Every week I’ll post a thread on http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/ with the top 5 questions you want me to answer. They can be pretty much anything you want. I’ll answer the top 5 most upvoted questions.

Doing this for two reasons – 1) so I can keep in contact with the community, and 2) to help answer some commonly asked questions here to alleviate all of the e-mails I get.

Source - http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/102d34/weekly_top_5_qa_10/

“How do you feel when you see other players that do similar things to you on your stream that have gotten you in trouble but they have no repercussion from their team or the fans of Starcraft?”

Just stopped caring about it. No point stressing over it, just a waste of time.

“You’ve mentioned that you’d shy away from Sc2 if you came back from MoW and you weren’t placing any higher/performing better in tournaments.

Would you shift to a general purpose streamer (i.e. some sc2, some LoL, some Misc games like final fantasy, etc.) or would you look to exit the streaming industry and try and revert to a more traditional job?”

No clue what I’d switch to. Maybe LoL, as it seems to have the largest fan base at the moment. Maybe DotA 2 if it grows more. Would obviously do anything to stay in this industry as opposed to going back to conventional work.

“What ever happened to playing da games with Phantoml0rd? I remember you two playing Diablo 3/DayZ a lot but then after that not so much. Was there a falling out? Or just you focusing more on Starcraft 2?

Thanks for streaming so much and keeping in touch with your fans.”

Just focusing more on SC2. If another sick game comes out that has multiplayer available, I might play it with him. We’re still cool with each other.

“What’s one event/gimmick/marketing move you did that surpassed your expectations in getting you are where you are in terms of viewership? What is one that underperformed in terms of your expectations?”

I was really surprised at how many viewers I got while playing DayZ. If that game would have did something more to quell the hacker situation, I might have considered taking that up as a secondary game and made a permanent part of my streaming schedule.

On the flipside, kinda surprised that HotS flopped so much in terms of interest. Was expecting 25k viewer Stephano/Idra streams and what not, but the bump in viewerships was barely noticeable, maybe 20% instead of the 80-130% I was expecting.

“What’s your family like? Evil siblings? Supportive mom? Freakish cousins? One-eyed uncle maybe? Any funny stories regarding your family?”

I’m not much of a family person, so I don’t talk to my siblings all that much. My mom/dad are crazy hardcore Christian/Republicans, but they’re super supportive and I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.

Timezone in CEST (EST) – Game I’ll be playing

1000-1400 (400-800) – SC2 HotS

1430-1800 (830-1200) – SC2 WoL

1830-2200 (1230-1600) – SC2 HotS

This schedule has no time at the moment for me visiting Nathan/Rachel, so it’s very tentative at the moment.

I’ll be doing a certain kind of commentary while I play. I’ll just call it “predictive commentary” for now. I won’t be annotating every action as I play, I’ll just giving predictions about how I expect the game to turn out. “He’s probably going bio, I’ll just do x”, “He’s taking his third now, I’m fine taking my fourth”, etc…like that. If you want to ask questions about what I say after the game, I’ll do my best to answer.

See you tomorrow! :]

Doing this for two reasons – 1) so I can keep in contact with the community, and 2) to help answer some commonly asked questions here to alleviate all of the e-mails I get.

Source - http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/zorc3/weekly_top_5_qa_9/

“Do you think you can have a set time with Kyle a la State of the Game and maybe chat about Starcraft/Gaming/News/Whatever?”

Hmm, maybe. I’ll message him and talk to him about it. We’ll see if we can get something rolling for Heart of the Swarm. I could actually even take suggestions for topics in a format similar to this.

“What is your favorite HotS unit and why?”

Probably the Viper, so far, as it’s the only unit that I can work into my gameplay at the moment. The Swarm Host just seems really awkward: in small numbers, they’re not so great, so they just have to be massed up and used, which is kind of lame.

