Skill4ltu, Me & Twitch Moderating

“Good day fellas” – This is a brief history of my journey watching skill4ltu, my times being a moderator and beyond.

My Twitch: RamesesNiblick3rd (It comes from the TV show Red Dwarf).
Following since 2016 – Second subscriber – Ex moderator

I want to make a disclaimer that all of the information is based on memory and my personal views so any dates or other information may not be factually correct. Non streamers usernames have also been replaced with aliases as a precaution they may not want to be mentioned.

The Start – 2016

The journey for me started some time around mid 2016. I was somewhat new to Twitch and was occasionally watching Orzanel playing World of Tanks while also playing myself. On one random day I heard him ask something along the lines of “Hey skill how is your stream going?”. Curiously I checked the name, visited his profile and saw indeed “skill4ltu” was another streamer but not online. Again curiosity got the better of me so I went to check the VODs. I was thinking hold on a minute the name sounds familiar, i’m sure i’ve seen this name in my battles many times at 2am and he was always making crazy plays and getting great results. Low and behold, I open the past broadcast and see this crazy guy sitting in a full wooden room in the dark, sat on a wooden chair, talking to the enemy like a mad man. I instantly followed.

Around this time the viewer count from what I remember would hover between 5 and 15 viewers, sometimes 20. I had never really interacted with Twitch chat before and was somewhat shy, but since it was a small and friendly community I decided to say hello. I was greeted with friendly responses and so it began, a new home.

At the time my sleeping schedule was all backwards, but the best part was so was his. I think I watched just about every minute of every stream for the first year despite him coming online at almost random times at night. Streaming from midnight to 8am, sitting in the dark, leaving the stream online while he went for 20 minutes to go buy cigarettes at the gas station. Great times. Somehow I felt like I just knew he was going to become successful, he had something different.

Becoming A Moderator

It had probably only been a few weeks in, however since I had watched so often and knew the answers people kept asking in chat I was actively helping answer them in a time he was fairly new to streaming. I believe this is when he decided to randomly make me a moderator. I was not expecting it or hoping for it but hey sure, I do have experience in another online game forum so I’ll give it a go. There wasn’t really much else to it!

The Early Years & Basic Index

Having now been part of the community for a few months with head mod “EZ” things were going well. The community was building, fun was being had, more tanks were being marked and it got to the point enough tanks were marked that I felt a simple list was not enough.

I took it upon myself to create a basic spreadsheet to catalogue each tank that had been marked by nation, tier, type and premium status. It was sufficient and worked nicely for the time and arguably was the initial seed for what is now known as the index.

Things Start Getting Serious

In perhaps 2017 some time things were getting more serious. The viewer numbers had become more than just another small drop in a large ocean and new head moderator “CB” had arrived. At this point it was more than just casual streaming to see if it works out, it became a real potential to continue with this full time indefinitely.

With more viewers came more trolls. It was probably the worst era for it. With a lot of haters coming in the chat, people stream sniping and rampant team-killing or yoloing when he was trying to mark hard tanks. With the direction from the head mod, things had to become more professional. Modding changed from being fun and helping out to a job constantly watching the chat and stopping trouble before it got out of hand, sometimes even before it started.

As much as I disagreed with the way the head mod did things sometimes, I respected that he was extremely professional and very good at what he does. However this new way was no longer for me. When I ban someone I wanted to tell them to **** off. He wanted to be polite. It makes perfect sense, this is now skills livelihood and it needs to be treated like a business. So I decided to un-mod myself and just enjoy the community without the job attached to it.

I don’t disagree that his way was better, he did a great job and things got better still. I did help moderating on and off multiple times over time but only when nobody else was online.

Things Go From Bad to Worse

As years went by the previous head mod decided to move on and in came the replacement “KY”. Things started off okay but they slowly felt like it was going down hill. He was less professional, although it was a tough act to follow. And was becoming this all encompassing guy seemingly taking control over every aspect of the stream, badly. It wasn’t a pretty sight and had me worried that what was built up over the previous years was slowly being dismantled.

For whatever reason I started hearing other people having bad thoughts too from trusted sources. This is when I decided to unfollow in around 2019-2020 as it just left me feeling bad about going there, things had changed too much for the worse.

After being so active in almost every stream since nearly the beginning I was kind of surprised how suddenly not going there for nearly a year I was not once contacted. But things had changed so I just added that as another thing for the list of bad feelings and moved on. Until one day I was sent a link to a video by someone named Chems. I had never heard of this name before, and it was something about “KY” and/or skill4ltu being bad. Not knowing what I was getting involved with at the time, I decided to share my bad experiences.

He made a new video and oh boy, it stirred up a lot of shit. He took a lot of what I said out of context to make things sound worse for skill. Such as me finding the location of another streamer he mentioned based on a picture and sharing it with him. I did that out of my own curiosity to see if I could find where it was taken, skill NEVER asked me to do anything. But here was Chems falsely claiming skill was doxing her.

He even failed to redact my name in one of the images. Not that it mattered anymore because a lot of what I shared could have only been from me. Probably every moderator that saw the video could have worked out it was me who shared the information. Immediately after that video came out and my messages were shown, I just knew I was going to get a message.

I did, directly from skill asking me to talk. It had been the first time in a year at that point and I was somewhat nervous and unsure what was going to happen. But after explaining the situation we both came to agree to let it go and the entire past year had been miscommunication on both of our parts. We could have both done better.

After a lot of thinking, I realised the things I was told from trusted sources were not quite accurate. And that I was far enough gone that no matter what choice KY made, I would see it as being the wrong one. So I made contact with him and we talked it out. He wasn’t such a bad guy after all!

A New Beginning

After apologies all round, a lot of regrets from sharing that information and what a shit show it became, I finally felt able to return, with a new follow date of August 16 2021. Things had changed again, “KY” was slowly taking less control and things were getting back to normal. We had fresh new mods, a much larger community, the large trolling from 2017 had pretty much completely gone, new streamer friends and things felt great!

Although I was allowed back, it did take some time before I felt like I was no longer on the naughty step. So I largely kept in the background, helping out other mods here and there. Helping a little with the fancy new index where I could and giving ideas (Such as the /maps section). I would love to have helped out more but unfortunately although I know how to do things, I’m not very good at completing things. And anyhow by now he has a great guy working professionally anyway.

It has been 9 years now and there are so many good memories, too many to mention. So I will leave the story there and perhaps leave the favourite moments for another day.