Trove streaming!
Queues and crashes
Trion keeps bring the servers down and back up (and sometimes they just crash on their own) so getting to play Trove has been a little spotty. The queue times have been pretty much consistently at 30 minutes, although there were a few exceptions where it was 10-15 minutes. I really do like the game and I understand that they had no idea there would be this many people trying to play but it is rather frustrating. Especially if your game crashes and you have to wait another 30 minutes again. Maybe I’m just not used to it, even when I was playing WoW, the servers I picked never had high populations so I rarely had to wait to get into the game.
I will give them this though, their compensation is pretty nice. So far it’s been a class coin, 3 days of Patron plus another 3 days if you bought something since launch, and 3 shadow keys. There is also talk about them looking into lowering queue times, which I really hope they do.
In the time I have played, I’ve gotten a few classes up to level 10 now including my knight, neon ninja, gunslinger, and tomb raiser. Lord Crumb and I got both of our tomb raisers from level 1 to 10 in just a few hours today. The 50% more experience from Patron status really helped that along. So now I only have the dracolyte and the pirate captain left. Some of the classes I’ve found more enjoyable than others but I’ll wait until I’ve gotten them all to 10 before making any final decisions.
Streaming and video highlights
So I’ve been playing with the idea of streaming lately. It all started when I read about Belghast playing with Forge.gg. (I’m still catching up on posts that I missed while on my vacation.) I like the idea of being able to easily pick out video games from a gaming session since I’d like to be able to include them in my posts here. Unfortunately, Forge does not seem to like me or the games I play. The video quality isn’t very good and it always seems to stop streaming/recording after only a few minutes. For Trove, that means the only things it records lately is the queue screen. It’s nice that it’s easy to set up and always on, but I think I’d rather have the ability to start it when I’m ready. The client also takes up quite a bit of computer resources so I’m just going to leave it off for now. Maybe once they work out the kinks, I’ll give it another try.
I almost said bugger it then and there but then I discovered that Twitch lets you save highlights from your stream indefinitely. So I signed up for an account and gave it a try. My first attempt was using FFsplit while playing Banished. I don’t know if I had the settings wrong or what but it did not turn out very well. Silly me wasn’t paying attention to what I was actually streaming either so it took me several hours before I actually looked at my Twitch channel. Some random person had stumbled upon it and pointed out that the video quality was horrible, with sections of the screen not updating properly or turning green for some reason. So I got rid of FFsplit and tried Open Broadcaster Software instead. It worked much better right out of the box on both Trove and Banished.
This time I was watching my stream more closely as I played so I saw when people had randomly came across my channel. At one point, I had 5 people watching me play. It felt…really strange. I’ve only watched streams on a handful of occasions, either to possibly win something or to hear/see some news surrounding it. So I guess I can’t really understand the mindset behind watching someone else play something for the heck of it. Would you rather be playing your game? I also generally play games alone so it feels weird to have someone watching my every move. One guy in the chat kept telling me to build faster in Banished, but I just ignored him because it was obvious he was trolling. For you stream-watchers out there, why do you watch streams? Is it something to do when you’re bored and can’t play yourself?
Anyways, the day after that, I found this guide for optimizing OBS for Twitch and now the video quality is even better since then.
So now that I’ve figured out the software on my end, I’m not sure about the streaming service. I went with Twitch simply because everyone knows about it. But I’m not certain if I like the platform of it. The built-in high light editor isn’t the best and I’m kind of disappointed that they’re still using Flash for their videos. As a web designer, it makes me twitchy that their videos aren’t responsive. So now I’m wondering if Hitbox or a similar service would work better. Or maybe not even streaming. I don’t know, is there something out there that I can run whenever I’m gaming and would be good for saving video clips? I’d really be curious to hear anyone’s experiences.
For the time being at least, feel free to pop by my channel if you’re interested in watching me play stuff.
Edit: I just realized that Twitch videos play automatically and I don’t know how to turn that off. No! Bad Twitch! Very bad user experience! Exported the videos to Youtube because autoplay is da poop.