Those of you who follow my Twitch may have noticed that I've gotten back intro streaming recently - or rather, I was until about a week ago. On my last stream, I had started a career mode run in NASCAR Thunder 2003. I was working on a video of a previous stream (doing the Lightning Challenges in the same game) and was hoping to release that before my next stream to drive viewership. Unfortunately, editing this video has kind of spiraled out of control. This could be the most heavily edited video I've released to this channel, and the runtime might be close to something like 20 minutes if I don't break it up into parts.
I'm gonna go back to streaming my NT2003 career mode for now. I think I'll be busy tomorrow, so I'll do it Sunday afternoon. I'll also be doing random MWO streams and other nonsense if anyone is interested in that.
Live for the next couple hours if anyone is interested:
www.twitch.tv/super_noodle
I'm not sure how I forgot to mention it until now, but I've had jury duty all week. I actually got selected, so that basically ate up my whole week.
I still have a bunch of random clips I could turn into a mostly acceptable video, so I'll probably have a crack at that sometime this weekend.
I'm already beginning to lose hope in this game. As many who play War Thunder are probably painfully aware of by this point, Gaijin is cashing in on the Top Gun hype and recently dropped a trailer teasing the addition of the F-14 into the game. Frankly, I couldn't give half a damn about a new top-tier jet, but what I find worrying is just how well this hype marketing seems to have worked. Everyone is talking about the F-14 - not about the game being a broken, poorly balanced, exploitative, pay-to-win mess, but about a stupid plane that in a few months will become just another plane like the hundreds that are already in the game.
The more I play it, the more War Thunder is reminding me of World of Tanks, and that scares the hell out of me. The War Thunder community is equally as toxic, equally as susceptible to hype marketing, and equally lacking in understanding of their own game as World of Tanks' community was. They do the same two-faced crap where they complain about the game on one day and show up to buy the newest, most expensive premium vehicle the next. To make matters worse, the community is so fractured in their opinions of the game that they rarely hold a consensus about anything. This leaves Gaijin free to balance their game however they see fit, and they see it fit to be lazy and balance their game based on spreadsheets of stats rather than an actual understanding of how their game feels to play. The recent BR changes reflect this. 7.0-7.3 games are pure cancer now, which a bunch of braindead gibbons running around in F89s, F84s, Su-11s, and other undertiered crap that nothing else that that BR has a reasonable hope of catching.
I was hoping War Thunder would be the next big thing for my channel. I've been putting a lot of effort into getting better at it so that one day I could make guides (especially something like the Unicum Guides for War Thunder), but the more I play the more it seems that this game is hopeless. Gaijin will continue to dilute and debase the actual gameplay in their game so long as it makes them disgusting amounts of money, and the community by-in-large seems to be compliant in handing over that money.
With all that said, I don't really know where to go from here. I've been trying to put out regular content on my channel for a change, despite the current situation in my outside life, but I'm beginning to lose hope in that too. It's clear that my previous inactivity has caused me to lose favor with the algorithm, and as such my plan was to simply put my nose to the grindstone, put out War Thunder videos, and slowly work my way back to relevance. If I either quit War Thunder or have to take long breaks to stomach it, then I obviously can't do that. I really don't want to go back to car stuff. As much as I enjoy it, I absolutely detest online car culture, and if I have to wait another year for superchargers in Automation I may actually go stark raving mad.
Frankly, this post is more of a way to vent my frustrations than a way of stating my future plans, because as I've said I don't really know what those are. Maybe I'll come around to War Thunder, maybe not. Either way, I'll let everyone know when I'm more certain of things.
I've been waffling a bit on my next video, though it doesn't help that I haven't set aside a specific date for posting new vids. I was thinking of making an end-of-the-week date, but I wasn't sure specifically which day.
I've attached a poll to this post to get your feedback. Bear in mind, I'll probably make vids public sometime around noon EST.
What day would you guys prefer to see new videos posted?
