This week's streamer interview is with RaizQT! He has been streaming Path of Exile since 2013 and has been a prominent member of the community ever since. In today's news, Bex and Raiz have a chat about his time in Path of Exile and learn a bit about his background.

Hi Raiz, thank you for taking part in the interview! Please introduce yourself.

Hey everyone,

I'm Łukasz, a 27 year streamer guy from Poland. My nickname "RaizQT" has evolved a lot through the years due to the fact I started playing PC video games since the age of 8. I went through many different nicknames since my childhood and eventually landed on XxSoulRazorxX at the age of 13 (I'm not kidding) because SoulRazor was the name of a sword in a Dragon Ball Z custom game I played in Warcraft 3. Eventually, I decided to shorten my name to something "less edgy" (haha) and landed on RaZoR because my Warcraft 3 "career" was getting a bit more serious and Esports was blowing up.

After quitting Warcraft 3 and moving to World of Warcraft my nickname was always taken. I had to come up with something new and since I was into tricking (it's a combination of different martial arts to become a Power Ranger) and one of the first moves I learned was a Touchdown Raiz, I decided that Raiz will be my new nickname. After some time I wanted to make a separate PVP character and since my nickname was already taken, by me this time, I added a QT at the end which was popular for WoW pvp characters back then. Eventually I grew to like RaizQT more than just Raiz and here we are.

Speaking of nicknames, why do people in the community call you the 'Polish Rat'?

A long time ago, when Path of Exile was still a very new game, a streamer was caught for cheating with an automated script that would close his game whenever his HP would reach a certain value to prevent his character from dying. When I found out about it, I made a remark about how his behaviour was extremely unethical to which he retorted by calling me a "Polish rat", amongst other things, in an extremely thick russian accent. The entire situation was too funny and the nickname has stuck to this day.

How long have you been streaming for? How did you get into it?

I've been consistently streaming for over 5 years now. I initially started off with World of Warcraft waaaay back in the xFire days. (If you don't know what that is, then that's probably a good thing.) However, I didn't like it too much and stopped streaming until I tried Diablo 3. After streaming Diablo for a very short time, I also quit due to loss of interest. However, when I heard Path of Exile was starting up its Open Beta, I swapped games instantly and started streaming again not long after.

What can people expect from your stream? What kind of schedule do you follow?

I do pretty much everything on my stream, competing to level 100 in HCSSFBTW, league/race start guides, speed leveling, endgame mapping, hardcore bosskills and price checks. However I think I was best described by Chris Wilson himself in one of the Build of the Week episodes as a prolific build creator. (Seriously, I reroll something new like every three days).

My schedule is very random. Sometimes I do extremely long streams at league starts. The longest I've ever streamed was 72 hours. With league starts I usually stream for many hours with only 3-4 hours of sleep in between or the usual 8-12h streams everyday. It's forever changing and extremely dependant on how deep into the league we are at the time.

That sounds very intense! What are your strategies for coping with these long hours?

I've been "blessed" with sleeping problems from an extremely young age therefore I have always needed to find ways to cope with lack of sleep so that has helped a lot. My strategies have changed a lot over the years, ranging from copious amounts of energy drinks when I was younger, to holding my breath for short periods of time but now I primarily focus on eating right and drinking enough water. I also mix in breaks for stretches, short exercise sessions and overall giving myself a moment to really breathe and gather my thoughts has also proven to be extremely fruitful!

How and when did you find out about Path of Exile?

As mentioned before, I started playing since day one of Open Beta. I had heard about Path of Exile a couple of years prior to this but I wasn't too interested due to how early it was in its development and I simply stuck with Diablo 2. However, when I saw Kripparrian play it, I realised how much the game has grown since the early stages I had seen it in. I knew I had to try it. I probably watched too much Kripparrian back then since I decided that my first build would be a Witch using Fireball and rushing to CI, while playing in Hardcore and dodging ALL life nodes. As you might imagine it went just about as well as it would go nowadays... It took me many tries to get to level 20, at which point I finally decided maybe I should try something else for my build.

What was the moment that got you hooked on the game?

Many things were spoiled for me due to Kripp's stream (Like the skill tree and some of the cooler builds back then) so it's hard to pinpoint an exact moment however the thing that really kept me going in the long run was the currency system, racing and variety of builds that I have not experienced in any other game ever before.

What are the top highlights from your time streaming Path of Exile?

Honestly, any of my top racing finishes. The recent rank #2 SSF Hardcore Incursion Level 100 finish meant a lot to me. My only ever rank #1 level 100 in a league during Harbinger was an extremely emotional moment for me because that's something I had been trying to accomplish for about four years before finally managing it. However, if we're talking H I G H L I G H T S, I can't help but mention Krame and me dying to the then newly-introduced abyssal cry exile back in the start of prophecy league.

