Stream/Show Suggestion

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I think the site should go beyond written guides to interact with the community. People have been commenting on how other games, such as LoL, SC2, DOTA, etc, have videos made to address very specific mechanics of the game, as well as to interact with the community a lot more.

I think CoH never truly had such a show. The closest thing I can think of was Tales of Heroes, where they would take Replays from the public and analyze them, but streaming was not as popular yet, and as such it never caught as much momentum as it could have. I know time and effort are needed to produce these, but hey, its worth a shot...

...and?
Is it possible for some of the dedicated casters of this community could do regular weekly casts? Set up a CoH2.org channel on Twitch, and two or three times a week, shoot up a live cast where you address specific mechanics of the game.

Think of how casters like Day9 do it. He's got a specific day of the week for people completely new to game, or where they just play monobattles. It gets people engaged.

What's wrong with the current streams? Nothing. They're great, but at the moment they are very personal, very individual. Which is good, but it doesn't bring as much cohesion to the community.

You guys already have SNF, and I love it, but a lot of the things seen and heard in it, are only fully understood by the higher tier of players. IMHO, a lot of casual players watching SNF for the first time won't be very motivated to try a competitive environment, simply because they won't understand all the little things (although there are exceptions, and several here can attest to it).

Been playing CoH since 2006, and I still remember seeing players around level 9-10, using automatic weapons against garrisoned infantry, spamming fausts to kill an early sherman rush, not knowing snipers jump out of cover delays their shots, etc... in 2011. CoH has a very steep learning curve for competitive play.

So what am I suggesting?

Grab two or three people that love casting, and have a webcam. Schedule either several small shows a week, or one show in the style of SNF (but shorter, obviously).

What could the show contain?

• Very specific, in-depth unit analysis and mechanics: How to work aggressively in Blizzards, general MG Behavior (remember how in vCoH, the firing arc had shooting priorities? what % of the CoH playerbase do you think knew this?), specific unit upgrades, their effectiveness verus other units, etc.
  
• In-depth map analysis. Good mine positions, good MG spots, good routes, bad routes. Good starts, bad starts. Good building to garrison and others to avoid. etc.
  
• Discuss popular strategies, and viable counters (self explanatory)
  
• Assign a show for new/popular strategy guides written for the site. When the show ends, people watching it on Youtube (Twitch version doesnt support this) can simply click on a screen link, get directed to the specific written guide in the site.
  
  If you were doing three shows weekly, one with each of those topics (and there can be a LOT more topics), you have at least a year of non stop content, without considering patch changes and the metagame evolution.
  
  Besides the obvious, how can this help CoH2, and CoH2.org?
  
  
• It introduces casual players to the world of competitive play. From the very beginning of the game's release.
  
• You have a true audiovisual complement to the website: People watching the stream are directly being marketed to head for the website, already people reading your strategy guides could also have a direct, full dedicated video to see it in action (instead of the rare clips or replay without commentary).
  
• It keeps raises the skill level of the community. TBH, the higher tiers of CoH play are very closed. Sure, clans sometimes poked their heads out to the open world to flame each other in the GR forums but for the most part, most of the community was stuck reading through endless forum posts, or watch tons of replays just to learn "Dont OP strat points".
  
  We need some dedicated people to walk hand in hand with the newcomers, and people wanting to improve their game... The Beta forums are a clear indicator of this. I'd do it for sure, but I can't stream and most importantly, I suck ass (could never get past lvl 10).
  
  If we want Relic/Sega to patch this game, to give us competitive replay tools and to avoid the problems vCoH had, then we need to step up and create a cohesive, engaged playerbase that gives them a reason to.
  

as much as i would love such a show, the NDA (even if it now is limited to only images/videos of the game) has made/is making that hard.

apart from that, i think something like "state of the game" for coh has been suggested already, though it would have gotten very stale very fast (with literally no changes to CoH itself, and not too many meta changes in a short enough time and the community just not being big enough for other stuff to talk about).

still, a show like that would attract quite a few viewers i think.

Relic isn't letting most of us make videos so I'm not sure it's fair to tell us that we need to do this stuff before Relic gives us the replay tools to make it ten times easier.

In addition to casting pro matches, I made an extensive series of tutorial videos for Natural Selection 2 and I'd totally do the same for CoH 2 if I were allowed to make videos but... nope...

As for when the game comes out, I'm sure I'll make stuff like this, as long as the game is good enough for me to purchase it. If not, I imagine plenty of other people will fill the gaps. Inverse already has introductions to both factions up on his YouTube channel for instance.

yeah, inverses videos are great like always.

if they are too "in-depth" for you, and you are looking more at stuff like day9's newbie tuesdays... do remember that day9 with his daily is doing stuff like that as a full time job. no coh caster would come even close to making his kind of money with a cast, so that's why he can pull it off to actually stream like 4-5 times a week.

inverse can probably tell you how much time goes into a single "strat talk" episode... if you were to put up 3 videos of that quality per week, you'd have pretty much no free time left to actually play the game.

yeah, inverses videos are great like always.

They are actually what popped the idea. They are not "too in-depth", in fact he is one of the most comprehensive streamers out there, for the game.

It doesn't have to be newbie tuesdays like Day9. I can perfectly handle a complex article, dealing with complex tactics, but a large amount can't. I'm talking the Scheldt kind, that will not be searching for competitive strategies, so they are unlikely to stumble upon the strategy guide... but they might be looking for other players playing their game, in Twitch or Youtube, and if the content is easy enough to digest, they'll make it a habit to come back.

The NDA is not a problem, because the show doesn't have to start right now (its a Beta, anything you say might change by sunday), but you can begin a planning stage for when launch date arrives.

In addition to casting pro matches, I made an extensive series of tutorial videos for Natural Selection 2 and I'd totally do the same for CoH 2 if I were allowed to make videos but... nope...

Because they won't allow you to make the video. But fi they approved a CoH2.Org stream, then anyone casting through that channel (with the understanding that the site admins filter the content so only very specific casters use it) can do it, too. I've seen your videos, and you have the portfolio to prove you have seriousness of purpose-