That's a great idea really. Though I would love for the sidebar to show up on more pages as well - personally I almost only use the "/find-new/posts" URL, and there should be plenty of space for it there, and on other forum overviews. Adding an option for everyone to enter their twitch user account, and regularly prompt the Twitch API to see who is online, should be a pretty simple addition to make, though I don't know how easy it is to expand this particular forum software. I guess that would be @Muf territory?
The bad feedback loop of "no one streams -> no one watches -> no one streams" can only be broken if people start streaming. So what can you do? 1. Set up a solution where you can stream whenever you want with 10s preperation 2. Make it a habit to stream every game, no matter how long your session goes or if you can talk/ read the chat 3. Highlight good games e.g. your PBs 4. Spread your best games to gather more viewers, e.g. export to youtube and link back To make it more easy for you, you should have simple settings to disable your camera and mic, in case you do not want people to see/hear you for your current session. With time it gets easier to keep an eye on the chat and notice if something is happening. It will probably still take a lot of time to gather some viewers and you stream a lot of time for noone. For the things you can do to promote your channel further, I set up a small page for myself: http://www.games-net.de/hosted/tggc/tetris/index.php?action=0 It just shows some explanation videos and my PBs, my schedule (always out of date) and embeds my channel. I can see how having this in a greater scale, could benefit everyone.
As someone who is also guilty of having the ability to stream, but not doing so (I have even moved my pc to such a cumbersome location that I can't do much with it other than stream tgm) I think there are plenty of things we can do about it. 1. Follow each other, and enable notifications. My phone buzzes every time @EnchantressOfNumbers, @Qlex , and @KevinDDR go live. I am not always able to watch, but it's nice to know when I can (Kevin in particular almost never streams at a good time for me). There are probably more people I can and should enable notifications for. 2.A Twitch team could definitely help, but at the moment, Kevin is the only one who can set one up. 3.Plug your streams in IRC. I'll click if I'm around. 4. I've wondered for a while about whether or not the 3 games being listed separately on Twitch is a bit of an issue. It is beyond annoying to check if anyone is streaming TGM through twitch. Maybe we can talk about a possible merging into one unified title? 5. I think it would be really cool if we could arrange for a host train one day. 12-24 straight hours of tgm, handing off the baton to one another throughout the day. Something fun like that.
I am guilty of not doing this...I should make it a point to mention my streams in IRC. You can follow the individual games. It is still a bit of a pain to have to click on each of them, but you can easily see if TGM is streaming. Having "box art" for each of the TGM games would be nice / helpful to see more at a glance. I would definitely be on board with doing this kind of thing. Another thought I had was that maybe we could organize a kind of Double-Elimination TGM1 (best 2 out of 3?) tournament at some point in the future. I haven't used it before, but I know the retro gaming community uses http://challonge.com/ to manage their tournaments. We could advertise the tournament and host a restream with commentary of the matches. EDIT: When I'm finishing my TGM streams, I try to look for other TGM streams to host to try to increase exposure. Usually there isn't anyone streaming, but remembering to check that can also help.
I'm not entirely sure if you do this, but it also wouldn't hurt to just say "I'm going to be done soon, would anyone like a host?" before you start your last game, giving someone else time to get a stream up and running before you finish. I have used Challonge in SC2 tournaments, it works very well.
A tournament is a nice idea on paper, but I think its to much hassle if you cannot get every participant to meet physically. We live in different time zones and many people do not have too much time. Once we tried to do some speedrunning in parallel, and we never managed to get more than 3-4 people, even for very short timespan like 15 minutes. Organizing some kind of event is a good idea, I would help but we should then aim for something which might realistically work out.
While it would take a while to team up everyone with location, time zone differences and of course whatever goes on in our private lives, I think the biggest issue here would be the skill margin. There's a very strong field of top players (of which most probably wouldn't even care to participate?) and a ton of people who just aren't consistent enough to put up exciting matches. At my current level I don't think I'd embarass myself by taking part in an online competition.
We can find a format that works. For example, tgm1 races divisioned by PB time. The 9, 10, 11, 12 ,and 13 minute club members play one another rather than something absurd like me directly challenging Jago. For the consistency issue, we change the format a little. Play 5 games and take the best game of the 5, compare that to your opponent. To address time zone issues, take it slow. Give each player 48 hours to find a good time to play and stream. This is indirect competition as opposed to direct competition, it doesn't need to happen at the same time or overnight. The time zone issue is actually what would make a relay marathon work quite well. We slowly work our way west, starting with European players, and ending with Kevin or hell even beyond to Pier 21 or Tetristhegrandmaster3, can't hurt to ask.