“Are you familiar with the Meyer’s-Briggs Personality types? Which are you?

http://www.personalitypage.com/high-level.html

If you aren’t familiar, here’s a tl;dr explaining it. http://www.personalitypage.com/html/info.html“

Meh, not a big fan of personality tests. I remember taking one of these in AP Psych, but it was so long ago. I honestly don’t give much stock to any personality evaluation that happens in <100 questions with multiple choice answers, though.

“If you could give any video game a professional scene, what would it be and why?”

Duke Nukem 64, because I am the best DN64 player in the world.  99 lives Stadium/Fahrenheit BRING YO SHIT BITCHES.

“If HotS is not out of beta by the time you’re out of Poland, do you think the bigger tournaments are still going to be held on WoL? If so, how do you think you’ll be able to base your progress with HotS as you won’t have any tournaments to show for it?”

Yeah, WoL will be in all tournaments until HotS is released. I’ll know how good I am because I’ll be playing tons of customs in the house. Might switch back and forth between HotS and WoL, too.

Bunker time needs to be increased to at least 40 seconds. Siege tanks should be able to “overkill” units, rather than smart-targeting other units and not wasting shots. Siege tank range should be nerfed by at least 3. Marine build time needs to be increased at least 5 seconds. Colossus need to lose the range upgrade. Forcefield should cost 125 energy per sentry. Protoss should not be able to warp in away from their base.

These statements seem pretty radical, but how else can Zerg possibly win the game? Marine rushes are unstoppable. 4gate is impossible to stop. The game is flawed and unbalanced on so many levels that it makes playing Zerg a joke.

———

Do these argument seem relatively unreasonable? Not as unreasonable as you may think. In fact, these statements are perfectly reasonable, provided that our map pool is Steppes of War, Kulas Ravine, Delta Quadrant and Lost Temple.

One thing that people seem to forget sometimes when speaking about Starcraft 2 balance is that a lot of the progress we’ve made in arriving at this relatively balanced point in the game has come from a better map pool. Close positions have been stricken from all but blizzard maps. The absurdly small maps no longer find themselves deciding tournaments. Rocky thirds that only hurt Zerg are gone. Open naturals that make it impossible for Protoss to safely expand are unwelcome.

Starcraft 2 can be an entirely different game based upon what the current map pool is. It can be incredibly unforgiving to certain races (Zerg and Protoss are the two that are most affected by the map pool), or it can provide countless entertaining and closely-matched games. Even though people might not talk about it anymore, a lot of people would agree with these points, especially members of the mapmaking community (I’m looking at you, ESV.Diamond).

So why do I bother bringing it up?

Heart of the Swarm is currently being balanced on maps that would be laughed out of the Wings of Liberty community.

Let’s go over just a few of the basic problems with these maps.

Akilon Wastes

This is the only moderately balanced map in the map pool.

Howling Peak

The natural has two entrances. This makes walling off or defending Zerg all-ins as Protoss disproportionately harder than any other map in the pool.

Fractured Glacier

Rocks in front of the natural favors two base play. Chance for close position spawns absolutely ruins some matchups. Gold base favors T in TvZ, and Z in ZvP.

Star Nation

Third base is incredibly exposed, making it very hard for Protoss to defend Z all-ins. Close spawns (horizontally) destroys some matchups.

Korhal City

Internal natural expansion make defending as Protoss and Terran incredibly easy, makes for much greedier play than ordinary. Large ramp makes for boring ZvZs as ling/baneling becomes incredibly powerful (remember ZvZ on Tal’Darim altar?)

Obviously we don’t expect Blizzard to make perfect maps, and we know that once HotS is released the community will be releasing maps that are much more suitable for tournament play, but the main problem is that Blizzard is trying to achieve balance through patching on fundamentally bad maps.

No one wants to play a SC2 where Zerg is strong enough to hold off all-ins in close position, because that would make them absurdly powerful in far positions. If Protoss are able to cover open naturals and open thirds in close positions, imagine the impossibility of destroying them in far positions. The only way to balance races on such broken maps is to essentially make them “too powerful” for more conventional maps.

