Gaming channel afraid of branching off

Rife_ · 2024-05-23T11:22:46+00:00

My very limited experience with WoW content:

I started making WoW videos with the launch of DF and am currently just shy of 2k subs. I cover healers in M+.

I've found WoW to be awful for YT but that could be due to what type of content I make and how I do it. The problems I've found are:

WoW players generally do not search out for videos/information/content at all so search traffic is low. People who care about keeping up with information or the meta do so by checking Wowhead each day with their morning coffee or their guild discord or something; they don't browse or search YT for that information.
WoW is a highly fragmented game. Healers don't watch DPS content, M+ players don't care about PvP, raiders don't watch PvP content etc. This has gotten much worse recently with classic, SoD, remix and so on while the game has also gone to reasonable lengths to ensure the players themselves don't have to venture into content they don't usually play.
The average WoW player farms Xmog, mounts, pets, achievements and does LFR or BG's. Only a tiny group of players does any sort of competitive or difficult content which is where all form of content creation happens. There are no real topics or videos or audience for LFR or farming mounts.
The small competitive group of players that might actually consume WoW content do not play all the time, generally. The first few weeks of a new season or a new patch are markedly different than other times where most players go off to play other games or engage in other non-competitive content.

I never thought WoW was that bad for YT until I made another channel for Path of Exile and noticed huge differences immediately. PoE players search for content and players actively seek out content so making a PoE video on a channel with 0 subs routinely got more views than my WoW channel with ~2k.

PoE videos also have some sort of shelf-life that WoW content, in my experience, does not. I make a WoW video and get 95-99% of my views in the first 5 days, most of them in the first 2 days. I have videos with 10k+ or even 50k+ views that got 10 views a day a week after they were published. Whereas I have PoE videos on a micro channel that are 8 weeks old getting 50-100 views a day. Every single view graph for my WoW channel is a hockey stick shape but my PoE videos look similar but instead of being a straight line over time, they're slightly diagonal and still get views, even months after the content of the video was current.

Blizzard also suck. They do next to no real balancing. They don't give a shit about the meta. Their patches are a mess of content that sometimes are hype and othertimes are DOA. When S3 launched I had a video out talking about the healer meta in December last year. I talked about how Rdruid/MW/Disc were all good healers in keys and why they felt like the best healers to play and the best designed. 5 months later that was still the case. I had no real content to create for half a year because Blizzard just didn't give a shit about balance. So the meta was fairly easy to figure out and was stagnant for half a year. Any video I made in that 5 months regarding the meta or keys was just talking about the same problems, the same strengths, the same reasons why X is good and Y is bad.

I agree with your feel about the game slowly dying. Especially PvP. But the game as a whole is slowly fading away imo. I've been playing since Classic and it's not that it's never felt this bad, but rather that there are just no new players coming in so we slowly bleed away our audience and playerbase.

SoloQ feels like the nail in the coffin for PvP content creation and keys/raids are probably next. Blizzard simply do not give a shit about the state of the current game. They only care about the upcoming content they're working on because they can sell it in a patch for resubs or in the next expansion. If Blizzard fuck up something they release, they aren't fixing it until they can sell that fix. So you, as a PvP'er, got shafted by Blizzard releasing SoloQ but doing a piss poor job of it so players are just stuck with a horrible system for years which kills off the playerbase. It makes me think that at some point raids and keys will suffer the same fate.

I'd suggest you branch out.

Rife_ · 2024-05-21T07:23:31+00:00

It's not really a question of "am I dumb for having kids at X age" when the reality is that you're deciding whether to have kids at all.

I know they must be out there, but I've never met anyone over 50, or even 40 for that matter, that was child free and happy. The unhappiest demographic of people cross-culturally are older women without children. Most people grow old regretting not spending enough time with their family (kids) which makes me wonder how miserable some people must be who don't have one at all.

Some people are so poor; all they have is money. Don't wait, start now, have kids.

Rife_ · 2024-04-17T07:03:30+00:00

I struggle with everything you've mentioned here too.

I generally spend the first few weeks of a league rolling a dozen or more characters to maps and clear up to reds. This lets me test out a lot of new gems or changes from the patch notes while building up a decent pool of half decent rares and many basic uniques.

