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Hello LiquidHearth, I would like to bring something to your attention.
I dont play hearthstone personally, but I do enjoy watching streams. I typically hang around 3-4 different streams, and I've been seeing very odd numbers some specific streamers, so I did some investigations.
I'll warn you that Amaz's stream has been filled bot viewerbots, despite the fact that he has been streaming for few months, and does have his own followers that is pretty large. You can find his stream at www.twitch.tv/amazhs.
Now, I'm not saying that Amaz is 100% viewer boosting. He has good number of viewership coming from real viewers. I expect his bot viewership be somewhere between 5000 to 8000 out of total viewers he get as of 5/07~5/21 investigation. I don't know if he was doing this before(I noticed but did not do investigation until 5/07).
Proofs:
1. His Numbers doesn't affect other streamers at all, until he hits 10k+ in concurrent viewers. I have seen him streaming at same time as other streamers such as Kripp, MaSsan, Reynad, and etc.
When Kripp or MaSsan is streaming already, Amaz typically goes up to 4k within an hour, 10k within 3 hours. During this, neither of their viewership is affected, and total viewership on HS goes up from 20~22k to ~30k,or even up to 35k, regardless of hours that he streams.
2. His viewership does not watch other streamers after he's done streaming. I was watching Amaz on May 15th, 2014. He had concurrent viewership of 18.5K viewers, kolento at 5K.
Amaz went off, and kolento went up to 8K viewership within an hour. Typically, you'll see this out of channels with 10K viewership or so, not from 18.5K viewership.
On 05/18/2014, Amaz was streaming along with kripp. When Amaz went off at 6:05 AM EDT, total viewership from HS went from 28k to 17k, and this went up to 20k in about an hour(at 7:00:AM EDT). Which is expected since there is a rise in viewership as night passes.
Compared to when Kripp goes off(25k to 20k, then up to 22-23k within an hour was sample I took), this seem to be drastic.
3. He uses chat bots. I use mIRC to track channel viewers. Then I saw something that I never saw before in typical popular streams. Whenever I go into Amaz's chat, throughout his stream hours, I see increasing number of chatters such as below, which I don't see elsewhere often. Here are some examples:
010926
0217422356
0240666888
0660185784
077160572o
2234907222
A0932813150
A123698745za
A14573
A187660705
A22893381
A3116033
A3591035910
A39189
Abc1028h
Abc308308
Abc38846
Abcd0061
A03006101
A06exx
A19860520
A3332802
A3508919
A4696766
A5p1
A8327231
A8343459
Aa113bba
Aabac84
I have list of 1500 chatters named this way and still increasing from his channel alone. I'm sure there are more than them in his channel that I can't find on my own. After that, I did some investigation, and found http://onlinestreambot.com/.
This website offers service where viewership+chat bot comes into your channel, and bots even can talk with random subjects, which fits for Amaz's channel. I requested 1 week service, and well, 10 out of viewer list above showed up to my channel which I have made newly. They asserted that they can boost up to 30k concurrent viewership via their support.
4. I found some moments where Amaz's channel viewership significantly drop, while looking into chat list etc. This happened over 10 times over my course of investigation(which is manually seen, not auto detected), which is 5/07~5/21. I suspect this out of his bot server resetting, or failing.
here's some moments, taken within 5 min of each other, as well as some of his viewerlist.
http://imgur.com/R9FNoxz,4HszkCd,mn1YTZKhttp://imgur.com/R9FNoxz,4HszkCd,mn1YTZK
EDIT: Twitch bot detector on twitter is not ran by twitch, and only detects with significant viewership difference between viewer count and chatter count, hence with bot chatters it doesn't detect them.
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Well if it's true that's sad.
I kinda like Amaz cause he plays priest and seems to be all around a pretty nice person. The only thing bothering me is when he overreacts to things or opens his mouth for a long time like he want's to wrap it around a cumcumber.
Anyway, good job on the investigation sherlock
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This is gonna be interesting. I reserve my judgement 'till later though, since I have no technical knowledge of this whatsoever.
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That's interesting to say the least.
If the facts presented in the OP are not fabricated, this would indeed indicate the use of some sort of viewer boting. BUT blaming it on Amaz without evidences that he is involved is highly questionable, all we can really say is that something fishy might be going on. That's it. He may have nothing to do with it. He has never shown any sign of bad behaviors and has been a reliable keystone of the community for quite a long time, you can at least give him the benefit of the doubt.
