Twitch Done Fucked Up

Seriously, what the fuck.  Streaming should be so fucking simple, you just play a game live and people get to come and enjoy the experience with you, why did you have to go and fuck it all up?!

I don't know when these changes happened exactly, but that's not really the point.  The point is that these changes did happen and Twitch has become all google-fied (read: total bullshit) and I wouldn't be surprised if the changes made to the twitch service would make people consider moving to other streaming platforms which aren't so focused on fucking you over.

The first change I came across this morning was the change to the Video on Demand thing.  How I understand it is that past broadcasts are going to be saved for 14 days and then deleted.  This part is kind of fair, I guess, since there must be just insane amounts of completely unviewed video just clogging up space.  They then go on to say that if you don't want your shit to be deleted you can save them in a highlight, which I guess is also fair since highlights receive a lot more views than just the raw stream footage.

OH BUT WAIT! THE HIGHLIGHTS CAN ONLY BE TWO HOURS LONG!

What the fuck is this crap, really?!  Why only two hours?!  This doesn't really affect me (right now) since most of the highlights that I make are an hour or less with the longest being the Silent Hill speed runs.  But there are PLENTY of members of the speed running community and other communities being fucked over by this limit.  Just to give you an idea, one of the biggest streamers on the goddamn site (Cosmo) runs The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and that's a 4 and a half hour run.  That  means, that if he wanted to save his run to twitch, he'd have to do it in 3 fucking parts and that's just a pain in the ass.

Even worse for runners who play games like Final Fantasy where the runs can be up to 6 hours or so.  Making highlights for those runs now involves so much busywork that I can't help but feel sorry for them.

But that's not the only thing, oh no, there have been changes to their policy on audio now.  They use some kind of automated software that detects third party content and then mutes that part of the video.  This is complete bullshit because 1) I'm pretty sure that stuff falls under fair use or some crap and 2) IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK

Here is the new Silent Hill time I got last night

http://www.twitch.tv/taurinensis/c/4833834

Nearly HALF THE FUCKING VIDEO has been silenced when it mostly contains ambient noises, Harry's footsteps and my talking.  I'm pretty sure Konami don't own the rights on my fucking voice.  My guess is that it got muted because at the very start part of the Silent Hill theme was playing but even if that was the case, why did TWENTY SIX FUCKING MINUTES of video get muted for that shit?!  Why not the whole video?  It's not like the audio is much different in the second half of the game.

What's even worse is that I can prove this bullshit doesn't work with this

http://www.twitch.tv/taurinensis/c/4580959

Here is a video of an older time I got a while ago.  Notice how NONE OF IT IS FUCKING MUTED but IT'S THE SAME FUCKING GAME!  So much for your fucking audio policy because you suck at enforcing it.

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So between fucking over speed runners and people who play long game and fucking over everyone else with this audio bullshit, I wouldn't be surprised if people start moving to a new service.  Unless things are solved I imagine twitches days could be numbered.

Google to buy Twitch?

Right, this has to be one of the strangest things I've ever tried to find information on.  Some websites are talking like it's already happened, some are talking like it's about to happen, some are saying it'll probably happen but no one wants to comment, the whole thing is a fucking mess.  Bad journalism right there.  As a result of all this confusion, I won't be posting any links to the stories, but you can search it for yourself and get the lo-down

Word on the grapevine right now is that Google are looking to buy Twitch for something like a billion dollars.  Now I'm sure there's lots of discussion about how this could be a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but none of that matters really because I doubt there are many people that actually want this deal to happen.

Ever since Google took over YouTube and has forced all it's fucking stupid Google+ shit down our throats that literally NOBODY fucking wants it's become a massive pain in the ass to use.  Nothing is ever simple now and every "update" just makes things fucking worse.  Twitch on the other hand is very simple.  You click a game, you click a channel and BOOM you're watching a stream.  My fear is that if Google get it's grubby little mitts on a service like Twitch then it's going to turn into a stressful mess of a shitty website.

Let's not mention how much of a pain in the butt YouTube is being with the whole copyright shit since Google decided to implement this automated flagging thing or whatever the fuck.  It's not so pertinent to me because I don't make money off my stream but I imagine there are going to be quite a few streamers getting fucked in the ass if this all turns out to be true.

From a user point of view, nothing good could come from this and I really hope it's all a great big hoax or misunderstanding or whatever.  Only time will tell.

If it aint broken, don't fix it!

I have a YouTube channel where I upload playthroughs and other stuff for your viewing pleasure.  In case you didn't notice the link to the channel on the side of the blog, here it is again.

www.youtube.com/user/taurinensis

Now I have a problem.  Since the start of this blog, this YouTube channel was name "The Identity Gaming Video Channel", it wasn't particularly catchy but it was exactly what it said on the tin.  Now it's been changed to just "Taurinensis", my fucking user name.

I mean this is fine, it's not that much of a big deal but the only reason this shit happened is because YouTube felt that I would just LOVE to use fucking Google+ and made me sync my G+ user name with my YouTube channel user name.

Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to change the name? It was fine the way it fucking was!  On top of that I don't have any intention to ever use fucking Google+ because I don't know 1 single other person that does.

It was 100% fine before, why did you have to go and fuck with it?! Jesus christ

Just to make it blog relevant as well, this is true for games as well.  If you have a formula that works and it's not stale, don't go fucking with it because you'll end up pulling a Google and just pissing everyone that fuck off.

Anyway at the end of the day all the videos are still there, so go watch them.  If you like them, please donate something and if you don't like them, call me something nasty in the comments and donate something anyway.