YouTube would be a great place for me to generate exposure for my twitch channel if I were to actually be a better YouTube user than I am now. I'm currently a power clipper(previously known as clip champ) for YourPrincess, and the statistics support the influence YouTube has had on her streaming channel in an interesting and encouraging way for anyone that can make good YouTube content and get some reliable exporting of information from it for others, which I hope to be me one day.
Twitch channels can host other channels, to help keep the channels like mine without a schedule pumping out content for viewers, or to help give smaller channels like mine(which happens a bit in the card games I play at times) a little extra exposure from the bigger channels. So that streamer I just mentioned is on my hosting list if you want to stick around and see her. Is a streamer from California that plays LoL, in case you're wondering about the details. So if you show up to my channel, you might not always see me streaming. Why not give me a call someway and show me you would like to watch me play something if you're not finding the channel I'm hosting interesting enough? I would appreciate it and if I'm not busy I'm sure I can change whatever plans I had for that day to accommodate you. If you cared enough to read this far into this post, you are undoubtedly someone that at the very least enjoys my style of communication on some minor level and would probably be a good audience member for my stream.
At this very moment my chat box is popped out on my secondary monitor, and you can type "!day" without quotation marks into the chat as a message and the bot will update you on my current status where I live with a weather report. You might also see some twitter-generated public messages from one of the bots since I've got that programmed in since I don't visit that site all that much and would otherwise miss some of those messages. That's mostly for my own purposes and not others, it's something that might pop up. In any case, it tells me when my channel has stopped hosting someone(their channel is no longer live or I canceled the hosting due to starting my own stream or changing host selection), as well as whom it is currently hosting and other important notifications as well like if someone is hosting my channel or if I have a new follower.
Saying hello can be just as simple as asking the chat robot for a weather report for the city I live in! And there are many other commands that streamers can program the bots for to make things a bit easier. There are also default commands, like /ban or /timeout which help to discipline or punish unruly viewers. And such commands are generally usable by any volunteer moderators.
Right now I don't really have any online friends available that I can trust to moderate my channel, but my channel's community is so small right now that it would be completely unnecessary to have anyone do it besides myself. Some bigger streamers have many moderators, and they have options for their channel to regulate the content of course, including but not limited to restricting chat to followers only or subscribers only and that kind of thing. I have that option too of course, but it would obviously be pointless and really, even if I was a bigger streamer, I would have to be careful about such restrictions if I really cared about the community and also those outside the community or just less dedicated to it. I saw one guy streaming from Japan that would just enable follower only mode just for when he wanted to do a giveaway then would turn it off after that business was over, so that made sense for what he was doing as an example.
I'm not really an expert twitch user yet, so allow me to post a YouTube video of a top Hearthstone streamer explaining a lot about how the economy works on this television service.
As you can see, there's reason to believe that I could definitely make gaming a part-time job. But it's going to take a lot of work for me to accomplish. I know many players such as Disguised Toast(the maker of that economy video), YourPrincess(I jokingly refer to her as ZergPrincess because she's generally role-playing as an aggressive champion in LoL, but she prefers to be called Jayden), and Faellu(first twitch.tv channel that I became a regular viewer of, she is a variety streamer that was streaming Hearthstone primarily at the time) have worked much harder than I have at this and they are very successful for a great many reasons. And I'm sure some of you may think(if you've even read this far) that I can't become an affiliate, much less a partner. And maybe you're right. But I can at least try.
So for now, that's my main focus, getting a job streaming games. And it's been so for a while, but I haven't communicated this very effectively to many of my friends, which is why I decided it's owed to all of you to make this blog. And I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to do so. To be fair, my health has been so miserable that I'm not sure my focus would have been strong enough to come up with all of this. In any case, I hope you'll look forward to my next blog which I can't make a promise on when I'll make it, but assuming I remember to review this blog before I make it or I simply remember normally, then I'll make it about card games online specifically in order to generate some interest in some of the stuff I like to play for my friends. Because I enjoy playing cards with my friends and it would be nice to have more of that than what I'm currently experiencing.
My username there is RayTeamStrategy, and this is the channel.
The username is a play on words. Real-Time Strategy is a genre of game which Starcraft(one of my first great "PC gaming loves" if you want to call it that) is in, among other games, and Team Strategy games are the genre of game I like to think I have a special talent for.
You might think that twitch.tv was the last thing I could possibly explain when it comes to communication. If you thought that, I wouldn't blame you. It's been a long blog already, and to think that there's more would be quite the assumption indeed. But there's more.
