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Revised Featured Stream Requirements for 2015 - Page 18

Forum Index > SC2 General
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codonbyte
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United States840 Posts
March 17 2015 05:12 GMT
#341
On March 17 2015 11:57 lichter wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 11:32 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:40 lichter wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:10 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:02 y0su wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:22 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:11 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:08 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:00 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:49 Cazimirbzh wrote:
[quote]

after a quick search, for 10k $ - 2 years (415/monthly) winter can have 40k viewbots....


Assuming you came up with a link from google it should be no problem for you to source that...

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Do you want me to post a link to a website that explicitly sells viewbot ? XDD (last word + .net, that's all i'll say)
for 100$/month i can pretend to be winter with 2.5k viewers and chatbot^^

I guess you got your numbers from here https://viewbot.net/

Assuming that website is legit (i really hope not), I have a number of statements to make...
- obviously I'm wayy off on my earlier estimate. my apologies for that
- I would guess that those people are able to provide the service at a reduced cost by using the same twitch accounts, servers, and IPs to raise the viewer count of what is probably dozens of streamers at the same time
- twitch.tv you guys have some fucking 'splaining to do



On March 17 2015 09:07 saltis wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:08 kryogenic wrote:

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Dude please... all you say is theory crafting, it shows that you really have no real engineering knowledge. Please, don't even try it...

Please stfu if you're not going to add anything to the discussion


Me too, i was surprised by how little(?) money it cost to obtain huge numbers at least for sc2 and that's why i am not really happy about the statement of TL which doesnt provide help for streamers whom may be viewbot maliciously which is basically "ask twitch".
Why twitch will bother for a guy with 0.5k viewbots when they have several streams with 2-3k and maybe more ? :S

Unfortunately, viewbotting is an issue that can be dealt by Twitch only.

Well, just going by precedence... The two recent de-features were both streamers that became featured AFTER being botted. So, there is still no precedence on what would happen if an already featured streamer suddenly noticed that the viewer numbers are off.

I still find the idea of "malicious viewbotting" hilariously stupid... Seriously, who do I have to piss off to get some extra viewers?


And that's the question i am asking ^^

If your partnership application with twitch get suspended because of viewbotting like mario, will you still find it "hilariously stupid" ?


A stream popular enough to be featured likely has no reason to risk his position or reputation with viewbots. If he does notice a suspicious amount of views or activity on his stream, it's in his best interest to immediately consult Twitch and raise a red flag. It's the same case as HTOMario, except someone like this already had the numbers to be featured. The only problem with HTOMario was that he didn't have the numbers to be featured prior to getting botted.


So if Mario managed to reach the required numbers but still get viewbot and twitch doesnt respond to his issue, he can still be featured ? Can this situation impede his application to be featured ?

I know it's really hard to be a streamer with a decent viewership and being featured can help a lot. I felt bad for Mario because he's a good guy even if he's sometimes mean to yoshi. In this kind of situation, it's hard to not being able to do something against what's happening to you. If you know that the community will support you in this time, it's reassuring and will not demoralize thos who try to be streamer.


If people continue to viewbot him it will be difficult to support his stream on TL. I hope that you can all understand that TL's stream list is just an aggregation of streams. We can't actually do anything about the viewbots ourselves, as much as we would like to. It's very unfortunate and I've talked to HTOMario at length about it. It's a difficult situation and I really hope Twitch does something about it, because they are the only ones that really can.

Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 11:35 ProTech wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:40 lichter wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:10 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:02 y0su wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:22 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:11 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:08 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:00 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:49 Cazimirbzh wrote:
[quote]

after a quick search, for 10k $ - 2 years (415/monthly) winter can have 40k viewbots....


Assuming you came up with a link from google it should be no problem for you to source that...

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Do you want me to post a link to a website that explicitly sells viewbot ? XDD (last word + .net, that's all i'll say)
for 100$/month i can pretend to be winter with 2.5k viewers and chatbot^^

I guess you got your numbers from here https://viewbot.net/

Assuming that website is legit (i really hope not), I have a number of statements to make...
- obviously I'm wayy off on my earlier estimate. my apologies for that
- I would guess that those people are able to provide the service at a reduced cost by using the same twitch accounts, servers, and IPs to raise the viewer count of what is probably dozens of streamers at the same time
- twitch.tv you guys have some fucking 'splaining to do



On March 17 2015 09:07 saltis wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:08 kryogenic wrote:

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Dude please... all you say is theory crafting, it shows that you really have no real engineering knowledge. Please, don't even try it...

