COMMUNITY NEWS

INTRODUCING TRW 2.0

It’s been a while since we last posted to our blog, but we’re back and we have some big announcements to make on the future of TRW Streaming and new ways to interact and grow within our community!

TRW BRAND UPDATE

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, TRW underwent a bit of a rebrand at the end of 2019. We wanted to create a more modern brand around TRW that helped us to showcase our plans for an inclusive streaming community.

We decided to be as subtle as a brick through a window by incorporating a purple to blue gradient across our banner and logo, as well as employing a new campaign hashtag of #StreamTogether.

We know there’s a lot of ‘interesting’ conversation taking place between members of different streaming platforms right now, but we stick by our aim to make an inclusive platform where all streamers can feel welcome and supported.

This rebrand and our renewed focus on inclusivity between platforms also lead us to look at how we’re running our community internally. Our Discord server has been the focal point of our community since it’s creation in early 2018, and in that time we’ve added countless channels, rebuilt the server countless times and set up more user roles than we know what to do with.

As any of you who manage a Discord community will know, it’s very easy to lose track of what’s important, useful and, most importantly, necessary within your server. This can make a server very confusing and overwhelming for new members, especially if they’re not familiar with how Discord works, which leads us on to the focus of our announcement…

We’re Moving Home!

As we’ve mentioned, the TRW Streaming Discord server has become a bit of a difficult monster to tackle. It’s a little messy, some roles are messed up and we can’t quite figure out what’s overwriting what, and it’s all a little bit overwhelming for inviting new people into the community. That’s lead to the server going a little cold, with very little interaction from our members any more.

This loss of communication within the community is 100% our doing. We tried to create a server that contained everything all at once and ended up making a bit of a hash of it, so now we get new members joining and not knowing what to post where, we have to manually assign roles to make sure that each user can do what they need to… it’s all just a bit of a mess.

In light of this, we’ve spent the past 2–3 months (thanks self-isolation!) rebuilding our Discord server from the ground up. Not only that, but we’ve rebuild our server management and announcement bot, created new, easier ways for people to register and manage their channels, and added a whole lot more functionality (we’ll talk about all that below).

It’s not an easy decision to launch a new server, we’ve put a lot of time, effort, energy and money into building the community we have, and we understand that it will be more than a little disruptive asking everyone to move over to a new server with us, but we hope that by showing you what you can expect in the new TRW Discord server we can assuage any issues with hopping into our new server.

Shiny New Features for Everyone!

We’ve spent the past few months redeveloping our Discord bot for our community and we’ve built in a bunch of new features that are designed to help both our community and us to manage things more efficiently within the new server. Here’s a list of all the new stuff and updates we’ve made:

TWITCH SUPPORT

Previously, only Mixer streamers had automated announcements in the server when they went live, but we’ve been working on a brand new Twitch integration that brings Twitch Live Announcements to the server and to our Twitter account!

This was a top priority for us going into this development. In recent months we’ve seen more and more Twitch streamers join our community and we haven’t been able to provide them with the same level of support that we’ve given our Mixer streamers, but that all changes with our new server!

Now, TRW Twitch streamers can expect:

• A Channel Embed in the server when you register your Twitch Channel
• Live Stream Embeds when you go live on Twitch
• Live Twitter Posts when you go live on Twitch
• Twitch AutoHosts from the TRWStreaming Twitch Channel [COMING SOON]
• Feature Posts on Twitter when you get hosted by us on Twitch [COMING SOON]

MIXER SUPPORT

We’ve always provided support for Mixer streamers in TRW, but up until now our live announcements have proven to be a little messy at times, especially with some streamers having issues with services and having to restart their streams a few times when they go live.

This update improves the way we monitor and announce Mixer streams in our server. We now have a dedicated channel for Live Mixer channels that only shows any active streams, making it easier for people to find out who’s streaming right now.

TRW Mixer streamers can expect:

• A Channel Embed in the server when you register your Mixer Channel
• Live Stream Embeds when you go live on Mixer
• Live Twitter Posts when you go live on Mixer
• Twitch AutoHosts from the TRWStreaming Mixer Channel
• Feature Posts on Twitter when you get hosted by us on Mixer

EASIER CHANNEL REGISTRATION

Up until now, registering your channel in our server was a manual process. As members joined and added their channel links, we would manually add those channels to our system for announcements and shoutouts, then assign the relevant user roles. This lead to a lot of streamers not being assigned their roles quickly enough and some channels being missed in our announcement system.

Channel registration for both Mixer and Twitch now couldn’t be simpler. Once you’ve joined the server, you’ll find the #register-your-channel section in the STREAMS category. Simply copy and past your Mixer or Twitch channel link in there and your channel will be linked to your Discord user.

Our new bot will also handle creating a channel embed in our #channels section for you, assigning your streamer roles and adding your channel to our announcement system.

Note: You can add one channel from each supported streaming platform to your account. Attempting to add another channel from the same platform will remove your previously added channel.

TRW LFG

Our previous server had a single LFG channel that went woefully neglected (mostly down to it being buried under a pile of other channels). The new TRW 2.0 Server has a dedicated LFG section, broken down into #lfg-on-stream, #lfg-competitive and #lfg-chill, so now it’s even easier for you to find a group of people to play with for a specific purpose.

Stuff We’re Still Working On…

Running and maintaining TRW is an ongoing job. We’re constantly looking for new ways we can help our community to grow and engage with their audiences, as well as improving the way we communicate with you and give back to the community.

Here’s some of the features we’re working on implementing in the future:

STREAMER SPOTLIGHT

Streamer Spotlight is a new feature we’re currently developing. Each week, a streamer from our community will be featured in the TRW Streaming Discord server and will have a pinned tweet on the TRW Streaming Twitter page with a link to your channel. We’re currently working on the best and fairest way to implement this to avoid duplicate features so everyone gets a fair opportunity to be featured.

TRW SQUADS

TRW SQUADS builds on a feature that we began discussing internally earlier this year. The concept behind this feature is to let TRW Members create a SQUAD in our Discord server, which other users can join. Each month, SQUADS will compete to be the most active within the community to top the SQUAD Leaderboard. The winning SQUAD each month will win a reward (which we’re still working on) and will be shouted out on the TRW Twitter page.

Roadmap to TRW 2.0

We’re on the verge of being ready to launch TRW 2.0 and we’ll be opening the new server to limited beta testing over the coming week. Our plan is to move our server link over to the new server early in June, with an aim to close the old TRW Discord server on 30th June 2020.

Effective from today, our Twitter announcements for live streams will be suspended for streamers in the current TRW Discord server, and will be enabled for our beta testers in our new server. From next week, auto-host on Mixer will be limited to beta testers in the new server

We appreciate that this change over will be disruptive for a lot of our members, but we hope that the new features we’re launching will make the switch over worth while for you all.

Moving forward, we’re going to try and put more time into creating more tutorial and information based content here on the TRW Streaming blog. We’ll be actively recruiting anyone in the TRW community who would like to create tutorials or information pieces regarding streaming and we’re also working on a series of Streamer Interviews that we’ll be launching in the coming months.

We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s supported TRW Streaming over the past 2 years, without all of you we wouldn’t have a community, and we very much look forward to continuing to build and grow our community with you all in our new home on Discord.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on Discord or Twitter.

—
The TRW Management Team