Fifteen Minute Cast Time

Julian, Char and I were discussing how we could make money by creating a HoN stream commentated by a girl (Char). The idea seemed pretty straightforward, we play, stream the games while playing, and chat as we normally do on Mumble. The allure would be the fact that there is a female playing HoN, and people would watch just to see what's going on. Their views would generate income from ads, which we could split between the five of us (Char getting the biggest share, of course, as she is the one doing most of the work (I think the fact that the five of us have to play is work for us, although, Julian said Char could just stream on her own with randoms and get all the profit, which makes sense to me)). Besides, we play every night anyway, so why not profit from it?

So why Char and not me - after all, I'm also a female that plays HoN? I thought Char could do the cute, Asian girl over webcam thing, and get even more money, so that was my biggest reason. But a part of it was to do with the fact that I've focused a lot on recognition based on merit, not gender (i.e. I'd like to be good, not good "for a girl"). The idea of selling my channel based on the fact that I'm female isn't appealing to me at all. Though that didn't stop me from suggesting someone else should do it.

The last part that frightened me was the thought that we lose often. In fact, I have a 50% win rate, so we'd be expected to lose about half of our games. Losing between friends isn't a big deal. We think about what went wrong, blame the random person on our team, and queue up again. Losing when 500 people are watching seems really embarrassing. Not just that though, I'm afraid that every time we lose, it just feeds into the stereotype that girls are bad at games.

Which is so ridiculous. I avoid having my skill judged with a female bias in mind, but at the same time, I'm afraid that when I am judged, I'll end up contributing to that bias.

I remember at the HoN tournament we played in about a month ago, we were seeded against the Qlimax Crew. As soon as they saw us, they were so confident they were going to win, and as they were walking back to their seats, they were laughing that we had a girl on our team. They completely crushed us. Their strategy was really aggressive and it seemed like they didn't even consider us a threat. It was almost like they were playing a practice game and we weren't even there.

I watched a replay of one of their other matches in the tournament, and they were a lot more cautious. I kinda feel like I let the team down. Maybe if I hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been so arrogant, as the team was an unknown, and they might have played cautiously in the first match, which wouldn't have caused the strategy we had practiced to unravel so quickly.

Besides, I wouldn't want any bad reputation to come to LCF, as I still think of it as Simon's clan, even though I've been clan leader since the beta.