Please stfu if you're not going to add anything to the discussion


Me too, i was surprised by how little(?) money it cost to obtain huge numbers at least for sc2 and that's why i am not really happy about the statement of TL which doesnt provide help for streamers whom may be viewbot maliciously which is basically "ask twitch".
Why twitch will bother for a guy with 0.5k viewbots when they have several streams with 2-3k and maybe more ? :S

Unfortunately, viewbotting is an issue that can be dealt by Twitch only.

Well, just going by precedence... The two recent de-features were both streamers that became featured AFTER being botted. So, there is still no precedence on what would happen if an already featured streamer suddenly noticed that the viewer numbers are off.

I still find the idea of "malicious viewbotting" hilariously stupid... Seriously, who do I have to piss off to get some extra viewers?


And that's the question i am asking ^^

If your partnership application with twitch get suspended because of viewbotting like mario, will you still find it "hilariously stupid" ?


A stream popular enough to be featured likely has no reason to risk his position or reputation with viewbots. If he does notice a suspicious amount of views or activity on his stream, it's in his best interest to immediately consult Twitch and raise a red flag. It's the same case as HTOMario, except someone like this already had the numbers to be featured. The only problem with HTOMario was that he didn't have the numbers to be featured prior to getting botted.



Consulting twitch only leads to endless emails back and forth trying to figure out whether or not you're still getting botted. They have told me on many occasions that they are simply making it harder for bot vendors to bot channels which in turn makes the bots more expensive. This is the only thing that i've heard from twitch for the 4 years I have been broadcasting, and it's simply not an answer. So what does one do? Accept the fact that it happens, and let your viewers know when it's happening and carry on.

One of the things you guys needs to take into consideration is that as a broadcaster you can't always be touching on the possibilities of viewerbots, because the real viewers will start to get it into their mind that maybe this guy is just viewerbotting his channel and ultimately leave. Reverse psychology if you will.


It's a tough situation, yes. On the one hand, we don't want to support streams that are being botted because it encourages botters to continue. On the other hand, we don't want to harm innocent streamers by de-featuring them when they would otherwise deserve it. But doing nothing only perpetuates the problem. We'd like to believe that our stance against botting encourages Twitch to act with more immediacy, but only Twitch can find a solution to this. We do encourage streamers to inform us of their suspicions so that we act with more leniency regarding potential botting; they don't need to announce it to the world.

Something just occured to me: since viewbots don't register ad impressions, if a streamer is being viewbotted against their will and they come forward to team-liquid about the issue, you could figure out whether they have enough real viewers to qualify for featuring by looking at their ad revenue statements. If we know how much they get for each impression and we know how many times they play commercials, should be pretty easy to work out roughly how many viewers they had.

Obviously it's not perfect, but it could work should we be faced with a situation where someone is being viewbotted against their will.
Procrastination is the enemy
ProTech
Profile Joined November 2010
United States491 Posts
March 17 2015 05:16 GMT
#342
On March 17 2015 14:12 codonbyte wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 11:57 lichter wrote:
On March 17 2015 11:32 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:40 lichter wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:10 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:02 y0su wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:22 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:11 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:08 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:00 kryogenic wrote:
[quote]

Assuming you came up with a link from google it should be no problem for you to source that...

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Do you want me to post a link to a website that explicitly sells viewbot ? XDD (last word + .net, that's all i'll say)
for 100$/month i can pretend to be winter with 2.5k viewers and chatbot^^

I guess you got your numbers from here https://viewbot.net/

Assuming that website is legit (i really hope not), I have a number of statements to make...
- obviously I'm wayy off on my earlier estimate. my apologies for that
- I would guess that those people are able to provide the service at a reduced cost by using the same twitch accounts, servers, and IPs to raise the viewer count of what is probably dozens of streamers at the same time
- twitch.tv you guys have some fucking 'splaining to do



On March 17 2015 09:07 saltis wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:08 kryogenic wrote:

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Dude please... all you say is theory crafting, it shows that you really have no real engineering knowledge. Please, don't even try it...

