FrankerZ Theater Day One [TwitchCon 2016 Panel Recap]

For the complete list of panels, check out the main

TwitchCon 2016 Panel Recap

post.

Voice Acting on Twitch

VoD link#

https://www.twitch.tv/twitchconfrankerz/v/92237135?t=09m56s

Moderator#

Elspeth

Participants#

GassyMexican, ZombieUnicorn, Margaret Krohn, georgiavanc

• Streaming and voice acting help each other out quite a bit, because you're always busy with your voice and audio.
• Using different voices can make games more entertaining to play and watch.
• Voice acting is a good and fun way to deal with trolls in multiplayer games.
• Use video game characters as a reference point for new voices you're going to use.
• Some of the introductions into voice acting were making machinima videos, theater, and local radio commercials.
• Livestreams are a great way to try out new voices, practice, and get exposure for your voice acting. Your audience's reaction will let you know if your voice is working or not.
• It's happening more and more that casters get contacted by devs because they've watched the stream and liked the voices they were doing.
• Try and find a level of comfort where you can keep up the use of a certain voice without destroying it.
• Using a catchphrase helps to get into character.

YOU DIED: Delving into Dark Souls Streaming

VoD link#

https://www.twitch.tv/twitchconfrankerz/v/92237135?t=01h30m06s

Moderator#

LobosJR

Participants#

Elajjaz, MANvsGAME, DreadedCone, Peeve, JenDenise.

• The beauty of Souls games is that you die a lot and people can see you gradually get better at the game.
• The games are very spoiler heavy, from secrets that you can find or figuring out how to deal with new mobs or bosses. Getting these spoiled in chat takes away from feeling like you achieved something when you do beat a boss and it’s hard to deal with these.
• Finding a mob or boss that is super challenging will give you a feel if you're gonna like the genre.
• It's really hard to find the lore in the Dark Souls games, increasing the replay value of the game. Spoilers will actually help you here because of how hard it is to find some of these lore objects because the game doesn't tell you where to go.
• Making player ran Covenants have made it so you can now group PvP in Dark Souls 3 with your viewers.
• One of the most rewarding features for the Souls games is the seamless invading of other people their worlds, no menus or queues in order to PvP.
• One of the challenges of streaming the Souls games is to not let yourself get distracted by chat, reading chat can easily get you killed.
• In order to deal with a toxic chat it helps to keep in mind that for every hater in the chat there are 5 lurkers who want to see you succeed and will cheer for you when you kill a boss.

Protecting Yourself on the Internet (Streamer Edition)

VoD link#

https://www.twitch.tv/twitchconfrankerz/v/92237135?t=04h30m21s

Moderator#

MaximusRaeke

Participants#

theCLASSIFIEDcas, Danotage

• Cyber security is important because you want to keep yourself and your family safe.
• There are 2 types of threats that streamers are vulnerable to:
• • DDOS-attack
  • Swatting
• A DDOS-attack means that the attacker sends so many packets to your network that it doesn't know how to handle them and gets stuck, bringing down your internet and your stream
• Ways to deal with a DDOS-attack when you are being targeted:
• • Get your ISP to change your IP-address
  • Use a VPN or proxy
• Swatting means that someone is trying to deceive law enforcement to dispatch an emergency response to your home based on a false report.
• Swatting can cause physical harm and psychological. Above all law enforcement is wasting time on a false situation when they could be helping someone.
• Ways to deal with swatting:
• • Go to local law enforcement and explain that you are a possible target for Swatting so they can keep track of it.
  • Ask the police to call you before they respond to a 911 call.
• This will not prevent swatting from happening, but when it does it will be in a less hostile environment.
• A good way to prevent both of these threats from happening is protecting your IP-address. Your IP-address is basically where you live on the internet and it's all they need in order to DDOS you. It can also be used to find additional info about you and your system.
• You can call your ISP and set up extra security measures for people to access your account with info they acquired on the internet, set up a password for instance.
• Be careful with what software you download. A lot of early access games don't focus on protection so it's generally easy to find out your IP.
• Doxxing is researching someone's personal information and using this against someone or publicizing this information.
• Some things to make it harder for people to find out personal information:
• • Don't use monitor-capture. It takes one slip up on stream to leak personal info about yourself or others.
  • Include your family, explain to them that exposing information about you could be dangerous.
  • Separate your personal information from your Twitch information.
  • Pay attention to the e-mails you receive, if you don't trust it research it before clicking any links.
  • See if there's information about you out on the internet on for instance a white pages website and request that they remove your information.
  • 2 factor authentication is your friend!
  • Every once in awhile Google your own name and see what you and others can find.
  • If you use PayPal, get a business-account because when people donate to you they can see your personal info when they donate to personal accounts.
  • Use a password manager to remember your passwords, but make you use one that encrypts your passwords.
• EXIF data is data stored in pictures. In this data people could for instance find the GPS coordinates of where you took the picture. You can prevent this by disabling GPS when taking pictures.
• Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook will automatically remove this information from your picture, services like Google Drive and Discord for instance don't. (Discord is working on removing it)
• 2 factor authentication is really important. 2 factor authentication means that there is more authentication required to access your account then just your password. For instance, on Twitch, you install an app on your phone that gives you a code that you use next to your information to login or request a password change.

What is Twitch "Science"?!

VoD link#

https://www.twitch.tv/twitchconfrankerz/v/92237135?t=06h00m10s

Moderator#

Dr_ewww

Participants#

advntrcptlst, HorsesOnDemand

• The Twitch Science team's mission is to help reach decisions about how Twitch products and programs should be. They collect data and supply these to people.
• • The user research team at Twitch aids in product development by helping teams understand user needs, motivations, and behaviors.
  • They work across the organization with product managers, designers, engineers, marketers, and product leaders.
  • They collect data by using research methods and working directly with Twitch stakeholders, viewers, broadcasters, and (game) developers.

