Adventures In Twitch Affiliate, Learning How To Do Things, And Twitch Etiquette

Fairly recently I started streaming on Twitch with PS4 broadcasts. I found that I love it. As the saying goes, it's not work if you love it. After a bit of time, I got Twitch affiliate and while that may be no big deal to most people, it was a big deal to me. This meant that all the hard work I had been putting in to build a community that is welcoming to everyone where we can talk openly and honestly about mental health brought a lot of good people who appreciated it and followed my stream and continued to stay. I can't even begin to tell people how much that means to me. I have done my best to be kind and welcoming to everyone who pops in and chats in my stream and I'm starting to get regulars now which is a very cool thing.

One of the big things on getting affiliate is being able to have emotes for the people who do a paid subscription to the channel. For affiliates, we get one in three categories: tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. I immediately thought of my dear friend tifad0esart who is a fellow streamer and does fantastic art streams. I asked her to design the emotes for my channel. I was delighted when she said yes and informed me later that I was actually her first ever commission for Twitch emotes. I am so happy that I got to work with her and the emotes she designed were perfect. I went with a little dragon who is basically the mascot for my twitch channel and we named her Amethyst. Tifa did a fantastic job designing the little dragon emotes and showed me how to upload them to Twitch. So for tier 1 it is Amethyst waving hi, tier 2 is Amethyst sip, and tier 3 is Amethyst with a yarn heart and the knitting needles in the heart like a little arrow.

Tier 1-3 Amethyst emotes look great!

I had to wait for the emotes to be approved. I was lucky that they were approved in a couple of days. Sometimes it takes a little longer if Twitch gets a ton of emotes submitted for approval. A couple of days later, the little dragon emotes were approved and ready to use on the channel. I was happy that so many people loved my little Amethyst dragon emotes. I had also uploaded them to my Discord channel so that people could use them there as well. 

After that, it was time for sub badges to the channel. These are basically cutely designed little badges next to the person's name in chat who have subscribed and after a certain amount of time of them repeatedly subscribing every month, the badge can evolve to a different badge i.e. a leveling up badge if you will, so it goes three months, six months, and a year. Tifa offered up the great idea of my sub badges being cute little dragon eggs that start out as a normal dragon egg and then gradually hatch over time. I loved the idea and Tifa got to work on them. She was fantastic about listening to what I wanted and how I wanted everything to look so the final result when they were finished looked perfect. I was delighted by the response from everyone about them and again, I uploaded these to the Discord so everyone could use them there alongside the Amethyst emotes. 

The lovely sub badges designed by Tifa. 

I have had issues with my stream, mainly technical. Sometimes our internet drops and with a PS4 broadcast when that happens, it ends the broadcast so I have to restart the stream. It's an incredibly frustrating feeling for me when this happens because it means my stream is in two videos. I am grateful to everyone in my community who is understanding about it when it happens and who offer words of support and kindness. I know I need a capture card for streaming from the PS4 and eventually the PC, but capture cards are expensive and I need to save up money until I can afford to buy one.

This means it will have to be straight broadcasts for the most part. The thing is, that issue caused me to look up and learn how to do workarounds with no capture card. One of the things is remote play with the PS4. Ron was very helpful with helping me figure out how exactly to do it. Remote play is not perfect. Essentially it is streaming twice, from the PS4 to my PC, and then to Twitch using OBS. There is a slight delay and some games work better than others depending on how much information is in them. I have streamed a couple of things using remote play; Dragon Quest Builders and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. One of the issues is the capture window is small in remote play so I have had to make adjustments. Another is the encoding overload issue which can cause small lag spikes. I have done my best to make it work, but it's not a perfect fix. It has been a good lesson for me though in learning how to do things and do my best to keep thinking of ways to improve my streams. This was also how Ron and I discovered my PC needs more memory so that's one of the first things that will be upgraded and then the capture card. 

A cute picture of me knitting by Tifa.

