cLn Gaming

So a lot has happened in 2015 so far i guess.

There was a good 14 of us at Maz’s house on new years eve. We all got together, played a lot of games, and drank a lot of booze. It is the first time we have all met up really if it’s not at our gaming tournament and we love it! It’s literally so fun and we all get on very well.

Back story complete.

A few days later i’m sitting there at work … taking calls … bored … uninspired … thinking to myself ‘what could i be doing with myself right now if i wasn’t here at work > – i could be playing video games…’ Then i decided to voice my opinion on the Whatsapp group. It turned out to be a very long text, it was quite passionate and wild – seemed like the most vague business idea ever to be fair, yet everybody seemed to agree that this was a good idea.

Well – most people that is, there is now a core of 6/7 of us, Charles, me, Ceej, Rich, Maz and Liam and we are all pretty committed on making our company work.

The company idea is to stream us playing video games and create decent content across a number of different games (at first) build a following and an online footprint on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the main one which would be twitch.tv.

We are only in the infancy of this company however have a couple of pages set up.

http://www.clngaming.com

http://www.facebook.com/clngaming

http://www.twitter.com/cln_gaming

Come and check us out!

I am extremely excited at what the future may hold.. but i am not counting my chickens before i lay my eggs, i know it’s an extremely long road ahead of us if we are going to get this company off the ground.

– Josh.

CS:GO

I’ve never really been that bothered about the pro scene in Counter Strike.

When i was actually semi decent at the game – still very average – i didn’t watch any streams on Counter Strike Source. I thought the idea of watching games was extremely boring. ‘I want to play games not watch them’ – i thought to myself, how can i get better or enjoy it if i’m not playing?

What was i thinking?

In fairness though, the great angles, the excellent casting, the live crowds, the smooth sounds levels, the professional streams – was something which wasn’t the norm. In fact it was once every month a tournament would happen which would not be overly great for public viewing.

This was in 2004. Skip 10 years to 2014 and it is a whole different world. Twitch.tv is dominating the viewing stats, and people are loving every single second of gaming footage they watch. In the world of first person shooters, it’s always been hard to follow a team based fps game on the basis that it’s actually quite boring. Add a gambling aspect in csgolounge.com and well.. it is boring no more. You can make money (all be it in steam, not hard cash – but still can be used to buy real games so i guess for gamers there isn’t really a difference) making you feel the excitement, the rush of every single frag.

I’m torn really. Is this good for the scene? – Overwhelmingly yes, anything which gives the game i love more views, more recognition is a win in my book. The problem with all of this is – where do we go from here? I saw this in Starcraft, and unfortunately that scene is pretty much dead now, it reached such a high but crashed miserably.

Yes it’s great that CS:GO is the main game in the fps world in terms of watch ability. You have players like JW for team Fanatic with the most incredible AWP skills in the game. Then you have the extremely strong french team LDLC. some extremely good teams out there as well however, Hell Raisers, my favourite team Dignitas, Na Vi, Virtus Pro, this is adding to the watch ability also. I am watching the big tournaments which are coming around. As i type this LDLC have just beaten Na Vi to face team Fanatic in the final of the Electronic Sport World Cup final after winning 16-14. It’s these close rounds, these highly competitive games, on extremely balanced maps which are making fans come back for more and more.

Let’s be fair, if every game was 16-3 and extremely one sided, nobody would be watching – unless they were putting it on to fall asleep to. It’s fortunate we are blessed with the talent pool we have at the moment. Long may it continue, however i am cautiously optimistic as i know the gaming world can be pretty fickle when it comes to what’s the hot game and what isn’t. But if my CS:S days tell me anything, it’s that it has an extremely loyal core fan base, and a great game which still pulls people in. 5v5 shooting for 3 minute rounds may sound boring – but it couldn’t be better. Just ask 200,000 live viewers.

– Josh. (cLn.Raiden^) 

Live Streaming – Part 3

So it took me in to the early hours of this morning, but streaming seems to be ok.

