For the past few days, I've spent a lot of my time watching Chinese Dota streams. Since I live in New Zealand, the streams do lag from time to time, but overall the experience had been an interesting departure from what you'd expect from Twitch. So in this post, I'll talk a bit about Dota 2 streaming in China, and a bit about the Chinese Dota scene in general.

Douyu is basically a Twitch knock-off...with 10 times the viewers

In the West, Twitch has almost established a monopoly over the streaming market. No other streaming site comes close to matching its popularity. In China, things are a bit more complicated. Several streaming sites, all of which are modelled after Twitch, compete for China's gigantic market. Right now, China's 'Big Four' streaming sites are Douyu, Huomao, Zhanqi and Huya. Douyu is arguably the most popular out of the four, although after a series of recent contract signings Huya may have come up on top.

BurNing's digital apparel Taobao store

China's Dota streamers have several ways of generating income. First, there's the money they get from signing contracts with the streaming sites. Well-known players, such as ZSMJ and longdd, can receive several million Yuan in advance, which makes streaming a very lucrative career. Players like YYF (part of the iG team that won TI2) have made more money streaming Dota post-retirement than during their professional careers. Back in Dota 1 days, professional Dota players were paid with tiny salaries. In 2011, a mere sum of 60k Yuan was enough to convince BurNing to quit EHOME and join DK. It only took three years for professional Dota players, like BurNing, to become millionaires.

On Twitch, streamers generate revenue mainly through signing up Twitch partnerships and playing ads. China's Dota streams also have ads, except they are advertisements of the streamers' Taobao shops. Taobao is essentially a Chinese version of Ebay, selling everything from snacks, gaming mice to clothing. Opening Taobao shops have become a popular way for retired Chinese Dota players to make a living off their fanbase, so it's no surprise their ads lead straight to their own stores. Besides that, however, you won't see ads for the new WoW expansion during a Chinese stream. Third-party advertisements are kept to a minimum.

Besides advance payments and Taobao shops, stream sites have also set up reward systems that pays bonuses for streamers according to their popularity. Douyu, for example, has a feature where you can gift a type of currency called 'Yuwan' to players of your choosing (Douyu or 斗鱼 literally means 'Fish Fighting', hence Yuwan or 鱼丸 means 'Fishball'). Player popularity is assessed according to the amount of 'Yuwan' they have, and bonuses are paid out accordingly. This system is somewhat similar to the donation boxes of Twitch streamers, except that money is administered centrally by the streaming sites themselves.

Ferrari's Douyu stream, with the 'Yuwan' spam on the right

In terms of raw numbers, China's streaming audience is enormous. On Twitch, popular streamers like Singsing may attract somewhere around 20 to 25k people. Slightly less popular streamers, like Merlini, may receive around 7k to 8k. In China, streamers such as YYF receive up to 400k viewers. Ferrari's viewership averages around 200k. Even the less popular streamers from tier 2 teams can consistently attract 10 to 15k viewers. Obviously, viewer count is as polarized in China as it is on Twitch. The vast majority of viewers are concentrated in a tiny group of famous Dota players, many of whom have already retired (with Zhou, longdd and xiao8 being the most popular). Even if you have 6k mmr, your stream is unlikely to attract more than a few hundred viewers...

Unless you are attractive. Like Twitch, China also has its share of female streamers. Like their Twitch counterpart, they are usually young, attractive and have facecams bigger than the actual gameplay. Unlike Twitch's female streamers, China's streaming sites actively encourage female streamers to dress up, cosplay and market themselves to China's male gamers. Huya, for example, has a section devoted exclusively for the female streamers. China's most famous female Dota 2 streamer is probably 冷冷 (or ''Cold Cold'), who also provided Chinese commentary for the annual TI tournaments. Unsurprisingly, she also has her share of drama in the Chinese Dota 2 community, but that's a story for another time.

In stark contrast to viewership numbers, China's stream chat is surprisingly well-behaved. Twitch chat is, of course, well-known for its spam and memes (can you imagine the state of Singsing's chat with 400k viewers?). Twitch chat is also thoroughly unproductive, unless it's on subscriber mode. To be sure, China's stream chat also features its share of memes, but the chat is mostly quite productive. Even on a stream as populated as YYF's, you can still see discussions over item builds, in-game decision-making, and of course a lot of flaming. Whereas on Twitch, you'd expect a wall of Kappa, BibleThump and lots of copypasta. Copypasta, by and large, don't exist in China. While personally this makes for a better experience, Chinese streams are admittedly less funnier without the emotes and the spam. But that's up to personal preference.

