Beating Out the Rainy Days of Streaming

With the big hurricane hitting the east coast this weekend, it felt like a fitting time to post about the rainy days of streaming. It's something that every caster faces for various lengths of time, but for the sake of the overall viewer experience it's important to be prepared to handle these challenges and bounce back from them every time.

The immense growth that Twitch has seen in such a short amount of time has come in conjunction with a lot of hurdles that test casters everyday:

• The increase in competition makes it tougher to manage steady growth for a channel. 

• Ingest servers aren't always able to handle so many live broadcasts across the platform. 

• New games may come up short or be frustrating in terms of driving engaging content.

• New changes to the site may benefit only select groups of casters and not your own

• Chat behavior may strike a nerve or trigger anxiety

• Full-time professional streaming raises the stakes of having long periods of consistent quality, which can lead to periods of exhaustion

These are just a handful of obstacles that can ruffle one's mindset towards casting and effect their presence as they go live. Whatever the trouble is, here are a few tips to shake out of a funk and get back on a good streaming groove.

1. Take Time for Inspiration

When streamers get burnt out, taking a break is always helpful to get back in a better frame of mind. Knowing how you respond to being overworked can help you better prepare for this, as everybody handles it differently. Some prefer to take a few regular days off during the week, some find it best to cast sporadically at shorter spurts rather than longer.

One way I find most effective at recharging is taking that time to tap back into sources of inspiration. Whether it's television shows and movies, playing games offline on your own or going out on a personal adventure, whatever activities inspire new ideas can always help to refuel motivation. These new ideas can be fun for your community as well, so the sooner you start bringing them to motion, the better stream experience you can make for everyone watching.

2. Reconnect with Old Faithful

Another great way to be prepared for a rough day of casting is to pull out your rainy day fund. It never hurts to return to a classic game, especially if it's one that improves your mood and you know you can have hours of fun with. It might change up the pace from your usual casting routine, but its well worth it to inject some new life into your channel through playing a game that triggers lots of fond memories and fun traditions. 

I always have a few back-up games ready to go to help get myself back into streaming mode. Since my busy schedule interrupts from my casting quite frequently, it's easier to get back into a groove through games that both you and your community are familiar with as everything comes more naturally. These sorts of games won't help you grow on most occasions but they're always guaranteed to make an energetic cast, which is just what's needed when the going gets tough.

3. Focus on the Fun

One of the natural side effects of dealing with the challenges of streaming is that your mind starts to take things too seriously. It leads to overthinking and overanalyzing every component of your cast, which distracts from the whole purpose of twitch: providing live entertainment through the joy of gaming and other activities.

Even if it's your main source of income, it's critical to not get tied up in all the intricacies of streaming as this makes it too easy to lose sight of your cast's overall value. Instead of striving towards perfection, focus on the qualities of your cast that get great reactions out of your chat. The more fun and memorable moments you create, the stronger connection you make with the community which sets your channel apart to them from everyone else.

And the best part: it's really easy to have fun, all you have to do is not let anything else get in the way.

A lot of times that's easier said than done, and there isn't a direct solution to many of these problems. But the more often you get past the speedbumps that streaming throws at you, the stronger you'll be as an entertainer.