I turned off the camera mic and focused on in game sounds only and that, although lacks interactivity, has massively helped the audio for the stream. That being said I do want to talk to the ever growing audience during the stream.

This led me to my greatest conquest ever. I shall begin the story at the start, on my 18th birthday nearly 4 years ago.

I was able to have a gaming PC for my 18th birthday. At the time it was fantastic, the i7 processor, a £300 graphics card, 6gb of RAM (which at the time was incredible). Needless to say everything was going great!

I decided it would be about time to start gaming again then, of course that is why I got it! I tried plugging the headset in and off I went. No sound coming out of the headset microphone? And no sound from the headset? Ok, maybe the front ports on my PC may be broken. So I decided to try the back ones. The headset started working, but the microphone still wasn’t doing anything. I went in to settings and there was literally no bar indicating any sound coming out. This angered me a lot, and also frustrated me tonnes. I knew it wasn’t my webcam microphone over-riding it because it literally just wasn’t being recognised at all.

4 years later, having used only the webcam microphone, with the worst sound quality ever. (see Alan Partridge sketch on Youtube.com/wraggy1234 for example of the worst sound quality you’ve ever heard)

I had since been back to look at it, also had Dan and Liam look at it briefly at i44, but again the same result, they were left scratching their heads wondering what was going on. I managed to get it working last night however, for the first time since I have had my computer.

It turns out we had been plugging it in the wrong port. There is a 3rd microphone port and this one works. Excellent, we are now officially the biggest idiots ever. Me being king idiot of course.

Needless to say the stream sound has definitely improved in terms of the microphone, if you go on www.twitch.tv/joshuawragg you’ll be able to see the difference between one of the latest streams to one of the older streams.

On a separate note I had clicked to upload to YouTube (after all that was the main reason I decided to switch to twitchtv from justintv, but apparently it doesn’t want to work for whatever reason). I’m not sure if there is a delay on it or something but it just isn’t appearing whatsoever, which is gay. Perhaps in an update I will be able to tell you it has worked and everything is fantastic, but I am not 100% if I will ever be able to do this.

I also tried to stream StarCraft 2 Heart Of The Swarm today, but unfortunately there were problems a plenty with this. Basically it didn’t want to have anything to do with this. There was a watchable picture, but every 2 seconds it would freeze for a little bit. Which is clearly unwatchable. So that counts StarCraft 2 out still. Which is so frustrating, because I would be playing that so much should it work! The still image makes it look worse than i first remember. It’s only until about half way through a game does it begin to pause, the first part of it runs semi-smooth.

At least the microphone works, and we are 100% convinced the Matlock internet connection is possibly one of the worst in the country.

Live Streaming is still a distant dream for these big games at the moment for me. I haven’t even looked in to the possibility of making money off the stream yet either, but my friend Jamie has suggested i play some old games, such as the classic DiscWorld, this way it can be interactive with chat and we can all go and explore together. I have thought of pokemon as being a good one to stream as well. That would be fun too!

Live Streaming – Part 2

Managed to get the stream working ok. Some of the settings are slightly dodgy though. By that i mean my webcam has literally the worst microphone on it. But my plugged in microphone on my headset has never worked, not for this headset or any other because the port is broken, meaning only usb connections are accepted, which majorly sucks.

The video quality is exceptionally poor also, however once you are in game it doesn’t look that bad, Mario moves pretty freely and doesn’t seem to drop many frames at all.

I decided to change from my justin.tv/raidenstarcraft to my new streaming site twitch.tv/joshuawragg this was due to the inability to upload youtube videos from the justin.tv site even though it had everything activated, the upload button was nowhere to be seen. The overall feel of twitch.tv is also much nicer on the eyes.

 

Old on the left, new on the right.

So yeah, from now on my broadcasts will be done from http://www.twitch.tv/joshuawragg and i will be uploading my streams on to YouTube and i hope to get a decent following! See you all on the other side!