Some concluding thoughts

What makes streaming Dota so lucrative has to do with competition between streaming sites, and the huge fanbases popular streamers have behind their backs. Obviously, streaming sites are operating at a loss when they pay out millions of dollars to streamers who can jump to another site if a more lucrative contract is offered. With increasing competition from LoL and other cheap MOBA knock-offs, Dota may lose popularity and with that, Dota 2 streams will become less lucrative. And with more and more pro players entering the market, there'd be increasing competition not just between stream sites but also between players. Chances are that the insane rate of growth that we are seeing now will die out very, very quickly, and the most money will, like always, go to the least number of people.

For the last week or so, I've worked pretty hard. From Monday to Wednesday I've hardly had any sleep, and my working hours went something like ten hours per day. Still, it felt really nice to be working because despite all the stress, I felt I've contributed something. Besides tutoring English on the side, I'm doing my bit helping out the family business. We received so many orders last week, and the workload was absolutely crazy. My parents and I worked really hard to get those orders moving, and I think we did a good job. The running joke is that this is the start of the new Rockefeller enterprise, and that I might take over the family business one day. Well, we are not earning nearly as much as them. But we are catching up!

I'm probably going to spend the rest of this summer on those two jobs, and then spent the next few months volunteering overseas before returning to Auckland, possibly finishing off my Bachelor's degree. In the United States, the Bachelor's degree lasts for four years. In New Zealand, a Bachelor's degree only lasts three years, and they give you an option to do an extra year which they refer to as an Honours degree. Which is basically an extended year of undergraduate study, except that you get to write a dissertation on a topic of your interest. I've always enjoyed reading and doing research, so I'm sure I'll pull through with good grades. I'm not too sure whether I want to actually go back to school, though, since I do have some loans to pay off and I don't like debt. 

Dota has been fairly interesting lately. Both the PA arcana and Oracle came out a few days ago. The former caused an influx of PA pickers, as expected. There are also quite a few Oracle pickers, and I think Oracle is lining up to be a really good support if he's properly used. In general, my pub games lately have been pretty decent. I play on Australia, which isn't exactly the server with the most skilful players, but people have in general been nice. Maybe it's to do with the PA arcana and how the prospect of getting free sets is making people cooperate more than before. I really am not sure. But I definitely hope this lucky streak continues. For the first time in a really long time, I feel that I'm enjoying this game again. Hopefully I don't jinx it.

What really got me excited were the hero effigies. In fact, if it hadn't been the effigies, I wouldn't have gotten back into the game. Valve is just really good at manipulating my feelings, it seems. It took a long time for Pygmalion to finish his sculpture, in the same way that it took me an hour finishing character creation on Dark Souls. But alas, they are done. So pretty.

Queen of Pain is an underpowered hero right now. A few years back, Queen of Pain was the midlaner to go for, and she was featured prominently in TI2. As newer heroes like Ember Spirit and Slark came out, Queen of Pain's skillset became less and less powerful. Queen of Pain belongs in the same category of heroes as Windrunner -- good by standards back in the days, increasingly outclassed by newer heroes that fulfil largely the same function but are better at it. 

Queen of Pain's recent buffs hasn't done too much to improve her pub winrate or making her more relevant in the competitive scene. Decreasing the cooldown on Shadow Strike is useful, but Shadow Strike is primarily used as a harassing tool in the laning stage. The casting animation for Shadow Strike is so slow that you'd almost never want to do it in the middle of a teamfight. The thing is, Shadow Strike is just a very mediocre spell when you compare it to, let's say, Ember's bolas or Storm's Lightning Vortex. It loses a lot of its utility after the first 10 minutes.

