Members' corner: Teach us about something that's close to your heart

Something I hate is how YouTube gurus take advantage of ambitious creators and sell them on stuff that makes little to no difference. For the longest time, I wanted to do something about it, start offering advice on YouTube, something I've been studying and mastering for 10 years now, that escapes away from the survivor bias many other forms of advice come down to. Here's some notes about the art of finding help as a creator:

While some may not want to hear this, however, finding practical support that actually applies to your situation is surprisingly very difficult, even if the reason seems obvious. While there are many willing people out there who wish to be helpful, the issue is no one knows the exact situation your channel is in, apart from you. No one else knows what you tried so far, what you haven’t tried, what worked, what hasn’t.

To give an example of the power these individuals have, during my visit to LTX in Canada, I asked some of my fellow creators at the event about their experiences with these growth experts. One, went into great detail about the predatory tactics they invoke, such as organising conferences focused solely on promoting their services under the guise of being an all-encompassing event to help fellows in the industry grow, where all assistants at the event at any time could whip out a POS terminal and sell you a service worth thousands of dollars! If you don’t want to pay up, however, they immediately switch over into trying to instil in you a fear of missing out. That is on top of all the other tricks I have already mentioned that were also in full-swing. However, when I asked if this tech influencer wanted to say a few words for a video I was working on at the time about these scams, he simply replied with: “Everything said at this table will stay at this table”. This should show you the mafia-like influence such individuals possess now, where creators are even scared of speaking out and exposing their ways, for fear of being targeted themselves.

When looking for specifical advice or general help about what to do, where to improve, or what your next steps should be, finding out how to online might be difficult. As previously mentioned, discussing your questions or woes with complete strangers online who may not grasp the full picture of your situation and resources can be rather futile.

I believe this is best summed up by this comment, left by a user under a video made about me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else explain the phenomenon so well:

“The thing is, usually you ask people for advice when you've exhausted your options. When you do ask for advice, there is a high chance that you'll get advice you've already tried. if the person giving advice fails to find a solution to the problem, they get frustrated. When that happens, they either disengage and avoid you or attack your character. The more often that happens to you with different people, the less patience you have for insults or attacks.”

I've spent years now studying how these guys do their business and prey on creators, and I'm constantly looking for new ways to prevent that, however unrealistic it might be.

If you do want to ask for help online, make sure to do it in the right hours to maximise the likelihood of getting something good, most likely early evening hours in the US. Ensure you keep on pushing for more detail or explanation to anything people say back as a response. In general, you don't want them to just focus on small details that are easy to fix, when you can gain something a lot more important from them. When going in, make sure there's nothing obviously wrong in your most recent content they can latch onto, instead of giving more fruitful advice. When they ask you if you done something, answer yes as often as possible, so they're more keen to move and provide something more useful. And finally also make your channel an interesting case for them to study. Make the challenge of finding that missing link rewarding for them as well, or give a very specific puzzle to crack that will help your channel grow.

Two of my things that have always been close to my heart are gaming and helping people. Gaming has always been a huge part of my life ever since I was young and it has made a huge difference to me and I have always had the belief of even the smallest gesture can make a huge difference to someone and that you should take every opportunity to make that positive difference for someone as you never know when they could need it , This is why I donate every month to the Special Effect Gamers charity, it is charity that helps hundreds of people every year who are physically disabled who are not able to use conventional gaming equipment and make specially adapted equipment for each individuals needs and provide it freely to allow them to be able to have the joy that is gaming and have experiences that will have a positive impact on them and make them feel included.

https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/

This was a hard one, I didn't know whether I wanted to actually go into my past to explain this but then I thought, it is what it is.

So the thing most close to my heart, is collectables, being able to collect anything from pop figures to actual figurines, being able to buy books. This is a special thing for me. Whilst it may seem mundane to most, there is a story behind it.

From the age of 2, I was placed in the care system, I have moved around constantly until I was 13, when I was adopted, the entire time, I was in the care system being moved from a temporary foster home to the next and then dumped in children's homes whilst they looked for new foster parents, my entire belongings was a black bag of clothes and 4 toy cars. It's all I had, buying foster children toys was never high on the list for these people.

When I was adopted, I finally had a set of parents who actually wanted me to have things, I remember my mum when she met me and then I moved in, carrying my one bag of clothing and my cars clutched tightly in my hand, burst into tears at what little I had. She essentially then went on to get me as many toys as she could, my first ever PC and games, my first ever stereo and so on, she also brought me the first Harry Potter book to see if she could get me into reading (which she did, I devoured that book, slowly, and was hooked).

Since then, even at the age of 38, I think there is probably a psychological reason for it, but I can't stop buying collectables, books, whatever I can get my hands on, key chains, and when I got to conventions I grab everything I can to collect. So yeah, that is something that is super special to me because I would say the bottom line is, what I didn't have, I am I suppose making up for.

Sorry if this is too real, but, I feel I can be myself here, anyway, images below of some of the stuff I have now (at my old house setup)

My parents told me that from the earliest days of my life, I was always disassembling something, and my favorite toy was a screwdriver. But it's not just a love for DIY projects; it's actually much broader.

I have always had a fascination with understanding how things work. Most of my hobbies or jobs are related to system building or design - be it custom PC building, game design, creating a gamer social platform, web3 services, or 3D printing. My life is an endless process of learning and understanding how things work, which often includes a teardown stage, hehe. After disassembling, I rebuild something new with the ultimate goal of achieving new emergent properties. This process of deconstruction and reconstruction fuels my creativity and satisfies my curiosity, constantly pushing me to explore and innovate in various fields. It's a journey of perpetual discovery and creation, and it's what keeps me passionate and engaged every day.

