Sodapoppin was one of the most-watched influencers on Twitch immediately following the release of WoW Classic at the end of August. But due largely to the way that stream sniping perverted his experience with the game, Sodapoppin decided that he needed to take a break from streaming.
This morning, however, the popular variety streamer posted a tweet suggesting that he may be back to streaming sooner than he originally anticipated.
“I’m craving streaming again,” Sodapoppin said. “Might be back sooner than expected.”
Right before December, Soda said that he was going to take a break from streaming to rank up in Classic’s PvP system. To rank up to the game’s highest ranking, 14, top players are expecting to grind PvP content almost endlessly through February.
“Listen I am not rly streaming for a while because I’m trying to grind rank 14,” he said. “I can do it but streaming it is rly boring and only makes it more difficult, and classic wow people hate streaming so I just don’t want to go live doing it. Maybe BGs, but that’s where I am atm.”
Two weeks ago, the PvP grind for streamers began in earnest with the release of battlegrounds. Some influencers, like Soda, weren’t happy with the most effective way of gaining honor. Despite not streaming, Soda was vocal about how much he preferred Classic’s capture the flag instance, Warsong Gulch, to its other battleground, Alterac Valley.
He expressed displeasure with the amount of honor that Alterac Valley gives because it forces players to feel required to play that instance and never play anything else, making the game feel boring.
Soda hasn’t openly said that he plans to stop his efforts to reach Classic’s top ranking. But one of his guildmates who’s also grinding to the game’s top rank, “Guzu,” said on stream earlier this week that Soda actually de-ranked this past week because he was bored of Alterac Valley and played capture the flag instead because it was what he enjoyed.
After Classic led to an explosion in viewership for Soda’s channel, he stopped streaming for a while in mid-September following numerous complaints that stream sniping players prevented him from having an authentic “Classic experience.”
Since then, he’s seldom streamed. Over the course of about three months, Soda has only streamed 206 hours, or about 69 hours per month. The first nine and a half months of the year, he streamed for 1,320 hours, averaging just less than 140 hours of airtime a month.