The MIDI file I used for my totally serious video about wolves appears to only exist in one other place on the internet right now, so I decided to upload a recording of it to my second channel. Enjoy.
In my most recent video I mentioned in a pinned comment that I had a bunch of leftover footage that I was thinking about publishing in a video for my second channel. I've actually completed the video (though I haven't rendered it yet), but after taking a look at the performance of my most recent videos and the projected performance for my most recent one it seems pretty clear that YouTube has "de-prioritized" me from their algorithm due to lack of activity. While I don't entirely feel this leftover footage video is up to the standard I want for my primary channel, posting it here to boost my activity would probably help my odds with the algorithm in the future.
If I were to post it, I would probably do so in a few days (make it a week after I posted the Horten video) just to space things out a bit.
I figured I'd leave it to you guys to decide. There's a poll in this message for you to vote on it.
As you're probably aware, up until my upload a couple days ago I'd been absent from YouTube for some time. Those of you who have been with the channel for a long time have also probably noticed that this has become somewhat of a pattern, unfortunately. I feel I owe an explanation for this, though I want to keep my life issues away from the channel. As such, I'm going to omit many of the more personal details.
When my channel first took off, I was making videos for fun. The Unicum Guide to the M4A1 Rev., the video that effectively launched my channel, changed my outlook on YouTube and video making. When I made the first Unicum Guide, I had no Patreon, I had no PayPal, I had no Twitch page with donation links; I didn't even have any reasonable prospects of it getting more than triple-digit views. I made the video because it was fun and I wanted to challenge myself. The same could be said, to some degree, of many of the videos that followed it, but as time went on I started making videos more out of obligation than out of any passion for doing so. Eventually, as significant amounts of money started rolling in and I quit my crappy retail job, I was doing it as my main source of income. All of this, plus all of the other dumb stuff your average online content creator has to put up with (Discord servers - never again) really tainted being a YouTuber/streamer in my eyes. My now pessimistic outlook, combined with external factors from my offline life, made it hard for me the muster the enthusiasm to make videos or even stream, hence the giant gaps in video releases.
This brings me to the present day. As I mentioned in the comments of my most recent video, I've returned to college to finish my degree. If all goes well, I'll be looking for a job with that degree by the end of the year. This means that, while I plan to continue releasing videos, these releases won't be very frequent (though, more frequent than my complete lack of videos as of late). Furthermore, the subject matter is probably going to be more varied, such as the song release you've probably all seen by now. I'd imagine it'll mostly be gaming videos, as it typically has been, but I'm not ruling anything out. In short, I'm going back to making videos for fun, not for money or upping my numbers. I'll leave my Patreon open for anyone who wishes to support me, but understand that it is in no way necessary to keep the channel going.
Anyway, I hope things are a little better going forward. I had planned to make a War Thunder video, but a particularly tough class this past semester put that on hold. Perhaps I'll get around to making it if this semester proves a little less taxing. In any event, I hope to have some actual content for this channel in the future.
If this shit doesn't stop happening soon, Verizon is going to be the first victim of an anti-corporation hate crime.
Three months now, I've been dealing with this shit on and off. I've intermittently canceled streams and stopped playing the games I enjoy, and I've called their useless fucking tech support so many times that the hold music is now permanently ingrained into my psyche.
I'm just tired of this. Everything I've done is coming to a halt because I'm drained from trying to fix it. Trying to find one person at Verizon with their fucking head on straight means constantly slogging through shit like automated call systems and "certified technicians" answering my call from god knows where.
There's a tech coming tomorrow. Maybe they'll fix this shit for good, but chances are they won't. I don't know what I'll be doing until then.
With my internet now fixed and my schedule sorted for the foreseeable future, I'm ready to start streaming regularly again. After giving it some thought, I figured there was nothing wrong with my previous schedule and I decided just to start streaming on that schedule again. I'm thinking Fridays will typically be reserved for Automation/Beam like before.
...and yes, this starts today. I'll see you guys this afternoon on my Twitch.
www.twitch.tv/super_noodle/
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