June 1st Update:

Greetings, and more importantly, hello,

I've already written this intro before, but inexplicably, due to Patrons god awful post editor, it was deleted and replaced by the outro. Why? Who knows! Just another wacky feature of Patreon to keep me on my toes.

Long story short, this is a three part post - Personal crap at the start and a warning about potentially missing content, a channel review for the past 90 days, and then a series retrospective, followed by a very humorous outro and a funny haha joke about Raid Shadow Legends because that's still relevant I hope.

For those of you not wanting to read, I'll put a TL:DR summary at the bottom of the post.

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MR STREAMER STUFF:

I've been hyper busy over the past month desperate trying to find anywhere to live. We're down to our last two weeks before we have to be moved into a new house and I think things have finally picked up. 

After over 45 emails, 14 phone calls, and a ridiculous amount of documents, we might finally have somewhere. Unfortunately, the letting agency's website still says that we're awaiting approval, but after donning my Karen hat and speaking to the manager, she's basically confirmed that the house is ours. There's still a bit of a concern given that we haven't signed on the dotted line, but I have to take their word for it and start preparing to move their otherwise there wont be internet by the time I move in.

Luckily the lockdown restrictions came at a pretty good time, and as of this week moving companies can begin operating again, otherwise moving a sofa across town on foot wouldn't have been much fun. The downside to that is my lungs are still fucked from earlier this year, so even though I wont have to trek through town with a fridge on my back, I'm just going to die of covid instead.

I'm hoping the stars align and I can get internet setup in the new house before moving, that way I shouldn't miss a beat on video uploads, but their might be one or two days of questionable content while that is dealt with. 

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CHANNEL STUFF:

So, first things first, the channel analytics. I haven't done this for a while because the stats have been completely useless thanks to the new Youtube changes and covid. So I figured we might as well go by stats post Youtube-quarantine changes:

Views from March 3rd vs previous 90 days: 4.4M views (down by 16%)
Viewing time from March 3rd vs previous 90 days: 1.2M hours (down by 25%)
Subscribers from March 3rd vs previous 90 days: 6.4k subs (down by 66%)

As for revenue, as per Youtube policy I can't give specific numbers, but I'm sure they wont complain about percentages (especially if none of you tell them):

Above represents how much a month makes up the past 365 days of revenue. So despite views dropping 16%, revenue dropped by over 50% from March to April alone. I understand, why would advertisers want to buy expensive ads when no one has any money, nor is anywhere open, to buy them anyway?

So, all of the times I've said "without the patrons the channel wouldn't be possible in the first place" in my desperately needing to be scripted outros, it has been unfortunately true more than ever. At the rate things are going it will take, assuming each series is a success, a good five more months to catch up to where we are the start of the year.

Basically, 2021 will begin at almost same level as 2020 did.

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SERIES STUFF:

So as the channel sank pretty significantly for a while there, I thought that taking a gamble with some new series wouldn't be a bad idea. It's been a lot of fun for me being able to do something other than CK2 or Rimworld. Right now the really challenge is finding a balance between grind in-game, the editing, and the upfront research, while still finding time for CK2 and Rimworld regular scheduled content.

We started with Bannerlord, which was a pretty good match. It has the disturbing character creation, the settlement management, room for horrible misplays, and terrible UI - fits the channel perfectly. The downside is towards the late game with Bannerlord, it becomes a management sim with very little of getting stuck in, which I personally don't enjoy, especially seeing as there are a dozen other games that could do the same thing but a hundred times better, like Total War. I edited up spending a lot of time editing down Mount and Blade and it was pretty refreshing for a while, but needed too much tidying up towards the end.

Next was Kenshi, which I'm glad we played, but is a good example of a game that isn't viable with the current format. This game is a grind fest, and requires both knowledge of how things work, and an idea of the world so you can go in with a goal in mind, neither of which I had. I didn't even have the usual benefit of having watched someone else play it, this was a purely blind run, and even though there were some funny moments, I can't imagine I'll explore games like that without a playthrough or two under my belt first.

Finally now we've started with Terraria. This fixes the Kenshi issue of not having any prior experience, given that Terraria is one of my most played games, but still has a lot of the grinding issues that Mount and Blade started to present, and requires some pretty hefty editing to get around. Like Mount and Blade I've got to a point where it's taking me well over half a day just to get a particular goal achieved, as todays (1st of June) episode will attest to!

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So, the plan then.

I feel like this will give you guys something, it'll give me something to play around with, it'll add a bit of variety and freshness, but overall should be a fun community driven thing.

Every Saturday night we'll vote on a new Patron-guided series for the main channel starting on the Monday following - 24 hours of voting to allow for timezone differences.

That gives us 6 days to try out a new game, so for those of you wanting FTL, Starsector, Xcom, etc then with a week available to play it should be a good amount of time, and for the longer series that might win the vote, we'll move that over to the second channel to continue, win-win.

Hopefully this will help keep things interesting, but more importantly, it wont have me falling into old habits and old games. I feel like I've gotten too comfortable with commentary on Rimworld and CK2 at this point because its the same old, same old. I've got to stay on top of my game somehow!

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I look forward to seeing what you guys have to say - I'm hoping it'll be a reliable breath of fresh air for the channel! If you have any feedback or suggestions then I'd recommend throwing them in the Patreon Discord channel so we can all discus it and try and work out what fits best, otherwise feel free to DM me or leave a comment here!

As always, your continued support is much appreciated. The pennies Youtube were throwing my way over the past few months were a bit disheartening, but thanks to you guys, nothing to worry about. And I can still have my soul intact.

Which reminds me, while your all here, have you heard of a great new game called Raiders: Soul Legacy? It's available on iOS and Android, and they've generously agreed to work with* the channel to give you guys an extra special spicy bonus EXCLUSIVELY!

Tales of your misdeeds are told from Sharymus to Slop Bipple,

Sam
Mr Streamer
Roll1D2Games
"Youtube Sensation"

TL:DR - I'm still not sure I have a house and might die. Channel is bad and I should get a real job. Vote on a Patreon Series starting once a week when I have a house and Terraria ends, that will go on the main channel running for a week.