Valve’s latest game Artifact is a failure for the company as the interest in game died within 2 weeks after its launch. The game can hardly manage to pull 500 peak players or even more than 200 concurrent players at a time, but the game has become a sensational hit among some trolls on Twitch.
Twitch’s Artifact section was one of site’s
least popular section and was largely unused, until some trolls saw this as an
opportunity and hijackedthis section
to livestream content that largely violated Twitch’s own TOS (Terms of Service).
It all started with some trolls using bots
to stream memes or meme videos in loops for hours. But a simple joke soon
turned into a category of streamsfilled with random crap which included reruns of popular streamer’s gameplay;
TV series marathons (latest season of Game of Thrones); entire movies (cam-print
of Avengers:Endgame);pornography, hentai amines or in some extreme cases videos
of hate speech and terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Some people started tweeting about the
content being streamed under Artifact category on Twitch with some big names
like Rod Breslau (aka Slasher)
calling out Twitch for this slipup. Although even after reports of illegal and hate filled content being streamed, Twitch
was slow to act and trolls were able to stream more than 30minutes of the
Christchurch Terror attack.
Rod’s tweet ultimately got Twitch’s
attention and the stream was taken down immediately with channel and videos of
the same being deleted. But this isn’t the first time things like this has
happened which clearly shows Twitch’s inability to properly moderate TOS compliant content on their
site. This became evident after Twitch let trolls exploit Artifact section for
days without taking a notice of the situation or even acknowledging it.
Soon the Twitch Support tweeted in response to the “exploit” and said:
“Over the weekend we became aware of a number
of accounts targeting the “Artifact” game directory to share content
that grossly violates our terms of service. Our investigations uncovered that
the majority of accounts that shared and viewed the content were automated.”
They soon posted a follow-up tweet stating
that they were working on removing the content and suspending all accounts
related to said content and apologised for this mess-up. As a follow-up measure
to stop this exploit running amok again Twitch
has temporarily suspended new accounts ability to stream on the platform.
But the question still remains how such a
big platform can effectively moderate the content being streamed on their site that
remains compliant to their own TOS. Twitch’s temporary measures are just Kneejerk reaction to exploit.We can
only hope that Twitch would come up with a better solution after this mess-up
so this doesn’t affect genuine streamers and games.