The conclusion is the following : let's first check the facts together on the next Amaz streams, THEN draw conclusions on who's to blame if the suspicions are confirmed.
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It is probably people targetting him with viewerbots. I've watched his stream for many many hours and he doesn't seem the type to do this. He has good personality and viewer interaction that I don't think he would need to 'cheat' to get viewers. Plus he is one of the few people to play priest at such high level.
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Looks like a troll post.
I see a few of those "bots" in Kripp's channel right now.
And you've posted the same screenshot twice.
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who gives a fuck, he plays good and delivers a good show
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On May 28 2014 18:18 dnagardi wrote:
who gives a fuck, he plays good and delivers a good show
well, it would matter if someone was inflating their viewership, but this feels like someone messing around with Amaz. So in this instance it doesn't matter, but with Gullin it did.
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thats some heavy accustations, unfortunately no real proofs so I guess I ill give amaz the benefit of the doubt
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Nobody else payed attention to this guys nick "amazislie"? He is clearly trolling. I'm sure he is expecting to get banned for this "joke" thus not posting it on his real account.
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I have been watching amaz his stream for a long time now, i started watching it when it had like 150 viewers. And it had always a steady climb in viewers over time and with a lot of chat interaction, till it got into the thousends and then the viewer numbers started to climb really fast.
I see no reason why to start with viewer botting when he was already becoming popular. So i believe there either is viewer botting without amaz ordering it or he just got really popular.
Also your post contains very few number for a "research" (just some incidents) and your name already shows you are out on a vendetta. That doesnt make me really believe you.
I for one see kolento his viewer count double as soon as amaz stops streaming. And that his stream increases the total HS viewership count says nothing, because every popular stream does this. And as you said he has a lot of real support, he gets the most subscribers out of all the streamers (and tons of donations). So it is more then reasonable that he also has the highest viewer count.
So yeah maybe there are a couple of thousands viewers by bots, but i doubt it is amaz who is behind it and it wont make a big difference as he already has a huge following.
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Amaz is my favourite streamer and I'm confident if that are chat bots they are not of his doing.
Keep the Priest faith Amaz!
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On May 28 2014 19:14 Izzo wrote:
Nobody else payed attention to this guys nick "amazislie"? He is clearly trolling. I'm sure he is expecting to get banned for this "joke" thus not posting it on his real account.
This, what a horrendous topic. OP is just straight up messing with Amaz his livelyhood without a shred of evidence. Unacceptable! Ban and delete please.
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On May 28 2014 19:14 Izzo wrote:
Nobody else payed attention to this guys nick "amazislie"? He is clearly trolling. I'm sure he is expecting to get banned for this "joke" thus not posting it on his real account.
Or he didnt have an account before and signed up specifically for this.
Im not saying I believe hit, but using his nickname as a reason for saying he is wrong doesnt work either.
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Original Title
The original title of the post was "Warning: Amaz is a lie". However, there is no reason to assume Amaz is a fraud even if your post was entirely true. It's possible for bot-boosting to happen without a persons knowledge. If someone doesn't like Amaz it would not be difficult to set him up.
Motive
Bot-boosting is typically done to get your channel to the top of the listings so that you can gain more real viewers as a result. This in turn allows you to build an audience and eventually have a functioning channel without bots. The idea that someone like Amaz, who typically is at the top of the listing already, would be doing this makes no sense. You mention that it would only be about 5000-8000 bots, but this amount doesn't even change his position in the listing.
Points 1 & 2
For many people Amaz is the most entertaining streamer currently and so it's entirely possible that there are a lot of people who just watch Amaz' stream and tune out when he stops.
Point 3
Check out popular Chinese speaking streamers on Twitch. Accounts like these are pretty common and are typical Taiwanese or Asian account names. Amaz lives in Hong Kong and often streams at Asian times. It's no surprise that on a channel with 30,000 concurrent viewers there will be a good amount of accounts like these. You can find similar accounts in the chat of other western channels as well.
Whether or not there are bots
Based on the information you present it should be impossible to come to the conclusion you came up with. That is not to say there are or aren't any bots, but simply that going by your post there is no basis to say that there are. Even if there were that doesn't make Amaz a lie because there is no motive for him and it could easily be done by people who don't like him in order to set him up.
