Blizzard is fighting the nonsense that is the Twitch Chat community - The UpStream

Blizzard is fighting the nonsense that is the Twitch Chat community

posted Friday Dec 28, 2018 by Scott Ertz

Blizzard is fighting the nonsense that is the Twitch Chat community

Anyone who has ever spent any real time on Twitch knows that a channel's chatroom can go from 0 to 60 in way under 10 seconds. As a streamer gets more popular, the potential for chat disaster gets exponentially worse. There are some measures that streamers can take to try and keep some semblance of control over their chat, including content filtering, moderation, and bans. For most streamers, this is enough to prevent the madness that can become a reality.

When it's an official channel, however, it's an almost guaranteed scenario that viewers will get contentious, and quickly. When that happens, things like moderation becomes nearly impossible because of the sheer number of messages being posted. Often times, these channels take more severe measures to try and keep some civility in the chat. Others, however, take severe to all new heights.

This is the way that Blizzard is trying to handle their official Overwatch channels. Discovering that toxicity comes with the territory, Blizzard has decided to bring harsher penalties to viewers who try to raise a ruckus in chat than just being banned from the chat itself. In fact, the company has announced intentions to force Twitch users to link their Battle.net accounts before they can chat on official channels.

The question is, how does the company intend to use the linked information? It would not be a surprise to find that Blizzard plans to suspend users from certain features on Battle.net, or within Overwatch itself, if things get too out of hand. They might even go so far as to ban users on their Battle.net accounts. Starting with the Overwatch Contenders season 3 finals, Blizzard will be piloting the program. If successful, it is likely that we will see the program rolled out on a larger scale, including all of the Overwatch League.

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