While most of my interests are related to IT, there are some hobbies where I find solace in working with my hands. One of these is bike mechanics. It started quite simply: as a bicycle enthusiast, I needed to perform regular maintenance. Professional servicing can be quite expensive, especially when you have three bikes of your own plus family members' bikes to maintain. I began learning from my bike mechanic, watching videos, and soon started servicing my bikes on my own.

As my skills grew, I joined a local bike club and began purchasing separate parts to upgrade my bikes. The next step was building completely new custom bikes, starting from a bare frame and assembling a ready-to-ride product. My servicing skills advanced significantly, and my workshop grew, filled with niche tools for forks, shocks, bearings, and more. Over the past ten years, I have built about 23 custom bikes from scratch for myself and friends.

Now, I can fix, tune, assemble, or service any part of a bicycle, including complex full-suspension bikes. Despite my advanced skills, I still consider bike mechanics a hobby rather than a full-time job, mainly because it consumes more resources than it brings in. However, I am confident that if I ever get tired of IT, I could open a bike workshop and earn a living doing something I love. This hands-on hobby provides a balance to my tech-focused life and offers a rewarding sense of accomplishment that comes from building and fixing things with my hands.

The long forgotten cross-class system of Final Fantasy XIV

Did you think you will escape my Final Fantasy lecture? :D

There are so many things I could tell you about in this game, took me a while to decide which topic to go for, but I think this one might be helpful for those, who are new to the game and are wondering why for certain jobs there is a base class as well, while others don't have this?

You will start the game as one of the base classes:

• Tanks: Marauder, Gladiator

• Melee dps: Lancer, Rouge, Pugilist

• Physical ranged dps: Archer

• Caster dps: Arcanist, Thaumaturge

• Healer: Conjurer

These were already present in A Realm Reborn (ARR), and once you get to lvl30, you will get a quest to change into a job, which builds on these base classes and brings in new story and new skills for them. Now if you are not familiar with how the game looked like 10 years ago, you will rightfully ask but why can't you start as Reaper which is one of the newest jobs? Or why does Sage, the newest healer on the block not have a base class, but if you want to be a White Mage, you will have to start as Conjurer and work your way up?

This is because the game 10 years ago was very, very different. Every job which was present in the game at the time had a starting class, and on lvl30 you didn't just get to switch to a job. For example in order to become Black Mage from Thaumaturge, you had to level up Archer to lvl30, do a quest, and then you could become Black Mage. Arcanist to this day is a very special class, the only one which can select from two jobs on lvl30, and if you level one, you will level the other as well. Back in the days as an Arcanist if you took up Thaumaturge you could become a Summoner (caster), and if you took up Conjurer, you could become a Scholar (healer).

Now don't even get me started on the complexity of Arcanist back then, because we would be sitting here for days.

Getting these other classes level up was not purely for getting that job quest done. You could also take skills from these other classes. Some of these skills don't exist anymore as they don't fit into the current game structure, the remnants of them you will find under 'Role Actions'. So tanks, look at all those defensive skills you have there! They used to be unique to the different tank jobs, and in order to get them all, you had to level up the other tanks as well. The skill which recharges mana for the casters and healers? Only White Mage had it. Same for Resurrection. If you were a Paladin (tank), and you levelled up White Mage, you could use Resurrection as a cross-class skill. Yes, you heard me right, tank which could raise a KOd party member.

As a Scholar you could get powerful damage-over-time (DoT) skills from Summoner, Black Mage and White Mage, making you into a true green-dps (a healer who focuses on dealing damage instead of healing)

These were really fun times, and of course there were some very strong builds and skills you had to get if you wanted to engage in high-end content and be useful, they also gave an option for a very unique gameplay as two characters on the same job didn't necessarily had the same skillset.

When the next expansion, Heavensward (HW) came out, there were two new jobs introduced, Dark Knight (tank) and Astrologian (healer). The max level in the game during ARR was lvl50 and in HW it got increased to lvl60. The new jobs started on lvl30 which would be the level in ARR you used to get your quest to change from your base class to a job, so these would have fit in with this system very well.... but I don't quite know why, they didn't get a base class assigned to them. I think it would have fit in well to add these to an existing base class and make all base classes lead into multiple jobs, the same way as Arcanist is. Probably this is a question I would ask the developers if I had a chance, because I believe this was a huge missed opportunity.

And this pretty much meant the slow decline and eventual death of the cross-class system. Skills which you could learn from other jobs slowly got removed or converted into the Role Actions, making everything more streamlined which is probably good for a modern game, but it took away a lot of uniqueness we once had. Now basically every tank has the same type of core skills, just they are called differently and have different effects. While they have some difference between them, in reality if you can play one tank, you can play all.

In the later expansions when they added new jobs they started 20 lvls below the new maximum level and now we are so far from the base classes that they feel useless and out of ordinary, not really having a purpose anymore. Probably they are only keeping them for the class quest stories and don't really know about a good way to get rid of them, but I imagine for new players their existence is very confusing.

So if you hear veteran players complaining that the game is easy or boring, while you might not agree with them, I hope this little history lesson will help you understand why they think so. I do love the current game, I think it changed in a good direction and kept up with demands of current games very well, but I do miss the old times too. One of the reasons why I love the lvl70 and lvl80 edgame content areas where you get to use some extra abilities alongside your own skills, is because some of them are straight from the old ARR era, and bring back good memories of the game from when I started to play. I hope we will get another area like these in Dawntrail so us "boomers" will have our playground with some old-time favourite abilities. (I can't possibly tell you how frustrating it is when I see a boss cast a spell which I used to have on my Summoner, but not anymore.... XD)

Well I hope you have enjoyed today's Final Fantasy history lesson, and let me know if you want to hear more!