Streaming & Recording Your Raids

Even just a year or so ago, recording your raid fights required a killer PC and a lot of active participation during the raid to get it right.  You would need Fraps, which in my experience, has been nothing short of cumbersome on all levels. You would then need to remember to turn it on pre-pull each attempt. The reason you would need to do this is that Fraps created such large files that you couldn’t have it running except during that critical boss fight. Those times are gone. You can record an entire night’s raiding, wiping, and silly moments for about 1-2GBs. As a raid leader, here’s why I think you should be recording AND streaming your raid nights.

• Allows guild members to actively see your culture before applying to the team
• Folks coming in to replace can be right there learning while they wait for X player to go offline etc. No more training them on all the things you learned the previous 10 wipes
• Had a confrontation with an raider? Go back, listen to see how  you and the person engaged each other. I found that on review of the “tape” ala Football that I was just plain wrong or abrasive in my interactions with a raider. It may have (typically is) a legitimate complaint, but I could have done it in a much nicer or better way.
• Like our guild, you may have more than one team. It’s been amazing to have the other raid leaders sit and watch our team to help avoid their team the silly wipes we went through.
• Putting them online for your team to review later is just plain fun and builds a team’s culture and pride.
• WoWProgress now lets you post your videos right next to your boss kills. This is an awesome way for recruits to see your skill, culture, etc before applying. Nothing is more of a waste of time than a complete mismatch in skill or personality for your latest star recruit.
• Post game analysis: reviewing the tape to see how we could do X or Y better has been fun and really pretty informative.
• PLEASE oh PLEASE use this as a learning tool, as a culture promoting tool, and DO NOT overlay techno over the most important part of your stream/recording –  the Ventrilo discussions!

I helped a bunch of the other folks get XSplit and Twitch set up properly for their machine (more an art than science tbh) and put together a video to show the steps. Enjoy and share. The more of us openly sharing our tactics, culture, and methodologies the better.

How to stream games online – a guide & tutorial to streaming games with xsplit and twitch.tv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKXur5ApG9s