Pocket_Aces has been grinding the late-night stream block for quite a while. He balances a full-time job on top of streaming and building a community. We wanted to know what his community’s like and what Pocket_Aces’s strategies are.
We drew three themes from Pocket_Aces: a shared and somewhat unique community, revealing his personal side and constantly improving. And outside those themes, he was also adamant about encouraging people to vote.
Shared Community
Pocket_Aces said since he streams late at night, until about midnight EST, he gets a few international viewers, namely from Europe. However, a large part of his viewers filter in from other members of HypeHorizen.
“I think myself and Rarran and a whole bunch of people on HypeHorizen, we share a lot of mutual people in the community. With that, you just get people who are very active, who are gonna come around and say hi even if they don’t stick around. Like no matter what, they’ll at least pop in for a little bit and that level of support is really awesome, right? I think that’s what makes our community extremely supportive and I would say that’s more unique than anything.”
He said another feature of his community, specifically his Twitch chat, is they love making Pocket_Aces break his streaming character. Through doing “random things,” Pocket_Aces the streamer takes a secondary role, and Pocket_Aces the person takes the wheel, if only for a brief point redeem.
Personality
“My chat loves to make me do random things. They love making me sing, they love to make me try out new video games, they love to make me imitate voice lines. That’s why I have these channel point rewards, ’cause they love making me kinda like get out of character for a little bit or be anyone but Pocket_Aces the streamer. I get it. It’s kinda cool to see a little bit of the dimensionality of the person who is the streamer. You don’t know them as just a Hearthstone player or just a person who streams on Twitch. You get a little bit of insight into who they are as a person.”
Pocket_Aces said among the random games chat’s encouraged him to play, a Pokémon Nuzlocke challenge was one of the most memorable. The Nuzlocke challenge is basically a set of agreed-upon rules, notably that if a Pokémon faints, you have to release it. He’s also been asked to play games like Jump King and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, because they want to see him mess up and start from scratch.
It seems like there’s a theme of chat wanting him to play hardcore/ ironman-type games. I wonder if he’d be interested in playing a game like Darkest Dungeon… @Pokcet_Aces.
Constantly Improving
You can see a lot of changes throughout Pocket_Aces’s streaming career. He’s upgraded his equipment, played a variety of games and game modes, and of course, he’s added some neat bells and whistles like channel-point rewards.
At the moment, he’s mainly working on two things:
“I should be starting up a YouTube within the next week or so… Not everybody’s gonna get the chance to drop into my stream, especially because I don’t get the chance to stream as long as other bigger streamers… Just giving people more opportunity to catch up on things I’ve been thinking about in Hearthstone, things I’ve been doing on stream. I think it’s a good avenue for that. Also hopefully, it just kinda introduces my stream to more people and helps grow the community in that way.”
Pocket_Aces has a few ideas for his YouTube. Of course he’d like to add some highlights of crazy Standard or Battlegrounds games. He also wants to focus his channel on thoughts about the game. Maybe a deck or meta he’s enjoying, or some changes he’d like to see. Something else he thinks would be particularly valued within his community is a deck review. Basically, instead of a guide, it’d be a video on trying out a new deck and giving overall thoughts on it.
The other thing Pocket_Aces is working on, like any good streamer, is himself.
“I think one thing that really drew people to me in the beginning, was how much fun I had while streaming and while playing Hearthstone and the positivity that I always had. And then I think I started to get super competitive with Hearthstone, and like naturally anything you get emotionally invested in and competitive in, when things don’t go your way, it just doesn’t feel good. I think that my chat, whenever I wasn’t doing well, sensed the change in energy, and I don’t think they liked that a lot… I’m a competitive player; I wanna win, I want to get better at the game, but at the same time, when it comes to streaming, my focus should be on my community, right? Making sure that they have a good time, making sure that I’m having a good time while streaming. I think that balancing act is probably the biggest thing for me right now in terms of things I work on for my stream.”