Please stfu if you're not going to add anything to the discussion


Me too, i was surprised by how little(?) money it cost to obtain huge numbers at least for sc2 and that's why i am not really happy about the statement of TL which doesnt provide help for streamers whom may be viewbot maliciously which is basically "ask twitch".
Why twitch will bother for a guy with 0.5k viewbots when they have several streams with 2-3k and maybe more ? :S

Unfortunately, viewbotting is an issue that can be dealt by Twitch only.

Well, just going by precedence... The two recent de-features were both streamers that became featured AFTER being botted. So, there is still no precedence on what would happen if an already featured streamer suddenly noticed that the viewer numbers are off.

I still find the idea of "malicious viewbotting" hilariously stupid... Seriously, who do I have to piss off to get some extra viewers?


And that's the question i am asking ^^

If your partnership application with twitch get suspended because of viewbotting like mario, will you still find it "hilariously stupid" ?


A stream popular enough to be featured likely has no reason to risk his position or reputation with viewbots. If he does notice a suspicious amount of views or activity on his stream, it's in his best interest to immediately consult Twitch and raise a red flag. It's the same case as HTOMario, except someone like this already had the numbers to be featured. The only problem with HTOMario was that he didn't have the numbers to be featured prior to getting botted.


So if Mario managed to reach the required numbers but still get viewbot and twitch doesnt respond to his issue, he can still be featured ? Can this situation impede his application to be featured ?

I know it's really hard to be a streamer with a decent viewership and being featured can help a lot. I felt bad for Mario because he's a good guy even if he's sometimes mean to yoshi. In this kind of situation, it's hard to not being able to do something against what's happening to you. If you know that the community will support you in this time, it's reassuring and will not demoralize thos who try to be streamer.


If people continue to viewbot him it will be difficult to support his stream on TL. I hope that you can all understand that TL's stream list is just an aggregation of streams. We can't actually do anything about the viewbots ourselves, as much as we would like to. It's very unfortunate and I've talked to HTOMario at length about it. It's a difficult situation and I really hope Twitch does something about it, because they are the only ones that really can.

On March 17 2015 11:35 ProTech wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:40 lichter wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:10 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 10:02 y0su wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:22 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:11 kryogenic wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:08 Cazimirbzh wrote:
On March 17 2015 09:00 kryogenic wrote:
[quote]

Assuming you came up with a link from google it should be no problem for you to source that...

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Do you want me to post a link to a website that explicitly sells viewbot ? XDD (last word + .net, that's all i'll say)
for 100$/month i can pretend to be winter with 2.5k viewers and chatbot^^

I guess you got your numbers from here https://viewbot.net/

Assuming that website is legit (i really hope not), I have a number of statements to make...
- obviously I'm wayy off on my earlier estimate. my apologies for that
- I would guess that those people are able to provide the service at a reduced cost by using the same twitch accounts, servers, and IPs to raise the viewer count of what is probably dozens of streamers at the same time
- twitch.tv you guys have some fucking 'splaining to do



On March 17 2015 09:07 saltis wrote:
On March 17 2015 08:08 kryogenic wrote:

Regardless, bandwidth, twitch accounts, and unique IPs cost money. The cost also increases as you scale up. I'm not saying that I know with any certainty that the number is close to $10k. I do know however that producing hundreds of views requires multiple servers, or, (more likely in my opinion) dozens of hacked computers with distinct IP addresses. That shit gets us into DDoS and blackhat territory and believe me it is very expensive.


Dude please... all you say is theory crafting, it shows that you really have no real engineering knowledge. Please, don't even try it...

Please stfu if you're not going to add anything to the discussion


Me too, i was surprised by how little(?) money it cost to obtain huge numbers at least for sc2 and that's why i am not really happy about the statement of TL which doesnt provide help for streamers whom may be viewbot maliciously which is basically "ask twitch".
Why twitch will bother for a guy with 0.5k viewbots when they have several streams with 2-3k and maybe more ? :S

Unfortunately, viewbotting is an issue that can be dealt by Twitch only.