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Makes sense since I don't know why any person would find this guy appealing to watch
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I watch Amaz while at work sometimes, and when he wraps for the day I close my Twitch window. I don't chat, just come for the play, and commentary. If you were watching last week when he gained over 150 subs, I don't remember seeing any alphanumeric-only usernames amongst the subs.
He's entertaining, gracious, and takes the time to explain his plays. That makes him worth my time, but others, not so much.
I am definitely not a bot. Check out this handsome briefcase, made of the finest baby skin. Would a bot have one of these?
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There was something fishy yesterday where the viewers would change between 21k and 31k just seconds apart (and 31k isn't a regular number for him at all when he's usually been at 18-20k before the sub train), but aside from that, it doesn't really seem like a whole lot of botting, if any.
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Wouldn't be his fault anyway, and it would barely change his spot in the streamer list. Hands down most entertaining Hearthstone streamer I watch!
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United States15536 Posts
As he says himself (on today's stream), what would even be the point of view botting? His stream is entertaining, so it merits watching on its own. If someone else is doing it to him, that's not his fault. More viewers wouldn't make his stream better, so I don't see why he'd even bother.
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its hard to prove this, and does not seem like something amaz would do, im giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one
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Are you sure your bias against Amaz isnt clouding your judgement OP?
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Amaz is pretty much the only stream I watch at the moment at all. He is a very nice guy, entertaining, does not play music that I dislike (lol no music except for ingame music, thank you youtube!), has a voice that I enjoy listening to, is articulate, easy to understand, understands the concept of a good stream and does not have breaks of 20+ minutes of saying nothing. He does not talk with others over skype etc, pretty much only interacts with the viewers (both chat and donations) and explains all he does. And he has not yet fallen into the Abyss that is playing miracle rogue.
So yeah, I like Amaz. And without any real proof or evidence or anything really (not even a fake graph to show a sudden drop/rise in viewers) it would be nice to see this thread closed and buried. Or at least a mod message showing up on the top telling new people visiting this thread that there is no real proof yet to be seen nor any fishy behaviour really, so until some is digged up Amaz should be considered not botting and not doing anything wrong.
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Maybe if you had some better evidence towards your argument then people would take you a little more seriously
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He's my favorite streamer if he has 16k viewers or 5k
Wouldn't care at all.
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On May 29 2014 01:01 Darkren wrote:
That username
Are people really complaining about the name? Suppose you had a proof that Trump was botting, would you actually be willing to risk your account, even though it were true? No, you wouldn't, because Trump is popular and whatever you say, whatever proof you have, there will be people that will call for your ban. Even in SC2, a long time ago when spades was pretty obviously maphacking in a show match, someone posted it on a different account, because despite the hours of nearly irrefutable proof people still said that it wasn't conclusive. People still said that it could be random chance that the guys screen constantly went over Luciron's army, and he pre-reacted to drops he didn't see, and that he had a perfect counter build every game.
I think the best way to do something like this is have an extremely good post, and NOT on your actual account. Now did this guy have a good post with lots of graphs, videos of viewer counts changing, etc? No, but he did provide enough description that I think it is clear there are bots in Amaz's stream. However, he doesn't provide proof that it is Amaz that is doing the botting, which is a very key point to miss. However, the post still calls attention to something that maybe now can be monitored or stopped, or looked into further.
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Amaz such a cool guy that I wouldnt believe hes viewerbotting until irrefutable proof was presented.
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People need to realize that you can actually target a streamer with bots.
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This should be closed. At best it has weak evidence and no motive.
The OP has 2 other posts one of which was...
"Well let's be honest. amaz is barely gm every season, and he was barely around rank3-5 until yesterday or so."
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On May 28 2014 21:13 eSen1a wrote:
Makes sense since I don't know why any person would find this guy appealing to watch
He grows on you. I actually hated Massan's and Amaz's streams. Massan was boring and has a monotone voice. Amaz has a high-pitched annoying voice, but they are watchable after a while. Their interaction with chat, commentary and gameplay are pretty fun once you look past the voices.
I still prefer Reynad, Hafu and Kripp the most, but I did expand my viewership to other streamers. I don't have a twitch account so I don't partake in chat but I do like to listen/watch streams in-between my own games of doto or smth else.
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Braavos36402 Posts
OK this thread has run its course.
Closing it barring some sort of actual evidence beyond anecdotes.
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EPT