I have learned how to do raids, hosts, and how to make people mods. I have learned how to time people out when they're trolling and how to ban them too. Luckily that has only happened a few times and I'm grateful to my community for having my back. I have learned the Twitch etiquette too and yes, there are etiquette rules. One of the big things of course is to always do your best to be kind. Being awful to people just because you can is not the way to go and many streamers won't put up with it and will let you know right away by either timing you out or banning you. Another is that if you are in a person's stream to not self advertise. It's considered incredibly rude. So how do you get people to your channel? Make friends in the community. No, really. Hang out in other streams, chat with the streamer and other people, hang out, and just have fun. When you build those friendships and are genuine, it makes it a pleasant experience for everyone. This is where hosts and raids come in also. Raids are a nice way to spread the love to other streamers, bringing people from your community to theirs and introducing them to someone new or someone you really like. Sometimes if the streamer raided you really likes you and appreciates you, they will give a shout out to you and invite people from their channel to go follow yours.  Hosts on your channel show that you like this streamer and if people would like to go directly to their channel from yours and check them out, they can. 

One of the best nights I had was just chilling out and playing Dragon Quest Builders. It was a nice night just chatting with everyone and I was just myself. That's a big thing too. Always be yourself. It got a few people to follow and I was truly touched that they liked my community enough to follow my channel. When I was done for the night and we raided my dear friend Makarimorph, a lot of people came with me after I had spoken about how kind he has always been to me and to others, that he is just a lovely person who is about fun and positivity. I was very happy to see that a few of the new people who had followed me and came with me for this raid, followed Makarimorph too. This is how you build a community, being there for each other, and supporting each other. 

Social media is another way for letting people know about your streaming channel. Twitter seems to be the big one. I do use the Mother Gamer twitter for the channel when I am streaming. A lot of streamers also have Instagram, Facebook, and some also do YouTube videos. For example, Gooperatives does a lot of great Let's Play videos on YouTube of games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Makarimorph has a lot of great Warframe Eidolon tutorial videos on YouTube. Of course, having a Discord channel helps as well. This gives your community a chance to hang out with everyone after streams as well as make new friends to play games with like Warframe. 

The rest of the etiquette is pretty much common sense. Don't be hateful to others, don't be a bigot, and don't be racist. It's a good idea to read the Twitch TOS just to get a feel for what is and is not allowed. This also applies to a streamer's channel. Read what the rules are on their About Me panels or check out their chat rules in the chat box settings. Follow the rules and do your best to be kind. 

It's been quite the adventure with streaming and I'm truly enjoying it. Sure it's been a little stressful when things don't work the way I expect them to or my stream has technical issues, but I am lucky that I have a great support system with Ron and with the people within my community. When I stream I am having fun and I am enjoying chatting with everyone whether it's hearing about their day, what they think of the game I'm playing, or talking about favorite books. Doing this and running my knitting shop has been quite an adventure and I'm looking forward to continuing it and celebrating every milestone as it comes. Special thank you to my husband, Ron who has been with me for every step of these adventures cheering me on and here's to many more adventures together. Thank you to my dear friend Tifa for doing such an amazing job on the emotes and sub badges. You are so talented and just an amazing person. Thank you to everyone in my community who has been so supportive and kind while I've been navigating this adventure. I'm still pretty new and learning all the things, but thank you for being here and helping me to build a community that is all about being kind and supportive. It means a lot to me. Thanks for reading everyone. See you at the next adventure! Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it!

Tifa's designs of the dragon emotes. See you at the next adventure!

Come hang out on my streams here: https://www.twitch.tv/mothergamer

Check out my dear friend Tifa's art stream channel here: https://www.twitch.tv/tifad0esart

Mother Gamer Plays Maple Story 2

It's been a long time since I played the first Maple Story, but I was ready to try out Maple Story 2. The game is free to play and looks like a super cute anime world complete with all the anime characters. Making my character was pretty easy. There is a lot of customization so you can make your character to your liking. Next of course comes the job classes. There are nine different job classes to choose from. So your options are: assassin, berserker, heavy gunner, knight, priest, archer, runeblade, thief, and wizard. I decided to go with heavy gunner because it looked interesting to me. Also choosing which server you would like to be on comes up. I went with NA East because that has more people on it and a lot of my friends are on that one. After that I was ready to play the game.

