Path to Partner

Hello everyone. My name is Zheal and I got partnered by Twitch recently. Since this is the biggest milestone on Twitch you can achieve and it took me quiet a while to achieve it I thought it would be interesting to write down my path up to where I am now.

- Pre-Stream:
I was a MMORPG player through and through. I started with Ragnarok Online and played World of Warcraft a long time. I played many more and a lot of games in general. When Let's Plays started to become popular I wanted to record my own playthroughs and present myself and the way I play games to the public. The youtube channel had german Let's Plays of mostly RPGs with no success. It was still a lot of fun and success was secondary anyway for me. I met some nice people but the whole community seemed very exposure oriented which is not surprising but moving through Let's Play board felt more like a big advertisement center where everyone tries to add subtle hints on their content in every message and spammed the actual advertisement sections. I stopped doing it after a while. I did it for about 6 months but I also burned myself out on it. I released 1-2 20min videos per day to keep up with the recordings.

- A new hobby:
Before I started to stream I was part of a small group of friends that played games together. It was a rather rough group with quiet some drama and fights here and there. I knew these guys for a very long time though so it was almost like a second family. At some point, late 2016 I started to feel confined. I played a lot of games that I didn't even want to just because we all did it. I wanted to find a new hobby in the gaming world and left the group for good, I also haven't had any contact anymore to any of them since them. I miss it sometimes and I hope they're alright. I remembered that we watched some AGDQ together sporadically. I was not the biggest speedrun fan but it was still fascinating to watch people being so good at games, the fascination of perfection so to say. Since I was looking for a new hobby I decided to give it a try to see if I like it.

- First speedrun:
The first thing you have to think about when you want to get into speedrunning is to choose a game. I was always a fan of the SNES and PS1 so I wanted a retro game. I wanted to run my favourite SNES game, Terranigma. The run was almost 4 hours long though and I felt that's a huge amount of time for a speedrun and especially for something I don't even know if I'd like it. I decided to run Super Mario World as my first speedrun, 11 exits. It is only over 10min long and just a sidescroller, simple to get into. I started to learn the speedrun and it went pretty well. I read the information on the leaderboards first, downloaded the right emulator for it and started watching other speedrunners on twitch. The one I liked to watch the most and the first speedrunner I was watching actively was MetaSigma, a Secret of Evermore runner. I was of coursr also watching SMW runners and tried to get in touch. It was hard to get into that community for me though since I did not use discord at that time and generally had no idea about how to get around in the speedrunning community. I focused on myself and through december 2016 I ran SMW 11 Exits and streamed it on twitch. It was a fast and easy way to record and upload my runs in one got. I had no webcam, did not speak, not even had chat open, just playing and recording the game and splits. Eventually sometime after christmas I got a 10:04 which I was pretty happy about.

- The speedrunning community:
While I was running SMW I also read more about the speedrun community and tried to make my first connections. I watched more runners and talked in their chats. I found all the different speedrunners, their games and all the categories so fascinating that there was more than enough stuff to talk about. I talked with a SMW runner called Volpey on Twitch and he answered me some questions, that was my first personal contact to another speedrunner, still not a very personal one. It was really hard to make contact with other SMW runners, they seemed all like lone wolves that are not interested in making contact with other runners. Looking back now it would have been probably easier to get some talk going if I'd have known about discord. Through metasigmas chat I met my first real contact in the speedrun commuinity though, Crawek. A french speedrunner that ran some SNES games on a high level and also evermore, like meta. He was a super nice guy, asnwered me a lot of questions and we had some good talks. Crawek was a respected guy among SNES RPG runners and being able to talk with him in different chats got my name a bit around too, at least some people started to notice that there was a guy named Zheal that is new to speedrunning. Crawek also ran Terranigma and since I started to like speedrunning a lot Terranigma became my ultimate goal, to run that game. 4 hours still seemed very much. Crawek got me into running Secret of Evermore which became my first big speedgame.

- Starting to stream:
Since I had so INSANELY much experience from my Let's Plays and it's a bit boring to just sit there and run the same stuff over and over without interactions I decided to setup that stuff from my LPs back then, Webcam and Mic and also interact with chat when speedrunning. Since I made some friends in the community I also had some viewers like crawek who was always interested in the progress of other runners. I also got close to metasigma and other evermore runners. Streaming was a lot of fun. I was still very nervous at the start but I mostly focused heavily on my speedruns and didn't pay too much attention to streaming stuff. My goals at that point was purely speedrun oriented and the plan was to slowly get used to longer speedruns to eventually run Terranigma.