Well, just going by precedence... The two recent de-features were both streamers that became featured AFTER being botted. So, there is still no precedence on what would happen if an already featured streamer suddenly noticed that the viewer numbers are off.

I still find the idea of "malicious viewbotting" hilariously stupid... Seriously, who do I have to piss off to get some extra viewers?


And that's the question i am asking ^^

If your partnership application with twitch get suspended because of viewbotting like mario, will you still find it "hilariously stupid" ?


A stream popular enough to be featured likely has no reason to risk his position or reputation with viewbots. If he does notice a suspicious amount of views or activity on his stream, it's in his best interest to immediately consult Twitch and raise a red flag. It's the same case as HTOMario, except someone like this already had the numbers to be featured. The only problem with HTOMario was that he didn't have the numbers to be featured prior to getting botted.



Consulting twitch only leads to endless emails back and forth trying to figure out whether or not you're still getting botted. They have told me on many occasions that they are simply making it harder for bot vendors to bot channels which in turn makes the bots more expensive. This is the only thing that i've heard from twitch for the 4 years I have been broadcasting, and it's simply not an answer. So what does one do? Accept the fact that it happens, and let your viewers know when it's happening and carry on.

One of the things you guys needs to take into consideration is that as a broadcaster you can't always be touching on the possibilities of viewerbots, because the real viewers will start to get it into their mind that maybe this guy is just viewerbotting his channel and ultimately leave. Reverse psychology if you will.


It's a tough situation, yes. On the one hand, we don't want to support streams that are being botted because it encourages botters to continue. On the other hand, we don't want to harm innocent streamers by de-featuring them when they would otherwise deserve it. But doing nothing only perpetuates the problem. We'd like to believe that our stance against botting encourages Twitch to act with more immediacy, but only Twitch can find a solution to this. We do encourage streamers to inform us of their suspicions so that we act with more leniency regarding potential botting; they don't need to announce it to the world.

Something just occured to me: since viewbots don't register ad impressions, if a streamer is being viewbotted against their will and they come forward to team-liquid about the issue, you could figure out whether they have enough real viewers to qualify for featuring by looking at their ad revenue statements. If we know how much they get for each impression and we know how many times they play commercials, should be pretty easy to work out roughly how many viewers they had.

Obviously it's not perfect, but it could work should we be faced with a situation where someone is being viewbotted against their will.



In order for a stream like mine to even get a decent amount of money in ad revenue I have to play a 3 minute commercial break after every single game that I play. That said, there is a lot of rage about how I was running ads, I tested different ways to run ads over time and to make a long story short: I don't run ads, and I'm sure there are many featured streams that do the same.
saurusaurus
Profile Joined July 2013
Australia21 Posts
March 17 2015 05:57 GMT
#343
I disagree with all the people cheering on this Winter persecution, and I likewise disagree with all the Winter defenders;

The one time I watched Winter he was giving away copies of SC2 to subs, with the ethos of 'the more people that play this great game, the better'. I was impressed by this positive and constructive attitude.

And so there is no victory and no joy in the downfall of Winter. Yes, he has been punished for doing the wrong thing, and yes it will mean more legitimate streams will have more exposure potentially, etc. However, as it was for cycling with Lance Armstrong (obviously at a micro level), the reputation of the sport is tarnished. After all, the end result is sponsors are more cautious and there is a rise in cynicism in the community).

Team Liquid has certainly done the 'right thing' but it is an unfortunate outcome.
However, I think it is really positive that this comes at the same time as the new featured streamer policy, as there are energetic ideas and momentum in there.