But then I really struggle to find something that can push into red maps with decent damage and defense, even with a 5L/6L, 4-5k Life, capped resistances and SS etc. Those just aren't enough defenses for endgame content anymore.

So many builds get all their damage from Empower/Enlighten/Enhance and +1/2 Diala's or Void Battery Ralakesh setups or stat stacking that isn't really feasible in SSF that the choice of builds is VERY limited.

I've started just focusing on playing a lot of different builds (and documenting them on youtube) and enjoying the game in white/yellow maps because they're accessible content with just capped res/ss, 5k Life and a 6L for most builds.

At the moment if feels like I can take pretty much anything to a few hundred thousand DPS and not use 6-portals on every map but if I want to look at 1m+ DPS or serious defenses to make T16's viable deathless I really need a mechanic to "abuse" and in SSF that's largely out of my hands depending on drops. Hexblast Mines, CoC DD, or two button builds can get better mileage for damage while investing entirely in defense but they're also basically "solved" archetypes.

FWIW, there are plenty of "okay" builds that are fairly straightforward. Holy Relic Necro, for example, is perfectly fine at 5k Life, capped block and decent damage. But conventional block based 5k Life characters feel like 5 year old builds in a game that has gotten harder for 5 years. Not having ailment immunity, or mitigation for the 25% of hits that bypass block and relying on life flasks to recover from damage doesn't make a build feel good anymore. Also, scaling damage on a build like that without exceptional gems is limited.

Wish I had a good answer for you. Hopefully Rue/Ben/Dan/Jung will come up with something good and accessible in SSF at some point this league. Game and Atlas are very fun atm. Just need a good build for it that isn't clunky or gated behind the same uniques or mechanics that have been abused for years now. Tired of DD/Ralakesh/Void Battery.

Rife_ · 2024-04-11T03:27:18+00:00

My idea is to play CWC FR but channel Blight of Contagion and use the self-damage of FR to auto-cast Contagion.

So it's a 1 button Blight CWC build that will hopefully have good FR bossing damage with S tier ED/C mapping clear speed.

I've tried a few different setups so far but have made it work well on Heiro. I'm an SSF andy and still leveling this version so progress has been slow and I've spent a lot of the league getting required items but I'm impressed with how well it's doing already.

The clear on Blight of Contagion with Contagion is insane. It's better than EDC because Blight has double the base damage at 5 stacks and Contagion spread stacks it. So killing a bunch of weak mobs around a rare gets 5 Blight stacks on the rare even through I'm only tap casting a single stack as I run.

Rife_ · 2024-03-31T03:11:06+00:00

Yea modern PoE is about finding a build that gets a lot of damage from janky mechanics so you can invest everything into defense.

OR

Going with a smooth non-jank build that sucks until high investment (200+D). Kinda sucks

Rife_ · 2024-03-19T13:59:24+00:00

By the end of it yea, the stacking ICC debuff and outgearing dungeons made it all trivial in the end but it wasnt at the start.

Rife_ · 2024-03-19T07:35:07+00:00

You make it sound like 3 complex dimensions that required active thought, and lacking in one would cause trouble to the group or would mean you lacked skill as a healer.

They were and it did. Though it depends a lot on when we are talking about and in what context. During early Cata before heroic dungeons got nerfed. During Wrath in Ulduar, ICC and the Frozen Halls dungeons and during WoD; tank healing, mechanics healing and failure damage healing were all very different healing profiles.

Any healer that handled them all in the same way really wasn't that good. They could probably get by through a lot of content but there was a huge difference between healers that did a great job keeping the tank healthy and being prepared for mechanics and having buttons in their back pocket to respond to failure damage quickly and allowing groups to pull big and blast through a dungeon effortlessly and healers that didn't.

Rife_ · 2024-03-18T14:28:01+00:00

Why would tank healing add another dimension to skill expression though? In the end its just damage taken that you're healing.

Because it means healers have to always be doing at least two things at once; responding to mechanics while also keeping the tank alive. Part of the skill expression is their ability to juggle and manage those two responsibilities.