I really, truly hope that Blizzard doesn’t make any more significant patches to HotS without importing some maps from WoL, or at least inviting members of the mapmaking community to create some new maps for HotS. It’s impossible to know how good Swarm Hosts, Reapers, or the Mothership Core actually are without seeing them on maps that don’t grossly favor certain races in certain positions.

Doing this for two reasons – 1) so I can keep in contact with the community, and 2) to help answer some commonly asked questions here to alleviate all of the e-mails I get.

Source - http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/zcexe/weekly_top_5_qa_8/

“I heard yesterday that you are waiting for payments from own3d. Could you talk a bit about this? I’m wondering if the money hold up is because own3d has the money from the advertisers and isn’t paying you, or if the advertisers are the ones holding out. Or do you know?

Additionally, is there anything us fans can to do pressure these streaming companies, Twitch.tv included, into getting the money to our players faster? Could we, say… email their sponsors? ”

Can’t really get into too many details about this. Twitch and Own3d both definitely have their problems, though. Sorry, I wish I could talk about it more.

“Feel free to disregard this question as it may be fairly personal but do you have any statement at all about ROOT releasing you? I feel like it was sad because I kinda think that’s the team that you belong to in the first place and that some minor drama that you didn’t cause in the first place (for once) was the reason behind it.”

Shit sucks. The endemic sponsors of e-sports are incredibly lazy/short-sighted when it comes to supporting teams/people. It honestly takes very few e-mails from very few people to get a sponsor to change their mind about something without the sponsor doing any research at all. To be completely honest, I could probably use my fanbase to get some sponsorships revoked from people, but it seems unnecessarily spiteful.

“Opinions on stem cell research?”

I don’t like killin’ dem embryos. I’ve heard you can procure stem cells in other ways, but I’ve also heard that those ways are inefficient and unreliable. I’d have to do a lot more reading on the topic to feel like I had an informed enough opinion that was worth sharing.

“With the beta now out, what is your plan, especially in regards to what you will be doing in Poland. Do you invest the time to get really good at a soon to be dead game, or do you invest the time in a game that is going to go through radical balance changes? Obviously some things can carry over like mechanics, but there is still a pretty big difference.”

I’ll be playing HotS exclusively, trying to get a head start on everyone else playing.

“What is your relationship with your ex-wife? How does that affect your relationship with Nathan?”

We’re friends. It doesn’t have any effect on my relationship with my son.

If you’re a budding computer enthusiast searching for hardware to increase the performance of your rig, one of the most difficult things ever is finding a part that will yield tangible performance gains. I don’t know about you, but DAMN I hate reading review after review of vague, nondescript praise about a product. If you’re just now getting into streaming or recording videos for Youtube, you’ll definitely be running into similar problems. What program is the best? Is Xsplit worth buying over something like FMLE or FFsplit? What is the difference between h264 and x264? And for hardware…Is hyperthreading really that great, is it worth the extra money? How much more will it help? Will a better CPU or GPU help me with streaming? Do SSDs even matter? What about RAM speed? If I overclock my CPU, how much will it help? Sure, it’s possible to find the answers to all of these questions, but it requires digging and digging and reading and reading and so much more research than one should ever have to do to find the simple answer to certain questions:

“How much of a performance gain can I expect from a given upgrade?”

A lot of people out there bought a PC with the intention of upgrading it at some point in time. Of course, this is hard when those Intel bastards change their socket type every 2 years, but I digress. A lot of people now are getting into the wonderful world of streaming! A year or two ago, hardly anyone streamed. If you’d venture a look onto teamliquid.net, you’d find maybe 10-15 streamers at any given point in time. If you check today, that number is easily 10 or 20 times greater.

