Should you play: Stream Raiders
By: Jp, With Faith
Tags: Discord, Review, Twitch, Gacha Games, Videogames

Should you play: Stream Raiders

Stream Raiders is a “viewer engagement” tool developed by Stream Captain; the game entering its open beta phase October 2020 after roughly two years of development. The game is a 2D pixel / grid based game where a captain ( a Twitch streamer ) can follow along of a campaign map by fighting through various 30 minute battles. Once they select a battle, viewers can place units to support their captain once every five minutes. Once the 30 minutes are up ( or the captain starts early ) the allied and enemy units battle it out automatically. Captains and viewers alike can level up their units to make them stronger using gold and scrolls — both which are acquired through battling.

A couple times a month, Stream Raiders has a 24 hour Captain vs Captain ( pvp ) event, where their captains can face off against each other for different types of rewards and sometimes even cash prizes. Battles in CvC are drastically shorter, and there is a limit on how many units can be placed per side based on a power meter. Depending on if you win or lose, your power meter will adjust in an attempt to get you to face similar strength captains. CvC is definitely a much more hands on mode, and requires the full attention of the streamer compared to the PvE mode.

A Game on the Side

For most captains, and viewers, this game is very much a side game that is supposed to enhance the experience of a stream. Some very dedicated streamers though will run this as their primary game and have it as more of a “just chatting” while they wait between battles. Every stream and streamer is different. For myself, when I first started out as a captain it was definitely a fun conversation piece. As time went on, however, it fell more and more into the background. My community did not have much interest in CvC, and due to some other issues on the PvE / campaign side of things, it slowly faded out.

Viewers can have a much more active role, with being able to play with 3–4 captains at a time and placing a unit once every 5 minutes per captain. With that being said, the required costs to upgrade units is scaled so that captains should be able to level up at relatively similar speeds. When I was playing on both captain and viewer accounts, I was able to catch up to my viewer account’s units over time.

A Part-time game with Full-time Events

Stream Raiders will run themed events that have generally run around three weeks in length, give or take a few days. These events could be holiday themed like Halloween or Christmas, or a completely different theme like the underworld, space, or even a more retro black and white theme. During these events there is a battle pass with 37 regular tiers, and a large handful of bonus tiers. There is also a free and paid track ( like most games with battle passes offer ). Generally rewards include bonus gold and scrolls, and along the paid track one can expect a couple of themed skins for their units.

For full-time streamers or those who can put in 20+ hour stream weeks, completing the event should not be of much concern if you don’t get stuck failing some battles 3–4x in a row ( spoiler: you may ). For other captains, or even viewers, with more limited times, you can expect to not see the end of the regular battle pass tiers. Each event generally has 11 “maps” with roughly 6–10 hours of battles per map depending on any early starts or failed battles. From my personal experience, it has taken 2–3 loops through all of the maps to complete the base of the pass, not even close to finishing all of the bonus tiers.

During non-event periods, participation in the game plummets drastically as there is no bonuses, no goals, just a loop of old maps and general monsters that you can use to try and level up some units or gain some more gold still. While I generally continued to play through them at the start, my average participants would go from near 20 down to maybe just 3 or 4. Even some of the largest full-time captains could see very large drop-offs in participation.

Engaging with Silence

As originally mentioned, Stream Captain refers to Stream Raiders as an engagement tool. This is not supposed to be a growth or discovery based tool. Though, for many streamers ( especially newer captains ) it can be hard to even drive more engagement through this channel.

We don’t really design with an increase in viewers in mind. Again, our focus is more on streamers engaging their current community.

- SC Thomas

From my viewpoint and outside of CvC, there are only two common reasons I saw people join my channel. The first is that if someone is in a captains chat, they have a better chance of random awards at the end of battle. Important note is that they do not need to be active, so one can expect them to be lurking — because who can really pay attention to three or four streamers at once, right? The second reason would be so they can see where you are along the campaign map. There is nothing in game for viewers to see where the captain is in terms of campaign progression. You can see if they are live, roughly how many people are placing with them, and what stage of a battle they are in.