- 2017:
In january I started running Secret of Evermore, a great speedrun, very simple and easy to get into but with a lot of potential for precise movement and some neat glitches and tricks. A good amount of RNG too that added some spice to the run. In February I learned and ran Illusion of Gaia. A run with more subtle but more punishing RNG, a lot harder execution and also a considerably longer speedrun with over 2 hours for 100%, which was considered the main category back then. End of February I finally made my dream come true and learned Terranigma. Looking at it objectively it's not even a that great speedrun, movement is simple, it has no complicated glitchles or tricks and fighting, at least in the speedrun, was very simple as well. You were mostly overleveled and one shot everything through the majority of the run but all that didn't matter. It was great speedrunning it, it was a completely new way to play this game and I enjoyed it a lot. This was also the first game I got a World Record in and that was great. Later it became a bit more interesting when it became more important to get a good birds fight and Dark Gaia manip was found. It was also a great game to grind since it had a relaxing start and then that breaking point 1 hour in. I still did not have enough, I enjoyed speedrunning so much, I wanted to learn more categories and gaming genres. The next game I looked into in March was Zelda 3: A Link to the Past. I spent a lot of time learning and practicing the run but only ran it for one month. I can't say why it didn't hook me for longer but I was a big jumper at that time, it was just too fascinating to learn new speedruns, meet more runners and get into more communities. I even felt fit enough for a really long speedrun and I went for a childhood favourite, Breath of Fire 3. I met the wonderful community, especially Neoslash and soma. I watched other runners a lot, especially the community around the "Moon Bros", elmagus, jenja23, bowiethehero, feralpigman, vultus, happysquid89, sakegeist and mooniz, a community of which some I'd proudly call friends now. Through Illusion of Gaia and crawek I also met le_hulk who is a small legend among SNES runners. In Terranigma I even met a new "second family" for a while, people I was in voice a lot and spent a lot of time with when not running myself. One of my early highlights in the speedrun community was after I got the World Record in Breath of Fire 3. elmagus, a very invested central figure in the retro RPG speedrun community modded me in his channel. It was technically nothing big but for someone so new to the community who tries hard to get involved and recognized it meant a lot to me, I never told him that I think so if you should read this, magus, thank you, I am not sure if I would be where I am now without these kind of things. Later in 2017 I had even more contact to magus since I learned Lufia 2, another childhood RPG I loved and he was THE guy for that run.

-2018:
2018 was a very mixed year. The early excitement flattened and routine set in. Since I started to take speedrunning very seriously I wanted to invest into original hardware so I can play my games how they're supposed to be played. I bought an american SNES and some games, terranigma, illusion of gaia, secret of evermore and a SD2SNES. The last one is a cardridge with sd card with which you can play almost every SNES game and rather expensive. It was a very generous donation from one of my very early and to this day loyal viewers and friends, Jhesper, it is an invaluable tool for a speedrunner. There was still another problem I had, input delay. I was playing on an original SNES but still on my capture on my PC so I had a lot of input delay. The CRT I got eventually is the same I still use to this day and it was probably the most lucky pick I could do, it's an amazing monitor in size, functionality and quality, I use it literally every day and it's great. I remember when I got my CRT and the whole setup finished I was deep into Lufia 2 speedrunning and suddenly playing the game felt as if the character can read my mind and moves even before I press. It was a great feeling. 2018 was a lot of SNES speedrun grinds. I got into Secret of Mana and invested a lot of time into that in the first half. At the start of summer I started to learn Final Fantasy VII. It was probably the toughest speedrun to get into for me so far. It was the most comprehensive game I ran to that point with a lot of potential for optimizations, movement, battle strategies. Comparing it to BoF3 was comparing rocket science to math 101, a completely different level. It was also a pretty optimized speedrun. I put a lot of time learning the game with an outdated guide with searching for bits and pieces in top PBs and talking with the runners. Soon after I finished my first few runs a new huge skip was found, guard skip. It was a blessing. Not only got this a lot people interested in the game, it stired everything up so much that the game became massively more optimized than it was before, a lot of people invested a lot of time into routing and optimizing money, fights and other aspects and so did I. I tried my best to work together with people like Luzbelheim, Meesbaker and Brutalspeed who are known to be the top guys in FF7. It was hard to stay head to head with them since I was still new but I did my best to help and see the run grow. It was not all fun and happyness in 2018 though. You remember that new "second family" from 2017? Things went downwards dramatically with them and we had some issues with each other. I tried to stick to them for too long anyway and eventually got kicked out of the community(again) which then let me realize that those are not the kind of people I want to spend my time with anyway and had to move on. This this day I still fight with the remnants of this time.

