Blizzard on Stream Sniping. - Page 17

Allow you to blacklist certain players? Right, then some scrub blacklists people better than him. Great ladder then

On January 21 2012 09:12 TheTurk wrote:
How can Blizzard possibly be so obtuse? Do they not understand that user streams are beneficial to Blizzard as well as the streamers? The possibility of stream sniping without ramifications is obviously going to drive players away from streaming. Could you imagine a world without streams? The volume of SC2 content on the web would drop so alarmingly. Honestly, how do we as SC2 enthusiasts get our SC2 content?

1) Big Tourneys
Stuff like MLG, IEM, HSC, etc. These only come around once every few months and generally take 3-5 days, some of the smaller ones being monthly at best. GSL of course has a slightly different format, but the premise is close enough to clump together with the others. These are nice, but obviously most people are only going to watch through the VOD's once before they're stale. (That's just how this game works.) Too few and far between. Not to mention that watching players in big tourneys is much different than watching them ladder, for many reasons.

2) Showmatch/Weekly Event
These, like the big tourneys, are generally sponsored heavily. Stuff that IPL puts out, Korean Weekly, occasional Twitch.tv stuff, etc. The fine production value and quality, high level gameplay, and pro casting feeds us interesting material. A little less sporadic, but the difference in strats and distinction between competitive vs ladder play is still there.

3) Third-Party Content
Day[9] comes to mind, among others. Stuff that isn't really commercial or professionally produced all count. These are adequate and quite varied sources of content that one could probably find fresh every day or two.

But none of these compare in volume or audience benefit to:

4) Streamers
Every minute of every day, from somewhere in the world there are at least a dozen pros streaming on one of a dozen host sites. This is the Bread and Butter to the average SC2 goer. Some of us have it on 24/7. It's where we go to learn, it's where we go for entertainment, and it's where we go to kill time with something we love. It's the largest source of content in terms of volume, and that by an incredibly huge margin. If something like stream sniping disrupts this content, not volumetrically but in terms of pissing off the streamer or ruining matches, etc, that's something Blizzard should have a problem with.

That huge rant aside, I also question Blizzards knowledge of what "stream sniping" actually is. There's no problem with attempting to play against a pro on the ladder by timing queues correctly. The problem lies in watching the stream to gain an unfair advantage and insight into the player's moves, strategies, and other information specific to that game. There's no reason that Blizzard should be ok with that, let alone discouraging players to stream as a solution.