If you are determined you will see some growth and increased engagement, though I think the same level, if not more, can be achieved elsewhere. So do I think it is worth it for engagement? If you enjoy the Discord community that they have and the game itself, then yes. I would just say that I would not go into it expecting anything.

Communications from the Team

As I just mentioned, the community is based primarily around Discord, with a little bit of presence on Twitter. While I love Discord and am in dozens of servers for various games, streamers, etc, this is one Discord that I believe needs a fair bit of clean up. With nearly 20 channels on this server, there is a lot to look at, including rules and faq. Though they do not have any bots in place, or even any sort of checks in place, to make sure even those roles have read the rules. It is a daily occurrence you can see even the simplest of rules broken as people will admit to not have read them.

Vague, missing, and outdated information is also present both in the game and in the server. In the game, you will find many mentions of various things, without any way to actually figure out what it is that they are referencing. The game finds itself being updated multiple times a week, so there is a lot of patch notes, though these can also be vague or even confusing. There have been many instances of the community mentioning an insane difficulty of certain maps ( failing sometimes 4+ times, which means over two hours for ONE battle ), just to see that the aforementioned level or creatures in said level receiving a buff! Values for unit changes are often not includes as well, but kept simple like “Power rating values for Tanks and Paladins set to lower, intended values”.

Snippet of one part of the notes for a patch

There are multiple long-standing bugs and other issues that you can sometimes see brought up daily in one of the two feedback channels or bug reports channel. Even some of the most well-known bugs have yet to find their way onto the known-issues channel, that, at the time of writing this, is four months since its last update.

snipped showing last update to the known-issues channel

The feedback channels are also just lengths of texts and are not actually a place to discuss feedback, hence the slow-mode enabled on both of them. Another piece indicating this is that devs and community manager stating that they read all of the feedback, but seem to ignore the fact that the community wants to be able to discuss it as well. Every time utilizing either of their two subreddits they have, or using a bot or a channel to get upvotes / downvotes on commonly brought up topics, it is said that the team does read all of the feedback.

The Friday dev streams are another place that the community can go and try to talk to the team, but be prepared as a lot of questions do get missed due to the quantity. In my opinion, it is not as much as dev stream as it is a hype stream for promised features in the coming months, and to showcase new skins.

At the end of the day, it can be near impossible to find content through the stacks of patch notes of various length, an outdated wiki, and no consistent channels to obtain the information.

New and Missing Content

For many, myself included, there is a weird mix of content priorities. For awhile, mobile users were allowed to buy skins but not equip them. As of writing this, they still can’t use the PvP cosmetic store either!

Another issue is end-game content, that they finally have some stuff planned for. I know a number of players who were not interested in PvP, PvE became stale, and they stopped playing. Most weeks, the biggest update is a few weird balancing tweaks as new skins from captains. Some new content also seems to be hyped then forgotten about. They announced the Ambassador program, which highlighted some community members for being veterans of the game, and being helpful. They planned up a few solid days of rotating streams and hyped up some exclusive skins for these ambassadors, but I cannot recall much mention of anything since that initial release months ago. Most are not present on the discord often either, so many individuals do not even know who these ambassadors are.

Snippet of the ambassador program launch promotion

There are a lot more areas to cover, including the partner-program and the issues within the CvC including untested maps, pushing captains and communities to do 24 hour grinds, unbalanced matching system, and other weird changes. Though without directly taking part in either of these, I do not want to go off of just what others say or what I have watched.

Possible winnings from PvP raffle series

In the end, in its current state I would say that it is worth checking out, but not to go in with high expectations. For me, the biggest highlight of the game was some of the others I met through the Discord, not so much the game itself. If it works for you, I wish you the best, if not, I would not lose sleep over it!