Still, I think she has potential in certain lineups. Faceless Void is very popular right now, and there is no other midlaner that combos as well with Chronosphere as Queen of Pain. The key to succeeding with her right now, I think, is to pair her up with big CCs like Ravage and Chrono, and keep on picking teamfights where she can cleanup and snowball those kills into an item advantage. It's kind of counter-intuitive to revolve a strategy around an underpowered hero, but that's just how things are. Unfortunately, her room for error is very low, because Blink itself has a very low margin of error. When I watch my replays on Queen of Pain, for example, I always think that if I had blinked just a bit to the side, my Scream/Wave could've hit two more people. If I'd been a bit more careful with my positioning, I could've dodged a stun and threw out a few more nukes. If my mechanics had been a bit more polished, I could've landed a few more right clicks. Even though I've played so much of this hero, there's always room to improve. 

Sonic Wave just got buffed with a slightly bigger AoE.

The circle indicates the casting range of Sonic Wave. 

Notice how the line intersects with her effigy on the right.

Unfortunately, neither the spell's animation, nor the range indicator, shows the spell's actual AoE.

The actual range of Sonic Wave is about twice that of the casting range. 

It has a MASSIVE AoE, which I feel is underused by Queen of Pain players right now, myself included.

So the trick to landing a good ult is to click in the general direction of the enemy, between yourself and the casting range limits.

Since unit targeting has been removed, do not ever click on the enemy hero. 

For the past few days, I've been really hooked on Valkyria Chronicles. It's actually the first game in a really, really long time that I actually, genuinely enjoyed playing. Which is really surprising, considering I didn't even know it was coming out on Steam. Well, I'm not that huge of a JRPG fan to begin with, so I guess my ignorance is excusable for now. The number of Japanese games with cutesy anime faces (barring OELVNS) are, by the way, increasing rather quickly on Steam. Trails in the Sky came out not so long ago, and Valkyria Chronicles certainly won't be the last on the list. Which is quite nice, I guess. Also I don't own a console, so this mini-review will solely be on the PC version.

A lot of people on Steam have been comparing Valkyria Chronicles to XCOM. I haven't actually played XCOM, so my closest comparison would be something like Company of Heroes. I imagine that if a Japanese game developer got his hands on Company of Heroes in a fantasy setting, he'd make something like Valkyria Chronicles. It's a mix of third-person combat, strategy, visual novel style storytelling, and cute girls, one of whom ends up being your wife. Basically, the game is right up my alley. And I liked just about every aspect of it.

Unlike most of things I'm into, the presence of cute girls isn't the only thing good about this game. The art style is, I think, the real selling point. The plot seems to be loosely based around Germany's invasion of Belgium in '40. But the character design is more of a mix between medieval fashion and World War II weaponry, which is quite charming in its on way. Edelweiss, for example, looks rather similar to a King Tiger (when you upgrade it fully) while the enemy tanks resembled the early war French designs. Unless you are a history nerd you probably won't notice much of this. Or unless you are a Girls und Panzer fan.

In Valkyria Chronicles you get to hand-pick your own squad.

My one shouldn't really be called a squad. It's more like a Chloe harem.

My first foray into HR. Everyone have their key competencies and employee relations.

Unfortunately I'm a terrible manager and I pick people exclusively on their gender and looks. So sexist!

The combat system is really well made. As a turn-based game, the combat actually feels moderately realistic, and even though it's a third person shooter the game doesn't feel too awkward. Of course, Valkyria Chronicles is hardly a realistic combat simulator. Strategy is what makes the game tick, and they did a good job not making the tank, Edelweiss, from becoming overly overpowered. In fact, some of the missions required multiple playthroughs because the AI was just that competent! Or maybe because I'm just that incompetent of a leader. Probably the latter.

Valkyria Chronicle unfolds, quite literally, like chapters in a book. So there's a lot stories, a lot of dialogue and even some skippable side chapters (although no one actually skips them, r-right?), which gave the game's setting a lot of extra depth and richness. The quality of writing is comparable to that of an above-average VN. Of course, it's nothing like A Farewell to Arms, but the drama did make the story a bit more 3-dimensional. Valkyria Chronicles tells both side of the story with a human touch, so that you can actually sympathize even with the Empire's soldiers.

I'm pretty sure that Darcsens are supposed to stand for the WWII Jews.

Valkyria Chronicles is actually a lot darker than it might seem.

I really enjoy watching little girls with twin tails running with a rifle.

It sounds perverted, but you have to try it out to feel it for yourself.

