Twitch

The Great WelpSquadTV Twitch Highlight Migration

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Next month, on May 19th, Twitch is purging highlights from channels with over 100 hours of stored videos. This announcement came out back in Febuary with the original date being April 19th. Since then, I’ve been working on exporting WelpSquadTV’s archived streams over to Youtube. We have been saving our entire broadcasts as highlights since we started streaming in 2017. It has long been a running joke that we must be costing Amazon a ton in video storage.

Turns out, we were right. The reasoning Twitch sent out to channels affected by this, and later added to their FAQ, is that storage is expensive. Which, fair, but it’s got to be less costly if you’re Amazon and you own all the storage right? My favorite bit though, is that less than 0.5% of Twitch channels are effected by this. I’ve never been in the top 0.5% of anything so I’m taking this as a win! I guess accumulating 3353 hours of saved video over the past 8 years will do that.

A few years ago, we did start moving some of our older videos over to Youtube with Twitch’s built in export feature. Back then, I remember it being a gamble whether or not the video actually got exported. Which lead to exporting one or two at a time, waiting 10 minutes to see if they showed up on Youtube and then start the next few videos. It seems that this feature has improved over the years and at least I’m able to “bulk export” videos out. I still have to click the export button on each video but they all make it over to Youtube.

There seems to be an upload limit for Youtube. At some point, the exports just stop working. I haven’t figured out if this is a video limit or a video hours limit but I seem to hit it after uploading about 100 videos (the most Twitch Video Producer will show on a page). And this appears to reset every day. It’s still pretty lenient, these videos are 2+ hours long after all.

So for the last 2 months, I have been dutifully moving everything over to Youtube. I’m going to just get everything uploaded before Saturday (the original April 19th deadline) and I will be glad to have finished this project. Though now that the deadline has been extended I may be a little more lax on hitting those upload numbers.

In case you’re wondering what the analytics of a Youtube channel uploading one hundred, 2 hour long plus videos a day, without tags, descriptions, or thumbnails:

I find it interesting that the average watch time is just about 18 minutes. I’m surprised anyone is clicking on these in the first place, let alone letting it run for 18 minutes. They must be sleeping through an auto play or something….Speaking of clicks, I love that impression click through rate is impressively low, but .4% or 450,000 impressions is still many, many clicks!

My 2019 So Far

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In February, we decided to put the brakes on our Twitch channel indefinitely. If you didn’t know about our Twitch channel, WelpsquadTV, it’s because I didn’t write much about it. We were on Twitch for about 2 years and somewhere along the way, I think we forgot streaming was supposed to be fun and not something we had to do. We were by no means a large channel,  but we had a decent little community of regulars, we made a little money, and we put in a ton of hours Now, it was a 4 man channel, but Jay and I were putting in 4 or 5 multiple hour streams a week, that time adds up.

Stopping wasn’t an easy decision considering how long we’d been doing it but a necessary one. No one was having fun anymore and the time commitment just wasn’t fitting into our lives anymore. Plus, I always felt that blogging was much more of my style than streaming ever was.

For most of  February, I didn’t touch Twitch and had very little interest in games in general. Then Anthem came out. I subbed up to Origin Premier to try it out, flew around and did story missions for 8-10 hours and didn’t go back.

I decided to give Apex Legends a try towards the end of  February and I’ve found surprisingly engaging. It’s been a blast with friends and has quickly become the defacto: “I don’t know what I want to play tonight, let’s see who’s on Apex” I haven’t had this much fun in a multiplayer FPS since Modern Warfare in high school, in fact, I think that’s the last time I enjoyed a multiplayer FPS.  It helps that I have enough people to play it with when I want to play because going in alone is an exercise in frustration.

I started up Black Desert in early March after a recommendation from a co-worker. I had bought the game 2 years ago and never got into it. I have a bad habit of playing something until it gets complicated and then quitting and Black Desert starts off complicated and continues to add to the complexity. The first time around I just couldn’t wrap my head around the combat. This time I decided to power through and see how I liked it. It helped that my co-worker kept telling me it was the “greatest single player game of all time”. And you know what? He’s not wrong. Once I got the hang of the combat and some of the systems the game really opened up and has more to offer than grind to the end to PVP.

Most recently I’ve been playing Trove. I always seem to come back to Trove, especially when I’m looking for a progression fix. It’s been about a year since I last logged in, long before Trion was acquired by Gamingo.  My old max level  Stellar gear is useless but was replaced with a much easier to obtain Crystal gear. There are new gem slots so that your Power Rank numbers can go up even higher. And 2 new modes have been added since I last played: Geode, a non-combat gathering activity, and Bomber Royale. I’ll have to write a whole post on Bomber royale, it’s possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in Trove and probably the only Battle Royale game I will ever win on my own.

Yes, this is yet another one of my many posts where I say I miss blogging and I miss writing and yes, it probably won’t be my last. But I always come back here and I’ve been away from my little space on the internet for far too long.

 

 

 

Introducing Welp Squad TV

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Back in February of last year, 4 friends and I decided that we should try this whole Twitch thing. It’s been a great experience so far and we’re still at it a year and a half later. For the longest time I’ve been hesitant to mention that here. For some reason I thought that the blog and the stream should be separate, but these days I don’t remember the reason why I wanted that in the first place.

Starting the stream is one of the reasons my blog posts have been slacking. WWe played a variety of games and never stuck with one very long. The original idea was to have 5 streamers on one channel so that we could fill most of the week up with streams and then have a group stream at the end of the week. e were all very gung-ho about it in the beginning. It was new and exciting and it was a great way to share the fun we were having as a group with other people.

Things didn’t turn out that way though. What started out as a lot of solo streams turned into fewer co-op steams and then fewer streams all together. It eventually boiled down to one member streaming a lot more than the rest of us which was ok for a while until burn-out set in. We made affiliate last September which renewed our interest in the platform again. I tried to step up my streams a little but it was hard as I was studying for some IT certificates at the time and looking for a new job. As time went on, I was getting too caught up on the numbers and the fun was starting to be sucked out of it. I also had a lot of impostor syndrome that has kept me from streaming on my own on more than one occasion.

This summer we took a step way back from the numbers and the schedules and decided to just stream when we wanted to stream. I’ve been meaning to get back into it and try some streaming on my own again once my new job’s busy season is over. I think as a whole we’ve been enjoying it a lot more as a group now. We’re trying a few different things like D&D, silly character voices, and trying to play a lot of different games to see what we like. Greg and I had a long running weekley series of 7 Days to Die but I can only kill zombies for so long. Turns out after 150 hours it gets boring.

We’ve met a lot of great people through streaming. Our sole mod, Charmcuddler, has been with us since the beggining and I think we’d all consider her a dear friend. We’ve got a couple other regulars who always make our nights when they stop in to chat. This summer has been a lot more chill on the stream and I think it’s been good for us. Our plan now is to keep trying some stuff out and go full swing again in the fall.

So if you’re ever on Twitch and want to stop by you can find us here:  https://www.twitch.tv/welpsquadtv