Long live Sc2.
JimmyJRaynor
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Canada17775 Posts
March 17 2015 06:03 GMT
#344
looks like Winter has been removed completely from the "Team nVidia" schedule on Twitch.tv

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia

he used ot be on weekends 9pm to 12am PST on weekends.

possibly, his nVidia sponsorship is in peril.
couldn't happen to a nicer guy
Ray Kassar To David Crane : "you're no more important to Atari than the factory workers assembling the cartridges"
tokinho
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States792 Posts
March 17 2015 06:09 GMT
#345
I wish that the racism and sexism were taken more seriously.
Smile
Cascade
Profile Blog Joined March 2006
Australia5405 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-17 06:20:11
March 17 2015 06:19 GMT
#346
How about adding captcha to streams?
Every 30 mins or so.

edit: or at least to suspected bot accounts through some detection system.
phodacbiet
Profile Joined August 2010
United States1740 Posts
March 17 2015 06:24 GMT
#347
On March 17 2015 15:19 Cascade wrote:
How about adding captcha to streams?
Every 30 mins or so.

edit: or at least to suspected bot accounts through some detection system.


That would make it such a hassle to watch streams and might turn a lot of people away from Twitch. The only solution is if Twitch does this from their end, TL and streamers are pretty much powerless against this.
GiveMeCake
Profile Joined October 2010
148 Posts
March 17 2015 08:31 GMT
#348
Found out about Winter first through Reddit. Later started watching him only because he was featured on TL. His rise came after a turbulent time (many people retiring, leaving for other games, etc.). He was mostly playing random which was different & I really enjoyed his interaction with this chat. I wanted to tune in and chat because sometimes he would say something I typed. I didn't mind his music.

At the time I always had a feeling that chat was moving too slow compared to other streams of similar viewers, but I still found him entertaining.

Eventually I saw how many hours he was streaming, and began to notice the quality of the stream going downhill. I didn't find the stream educational because he was beating lower leagues using Masters+ macro. One of biggest factors in lower leagues is who macros better, and Winter almost never touched on that point. He no longer read out the troll questions and became more strict with chat.

Twitch got bought by Google and many streamers threatened to leave. Winter got partnered and was given a spot on the front page. He looped a video of a dog (Loopy) and it caught peoples attention (brilliant move). More and more people started joining chat to find out if the dog was real. Because of this, chat scrolled faster and Winter's viewership began to rise. I noticed how high his viewers were at night when there were generally less viewers watching. Chat still did not feel fast enough to warrant how many viewers he had.

Of course he got his sponsorship, and that helped sell the fact that Winter was successful. Any complaints of view botting were countered with the argument that he couldn't be botting if he was successful (partnered and sponsored). He put in a chat bot and announced a new system of loopy points. This was another brilliant move because it meant that users were spamming commands constantly in chat making it scroll faster.

Sometime while all of this was going on, Winter got DDOS'd and that's when I knew that Winter was view botting. I watched as his viewers jumped by hundreds in just a matter of minutes each time the stream would go back online after just a short period of time. I kept an eye on the Starcraft page on twitch to see where the 2.5k viewers were going when his stream went offline and I wasn't surprised at the results. From 2.5K viewers, maybe 200-300 of those ended up in other SC2 streams.

I'm happy to see that he is not featured from TL, and I think it's very funny that Avilo (a name you could not say on Winter's chat) is the poster boy for his departure in the SC2 scene. I don't feel bad for him because he made money off of it, and I don't blame him for wanting to cheat. At the end of the day, he had a refined product that was good enough to be on the shelf, he just needed help getting there. Like many of us, no one gave Winter the foot in the door he needed so he bought a bunch of bots and punched through the door him damn self.
I had a dream I moved to Korea to become a GSL champion. I slept in PC bangs and practiced only vs the PC. I named my self Death and faced Life in the finals. I beat him, but ended up dying as I killed his last building.
rednusa
Profile Joined October 2012
651 Posts
March 17 2015 08:37 GMT
#349
On March 17 2015 15:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
looks like Winter has been removed completely from the "Team nVidia" schedule on Twitch.tv

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia

he used ot be on weekends 9pm to 12am PST on weekends.

possibly, his nVidia sponsorship is in peril.
couldn't happen to a nicer guy


I wonder which sc2 streamer will pick up that nVidia sponsorship now.
Penev
Profile Joined October 2012
28536 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-17 08:59:33
March 17 2015 08:49 GMT
#350
On March 17 2015 17:31 GiveMeCake wrote:
Found out about Winter first through Reddit. Later started watching him only because he was featured on TL. His rise came after a turbulent time (many people retiring, leaving for other games, etc.). He was mostly playing random which was different & I really enjoyed his interaction with this chat. I wanted to tune in and chat because sometimes he would say something I typed. I didn't mind his music.

