The History of Snipealot

It was the best of times, and the worst of times. 4 little channels that run silently in the monstrous storms of channels on Twitch, accepting that it will never be a popular channel, never be a channel with subscriber perks. The channels know that and it does make them sad, they still keep going, going for the 5-10 viewers who hop in at 2am on a tuesday morning, showing them the mysteries and magic that is Brood War. They do know that deep in their heart, as long as there are viewers no matter how little, they will do what they can to deliver the best of brood war. And for that, they are happy.

This is a story about the Snipealot 24/7 Twitch Channels.

Let's get started on how the snipealot channels came about. Ah, I remember it quite so; it was way back in 2012 when all of this started. Professional BW was having its last flames, SC2 was taking over the Korean esports scene, Players left and right were dropping/retiring from playing. It was a bleak and gruesome time for the BW fanatics. Depsite all of this, there was one place where BW still thrived, where BW was still being loved and cared for; That place was Afreeca, Korea's own streaming web site. Ex-pros and B teamers would stream brood war to the hundreds/thousands of viewers, enteraining the fans in returns for donations in the form of balloons. Now, this was the only way at the time to watch high level BW live. And it was quite difficult to do so for foreigners due to a multitude of techincal/political reasons (there were only few streamers on TL who could restream and they would only do it for 2-3 hours at most). But I digress, that's not the point of the story, let's continue. There appeared a man who we now know in the BW community as Snipealot would appear onto the scene with a hurricane behind him.

Snipealot was a foreigner who was doing an extended study abroad in Korea to study Korean and while he had a counter-strike background, he still had somewhat of an interest in korean BW. So, using his extra PC, he created 2 snipealot channels, snipealot1 and snipealot2. 1 was for live streaming of which he would control, and the other for backup/testing. And did these 2 channels kickstart a whole behemoth.

Immediately, people started flocking to these channels to watch BW. Even the Chinese community, who didn't have a proper restreaming solution available would come flood the snipealot channels, leading to massive viewership numbers for a “dead” game. Everything was still done manually by active mods that Snipealot recruited over the next couple months. Management software was installed on the streaming PC in Korea to allow for mods to remotely come in and the 2 channels expanded to 4; there was 5 channels at one point in time even! Oh, so many things started because of this. We were able to get quality options on some channels, and we once even made it to the front page of Twitch's channel directory with over 2000 viewers all watching Bisu stream for the first time. Ah, I remember Bisu's first time, he would spam so much (as if he wasn't fast enough) because he was so nervous about losing in front of his legion of fans. Hell, he even made $40,000 on that day just from donations. We saw this happen live, we say many other funny things happen live, we got to watch everything that happened in the korean SOSPA scene all live. I recall Hiya visiting us directly in Chat calling himself hollywoodfishking. I remember Eagle (it was Eagle right?) having the Afreeca chat and us twitch chatters next to each other and we would say hello to each other. I remember being there for all of this and it was so surreal, everything that was happening and that did happen. It was a magical time

While all of this was happening, Snipealot himself racked up quite a hefy power and internet bill to host this. He was able to pay it off from donations from the TL community and from the ad revenue. He even worked on a major revamp to the streaming platforms, adding autohotkey scripts and channel bots so that everything was basically automated. The streams were able to run 24/7 without any mods intervention. That was the best of times, the golden age. We were happy, but this happiness comes with a cost. No community anywhere is ever going to be happy go lucky all the time. There will be some problems.

One of the biggest problems that occurred during this time was with some of the mods and with the twitch viewers itself. One of the problems was that because of the fact that all the streams were handled manually for the most part, mods would fuck up sometimes and ruin streams. Other times, mods would want 1 specific streamer on and would constantly change streamers without any regard to the viewers or to the other mods. There were some conflicts about these, but most of the time, they were resolved peacefully and life moved on.

