Riot Games
Riot Games and Twitch teamed up in a unique way to give players access to the Valorant closed beta.
Instead of having everyone get access all at once, Riot decided to give access by making viewers watch streams that had drops enabled. This means names like summit1g, Myth, Pokimane, and many others all had boosted viewer counts for players just trying to get access.
Summit ended up gaining thousands of subs as a result of his boosted view count, but other streamers saw this happening and attempted the game the system and gain inflated views of their own.
Streamers have been setting their streams as “Live,” but instead of actually playing live content, they play recorded content 24/7, just as a way for viewers to farm drops. Anomaly, who sits at the top of the directory in Valorant, often topping over 100,000 viewers, has been one of these people and with the recent guideline updates, it looks like that will be coming to an end.
Look at all of the “live” streams.
“We’ve heard concerns about creators continuously streaming VODs while tagging the channel as “Live” to farm Valorant Drops,” Twitch said on Twitter.” This harms the integrity of our Drops Program so we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to clarify that cheating any Twitch rewards system is prohibited.”
📢 We’ve heard concerns about creators continuously streaming VODs while tagging the channel as “Live” to farm Valorant Drops. This harms the integrity of our Drops Program so we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to clarify that cheating any Twitch rewards system is prohibited.
Summit1g has been a constant critic of this ever since it started to become a problem, and has frequently spoken up about how the directory is being taken over by bots.
It’s the future. The terminators have taken over. @Sneaky and @CDNThe3rd holdin hands out here fighting, surrounded.
This is a great move by Twitch that was immediately applauded by the community, but now they’ll have to set their sights on what’s going on in the CS:GO directory.
At practically all hours of the day, fake streams by shroud, who moved to Mixer, and S1mple, a popular CS pro, are at the top of the directory as scams.
As soon as one stream goes down, it seems like another one takes its place almost immediately.
On the bright side, the Valorant problem has been solved, but there’s still a long way to go before everything else wrong with the platform disappears.
For the time being, it looks like players will have to the chance to produce Valorant content on Twitch again without being buried by fake streams.