At the time I always had a feeling that chat was moving too slow compared to other streams of similar viewers, but I still found him entertaining.

Eventually I saw how many hours he was streaming, and began to notice the quality of the stream going downhill. I didn't find the stream educational because he was beating lower leagues using Masters+ macro. One of biggest factors in lower leagues is who macros better, and Winter almost never touched on that point. He no longer read out the troll questions and became more strict with chat.

Twitch got bought by Google and many streamers threatened to leave. Winter got partnered and was given a spot on the front page. He looped a video of a dog (Loopy) and it caught peoples attention (brilliant move). More and more people started joining chat to find out if the dog was real. Because of this, chat scrolled faster and Winter's viewership began to rise. I noticed how high his viewers were at night when there were generally less viewers watching. Chat still did not feel fast enough to warrant how many viewers he had.

Of course he got his sponsorship, and that helped sell the fact that Winter was successful. Any complaints of view botting were countered with the argument that he couldn't be botting if he was successful (partnered and sponsored). He put in a chat bot and announced a new system of loopy points. This was another brilliant move because it meant that users were spamming commands constantly in chat making it scroll faster.

Sometime while all of this was going on, Winter got DDOS'd and that's when I knew that Winter was view botting. I watched as his viewers jumped by hundreds in just a matter of minutes each time the stream would go back online after just a short period of time. I kept an eye on the Starcraft page on twitch to see where the 2.5k viewers were going when his stream went offline and I wasn't surprised at the results. From 2.5K viewers, maybe 200-300 of those ended up in other SC2 streams.

I'm happy to see that he is not featured from TL, and I think it's very funny that Avilo (a name you could not say on Winter's chat) is the poster boy for his departure in the SC2 scene. I don't feel bad for him because he made money off of it, and I don't blame him for wanting to cheat. At the end of the day, he had a refined product that was good enough to be on the shelf, he just needed help getting there. Like many of us, no one gave Winter the foot in the door he needed so he bought a bunch of bots and punched through the door him damn self.

Just a FYI: Amazon bought Twitch

On March 17 2015 17:50 Cascade wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 17:37 rednusa wrote:
On March 17 2015 15:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
looks like Winter has been removed completely from the "Team nVidia" schedule on Twitch.tv

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia

he used ot be on weekends 9pm to 12am PST on weekends.

possibly, his nVidia sponsorship is in peril.
couldn't happen to a nicer guy


I wonder which sc2 streamer will pick up that nVidia sponsorship now.

Avilo? :D Oh, the threads that would ensue!
+ Show Spoiler +
Was it Avilo with his anti-winter vendetta that bought the viewbots, and then DDOSed winter while himself switching of the bots?? Was it?? :D We will never know! Well, innocent until critial mass pitchforks! + Show Spoiler +
Yes, I'm joking and making fun of the entire thread.

Well done indeed sir! xD
I Protoss winner, could it be?
Cascade
Profile Blog Joined March 2006
Australia5405 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-17 08:50:57
March 17 2015 08:50 GMT
#351
On March 17 2015 17:37 rednusa wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 15:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
looks like Winter has been removed completely from the "Team nVidia" schedule on Twitch.tv

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia

he used ot be on weekends 9pm to 12am PST on weekends.

possibly, his nVidia sponsorship is in peril.
couldn't happen to a nicer guy


I wonder which sc2 streamer will pick up that nVidia sponsorship now.

Avilo? :D Oh, the threads that would ensue!
+ Show Spoiler +
Was it Avilo with his anti-winter vendetta that bought the viewbots, and then DDOSed winter while himself switching of the bots?? Was it?? :D We will never know! Well, innocent until critial mass pitchforks! + Show Spoiler +
Yes, I'm joking and making fun of the entire thread.
TurboMaN
Profile Joined October 2005
Germany925 Posts
March 17 2015 09:17 GMT
#352
On March 17 2015 15:19 Cascade wrote:
How about adding captcha to streams?
Every 30 mins or so.

edit: or at least to suspected bot accounts through some detection system.