However, mods infighting wasn't the biggest problem we had. These was an old mod who was a friend of snipealot from the old days who had issues with the chinese community. He was quite infuriated with their inability to speak english with him and one day went on a power trip, banning everyone who spoke in sight. This caused quite a problem with us mods and we were forced to remove his modship and to change the entire streaming setup (all the passwords and access) so he wouldn't have access to it. He was disposed of his modship position and left in the dust. Of course, twitch chatters are never that innocent too. We would always have problems with 2 major problems. The SC2 trolls and the ever going Taiwan's independence problem.

WTF, Taiwan's independence? How does that even make sense? Well, for those of you who don't know about this (Congratulations, you're one of the 10,000 today today to learn!), Every single Chinese dialect has the same written language. So any cantonese speaker can pick up a newspaper written by a Mandarin speaking news agency and have 100% comphrehension of it. So, this leads to the problem. Since Twitch is an open community and thus Taiwanese and Chinese speakers can visit it, you're going to have clashes of counties. Most of the chinese conversations eventually spiralled down to the problem at hand and it took a toll on our resident Chinese speaking mod who had to shut it down every time it happened, which was all the time.

There were problems we had, but we perserved, we got bigger and bigger. More people was joining. Then the hard news hit us: Snipealot was leaving Korea to return to his home; his stay was done in Korea. That meant no more streams, no more BW for now. It caused a ripple in the community.

What do we do, how will we manage now? Will we wait until Snipealot goes back to korea to watch BW? Are we doomed? Questions were asked and none were answered. The Chinese left us as they figured out their own streaming solutions and we lost a lot of viewers. It was a bleak moment of time. However, it is said that tough times bring out tough people and tough people create good times.

In the cold hash center of Moscow, russia was a fellow BW enthusiant and paricipant in the Russian BW community (and also the TL community) who emerged from the dark. His handle is AlexoundOS and he was already in the works of something entirely different: A streaming setup to replicate that of Snipealot's, 100% automated and that could work on any linux distro, provided that he had a good connection to Afreeca (Hah! Good joke). With Snipealot's help for the stream keys, he
managed to get all 4 streams running on his local machine at a lower overhead. It was crappy quality, but the beauty of BW is that crappy quality still makes the game look good. This went on for a month around the early part of 2013. Streams somewhat worked, but would be choppy. But hey! We still got BW. We can still make TL threads of the matches, we can still watch the SSLs, the small clan leagues, and more. We still had something. We still had faith in BW.

So, how to remedy the connection issue? I guess that's where I come into the pictures kids. I remember approaching AlexoundOS and snipealot around I believe was march or april of 2013 with an idea of mine: Let's migrate the streams to a VPS that is located geographically close to korea and let's use that to restream everything from there! We'll have a better connection and I'll front the bill since it would not cost me much to maintain. From here, the rebirth of Snipealot happened.

We used a VPS provider who had a location in Singapore, spun up a server, and moved the streams onto there. There was some hiccups along the way, but ultimately, we managed to do the impossible. We got high quality bw streams that are on 24/7 that is 100% automated by bots and is easy to manage. We managed to salvage BW streaming, and the rest is history. We got featured on TL, we had everything. We witnessed new ex-pros start streaming, we started get busy creating highlight vods of good games, we have now a shitload of BW content to absorb. We did unfeatured when it turned out that Afreeca rolled out flash players that did not require any fancy silverlight plugin to use. While I can go into a rant about why that was a stupid deicion to do, that's not the point of the story at hand.

So, where does the story of the 4 small snipealot streams lie today? It will always be a bumpy ride. Our connection to afreeca will suck at random times, but we still have bw restreaming. We still got the 4 streams running strong (though 1 had a TOS violation as it was probably some streamer restreaming illegal content and no mod to catch), but we're working on that. We have SSL 10 coming up, LoveTV SL3 coming up, and more to come. Sure, we're not netting the 200+ viewership numbers that we would get, but as long as there are the dedicated bw fans who still click on the little streams and still watch the magic of BW, the snipealot streams are here to stay.

What will happen in the future? Who knows, only time will tell. As the story comes to a close, I want to remind everything that we of the snipealot staff thanks you all for supporting BW and that without you guys, BW would never have risen out of the ashes of the old KESPA days.

For we are BW.


Thank you.