Poll 40 Results, Poll 41 and This Week (Patreon)

Arty/CAS won Poll 40, so it's time to blow something up again! Also time to zoom in a bit on the old quality control for the shorts- the last couple have had some silly errors (like... the title, which may or may actually be necessary).

That does somewhat get to exactly what the deal with the shorts is... the initial idea was to create a kind of reference library for people to quickly look up, say, whether their Sherman could penetrate a Panther.

Sounds useful, but that's really not how Youtube Shorts work. While you can hop into someone's channel and try and hunt shorts down, 99% of the time it's going to pop up in viewer's feeds at the caprice of the algorithm. That was, admittedly, pretty funny early on when Youtube couldn't distinguish between Combat Mission content and War Thunder content, resulting in a comical uptick in views, but I reckon it's figured it out now.

The kind of gaming shorts content YT is really after is a slice of exciting or impressive gameplay that catches people's attention for a few seconds. So... not really the kind of (comparatively) slow quasi-experiments I've been doing.

You would think that it would be easy to generate more shorts content by using extracts from the long-form videos, but I'm almost always trying to use shots where the focus is roundabout the 1/3rd and 2/3rd lines like this:

... and those lines correspond pretty well to the limits of the shorts format, leaving things out of place.

In other words, I'd have to go back and reshoot to get shorts that work. Of course, that's doable, (assuming I can remember which turn the thing I want to show off was in) but it loses all the context that makes it actually interesting. I can make shorts of TOWs blapping tanks all day long, but without knowing that those tanks are suddenly bearing down on some vulnerable AAVs there's no stakes and no tension... it's just a T72 getting deleted. Of course I can edit in more stuff to illustrate that context, but then we're getting into 'long' short content again.

This is a very long-winded and rambly way of saying I'm not really happy with shorts from a CM perspective but I don't think there's a good solution. I definitely don't think its worth getting rid of shorts because I think the engagement with the polls is pretty good and I want you guys to have some input... but what was supposed to be a quick source of extra content has developed into a bit of a slog (not helped by the editing software's sadistic predeliction to crash at the most awkward moments, making the average short take anything up to an hour to make, which is semi-ridiculous for a sub-minute video).

But anyway, I digress. Sometimes 80% of these updates is me trying to organise my thoughts for the upcoming week!

Speaking of, I've made a start to the 18th War Room episode and gotten in about 1000 words of background on the Wars of the Roses. Tough keeping it simple, but I think it's getting the general points across. Now on to setting the scene for Ferrybridge, with the unfortunate Sir Fitzwalter bedding down for the night having seized the titular bridge, unaware that Lord John "Butcher" Clifford is about to descend on him before dawn. Fun times.

That leaves this week's poll and we're back round to moderns with the absence of Infantry Firepower, who won last time.