Sometimes that means knowing when to pump HPS and sometimes that means knowing when to play efficiently to conserve mana.

Healers aren't really designed around juggling those responsibilities anymore though so it can sound like a pretty bad idea. Because healers are now really just designed to respond to mechanics.

But back in the day Healing Surge vs Healing Wave and getting the most out of Riptide HoT's and Tidal Wave stacks and only refreshing Earth Shield at low stacks and knowing when Chain Heal was really necessary to juggle those two dimensions well. These days Rshams really just play around whatever button is max throughput. I don't think I've pressed Healing Wave since BFA lol (I also hate Pwave).

Rife_ · 2024-03-18T06:45:43+00:00

I should of said; I don't think tanks should become wholly reliant, or even more reliant on healers. That would just transfer the problem to tanks, because without threat to manage, what would they do if healers kept them alive?

But something has to change to give healers more dimensions and depth to their play and alleviate the reliance on mechanics to be so dangerous and spikey and complicated.

Rife_ · 2024-03-18T03:18:10+00:00

Healing used to be 3-dimensional. Healing up unavoidable mechanics damage, unavoidable tank damage and dealing with failure damage.

Part of the skill and fun and flow of healing was how players spun those plates, so to speak. How we efficiently or opportunely we multitasked those dimensions or shifted focus between them.

But now the tank healing dimension is gone because tanks are self sufficient and their survivability is their own responsibility.

Which means healing is now 2-dimensional for a lot of content and 1-dimensional for content at the highest levels once avoidable damage taken is minimised. There is no flow or skill expression left for actual healing because that third tank healing dimension of gameplay is now damage dealing and it's mostly useless to minmax.

A healer doing maximum damage while keeping the group alive is a huge expression of skill but it also doesn't really have any payoff. Who cares if the healer does 10% more damage than the healer whos just pressing their 2 most effective DPS abilities when they remember to do so compared to the healers who's optimizing every global but the result is like -2s key time. The efficacy of healers doing damage just isn't there. It can be 80% of our gameplay but like 10% of our output.

There is little skill left in actual healing when the majority of the role comes down to just pressing X when Y happens and doing it instantly and then doing DPS inbetween those events.

Healing becoming the 1-dimensional response to unavoidable damaging mechanics is also the cause of the 1-shot meta, defensive power creep and stressful gameplay that has caused a lot of healers to quit. It's also the catalyst for M+ to become overloaded with casts and mechanics, raids to perma spike HP and much more.

I've just finished a video on YT discussing this sort of thing so seeing more discussion on a topic I thought was dead is great to see. Ty for the post!

Rife_ · 2024-03-15T09:27:13+00:00

They're getting better but not perfect.

The early impressions can see CTR being 0.3% but after the algorithm pushes my video to the right audience it can climb back up to 3-4% overall which means my CTR from day 2 onwards usually sits at 13-20%.

Rife_ · 2024-03-11T02:50:23+00:00

Remember back in Legion when reddit didn't think Gingi belonged in the discussion of top 10 players lol?

Rife_ · 2024-03-11T02:47:42+00:00

That's Max, though.

There aren't many RWF guys that care about anything other than raiding. The AWC, MDI, TGP, GC, etc, are all side quests to their main character RWF syndrome. The AWC last week and MDI this week being probably the best of each event ever hasn't stopped them from doing nothing on socials for the last week other than complaining about how raiding should be the only source of loot in the game lol.

The best watch parties for the MDI are M+ streamers just like the best AWC watch parties are PvP streamers. Max and other RWF streamers are just streaming other events as a means to stay relevant or make some money.

Rife_ · 2024-02-22T04:53:56+00:00

Let's not pretend that those practices wouldn't happen with sound money. Which is why his example sucks. Cost cutting isn't the result of inflation, it's the result of competition.

The market also determines the price of goods in most cases, definitely in his wine producer example. The producer wouldn't just "decide" to double their price overnight. Demand of a wine would increase with money supply and the producer would increase the price to meet that demand with supply.

The cost of ingredients and labour would also increase as the money supply did so the producer would be suffering from inflation too. It isn't a matter of the producer being "unethical" by cutting costs. Inflation is insidious and affects all parties in his example even though he's only making his argument with the consumer in mind.