One question people constantly ask me is “What part of my computer should I upgrade to stream better?” Unfortunately, the answer is your CPU. Streaming is entirely CPU dependent and better RAM/SSDs/GPUs will not help you stream better. Unfortunately a CPU upgrade for a lot of people also means a motherboard upgrade, and, consequentially, sometimes a RAM upgrade as well. This translate into way more money + time than a person might want to invest into just picking up streaming as a hobby. And that brings us to….

Review

Avermedia Live Gamer HD C985

I, on principle, absolutely hate these kinds of products. “Plug this device in and it will magically decrease the strain on your computer and increase your system performance!”…yeah, right. As someone who’s been streaming for a long time, I’ve become highly skeptical of products like these. My motto is the typical “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”  I searched and searched for any kind of decent benchmarks, but all I could find were these vague statements of praise -

“Another appealing aspect of this card is that the hardware H.246 [SIC] encoder found in the device unbelievably reduces the cpu consumption.”

Unbelievably, huh.

“One of the enticing features for me was the compatibility with Xsplit and the low pc resource consumption.”

Low PC resource consumption???

I searched and searched and I couldn’t find any good reviews. I hate descriptive adjectives; I WANT NUMBERS!

ARG! Let’s start with the product that we have here.

The Avermedia Live Gamer HD C985 is a PCI-insertable card that assists with capturing and encoding. You plug it into a PCI slot, run an HDMI cable from a monitor to the “Out” port on the card, then run an HDMI from your graphics card to the “In” port on the capture card. The card can then be used to capture the image, or you can use it to encode it into an h264 stream. You can only do one at a time, though that’s irrelevant. I won’t go into detailed explanation here, but the h264 hardware encoder on the card is no good for streaming as the bitrate it spits out is far too high. If you’re interested in purchasing this card for streaming, you will be using it for its capture purposes.

The card is capable of up to 1080p@30fps or 720p@60fps. Based on the polling I’ve done, either setting seems to be fine, with a slight preference for the 720@60fps option.

The Laboratory

My rig -

I7-2600k @ 4.4GHz

GTX580 @ 975MHz

Benching software -

Fuck Furmark, and fuck 3dmark. I don’t care about the results for those programs because I don’t play those programs in my free time. I, personally, play Starcraft 2. Starcraft is an incredibly CPU-intensive game, so it should be a good program to get us some decent benchmarks.

3 tests to make sure I have a decent average. I’ll be using FRAPS to give me averaged FPS measurements. I’m going to run a Starcraft 2 replay from 0:00 for 1 minute for every test. All tests will be done using Xsplit doing a local recording. The testing will be done at 1280×720 @ 60fps.

All graphics set to their lowest setting, game is in Fullscreen: Window mode and running at 1920×1080.

Starcraft 2 baseline bench - 334FPS

Streaming with X-split's "Screen Capture" - 203FPS

Streaming with X-split using the C985 - 237FPS

Wow, I’m honestly surprised. That’s a fairly solid 34FPS (17%) gain, considering all I did was plug in a card to my PC. I was more just curious to see if I could get a noticeable difference in FPS with these settings. I would never stream with the game looking like this, however. So I bumped up the settings to “Medium” and checked the “Reduce Mouse Lag” button (Keeping off anti-aliasing/other effects) and repeated the same tests.

Starcraft 2 baseline bench - 202FPS

Streaming with X-split's "Screen capture" - 111FPS

Streaming with X-split using the C985 - 147FPS

Holy shit. If anyone had told me that these kinds of gains were possible (32%) using a $220 capture card, I honestly wouldn’t have believed them. Not only is the FPS bumped, but the game feels amazingly smoother. Streaming with the capture card eliminates all of the jittery laggy problems that occur when streaming.

My chip is no slacker. Even when it was clocked at 4.8 I could not stream without some noticeable lag, especially when scrolling on the sides of the screen. The C985 eliminates that lag.

Conclusion, Afterthoughts

Buy. This. Card.

