Change in Stream Culture

Hey everyone!

First of all, as always, thank you and welcome to all our new patrons!  Your support is much appreciated and I hope you're enjoying this service so far.

Now then, straight to business!  This post will carry a bit more of a serious tone than usual.  Typically it would be something reserved for the $10 "life post" but seeing as those of you who donate at all are a more devoted following, I wanted to make sure this message got to all of you.

For those of you following on Facebook and Twitter, you know about my recent "meltdown" over the jeering comments during my For Honor stream.  While these aren't new feelings (nor my first warnings about such chat behavior) I've hit a boiling point with it and had to make the decision for my own emotional health to stay away from those games, at least for the time being.  My temper is my own fault and my own problem; it's one that I've worked hard over the years to learn how to manage.  It is not helped, however, when I get into these games, get frustrated and then have people poking fun from the sidelines in typical online trash talk, even though it's in good fun.

Games like Dark Souls and For Honor aren't the only places this comes up.  There have been people who intentionally try to bait (or blatantly insult) our group in the middle of raid streams.  This goes beyond the fun we usually poke at eachother and delves into the realm of obnoxious.  Now, obviously, the best thing to do is ignore it, but it's not always easy when a lot of the group really enjoys interacting with you all as fans.  What many seem to misunderstand is that we're all still just people.  We're not on a higher level, we don't have saintly personalities.  We're just funny from time to time and I do my best to bring those moments to the surface in the videos for both you guys and our own group.  We have our own stresses and problems and these videos are a helpful reminder that it's all worth it and we can still have fun.  So when people get too comfortable and get unwittingly hurtful, it makes us all less willing to put ourselves out there.  And it's coming from fans.  It's easy for me to just mute or ban a toxic person from chat, but these are all people who support in one way or another and are just acting inappropriately.

So what does that mean for all of you?  Why am I just griping to no end, lol.  You all are unique in that you're all on one platform (patreon) and you've made your support known in something other than lip service (as others have done with artwork, music, etc.  they're just not all here).  As a channel for the FFXIV community, I'd like your help as the community to help keep harmful comments to a minimum in a constructive way.  I don't want to take my frustrations out on people who just think they're having fun and otherwise think the world of our group.  That sentiment isn't lost on me.  Changes need to happen, though.

One thing I'm working on is assigning mod roles during streams to enforce these rules more sternly and consistently.  It helps for others within the regular chat to chime in support as well, though.   So here are examples, most of which just rely on reading the atmosphere of the raid.  If a member or myself is frustrated at a loss or fight hangup, any form of sarcastic "kappa" remark is usually not going to help keep us in a good frame of mind.  "Time to git gud guys! kappa" "Ha you all got rekt! kappa" "Hey, try doing more damage kappa" and so on.  Any form of critique or strategy help without someone asking directly comes off as very insulting as well, especially in the midst of frustration.  We're big kids, we do our research and we have people in the group who have beaten these fights before who are alrady instructing us.  As much as we put our silliness on display in the videos, we're a serious group when it comes to progression and we take all the necessary steps to make sure we get our clears.  Some people will get frustrated when we don't reply and think we're just being stubborn when, in fact, we're trying to work out our own strategy.  It just gets tiresome to have to tell people over and over that their help, unless asked for, should be kept to their own groups and let us play how we're playing.  Progression isn't always smooth and I know people just want to help, but if you think about it from our perspective I hope our attitudes towards such things are more understandable.

Regarding competetive games in general, I'm just a hothead.  It's something my younger brother loves teasing me about and it's gotten him a couple bruises in the process (which I'm not proud of).  I'm a very expressive person so it's very easy to tell when I'm no longer in a good state of mind or just frustrated due to my lack of ability to succeed.  I'm prideful and easily embarassed, so having jeers from the sidelines are... less than helpful.  Because of that, I'm hoping that when we do those types of streams again, you all can help calm chat down and give me time to compose myself so we can get back to the fun.  And this is all stuff that I take into consideration when playing with friends: if someone is getting legitimately upset, I try and help them out of it instead of rubbing it in so we can keep having fun (plus I know how it feels).

That's about it for now, I apologize for my rambling.  I feel you all are people I can trust with this information and have a willingness to help keep the fun in the content I produce.  I will continue working on myself, and I hope i'm not asking more than I should.  Thank you all, again, for making all of this possible, and for your amazing amounts of support.  You're all awesome.

P.S. - I'm one of the ones who started our monk damage jokes, but there can be too much of a good thing.  Even our own group is beating it into the ground, so I'm hoping we can keep it fresh and mix in a few other things.  I'm big on kind words, expressing and receiving, so when it's all negative bashing on my job, it starts to suck the fun out of what we're doing.  I'd like to keep the joke in circulation, just in moderation. :P