The theme for Season 18 of Diablo III is: The Season of the Triune. It began on August 23, 2019. I’m playing a Hardcore Barbarian (again) because the “free set” is The Legacy of Raekor and I haven’t spent much time using it.
My intent was to stream my progress through Season 18, every day, if possible. Unfortunately, the stream I did on Twitch this morning lagged terribly and was so unusable that I decided to delete it.
I usually wait a bit before starting a new Season, especially if I intend to play Hardcore. My goal is to avoid dying due to lag, which can happen when a huge amount of players are all on at the same time.
I took a break from streaming for a while, but decided to give it one my try during Season 18. Originally, my goal with streaming was a hopeful one. I thought it might be possible to make a few extra dollars from it, as a way of supplementing the income I make from freelance writing.
My chronic illnesses drain my energy terribly, and that often meant that I had no energy to stream. It was hard to find the “spoons” to stick to a regular schedule (or even an irregular one). It is my understanding that having a regularly scheduled streaming time is best.
Twitch doesn’t start paying out until after people reach Affiliate status. To get there, a person needs to consistently hit certain benchmarks, every month.
Those that need a break, like I did, will lose ground on their goal to reach Affiliate because of how Twitch counts your average number of viewers (and other metrics). I find this frustrating, and not ideal for people like me who have disabilities.
The other thing that is making streaming a struggle is because I’m trying to do it on a Mac. There is an OBS version for Mac, but I’ve learned that it functions differently than than the PC one. When I tried streaming this morning, I discovered that I can now download my stream from Twitch. That’s new, and was not possible the last time I streamed.
Trying to get the sound to work while streaming on a Mac is difficult. It requires a second piece of software that, in short, routes the in-game sounds and music through to the stream so viewers can hear it.
Doing so means that I cannot actually hear the music and sounds while playing. There is no way for me to know, for certain, if the volume of my audio is too loud, or too quiet – because I can’t hear it. The only way I can tell is when someone comes into my stream and tells me that the volume is too quiet or that the music is too loud.
I’ve attempted to solve this issue by fiddling with the in-game sound options. It sort of helps, but doesn’t really fix the problem. The Mac version of this software does not allow me to separate my voice from the in-game sounds. So, all of it is too loud, or too soft, and that’s what I’m stuck with.
It is my understanding that the PC version does enable streamers to separate the volume of their voice from the volume of their in-game sounds.
My Mac has been “bootcamped”, which means I could try streaming as though I am using a PC. But, its been a long time since my husband set that up for me, so it will require updates. I’d have to take the time to learn how to set up my Twitch stream on PC, and I honestly don’t have the energy to do that right now.
So, why did I try to stream Diablo III this morning? I’ve given up trying to make money on Twitch. I just don’t see how that’s going to ever be possible for me. Fall pollen season has started, and I’m physically struggling as a result with all kinds of horrible allergy symptoms. I barely had enough “spoons” to stream with.
The thing is, I’ve gotten into the habit of putting something new on my blog every day. This is thanks to Blaugust 2019, which I am participating in. My thought was that I could stream my progress through Season 18 and then use a video of my stream as content for my blog.
This plan did not work out. My stream on Twitch lagged so badly that it was unusable. The problem wasn’t my software, which kept up with my stream.
The problem was on Twitch’s end, potentially because it was the first night of Season 18 and many big streamers were doing a “Level With A Cause” stream. Those streams consistently get a lot of viewers who want to help raise money for the cause. This is not a complaint against those streamers, who are doing a good thing. It is simply a guess as to why Twitch was so very laggy for me this morning.
Now, if I had remembered to hit the record button when I started streaming, there is a chance I would have had a usable video to post here. Instead, I ended up with a handful of screenshots that I took while streaming, and this avalanche of words about struggling to stream.
#Blaugust2019
Season 18 (Season of the Triune) – Struggling to Stream is a post written by Jen Thorpe on Book of Jen and is not allowed to be copied to other sites.
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