If you are someone who is looking to upgrade your machine to get into streaming, I have two pieces of advice for you. 1) If you’re looking at streaming in high quality (720p@60fps or 1080p@30fps) you WILL notice some lag on even the BEASTLIEST of systems unless you want to run a two-PC set-up. Again, this is coming from someone with a GTX 580 and an i7 that was clocked at 4.8GHz. And 2) even though this card is somewhat pricey for a PC part ($220), the amount of money you save by purchasing this card over building a whole second system is irrefutable. I will never stream again without using this capture card. Ever since I first hooked it up and got it working, it has become an indispensable part of what I do every day. In case you’re not too familiar with me, I stream ~8 hours a day 6 days a week, so I’m very serious about my streaming hardware.

Questions/comments? Leave ‘em below, I’ll try to edit or update everything up here accordingly if there’s something I missed.

Doing this for two reasons – 1) so I can keep in contact with the community, and 2) to help answer some commonly asked questions here to alleviate all of the e-mails I get.

Source - http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/yz5fc/weekly_top_5_qa_7/

“I got caught in a youtube loop of old destiny videos recently and with pretty much all of them, you would have a group of people on skype to shoot the shit with. That seems incredibly rare now. Is this just because you’re reaching the age where your friends have less time to sit and play video games or is it a change in your approach to playing. You seem to focus more on getting better nowadays.

A condensed version: Is there a reason for the lack of skype shenanigans or is it just people getting jobs and wives and white, picket fences and 9-5s?”

A lot of the friends that used to play no longer play anymore, unfortunately. Kyle’s pretty busy with schoolwork and what not, or Dota 2, as well. I also need to concentrate harder, and there were times in the past where I would have to hang up with people on Skype because I get angry for losing a game due to broken concentration.

“I don’t wanna get personal and don’t respond it if makes you uncomfortable to disclose to ‘all’ of Reddit but how’d everything turn out with Erisann? Any public last thoughts about this past weekend? Again, if its too personal I understand.

√4√”

We’re still fine. Going against everything I’ve ever said before, we’re trying to make the long distance relationship thing work. I don’t mind being too candid about me, personally, but I’m a bit uncomfortable sharing things concerning other people’s personal lives. As for public thoughts on everything that happened, meh. Lots of mixed feelings about everything, but I could write pages about that and I don’t feel like being torn asunder by legions of morally elitist internet armchair white knights.

“How was your life throughout high school? Any specific events or hobbies that stood out?”

Some pretty stupid shit happened, but my life was nothing to complain about. My main hobbies were vidya and music. And making people laugh.

“You have said before that you follow some rules as to streaming. One of them was that you wouldn’t listen to certain “like it or hate it” stuff in order to prevent driving people away from your stream. You had the exception of listening to Immortal Technique “because fuck you guys” as I recall. What other music do you listen to regularly at the moment that you wouldn’t play on stream for these reasons, if any?”

Those weren’t really “set in stone” rules so much as they were guidelines or suggestions for new streamers trying to make it. I don’t follow much of those rules because I’ve already established a fan base. I pretty much play whatever music I want to on stream. If I were trying to edit it to have more mainstream appeal, I’d get rid of anything having any “screaming” (Emery, Opeth) in it, and probably a lot of the “dirtier” (less cleanly produced) post-rock (te’, wang wen, etc..).

“Do you plan on joining a new team since you aren’t in root?”

No clue at the moment, everything’s up in the air.

Originally I would have defended the former, and I was going to dissect Tasteless’ statement that ignoring the community is incredibly pompous/arrogant (especially considering that you owe them your livelihood), but I think I understand where he’s coming from, and (sadly) I agree wholeheartedly with him now. I guess that as part of e-sports going mainstream, things like purepwnage (homophobic), pwned,nl (homophobic), “leeroy jensen” (racist), baneling analogies (rape culture), red vs blue (homophobia, racism, sexism), etc…etc…are all too offensive and demeaning to be accepted in the new, “mainstream” culture.