Nobody would like that. Imagine you are watching soccer on TV and you have to put in captchas.
It's Twitchs duty to find viewbots, not ours to confirm that we are human.
Creager
Profile Joined February 2011
Germany1961 Posts
March 17 2015 09:19 GMT
#353
On March 17 2015 07:18 Plexa wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 04:36 Creager wrote:
On March 17 2015 04:21 Cheren wrote:
i really think the german community should start their own version of TL rather than constantly asking TL to feature german streamers and content

iirc the millennium website is like a French TL, maybe takeTV could make a german TL-like site with rocketbeans, knowme, etc all featured.


I really don't see the point in doing so, we have sites like instarcraft.de, mystarcraft.de, readmore.de, but they all are pretty dead and/or not appealing. Since I've joined TL, I've been sticking around here as it's THE site for following StarCraft.

TL is an international site with featured streams from all over the world and with our rather "small" community I don't think separating/excluding stuff regarding StarCraft just because it's a more "local thing" is a very good idea.

My solution to this is for you to favourite streamers than you enjoy.


I don't need any solution, I'm completely fine, just don't want stuff to get separated unnecessarily like Cheren suggested...
... einmal mit Profis spielen!
nimdil
Profile Blog Joined January 2011
Poland3772 Posts
March 17 2015 09:39 GMT
#354
How does viewbotting work exactly and why viewbotting Winter's stream for a year is ~1000$?
Penev
Profile Joined October 2012
28536 Posts
March 17 2015 09:47 GMT
#355
On March 17 2015 18:39 nimdil wrote:
How does viewbotting work exactly and why viewbotting Winter's stream for a year is ~1000$?

Just google view bot and you'll see. It's about $100/ month for 1k viewers.
I Protoss winner, could it be?
Penev
Profile Joined October 2012
28536 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-03-17 10:19:27
March 17 2015 10:19 GMT
#356
Whoops, wrong thread!
I Protoss winner, could it be?
Everlong
Profile Joined April 2010
Czech Republic1973 Posts
March 17 2015 10:26 GMT
#357
I can already breath more freely now that this happened. It's almost like when I have an asthmatic attack and I take my meds.
BreAKerTV
Profile Blog Joined November 2011
Taiwan1658 Posts
March 17 2015 10:31 GMT
#358
Hi guys... I don't want anyone to think I am spamming but I have a very good, relative, on topic question to ask:

Do these changes also apply to streamers that stream heroes of the storm?
Retired caster / streamer "BingeHD". Digital Nomad.
Corgi
Profile Joined December 2014
United States408 Posts
March 17 2015 10:32 GMT
#359
On March 17 2015 17:50 Cascade wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 17 2015 17:37 rednusa wrote:
On March 17 2015 15:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
looks like Winter has been removed completely from the "Team nVidia" schedule on Twitch.tv

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia

he used ot be on weekends 9pm to 12am PST on weekends.

possibly, his nVidia sponsorship is in peril.
couldn't happen to a nicer guy


I wonder which sc2 streamer will pick up that nVidia sponsorship now.

Avilo? :D Oh, the threads that would ensue!
+ Show Spoiler +
Was it Avilo with his anti-winter vendetta that bought the viewbots, and then DDOSed winter while himself switching of the bots?? Was it?? :D We will never know! Well, innocent until critial mass pitchforks! + Show Spoiler +
Yes, I'm joking and making fun of the entire thread.


Nobody. Any sponsor watching Avilo's video should realize that the value of sponsoring him is very low through the words he chooses and the way he communicates.
lichter
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
March 17 2015 10:39 GMT
#360
On March 17 2015 19:31 BreAKerTV wrote:
Hi guys... I don't want anyone to think I am spamming but I have a very good, relative, on topic question to ask:

Do these changes also apply to streamers that stream heroes of the storm?


This was posted in SC2 General because they currently only apply to SC2. Once we have a more stable Heroes of the Storm environment we'll probably make a post about that too.
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