Discord. Not a disagreement between people. Incorrectly derived from the word discourse it seems. It's a place you go to discuss gaming in particular, for it is a communications program built for the gamer. And it's free. It's an amazing service that I feel like people would pay money for if they had to, but it's free. The server is free. I suppose you can make purchases on Discord to suit your purposes and get some value out of that, but for the most part, there's nothing to pay for. I think you can do a subscription so that you can use emotes from other servers and/or programs or something like that and I don't know there might be more stuff, but everything I need to communicate as a gamer is here and I don't have to pay anything for it.
I can invite an unlimited number of people to my server. I have chat channels set up to discuss various genres of games, I can assign members of the server to various roles to indicate what kinds of games they like to play. I can do a lot of cool things with it, but in the end I could always use more people that I know in real life on that server. I can talk to you just as readily as I would on the phone, with the exception that my phone doesn't work with Discord. But I know some gamers whose phones work with Discord and I've even talked with at least one friend that I met online over Discord using my computer and their phone.
There are voice channels on my server so voice chat can happen while playing cards together to make the game a bit friendlier, and there is also the possibility of teamwork being enhanced by voice chat, which I took advantage of during the recent League of Legends quest in order to defeat a rotating game mode boss on the highest difficulty possible with a specific handicap for each player. I remember literally talking on mobile phones with one of my friends while playing 2 vs 2 Starcraft back in the day, and it was glorious. And all this can happen on the computer without any kind of phone bill.
Of course, I have a phone bill and if you are my friend on Facebook, you have access to that phone number that I'm using. But it's unrelated to Discord and mostly irrelevant to me when it comes to my gaming activities. I can actually sometimes voice chat with the opposite sex on Discord because we have a common interest! We play the same game, although there's usually more required than just that, it's still a lot easier than trying to talk to such people over the phone!
I know what you're thinking, "but did Discord help him get him a romantic relationship?" Okay, smarty-pants, you're right. I'm still single and ready to mingle or whatever you like to call it. But from what I can tell, the opposite sex is interested in men that have a job. So I can't allow mindless chasing after the wind to be a priority to me. I'm tired of wasting time. I want to do work. And for now, it seems the most viable work that I can do is entertaining through twitch. But Discord is a great place to communicate with me and anyone else you play games with. It's definitely far superior to any in-game voice chat service I've run across. And none of the other voice chat programs even compare to it because it's so superior in so many ways. I'm not going to detail out why it's so good, but it's truly amazing and a must-use program if you enjoy playing games on the computer regularly IMO.
Twitch TV has its competitors and I could argue for or against twitch for whether streamers should or shouldn't use their streaming service(I've found out recently that a YouTube user I've subscribed to switched to Facebook for streaming of all platform possibilities), but I can't imagine liking a voice chat program better than Discord, and as an overall communications platform it seems completely peerless to me. Facebook has voice chat now and I've used it a little bit and that definitely helps Facebook step up its game, but it's meant for a different audience and doesn't really suit the gamer's needs appropriately most of the time from what I can tell.
You can join a discord server from just a link and chat through your browser, and you can also download the app for an improved experience. And here's the permanent link to my server, Stronger Together.
If you'd like to share your gaming experiences, you can post screenshots in general chat as an example. I do that myself from time to time. Usually I know who people are(roughly at least) immediately when they join, but let me interrupt this web-log-post-making for a moment to make another chat channel specifically for people that might not want to post directly in a general chat to explain who they are, because then whether myself or someone else is confused about who someone is, they might be able to find out there. Would make the server a little less confusing for newcomers to it I guess for every post in there.
Nothing we can do will be perfect. All we can do is our best to make what we do as perfect as possible. In other words, try to improve and look around you for examples, because there's always someone to learn from. Good and bad examples of various things are everywhere. And I'm hoping you'll find something to like about my Discord server or my Twitch channel. Either way, I'd appreciate any feedback you can give me so that I can figure out an improvement.
The nice thing about twitch and discord is that I have a lot of control over such things because I'm the administrator on my own channel and on my own server respectively. And not everyone may know this, but I like being in control. But there's more to building a community than just trying to control everything. You need people in it, and I know that controlling people is generally not a thing we should aspire to, even if my oldest email account's username would suggest otherwise(it was an ode to Civilization/Starcraft which are strategy games) which was dcttr66, dictator without the vowels, followed by 2 sixes because that's how many letters are in my first and last names. I think 6ray6 is a good improvement, but keep in mind I have many aliases(usernames) so don't try to use the same one somewhere else again and again and expect to always get it right!
