Things are about to change!
After I had logged off of Hermitcraft today, I logged into the Muse Farms world to play. But once I was in, I couldn't stop thinking about my mansion in Hermitcraft. Or the tree farm. Or the upcoming ABBA tournament. Or a prank I'm planning in the future. I was about to start recording, but I realized my heart wasn't in it. I wouldn't be recording because I wanted to play, I would just be recording because it's what a portion of my viewers want. I had to make a decision- Do something I don't feel like doing, for the fans? Or do what I want to do, so I can "be myself". It's a difficult decision, but it was decided when I realized that I simply wouldn't really be having fun. It would be a chore. Sure, a portion of my audience wants me to do Muse Farms, but they want me to have fun playing Muse Farms. Which is something I don't have a whole lot of control over.
I chose not to record. Or play. In fact, it seems a little stupid and conceited to even be writing this blog post. I mean, I am an adult. I pay my taxes, I work on my car, and look at labels when I go grocery shopping. Yet here I am, feeling guilty about not playing a videogame.
I started up MFS2 because I had a lot of fun getting back into vanilla Minecraft. But Hermitcraft is the first real SMP server I've played on and it is introducing so many more options that I've never had, in addition to all of the things I can be getting in single player. I can't say I feel like playing a watered-down single player experience today. And I probably won't tomorrow. Or the day after that. But I have been too quick to officially cancel series' in the past. So I'm not going to say MFS2 is cancelled, or that I won't go back to it. The simple facts are that at the moment: A) I can have more fun on Hermitcraft and B) More people watch/enjoy Hermitcraft.
I feel bad about putting a series on an extended hiatus. It feels slimy... somewhat unprofessional. But for the last two years, I have maintained a professional vibe because I thought that was what people wanted. I never talk about my personal life in my videos, I keep the audio and video crisp and clean, throwing away anything that doesn't look or sound great. But the simple fact is that a professional vibe just doesn't really matter. It's a ton of extra work, it creates a distance between myself and my viewers, and I've been doing it for two years and seen literally no channel growth because of it. I have more subscribers, sure, but I'm getting just as many viewers now as when I started uploading to this channel. The games you play and the personality of yourself and the people playing with you are all that really matters. In fact, I believe it may be hurting my channel because the time I spend focusing on editing could be better spent on more productive things. I'm basically feeling a tad dejected because the niche that I've been trying to fill doesn't really exist.
So for that reason, things are about to change. "Channel growth" was a driving factor in a lot of the things that I did, including near-daily uploads, playing high traffic games, and doing games that I didn't feel like doing that day. And it hasn't been accomplishing a damn thing. So I am going to start focusing more on doing what's fun.
The whole "Muse Farms" thing isn't the sole reason for this change. In reality, the I've Got Diamonds video is responsible for some of it. I spent almost a year on that video. I poured my heart and soul into it. I thought that people would love the quirkiness of the obscure parody. I didn't pretend to think that the animation was great, but I thought it was "good enough". I mean, look at Sparklez' "TNT". That video is terrible from an animation standpoint, but it has 73 million views. I assumed people just liked animated parodies and I was submitting mine into that mix.
But it flopped. It failed miserably. Almost no one outside of my subscriber base saw it or cared about it. I sent it to BebopVox and he didn't even give it a 5-second blurb in his "Minecraft Parodies" section of his show. Almost 500 hours of work went into it and it has barely more views than "porkchop falling over", which took about 20 minutes to make. Lesson learned.
The moral is that it basically proves that I have no idea what people actually want to see. I can't predict it or control it. I like to pretend like I know what I'm doing, but the fact is, I have no freaking clue. So rather than trying to harness it, I am just going to start focusing entirely on having fun. I'm still going to focus on making my videos fun to watch because I greatly enjoy doing that. But I'm not going to stress over uploading "because I have to".
That being said, Chris and I are starting to tire of the Mindcrack pack in Facepalm. It's horribly outdated, and we're reaching a point with Gregtech that you need Iridium to do anything, so we'd need to do a ton of grinding to advance. I mentioned in passing that we might be adding more people to the server, but since it's so outdated (and about to stop being supported), we will likely take a different direction. Though I'm not sure which direction that will be at the moment, and I need to discuss it with Chris. This situation is precisely why I didn't name the series after the mod. Because "Facepalm" is about sucking at something, and we suck at a lot more than just FTB.
Oh yeah, I'm still doing animation. That's fun. No projects on the horizon, just kinda messing around and learning.
I almost forgot to mention, I really enjoyed doing the "YouTooble+" vlog video. I'll probably do a lot more vlogs in that style, possibly about things that aren't even related to videogames. After all, I do have a college degree in Communication, so I could write more about topics that I'm literally well-educated in.. Something about doing all the research and citing sources, while staying informal and hilarious, is very fun to me.