It's been a few years now - can you finally tell us, did Mors do it first?

Mors #1 always and forever.

Is streaming your full time job?

Streaming has been my full time job almost since I started. Somehow everything fell into place and I got partnered with Twitch very early into my streaming career which was incredibly difficult back then since you needed 500+ viewers with maybe only 100 streamers in the whole world hitting those numbers consistently compared to the current requirements of 75 viewers and thousands of streamers having 500+ viewers nowadays.

After being declined for Twitch partnership two times, I was finally accepted on a "throwaway" application I sent right before going on a very short vacation, assuming there is no way they would accept it. I opened my email for the last time right before shutting down my PC as I was rushing to not be late for my train. It was one of the most surreal moments in my life. I've never been so happy but also had absolutely no time to celebrate it, otherwise I would be late for my train.

The reason why I say it was my full time job from the beginning was because I had planned to stream full time and saved up money so that I could dedicate a year to streaming as much as possible and just see how it goes. Luckily, things worked out.

What were you doing for work prior to streaming?

My work experience prior to streaming is nothing particularly exciting but it has helped me a lot in getting the confidence to get into streaming. I used to work at a couple of gas stations, stores, and I did a bunch of small home renovation jobs. During all of these, I would also part time coach in Warcraft 3, Heroes of Newerth and Dota 1 and was always looking for opportunities to make some money online and be my own boss.

Eventually I attempted to do online work full time but unfortunately I was not able to sustain myself. This was a pretty big hit for me because at around the age of 20, I felt like my dreams were shattered. I stopped working full time for about a year and really focused on developing myself. During that year I also travelled through all of Poland with my girlfriend at the time as Cat show stewards which was a pretty big passion for both of us. Every weekend we would visit a different city or country and try to get by with only 200 złoty (around 40 euro) that the show organisers would pay us for 2-3 full days of work.

Traveling and finding a place to stay with the little money we had was challenging but has taught us both a lot. Eventually, I decided it was time to grow up so as a form of motivation I signed up for the worst job I could imagine at the time - a 24 hour shift gas station attendant. 24 hours of work, 24 hours of break. I had to get up at 3am to catch a crowded train at 4am that would travel for about an hour out of the city, after which I also had to walk for a hour to make it to my 6AM shift. After my shift I had to travel back, function like a normal human being for the rest of the day then go to sleep and wake up at 3am for another shift. Needless to say, after about five months of living like this I didn't need any more motivation to work towards my goals and here we are.

What hobbies or interests do you have outside of streaming?

My hobbies are very dependant on where I am in the world at the time. When I'm in Poland, it's trampoline parks and inline skating. When I'm in Austria, it's hiking and swimming in the summer and snowboarding as much as possible in the winter. Other than that, it's all video games for me

If you could say one thing that every Path of Exile player should hear, what would it be?

Don't let other people influence how you have fun in Path of Exile. The game offers millions of ways to be played and it always makes me very sad whenever I see someone telling others that they are not playing the game the way they should be. If you are having fun, then you ARE playing the game the right way.

It doesn't matter what league, build, content you are doing or how fast you are going or how much currency you have. If you are having fun, you're doing it right. Way back in Onslaught League, all I did for six months straight was farm Fellshrine and trade. It really gave me that cow level farming feeling from my childhood and I just couldn't get enough of it. All my friends told me to do all these other things they were doing and that what I was doing was boring. Eventually they grew tired of doing the meta things and stopped playing but I'm still playing and having fun to this day.

What kind of pressure is involved in being a full time streamer? How do you manage this?

Being around so many different people can definitely take a toll on you. That's probably the only aspect I've struggled with over the years, being a person who really appreciates being by themselves. Learning to take time off and go running/snowboarding/inline skating by myself has been super useful in my experience.

Even after so many years I'm still learning how to balance my life around the amount of hours you have to put in to keep our community growing but other than that it's really been a dream job.

How has the sunderboi saga affected you?

It can be very difficult at times to be honest. People constantly approach me on the streets asking for autographs and unfortunately most of the time I have to turn them down as being humanity's only saviour is busy work. However, I am planning to open schools for aspiring sunderbois all around the world very soon.

Do you have any projects on the horizon you want to share with the community?

Every league and race event you can watch me compete for rank #1 level 100 live on my Twitch channel.

Skryah and me always have cool new projects on our YouTube. We make build guides, leveling guides, speedruns, Path of Exile highlights, guides for advanced and beginner players and a lot of other random content that you can find for all your Path of Exile needs.

I sometimes post on Twitter too, I guess.

RaizQT

________________________________________________________________
Thanks so much for participating in the interview! It was a lot of fun. Thank you for all of your contributions to the community.