Live streaming and doing an about face

I will be frank, I thought that there could be nothing more boring than watching someone live streaming. Which is a really odd thing to say considering I enjoy watching arena games and Starcraft games at Blizzcon. People also stream themselves just playing WoW.  I could not think of anything more boring.  Why would I want to watch someone playing WoW when I could be playing it myself?

However, last night I was chatting to Ravz and I asked him "Are you having fun listening to us dying all the time?"  And I was a little surprised when he said "No".

A flurry of thoughts went through my head.  Was he disgruntled for missing out on the raid and feeling resentful?  Was he bored listening to us talking?  Did he think we were doing it all wrong and had a better strategy?  A bubble of indignation rose in my chest.

"Why?" I asked.

"I wish you were live streaming so I could see what you were doing," he said.  "I want to learn it so I can do it next time."

Oh.  Well I hadn't expected that.  And you know what?  I could TOTALLY understand what he meant. How many times have I sat out of raid and wished I could watch?  And listened longingly on vent dying to have been there to see it for myself?  It had never occurred to me that I could watch someone stream it... well, because I never really think of streaming as a fun thing to do.  But this was totally a good idea!

I was inspired.  I decided that I would look it up.  So in the middle of wiping on Heroic Blackfuse I was off googling "how to stream world of warcraft".

I knew Twitch.tv had something to do with it.  And during some searches, some people said to use X-split so I decided to go with that. So whilst Jazz and Nath had their lagging issues and did a full restart of their computers, I was off downloading software so I could try this streaming thing.

Aimei was my test dummy and I bounced all my questions off him and made him watch the stream.  "How do I set up an account?  How do I get this to work?  Why can't I do this or that?"  But it actually turns out that the whole thing is very easy to do.  Just make an account on Twitch and X-split and then off you go.  So before long I was streaming, but I didn't realise it was streaming and Aimei was watching me fumbling around in game.  Now this was the funny part, because everything was coming through - my conversations, keyboard tapping, mouse clicking.  So after I did a bit MORE fiddling and disabled ALL game sounds (much to my chagrin - I can't cope with no game sounds) we were off doing Blackfuse again.  I told Ravzz I had it up and running so he watched it.

I asked him about it today, and he said that it was actually really good to be able to watch it.  At the time, he said that it looked very busy - which it was - and he said it was a really good learning tool.  I was happy and suddenly streaming went from being something stupid to something I might actually do for raids for learning purposes.

Naturally I had my own anxieties about it.  Have you seen my non beautiful UI?  Totally ugly.  And how about my bags being open sometimes?  Oh and how I often have quest objectives up on the side... OH, and what about people seeing me CLICKING stuff.  Oh and my personal chat - I hadn't covered that up - so people can see real names and all my private conversations etc! Oh and what if people hear me FART...

But I've now bought the subscription so I can block out the chat now.  Also, I will just have to be conscious of my language use - I do say a lot when I'm not hitting push to talk >.>