Timezones are absolutely not the biggest issue with tournaments, in my experience (which if I do say so myself is pretty considerable over the last 10 years or so, given I've run tournaments in multiple formats across Nullpo, Tetris Friends, Blockbox and Tetris DS). The biggest problem is almost always getting people to actually play their matches, and striking a balance between accommodating personal schedules (give people lots of time to arrange and play games) and keeping the tournament from dragging on and losing interest. In particular be plenty prepared to enforce rules and kick people out if they don't sort their game out, or things just stall indefinitely, especially in an elimination-style tournament. Like TGGC said, they can be a great idea on paper, but in practice people are shit at participating. In particular note how you expect people to communicate with each other (forum PMs can be slow as shit, but all other forms of communication aren't necessarily ubiquitous), how long games are likely to take, how long the entire tournament is likely to take (preferably short so people don't get bored and it's an easier timescale to commit to), how you actually expect people to set up their games together (in a client with a lobby like Nullpo, this is easy, in other clients not so much), which games are going to be streamed (who does it? how do they add to the scheduling issues?) etc. For TGM I'd kind of question how it would work online - if it's in separate clients then how do you see what your opponent is doing? If you can't see, then does it really feel like you're competing? If it's in the same client then how does that work (last I tried, online MAME with Kaillera and the like was pretty dogshit for high-level play but admittedly that was a good five or six years ago). Is it possible to set up TGM Marathon VS in Nullpo somehow? To give some constructive suggestion, I would say Nullpomino Weeklies were the only tournaments I've run which were successful in terms of almost all the games actually getting played and the people involved enjoying the touranment. They were regularly held on a weekend evening Europe time (and therefore mid/early afternoon US time), people signed up in the client lobby half hour or so before the event, bracket got drawn up, everyone played their games because they're already there in the lobby, and there's a stream running throughout the entire event trying to pick up as many games as possible. The tournaments were single elimination to keep things short, and on the basis that if you lose there's always next week. That format worked well for 12 weeks until I basically ran out of free time to run it and nobody else picked it up, and I'd thoroughly recommend any community tournament follows a similar format (unless you've got big prizes). So long as you get 4 or more people on a regular basis it works. There's always the potential that the time isn't convenient for everyone and people miss out, but really you're never going to please everyone and it's better to have a tournament that works well for 95% of people than to have a tournament that works badly for everyone.
Oh boy that brings back memories. Things would always grind to a halt the moment someone started making excuses. (non-Tetris related.) Though as for Kaillera I'd assume it's be okay for TAP and fine for TGM assuming there are set servers available and all players are near the area (E.G having a server in say, Gravelines (France) would allow most of the western side of Europe to play at roughly 10-40ms which is approx 0.5-2.5 frames of input lag.)
@JBroms: If you remove all the interactive elements in the end its not much more than something like the carnival of death. You would need a very active team of organisation and commentators to create appealing content out of it. Noone does this for the carnival so I think those people simply do not exist. So I think much simpler things can have the same effect. E.g. ask people for replays and stream the 5 best of them together with Qlex, Kevin and the like as commentators. Most likely it will still get far below 1000 views, but a lot more than the average stream of all those 5 single guys.
I have never seen this community as active as it was during the Carnival. During last year's carnival Jago's extra challenge got quite a few people to bite the bullet and stream for a while. I would rather us have something of an ongoing league that requires streaming for verification than a commentated tournament with the players playing at literally the same time.
I did not want to say that the Carnival is bad. But it is not a tournament and it will not create content which will have the same emotional impact on viewers as footage of a tournament with good commentary.
Don't worry, I did not interpret it that way. I would rather see something closer to a league. Still an elimination competition, but over the course of weeks or a month. It would force people to stream more often than a one-off event with commentary, and we can still have someone commentate matches after the fact from VODs. Neither format is wrong, and I would play in both. I don't think the emotional impact part of it is a big deal, because at the moment most of the people watching our streams are members of this forum and the odd people every streamer knows from elsewhere.
I still play a few hours a week on stream, I just don't put any game title up because I'm technically using a clone and I don't want my Twitch account to be smited for strange reasons
