The main project that we work on in CQ After Hours is the Quarantrain raids. Taking place on Twitch, we work to move viewers from one streamer to another so we can keep the music going. We’re always moving on to that next broadcast.
We’ve been running our chain of raids for nearly 19 days at the time of writing. 24/7 continuously guided raids. It seems the stability of the streaming software has been deteriorating on a weekly basis. At first it was a rare occurrence to have a panic raid due to some software glitch. Now several weeks in its happening at least daily and sometimes 2-3 times a day. Since we average about 9 stops a day thats 30% of our stops that are experiencing glitches.
Of course every time a stream is restarted there are a number of viewers that decide to move on. These problems are putting even more pressure on small streamers to make sure that their setup is correct in an environment with little official documentation.
Streamers have been moving en mass from Streamlabs OBS which has a number of added toys, and back to vanilla OBS. That being the open sourced version with far fewer features but seemingly greater speed and stability.
For those staying on Streamlabs there are a few precautions that seem wise to take. This is particularly true under larger loads with high viewer counts. A stream may work for hours with 30 people but break in 1/2 hour with 400 or even 120.
While streamers have depended on GIFs and toys for entertaining their audience in quiet streams it may be those little sideshows causing the problem. From what we’ve seen fixed in the field the extensions and sound notifications are can interact badly and eventually crash the stream, mute or garble the sound, or even give a BSOD. Disabling these notifications has stopped the crashing in multiple instances that we’ve seen.
Remove them completely. Don’t just make them invisible on the screen as they may continue consuming memory and resources in the background leading to the same problem. IF you have a stable setup that doesn’t crash, don’t make any additions until a fix is announced or you risk importing one of these problems along with it.
For us.. we’ll keep rolling along making 1 emergency landing after another. Hopefully the problems get fixed soon. We like seeing the streamers able to put on their best show, not having to wrangle software errors.