Wow, its been a hella long time since the last update. I was still procrastinating in class back then!
General Updates
As you have probably noticed, the website has gone a radical redesign (which at the date of this posting is still somewhat in development). With the two year anniversary of the channel, I felt it was due for a more advanced refresh. A big point of me taking on these projects has a lot to do with seeing how my general design and technical skills have improved over time, much in the same way as my channel overlays have. Of course, these projects also have to do with providing better benefits for the community. Some of our older members may remember the glorious service that used to be RevloBot. It was a fantastic bot/website combination that provided channel currency tracking, as well as a front end reward store to use that currency in for Twitch channels. When it first came out, NickxSkull69 was the one who recommended it to me at the time, and I set it up for the channel then. Unfortunately for one reason or another, RevloBot was unable to properly monetize their business, and all that work simply went under. I was determined from that point to make our channel currency systems as non dependent on third party services as possible. Our current channel bot, Iris.EXE, is locally hosted on my machine. The channel’s rewards are also self managed on the website. All of this provides incredible redundancy. There are many services now that replicate RevloBots functionality, such as the new StreamLabs Loyalty Store and extensions; however I think the solution we currently have developed here works just as well for everyone.
Here are some of the notable website updates we have now:
Website Updates
- The overall website design is fresh and consistent compared to the old one. The old website was hosted on wordpress.org; while its a great free service, the tools are severely limiting. This new site is hosted on a completely separate provider completely on my dime, and as a result I was able to go all out as I pleased.
- We now have forums! They’ll hopefully provide a more permanent place to post and preserve community content.
- The entire website now has account access and twitch authentication. No more need to redeem rewards based on an honor system.
- The zenny store is also redesigned and should be easier to navigate and redeem. I believe it finally does truly function as a replacement for the old Revlo systems.
- The site will now even show a notification when I am streaming live.
There are many more improvements, but I’m not going to bother listing them all here.
Channel Updates
I’ve actually been severely slacking off in regards to the channel (clearly I need to stream and play games more often). As of this date, the Persona Marathon has officially started, this time with a new twist; Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner- Raidou Kuzunoha vs The Soulless Army.
This present game will most likely be shuffled in between Persona 3 FES. Or maybe I’ll finish it straight through in one go, who knows.
The rest of the channel has pretty much been virtually unchanged. Make sure to give me complaints feedback on the channel feedback form.
Networking
Its not really an excuse for my lack of streaming, but one of the main reasons has simply been because I have been actively Networking. I In the famous subreddit of complaints, the Twitch subreddit, one of the main complaints I tend to see is that people do not seem to know how to “network,” or even what “networking” is. They tend to think networking is spamming their channel link all over twitter, reddit, and up peoples asses. I’ll tell you my own interpretation of networking; its simply generally being a good and contributing viewer in other peoples channels, creating generic relationships with those people. This doesn’t mean I go out of my way to go to every single stream and chat (I don’t, I’m actually quite picky about what I watch); it just means that the streams that I naturally already go to and enjoy, I make at least a semi-active effort to contribute in some way. Even just coming back again and again helps to contribute. Once the streamer and people recognize you coming back again and again, this naturally builds up that virtual friendship meter with those people, eventually looping back and benefiting you in the long run. That’s really all it is honestly, at least to myself.
Good streamers will naturally have you coming back to them again and again, and even if you are a lurker, you will eventually participate in their community by virtue alone. A great example of this is a streamer I will plug in here: AmatoryKnight. A streamer I regularly watch often (and many members of the community probably recognize as well), his chat is actually pretty quiet most of the time. He attracts lurkers from all ends of the earth. However, eventually and without fail, nearly all of these lurkers will eventually pipe up and engage him in active conversation, or participate in other ways, such as submitting clips and the like. Amatory knows this very well, and also without fail I have noticed him engaging in many other streamers chats that visit his channel, also actively participating. This is networking. This is really all that it is. Anything more than that, and you are starting to massively over-complicate things cough cough twitch subreddit cough.
That’s about it for this post. Engage with the community on Discord or the forums at your leisure!