I’ll be focusing hardcore on SC2 in Poland, I should be turning some results after I leave there. For those that have supported me, I deeply appreciate it. To the people who purchased lessons, subscribed to my stream, donated money, watched me without adblock, supported me in public forums, commented/followed me on twitter/facebook/teamliquid, I greatly appreciate it. To those who don’t watch me because they don’t like me, I understand and respect that, as well. To those who took so much offense with me that you find it necessary to sit in your basement and go on letter-writing campaigns, I hope you enjoy your doppelganger representatives.

If you want to reddit this, r/destiny, not r/starcraft, please, thank you.

Doing this for two reasons – 1) so I can keep in contact with the community, and 2) to help answer some commonly asked questions here to alleviate all of the e-mails I get.

Source - http://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/ylmet/weekly_top_5_qa_6/

“Hey steven, are you happy? I feel that this is a very plain question, but you’ve had relationship problems, you have a child, and… well I don’t know much more than that, but you don’t seem to be in a state where you’re living your dream. So are you generally happy?”

I get by, heh. I would write a diatribe on my life, but there are people who are  much worse off than me. And I have enough good things going for me right now that I feel decently about things.

“You’re bringing your saxophone to Poland right? Now that you won’t have neighbors to bother, you’ll play your sax on stream, right?”

Still figuring out if I’ll have any place to practice. I don’t want to annoy everyone else there.

“You sometimes complain that NA ladder is bullshit. That just getting all-inned is just a massive waste of time. However, do you find any of that beneficial because of the possibility you might see that kind of play in a major tournament? Or is that just you raging?”

I sometimes rage etc…but I don’t think I’ve ever said it’s bullshit or a waste of time. If I’m still losing to said all-ins, then that’s something that I need to improve as part of my play.

“Hypothetically, lets say you get a lot out of these months in Poland. You become a top foreign player and begin placing well in tournaments. How is that going to affect your streaming? Would you keep going as you are, even if you could spend more time practicing, or would you cease streaming altogether to prevent others from knowing your builds and strats? Or somewhere in between?”

I’ll continue to stream the exact same frequency I do now. My approach to the game is one that (hopefully) won’t have to rely on “secret builds” or anything of that, just solid, reactionary macro play.

“if you could make 1 change to Zerg or another race in sc2 to improve balance what would it be?

inb4 free infestors”

This question is so complicated that it would take pages and pages to answer. I’m pretty happy with the way the game is right now, though.

There are three basic arenas where a person can (attempt to) communicate with a high profile person. There’s face-to-face, such as at live events or designated “meet-and-greets”, there are public forums online, such as screddit and teamliquid, and there are private lines of communication, such as e-mail and Skype. I’ll cover these three forms of contact and go over some dos and don’ts of each.

LIVE EVENTS

One of the largest draws of attending live events is that you can actually meet a player you really like in person. It’s a chance for you to see him or her perform in person and to actually talk with them and have them sign something for you or pose for a picture.

DO approach a personality and ask him if he can sign something at an appropriate time. I’ve only really met a couple high profile people that try to avoid fans. For the most part, I think most people don’t mind (or even enjoy) signing things for fans.

DON’T try to get an autograph from someone who looks like they are in a hurry, or just lost an important match. A lot of times pros have to move between places very quickly, whether a match is starting soon or they need to meet with someone. Nothing is more difficult than having people (almost literally) run you down or try to catch up to you to get something signed when you’re in a hurry or have some place to be.  It makes the fan feel hurt because his idol turns him down for an autograph and it makes the high profile person feel shitty because he knows he’s disappointing a fan. Also, most pro gamers are very upset when they lose matches. Generally they don’t want to deal with anyone, so being approached by a group of people asking for autographs right after losing a match can be upsetting.

DO ask for pictures. Most celebs don’t mind taking pictures with fans. It’s perfectly fine to ask for one after getting something signed. Most people expect and don’t mind it.