-2019
This was a very exciting year. It was a year full of grinds of old games. I got back into Illusion of Gaia and learned Breath of Fire IV because I got accepted for RPG Limit Break which would become my first on-site speedrun event. I would run IoG as a race against bowiethehero(which he won btw) and BoF4 on co-op style with also bowie and elmagus. This was the greatest time and extremely interesting for me so far in my speedrunning career. The whole event would deserve its own pastebin but it was not only fun performing with friends and mess around with like-minded nerds, I also met a lot of new cool people. 2019 also was the start of my actual streaming career, it was the year when I decided to put more time and work into streaming and try to grow my channel a bit more. Until that point I was streaming on and off, sometimes a couple times a week, sometimes not at all, my schedule and live-time was also very inconsistent, I wanted to change that, bring some consistency into it and have it structured. I also chose my next speedgames not only about what would be fun to run from my childhood but also what people would be interested in watching. I started to learn and run Chrono Trigger. Streaming wise it was not a big success but the run was technically pretty similiar to Lufia 2 and a lot of fun to run. To this day I consider my Chrono Trigger PB one of the best runs I've done and I want to get back to that game eventually to improve. The other plan after CT was Ocarina of Time. That one is one of the most popular speedruns, very technical, highly optimized and contended. Another thing would stir everything up though and rip my plans apart. I was diagnosed with colon cancer in an already later state in early 2019, RPG Limit Break was right before my therapie for that started and I even delayed it for the event. The therapie was a mix between chemo and radio and had heavy impact on my body. I could often not stream, would be in the hospital a lot generally left me often without motivation to work on speedruns. I tried to learn OoT MST as good as I could and even when it was a lot of fun I was physically and mentally not able to really get into it. When I went to the hospital in september for the 2 operations I even took a notebook and all necessary tools with me to learn some more OoT but I barely touched it, I had neither the time nor the energy. Even though I was in an already later stage of the cancer the tumor responded very well to the therapies and they could remove it, together with a good chunk of my colon. I was cancer free but left incontinent due to the heavy in colon muscle structure. It will recover eventually but takes years. After I came home, in october, I slowly recovered. Eventually I got back into streaming and speedrunning But due to the circumstances I could not run longer games since I had to be ready to go to the toilet quiet often. I decided to run FF7 any% on PC and Lufia 2 Ancient Cave since the runs a very very short in comparison to my usual ones. This would be the rest of the year.

-2020
Finally where we are now. In early 2020 in felt strong enough to tackle competitive speedrunning again and went for a Secret of Mana grind to get back into shape. I got a 1:40:09 eventually which I hopefully can improve to a sub 1:40 eventually but it felt amazing to do some optimized speedrunning again and grind actively for a good time. I wanted to get back into striving for my speedrunning goals and growing my channel but got soon distracted by the Trials of Mana release. I decided to deal with that game for a while and run it. It was a great game and a fun run with also a lot of potential for optimizations but as for most PC speedruns my PC killed a lot of the fun about the run since the game ran considerably slower for me which eliminates the competitive aspect of running. I still had fun for a while. Mid 2020 I decided to go for the biggest grind so far for me, a sub 7:10 in FF7 any% No Slots. That was a goal of me and I felt it is time, people might also be interested in seeing that and I was right. The grind got even more positive response than I thought it would. I had a lot of fun grinding for it, optimizing and practicing the run and have a wonderful growing community around me that supported it. Eventually we got it and soon after another big skip was found which keeps me running the game until now since it made an even greater goal possible, sub 7 hours. The whole FF7 grind not only enabled me to apply for partner, it catapulted me far beyond the minimum requirements. It would take over 3 months to get a positive response about my partner application and also only after seeking contact to a very nice community manager.

-The Path to Partner:
Growing a Twitch channel was no easy task for me. It took a long time to get even used to streaming and even longer to build a community, to find people that are interested in me and my content. I also had no community from another platform I could advertise my twitch on like youtube, I was all by myself. For the longest time I also just did what I wanted, what viewers wanted was secondary but slowly the channel grew at least a little bit and eventually I felt obligated to give something back to these people that watch and support me. That's when I started to look into content that is not only fun for me but also fun for the people and soon I was into the thought of growing the channel actively and started to stream more consistently. I am still not good at advertising myself since I self-reject a lot but I am getting more confident in my content and my ability to provide entertainment thanks to you guys. There might be better way than speedruns to grow a twitch stream and there might be better methods how to conduct a stream than what I do but I am happy where I am right now. I will continue to try to grow my channel and present interesting content in the future. I am excited to see what the next steps are.

- Afterword:
Of course there are so many more people and situations that were involved into the whole process and I want to thank every single one of them. Considering this tries to explain 3 years this is just quick summary so even when I didn't mention certain things or people it doesn't mean I forgot about them or what they have done for me. Thank you everyone so much. Let's look into a bright future together.


-TLDR:
 - Was gaming nerd, lots of MMORPGs. learned first speedrun(SMW 11 Exits) because needed new hobby and AGDQ was cool
 - Met lots of cool people, streaming was secondary, wanted to have fun with community, meet new friends and learn cool speedruns
 - Went through lots of cool speedruns
 - Streaming became slowly more important and I started to think about growing the channel in 2019
 - Colon Cancer in 2019 and surgeries which canceled all plans
 - Recovered from it mostly and went back into streaming
 - Started a big FF7 grind that got positive response from a lot of people
 - Applied for partner in june 2020 and got accepted oct. 1st after contacting a community manager