Bloodline Champions

A couple of my friends told me yesterday that they wanted to make an arena team in Bloodline Champions to play somewhat competitively. A while back, I had bought some starter pack for the game, so I was quite interested by this prospect and told them that I would give it a shot with them. Thus, yesterday, we played 5 of our 10 placement matches required to be placed into a competitive league. We won all 5 matches, which is very encouraging.

In addition, I brought my gaming stream back online using a new streaming tool that I'd be glad to discuss at some point in the future. Maybe I'll even update my streaming tutorial page. Regardless, since I recorded all of the matches, I decided to upload them to my new youtube channel, so you can find the videos there. I also have embedded the first match here.

My Stream

It's been a long time since I've streamed any games regularly. I haven't completely given up on playing games despite being really busy with various real life things that I have going on right now. However, I've decided I should really get back into streaming at least a couple times a week. Right now I'm thinking of including the following games in my streaming rotation:

• Diablo 3 beta
• Dota 2 beta (probably not too much playing myself)
• Terraria
• Minecraft
• WoW raids with my guild

If you think of any other games I should stream, feel free to send it in a message to my twitter: @cordoro1

Starcraft 2, Day 2

On my second day of Starcraft 2, my friend Phorisc wanted to play with me so I started by playing a 2v2 where we placed into Diamond. Then we played some 3v3s with Bothari and after that I played my 1v1 matches for the day. Sadly, my stream stopped working somewhere in the middle of the 3v3 matches so my triumphant victory while playing terran (my worst race) was not recorded and I can't share it with you. Instead, I have to share the placement match with Phorisc on my team. I also helped Phorisc set up his stream by pointing him at my Streaming Tutorial.

Moving to justin.tv

Even though I originally started streaming on ustream, I had recently been having problems with it. The main problem was that videos I recorded there would not upload to youtube automatically and required me downloading them, and then compressing them again in another program. This conversion resulted in a huge loss in quality, and the audio and video being out of sync. Clearly this is not a good way to make youtube videos, so I decided to switch to streaming on justin.tv.

There are a couple benefits to justin.tv from my point of view, and the main one is that uploading videos to youtube is way easier. Whenever I stream to justin.tv, the video is automatically saved (for 7 days). While the video is saved, I can easily go back and watch it to make highlights. These highlights can then be uploaded to youtube, and the best part is that justin.tv will split the video automatically for you, so that you can upload something that is longer than 15 minutes in multiple parts. I used to have to watch the clock to try to stop the video every 10-15 minutes to be sure the video would upload. The other benefit to streaming on justin.tv is that they seem to have way more gaming streams, meaning people that are interested in watching games will be more likely to be on justin.tv already, giving me a greater chance of higher exposure.

Razer Carcharias Test

Two days ago, the audio in my stream had an obnoxious clicking sound that I was able to trace to the microphone input. I've been using a cheap $20 headset and mic that I got more than 3 years ago so I figured it might be time to upgrade to something a little better. I read a bunch of reviews online and decided that the Razer Carcharias would be worth trying out so I went to Best Buy and picked one up. The headphone part was fine and was definitely nicer than what I had at home. However, the problem I was trying to solve was getting a better microphone sound for my stream. It turns out that the microphone on the Razer Carcharias is worse than the one on the cheap set and does a worse job of picking up my voice. In addition, I found a lot more static in the signal coming from the Carcharias mic, so I decided to return them.

This morning before I returned them, I gave my old set another try, and the clicking noise was gone from the mic. My recommendation would be to only get a Razer Carcharias if you don't care too much about the microphone and plan to only use it for gaming with the occasional communication through steam, ventrilo or teamspeak.

First Stream

I figured it would be nice to show some results of my first attempt at streaming. I just uploaded the video of the game we won in League of Legends to youtube, so here it is:

Setting Up Game Streaming

For a while I've wanted to figure out how to stream the games I play so that other people could watch if they wanted. I know I enjoy watching other people play games from time to time, so I thought it could be fun to have other people watch me. I've tried to get stuff set up for streaming before, but the sound didn't work right, or the video would end up choppy, or something would just go wrong. But yesterday, I was successful.

The key for me was a program called XSplit. I've watched a lot of other people stream League of Legends on own3d.tv and so I decided to make a channel there. They suggest using XSplit so I downloaded it and installed it. After setting up XSplit, I clicked broadcast to my own3d channel, and nothing showed up. It seemed like I was broadcasting, but even my friends couldn't see anything on my channel for some reason. The only time video would show up is when I'd turn off the broadcast. A brief amount of video would get through right at the end of the broadcast. I still haven't figured out why XSplit didn't work for me with own3d (I might need to open ports or something).

So I decided to try out my ustream.tv account that I'd already set up in my previous attempt at streaming since XSplit has an option to use a ustream account. Magically, it just worked. I did spend some time playing around with the settings in XSplit to get the sound to work right, but I was able to broadcast 2 hours of minecraft just fine. Then I decided to play a couple games of League of Legends, and they also worked just fine. One thing I'd noticed other streamers using to get LoL to work in windowed fullscreen mode, was a program to shift the window slightly. This thread on the LoL forums tells you where to get the program and how to set it up.

I also tried streaming a Starcraft 2 game, but the stream was kinda choppy, probably because I had the graphics a little too high. In the end, I'm glad to have streaming set up on my computer and I hope my experience with setting it up can help other people in the future