DON’T ask for embarrassing actions (kissing/hugging) or poses. Although some people might not mind, this might make others extremely uncomfortable. Even if they agree to it, you run the risk of them avoiding others in the future because they don’t want to risk running into people who request things that they’re not comfortable with.

DO offer gifts of pictures, artwork and other trinkets. Most players don’t mind receiving things like these, but don’t be hurt if he doesn’t hang it up on his wall and treasure it forever. There’s a chance that he’s gotten a decent number of items in the past, but I’m sure he appreciates them none the less.

DON’T offer consumables to people. As much as it may be delicious and as nice and innocent as you may be, it’s just too dangerous to accept something from a stranger for consumption. It’s impossible to know who’s trust-worthy and who could have more malicious intentions in mind. The same thing goes for asking someone to go out for a drink or something after the event. Again, as much as they’d love to, it’s impossible to know who to trust.

DO watch and cheer for progamers that you support and adore!

DON’T boo others just because they beat your idol. And don’t make stupid comments while you’re watching people play, especially after losses.

PUBLIC FORUMS

There’s not really too much to write here. People can post on public forums while being shielded by anonymity, so asking people to be polite in their actions seems like a waste of time. Everything that I could write here basically boils down to common sense. Don’t act like a flaming asshole anytime you see someone famous posting on a forum, otherwise it encourages people to never post on said forums. There’s a reason why most people stay away from places like TL or SCReddit and it’s because dealing with mobs of people acting like assholes is very hard for most people.

PRIVATE COMMUNCIATION

There’s a golden rule that applies to most of life, but it’s especially 100% true in this situation. Whenever it comes to dealing with a high profile person, ask yourself this simple question – “If a large number of his fans did what I’m about to do, how would he react?” If you’re ever in doubt and you refer to that question, it will keep you clear 99.99% of the time, I think. I can speak with a lot of knowledge on this subject because I receive a large number of e-mails from fans and I make it a point to respond to every e-mail I get. That being said…

REQUESTING INTERVIEWS: If you’re going to e-mail someone requesting an interview, whether it’s for your budding website, a school project, or some local news paper. you should probably be prepared to offer them some form of compensation for it. This sounds kind of like a dick thing to ask for, but you have to consider that these people are receiving several interview requests per month, and to take the time out of your day to do them means you should be getting paid for it, otherwise it’s simply charity work. The only exception to this is if you feel like you can offer enough exposure for them to justify the time it takes to do the interview. ie: if someone wants to interview me for a school project, I’m probably going to want some kind of compensation for it. If CNN wants to interview me for an article, I’d gladly jump to do it for free. A good rule of thumb for compensation is ½ the price of whatever that person charges for an hour lesson.

TECH SUPPORT: No. It’s amazing how many e-mails I get from people asking how to set-up xsplit or fix an audio cables problem. As much as I love helping people, if you can find the answer on Google or some other forum it’s probably not a good idea to e-mail someone asking for the answer to your question.

“LET’S CHAT”: As flattering as it is to have random people e-mail you or add you on Skype requesting to just talk sometime, it’s impossible to fulfill all of these requests. If you’re adding someone and your message is something along the lines of “hey, u seem really cool and im pretty cool we shuld chat or hang out sometime lol thx”, you should probably think twice before clicking that “add contact” button.

ASKING FOR GAME ADVICE: If you want lessons, buy lessons. Don’t ask pro players for game advice via e-mail because the answers are often complicated and take a lot of time to fully explain. So you end up with two things, either 1) getting a half-assed answer, or 2) receiving no response at all. Don’t send off e-mails to Ret or Sheth saying “what do u do in zvp when the p puts early pressure on u?” If you really want lessons, buy them! Otherwise, there are tons of forums and other people you could consult for the answers to your questions.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below and I’ll try to edit my above post to answer them. Otherwise, glhf at  your events and happy obsing!