That's about it, really. I usually like to criticize and nitpick things when I run out of things to say, but this time, I don't have any criticisms at all. Valkyria Chronicles is just that good of a game. Well, I guess you could have more cute girls carrying rifles and driving tanks, I suppose, although that might make the game kind of creepy. In any case, the reception Valkyria Chronicles has received should tell Sega that JRPGs do have a big market in the West. So we might see more JRPGs being ported over and translated and put on Steam. Which is really nice.

Not too much has happened recently. I've meant to put my time to more productive uses lately, but besides doing some reading, not much has been done. I've been preparing for my exams all this time and honestly, it's been pretty hectic. It gets worse when you realize that the exam is only in a few days time and you are woefully unprepared for it, which means that your sleep schedule is going to get wrecked and your end up procrastinating a lot. If there's one thing I really, really got out of university, it's the fact that my sleep schedule is nothing like that of a normal person. Most people's day starts from 9 and ends at 5. Mine starts at 1 in the afternoon.

I've been playing a bit of Dota and Hearthstone lately, but neither feel all that close to me anymore. Dota, in particular, has become a game that I enjoy watching far more than playing, because I find the game really really stressful. The same goes with Hearthstone, too. Maybe it's a case of ladder anxiety, but I find it so much more comforting watching other people screw up than actually playing the game. I probably am not the only person with this mentality. The reason why Twitch is so successful is precisely because people like watching others play games for them. The division between labour and leisure is increasingly frail in today's world. When you realize that you are generating capital by watching others play games for you, you know that this world is kind of messed up.

The last anime I watched is Love Live S2, which actually ended up being pretty good, and very touching. If I had to find one anime that sums up today's anime industry, it'd be LL. They basically combined two things that obsessive otaku in Japan loves: idols, and high school slice-of-life aka fictional utopian hug-boxes. Add cute girls to the mix, and you have a show that sells on par with Madoka and Bakemonogatari. It's a pretty standard formula, really, but very well executed, and extremely well marketed. 

LL reminded me of K-ON, a lot. The scene where the girls declared they'd disband when the 3rd years graduate, was reminiscent of HTT breaking down in tears in their band room after their last performance. And I'm not going to lie: both scenes hit me like a truck. LL's execution was a bit less polished than K-ON's, and it didn't do as good of a job combining the slice-of-life elements with the music, and sometimes the drama was cringe-worthy. But very powerful nonetheless. So powerful that it makes you want to throw money at a bunch of girls who don't really exist.

So this is the cover of the character song I just bought.

I really like Honoka's face. It looks mildly autistic, which is kind of cute, I guess.

So I ended up eating up this capitalist marketing scheme and bought some LL merchandise in the end, in the vain hopes that the more money I burn the more real the girls will become. Well, a guy should be allowed to dream! Anyways, I bought two CDs (Honoka's character songs) and a Honoka wall scroll, which will take up the remaining stretch of my bedroom wall that isn't covered with cute girls already. It's only about 70 dollars of value in total, which isn't very much I guess, since my consumerist spending has really died down this year compared to the last. I'll write a review on those merchandise when they arrive.

Besides that, not too much has happened. It's quite amazing how much stuff I can type out when I'm in front of the computer when just a minute ago, I thought my life was so boring my post would end with a single paragraph. But I suppose I was wrong. I'm going to see a movie tomorrow, so I'm going to take some pictures of the mythical 'outside world' while I'm at it. Auckland is a really beautiful city, you know? Hopefully we'd have a nice weather tomorrow.

I've also started a Honoka folder. Soon it will be full of Honoka pictures. Here are some of the ones I really like. Yea I know you can get them elsewhere, but who doesn't like cute girls?

And last, but not least...

Drank like 5 cups of coffee 10 in the evening and now I can't go to sleep. Marathoning Love Live S2 right now. Should've done this a long time ago. Most productive anime watching session I've done in a long, long time.

Just to make this post a bit worse than it already is, here's my list of the best (and worst) Rabu Raibu:

Best girl tier: Honoka, Kotori (Honoka is actually slightly better, but yea, they're both great)

Meh tier: Rin, Maki, Umi

Waifu tier: Nozomi

Harasho tier: Eli

Please kill her off tier: Hanayo, Nico