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7. Write 600 words or more on something about anything in the league that interests you. It could be related to statistics, a league issue that you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 600 words about your team’s participation on a Werewolf server or something.
It is that time of year again. The wonderful time in which we get to partake in the Offseason Task and write a bunch of words on things that interest us. This season I have been looking forward to doing this write up because 10 TPE for 600 words just sounds great. For this season's tasks I will be focusing on something that I have always enjoyed but, feel like it is definitely time for improvement and that is the sim and sim presentation itself for the league. One of the most enjoyable sims I partake in is over at the PBE. The sim team does an excellent job with the presentation and the overall feeling of engagement and activity in the stream is just not comparable to any other sim league right now. Are they perfect? Of course not, there are things that we do better but, I definitely think we could learn a thing or two from the PBE.
The first area I want to focus on is the platform we use for our stream presentation. I know that we do not use a live stream and that sims are done beforehand and then set to premier at a later date but, I think finding a way to incorporate the live stream will add to the enjoyment of the stream. This would also allow us to use a platform like twitch which, is what the PBE uses. Twitch has a much better interface for the audience to interact with, earn channel points, and even bring in some passive income for the ISFL itself. The ability to do predictions and have personal connections with commentators on the stream just helps to add an extra layer of engagement and enjoyment to the sim that the a YouTube premier does not have.
The next area I want to look at is one that I briefly touched on in my last point and that is the live commentating during streams. We only stream 3 days a week and I think it would be extremely beneficial to find a team that would be willing to go live for that hour or two to add a voice to the stream. This voice does not have to broadcast a game or do a play by play but, it would be nice if the voice was there to engage the audience. Give a breakdown of things to expect and even run the predictions to earn channel points if we were to move to a platform like twitch. I know that some people would not want to get rid of YouTube but, we could easily upload the vods to YouTube after streams and nothing would change in that regard. Having a personal commentator and stream host could even help with retention.
So as you can see I really think a switch into the twitch platform would be beneficial. Some good things about our sims and stream right now are that it does allows us make sure there are no issues with the sim and that things stay nice and scheduled at all times. Very rarely do we experience delays or issues like we see over in the SHL or PBE with the live streams. So while there is definitely some advantages to our current system I think it would be very beneficial to implement some of these changes to try and help with the engagement and enjoyment of our streams. There is only so much that we can control when it comes to the sim itself, so I think it is crucial that we are always looking at ways we can improve things and to me this would be a simple and effective solution.
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