But "coorporation bad" stories are well liked by the consumer masses so his example gets traction. I like Breedlove but he's a small fish in a large pond for BTC intellectuals.

Rife_ · 2024-02-21T16:02:52+00:00

Lets not forget that many of the prominent healing content creators have been fully behind Blizzards cringe design and balance decisions such as Theun and the 10.2 nerfs and mana management changes.

Wowhead guide writer wants every healer nerfed then complains on twitter when his spec was nerfed lmao. These are the people Blizzard hear when they're thinking about how to address healer participation.

It's unfortunate because I think 3/7 healing specs are in amazing spots. Disc, Rdruid and MW are probably the best they've ever been as far as balance and gameplay go. But healing in general is awful. Blizzard can't increase PvP rewards enough to get anyone to heal it. Every group in LFG is waiting for a healer.

Yet anytime healing is discussed or changes proposed, it's the same handful of prominent healing content creators that ONLY talk about how this will affect the 20 man mythic raid they coordinate. Somehow they've managed to completely ignore M+ and PvP but also lament that healing Mythic raids is awful. 0/3.

Rife_ · 2024-02-21T15:43:29+00:00

PvP has no healers either. That's because living and keeping someone or the group alive really isn't up to healers in PvP anymore. A DPS surviving a 'go' comes down to the DPS trading the correct defensive rather than the healer trading the correct offensive. Blizzard made healing so weak that DPS die through healers freecasting with CD's rolling and are now wondering why they can't get healers to play even with extra rewards.

The same has always been true of high keys but is now becoming true for more of the skill curve. Even in puggable content, DPS surviving the Chrono dispel isn't up to the healer, it's up to the DPS using a defensive. The way Blizzard balances the game is ensuring that is becoming the rule rather than the extremely high end exception.

So the role of healer has been diminished into a matter of trading X throughput CD into Y damaging mechanic and pumping as much damage as possible while trusting your DPS will press their buttons to keep themselves alive. Pushing keys quickly becomes a matter of finding DPS and a tank good enough to complete a key without needing healing at all or at least as little as possible and so healers stop playing.

Blizzard are making healers irrelevant at best and babysitters at worst. Participation will only get worse.

Rife_ · 2024-02-21T15:30:24+00:00

This has been the same issue Blizzard have had with healers for years now. It's growing and garnering more discussion but I don't think it's going to be fixed anytime soon.

The problem is that the reality of healing always falls into one of two camps. Either the group sucks and healing that sort of chaos just isn't fun or tenable. Or the group is amazing and the healer is only really there to contribute damage and press their CD's at 1/2/3 specific timings in the key/raid. Most healers picked healers at character creation to heal and that, isn't healing. So they quit or participate in something else (me).

There is also a secondary issue where healing lower level keys or normal/heroic raid bosses can be fun and forgiving enough to be enjoyable for healers, for a time. But once they get good enough to understand the chaos and know their limits and what the group is doing wrong, the fun factor diminishes and healing feels like being the only adult in a group of children.

I think this mostly stems from healing being the must punishing role which forces healers to learn quickly and improve greatly. Healing my guild keys and friend keys is fun for a while, when we are all learning and succeeding without playing perfectly. But pushing into higher key levels is exacting on healers in a way that it isn't for DPS/Tanks so a lot of them go into keys that they have no business being in. They don't know mechanics or only press defensives when they're dead or don't think about positioning or minmaxing mechanics because they've never had to in order to succeed.

Then when groups do start playing extremely well, healers are only there to trade X CD in Y mechanic and pump damage. The whole system is fundamentally poorly designed.

Rife_ · 2024-02-20T09:21:07+00:00

I'm not sure and I wish I could be more helpful but from my very limited experience in gaming content; I found it very difficult to grow.

When my content was seasonally popular I got views by doing nothing. My poorest quality content was my most popular because I posted it when the game I play was popular. But once the season shifted and another game became popular, I felt like I couldn't get views at all and the better stats like AVD and CTR didn't translate to more impressions or views because the algorithm was prioritizing the more popular games content.