My super anime heavy gunner. 

There is a bit of a tutorial showing you how the controls work. I have issues with arthritis in my hands so I use a controller often while playing games on PC. I was thrilled to find that Maple Story 2 is quite compatible with a gaming controller, so that is what I used while playing the game. It was very easy to set up and map the abilities to the controller. The world of Maple Story 2 is huge. There are a ton of main story quests and side quests to do. Exploration is definitely encouraged. Load times for the game are fairly decent so you can get to and from different areas pretty quickly. There are dungeons you need to do for the story quests and these are fun to explore offering experience and rewards for your job class. 

Fighting a boss in a dungeon. 

There are group dungeons and raids as well. While you can solo some of the story dungeons, it goes a lot faster in a group. Raids are much more challenging and having a good group definitely helps. There is a daily reward cap of 10 dungeons and a weekly reward cap of 30 dungeons. Once you hit the cap you don't get any more rewards until it resets weekly on Fridays at midnight UTC. Whichever you like doing, they are a lot of fun. The dungeons and raids are colorful areas with a variety of cute anime style enemies as well as interesting story elements. 

There are lots of colorful dungeons like this one. 

If you need a break from running around dungeons, there are also tons of fun mini games. The game will give a notification of a mini game happening like Dance Dance Stop and you can click on it and you will be whisked away to the event. Participating in these mini games gives you experience on your character and if you win you receive rewards such as a Kay coin which can be used to spin the Kay's Event Wheel for a chance to win accessories and consumables. The mini games are a lot of fun and a nice break from grinding. 

Everyone having fun playing Dance Dance Stop.

There are mounts in the game for getting around that great big world. Some you get as a reward for completing certain quests and others can be bought with varying currencies such as merets. Each mount varies in speed, riding options, and unique run cycles. Certain mounts can only be used on land or sea. There's a variety to choose from and getting them is half the fun. 

I can ride around on a giant duck mount!

An adventurer needs a place to hang their hat so you do get a little starter home in Maple Story 2. You get a tutorial on how to decorate your home, how to build things in it, and how to place items. You can customize your house however you like and some people have even expanded their houses. The creativity is endless and it's very cool to see how many different housing styles there are. You can also buy a plot in various areas and build a house. If you have the funds you can set up your pad and make it great. 

Exploring my starter home. 

That's not to say that Maple Story 2 doesn't have problems. The biggest thing are all the bots. Bots seem to be the bane of every MMO's existence. Unfortunately the bots are rampant in the game. They are on every map and now some of them are invading the dungeons. It can be incredibly frustrating seeing the constant spam from gold sellers as well as how obvious they make themselves when running dungeons. Nexon has made a statement that they are aware of the issue, that their GMs ban them as soon as they are noticed and have an automated system. They have admitted that the problem is the bots create a weird combination and generate accounts too fast. They stated that because of this they are working on ways to combat the bots abusing their system. Hopefully they will have a fix for it soon. The other issue is some of the elitist players. That's not to say that everyone is like that, but there are some players in the game that feel that just because they're behind a screen they have a right to be rude to others. This is what the block button is for and it should be used accordingly. You can report harassment as well, but that should really only be used for extreme cases. Having friends to play with in the game definitely makes it better. 

Overall, Maple Story 2 is a lot of fun to play. There is so much to see and do that it can be a little overwhelming, but luckily it's a game that allows you to be as casual or hardcore as you want to be. I love that I can hop on the game and play for an hour or two and hop off. Maple Story 2 is great for playing by yourself, but more fun with your friends. It's a big colorful world with lots of fun to be had. Get out there and explore! See you at the next adventure!

See you at the next adventure!

*Maple Story 2 is available to play on the following platforms: PC

Come follow me on Twitch and hang out for some gaming streams: https://www.twitch.tv/mothergamer