• A typical research product development cycle involves the following:
• • Ideation
  • Prototyping
  • Development
  • Launch
• Everything on Twitch starts with an idea. Often these ideas come forth out of talks with viewers, broadcasters, and partners. Twitch has ideation workshops to think of new ideas for Twitch.
• A form of Twitch prototyping is paper prototypes. It's cheap to make and an easy and quick way to get instant feedback.
• Twitch has a lab with all the different platforms that Twitch is used on to test the prototypes.
• The work doesn't stop when the product is launched. Post-launch, the Science team partners with customer service and data teams. Collect information using surveys and use all these feedback to better the product or perhaps use them for a future product.
• The friends system is one of the bigger launches the Twitch science team worked on. One of the challenges was finding a way to discover friends without having to search for them. Twitch made recommendations for whom to befriend based on the following interactions:
• • whispers
  • chat mentions
  • follows
  • hosting
  • co-moderating
  • shared friends (post-launch)
• Goal is that people accept friend requests based on these recommendations, so the system was fine tuned to increase the acceptance rate.
• After the friends system was added the percentage of whispers between friends was measured and turned out to be really high, another indication that the recommendations worked.
• One of the reasons the friends system was added so that you can share who you watch and thus increase follower rates for those broadcasters. Between community-members it increased follower rates among streams followed and watched by friends.
• Experimentation is very useful for the Science team and should also be for viewers. When you're playing games you kinda work on experimentation already by trying to do things that make you better at a game. Experimentation has 4 principals:
• • Pick something to improve
  • Make a change you think will help
  • Minimize other changes
  • Measure the result
• The 'recently watched' system is a feature that for instance helps with finding channels you've watched but for some reason didn't follow or remember the name of. They experimented on this feature by trying to figure out if this would work with games too instead of just channels.
• • Goal: help people find something to watch
  • Change: show recent games
  • Minimize other changes: A/B test (compared two groups of people, one affected by the change, one not affected by it)
  • Measure: compare how much video people watch between control + treatment, this was measured by:
  • How much video people watch: people turned out to watch moderately less with the interface
  • People's odds of returning to Twitch: Didn't get affected much
  • How often people loaded the game directory: Was loaded quite often, but was more about novelty then being something useful.
  • How often people followed a channel: Was unchanged.
• All this helps to understand the products they design. They design something to make a change but they don't always know if it has the desired effect.
• Try this at home, how to promote your channel:
• • Lot's of streamers tweet before they go live and when they go live and then stop. The panelist believes that tweeting throughout the stream will draw in more viewers.
  • Goal: Get more viewers!
  • Change: Tweet every hour while live
  • Minimize other changes: Stream normally for a week, then stream for a week with the new twitter change (it's important to base this on a whole week, since different days have an impact on viewer numbers and so does the weekend versus the workweek)
  • Measure: Compare how many viewers you get (and when you get them)
  • Decision time:
  • Did you see a change in your metric?
  • Do you think that change was the result of your new habit or something else
  • Make a decision!
• Another experiment to try at home that is being recommended is the auto hosting feature that just got released.

Master of the Game: GMing Tabletop RPGs on Twitch

VoD link#

https://www.twitch.tv/twitchconfrankerz/v/92237135?t=07h29m55s

Moderator#

Adam Koebel

Participants#

Matthew Mercer, Steven Lumpkin, Chris Perkins, Nadja Otikor

• Tabletop RPGs get an audience because it's up to the viewer to decide how (s)he visualizes what happens. Unlike most of the current media where this is being visualized for you.
• It's important to keep a distinction between you the GM and and the players you're playing with versus the viewers. Don't let them influence you and your game to much. There's a lot of backseating involved when it goes to GMing, encourage discussion but don't take their critique and/or suggestion to heart.
• There's not a very big difference between a tabletop RPG online or at a table. The only difference seems to be that people get distracted a bit easier online.
• Not every tabletop RPG is suitable to be streamed. When the RPG is too complex the audience loses interest pretty quick, in what setting you're playing doesn't seem to matter much though.
• When it comes to finding players to play with it's important to find a group of players that work well together as a team, it has to be entertaining to watch so you can't just get a random group together.
• Every GM can get a group through a D&D session, but the type of GM drastically changes how they get through it.
• When you have a group that tends to turn away from how you set up the story, don't be too strict about it and let them take a run with it. The challenge is to afterwards try and turn them towards where you wanted them to go.
• It helps to get a bit of a backstory from your players before you prepare a story for them. It gives you an idea of what setting your story is going to play in so you don't get laser guns in a medieval setting for instance.
• If you rotate characters/players you need to think about how for instance death's will impact the world, legacies, and the rest of the group.
• You need to prepare for shows/games, but don't over prepare. Part of the fun is that anything can happen and to find a way to deal with it on the spot.
• Handwritten notes are handy, but in case viewers want to see the notes when the journey is done it's easier to keep notes digitally.
• There are a lot of online resources that you can use so that you always have the information that you need at hand, don't be afraid to use these resources
• The hope for the future of tabletop RPGs is that the audience gets broadened and it becomes more of an accepted hobby instead of being somewhat niche.
• Tabletop RPG's on Twitch has shown that its not that hard to GM your own game or even play your own game and has opened up a bigger audience this way.
• One of the issues with streaming tabletop RPG's is scheduling, when you have an audience there are a lot of people counting on there being something to watch so you need to make sure everyone shows up.
• What you also need to keep in mind is production. It has to look and sound good for your audience, something you don't have to worry about when it is not being streamed.