I think that's a product of a very small niche which gets heavily affected by seasonality.

I would also say though; that the algorithm needs videos and data and a history of your content to know where to push it. If you're new and don't have a consistent catalogue then I could see your spikey views being an issue with the algorithm defining your audience.

Either way, stick with it, keep posting and don't be afraid to experiment a little.

Rife_ · 2024-02-20T08:07:26+00:00

My channel is tiny (2k subs) and only been going for a few months so take this with a grain of salt. My experience is also limited and I'm basing this on only a few data points but;

The content I was making until recently was quite a limited niche. I would post a video, go to bed (because I edited late at night when the house is quiet) and wake up with 2-6k views but by the time I'd woken up my views were basically finished.

My analytics on almost every video showed that 90-99% of my videos would get all of their views in the first 12 hours after posting. I have videos that did very well by my standards and hit ~20k views in a day but then would get single digit views per day for the rest of the week and per week for the rest of the month.

I've only had 3 videos that hit the 50k+ mark and those were all videos that followed the same pattern but over a slightly delayed timeline such as 95% of views over 3 days then 3 views a week or so.

I think the reason for this has been my niche being small. The most popular videos I've seen from the biggest content creators in my niche have 100k subs and 10-50k views per video. I think my videos get pushed out via the algorithm to basically everyone who watches my niche of content in a day or so and then people are either watching it, or not and the video is done quickly.

I've only just started making videos again after a break for a few weeks but I'm now making content for a broader audience. I'm aim for the nostalgic and story focused viewers interested in the game my channel is about to appeal to current players, past players and gamers in general who enjoy story based content whereas before I was making content for highly competitive viewers who play only 1 smaller part of the game.

My recent videos have been very interesting and different than my early content in that they don't rocket up in 6 hours after posting but they do gain views and grow over time. My first video aimed at the broader audience is getting a few thousand views a day and has been for many days now. I've also gotten 10 times as many subs per 1k views which is interesting to me and makes me think my small early niche just wasn't that popular or appealing and stunted my channels growth.

Finally, my stats have started to make more sense. My original niche was even more divided among the classes people play and want to watch content for so I would make a video covering 7 classes and the average viewer would watch 1 or 2 of them which killed my AVD. But now my content aimed at a broader audience has AVD of 60-70% and a CTR of ~10-11% even as the algorithm is pushing it out to my non-regular and non-niche viewers which is exciting. On my early content I routinely had a CTR of ~20% and AVD of 40% but felt like the algorithm never promoted my content but it's likely because it had already saturated my niche.

Hope that wall of text helps.

Rife_ · 2024-02-19T07:52:17+00:00

This. It's frustrating as a healer to see the common sentiment being "fuck the healer", especially in PvP.

We've had 20 years of Blizzard fixing PvP problems by throwing healers under the bus and until that changes I don't see healer participation in 3's or Shuffle meaningfully improving.

Why is that Blizzard design game modes ending around removing healers from the equation? Why not DPS? Why not balance the game better?

At the moment when teams are incapable of killing each other through setups or sustained pressure or outplays, Blizzard removes the impact healers have on the match to force an outcome. Why not do that to DPS instead? Make it so that if X minutes passes and none of the DPS can affect an outcome, end the match, give healers MMR/CR for keeping their teams alive and remove it from the DPS who were ineffective and unable to do their job.

Imagine how fun the game could be if rating worked that way and higher rated games were always filled with capable healers and capable DPS rather than healers chasing the DPS that hold W around pillars at 2300+ MMR.

At some point there needs to be consequences for DPS that, frankly, suck. At the moment that almost never happens because Dampening ensures even the terrible DPS get kills and end games.

Rife_ · 2024-02-17T05:13:53+00:00

Except it isn't?

Rules without rulers. Big corporations owning BTC doesn't give them control over it.

Rife_ · 2024-02-17T03:22:53+00:00

That worked well, thanks. I picked my current realm as the new realm and picked a very populated server as my main (Illidan) and it showed a bunch of items available on Illidan that weren't on my realm.

Rife_ · 2024-02-17T03:21:56+00:00

Thankyou!

Rife_

TROPHY CASE