Stream snipers have plagued battle royale games and Fortnite is no different – Twitch superstar Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins believes more needs to be done to eradicate the issue.
Since the game’s inception, players have intentionally attempted to ruin top streamers’ experience by watching their live feed to gain an unfair advantage.
Almost every large content creator or professional player has encountered the issue, most recently CouRage who was able to catch his stream sniper in the act and hopefully get him banned for good.
Despite Twitch actively banning users who are caught stream sniping and broadcasting it on the platform, Ninja believes that Epic Games must do more to crack down on the issue to give streamers the best experience possible.
He cited the success achieved by Apex Legends as the main reason to give priority to streamers and content creators ahead of regular users of the game.
“Content creators make video games dude,” Blevins said. “Take Apex for example. It was a free game, EA paid a bunch of creators to play the game and it blew up. It made 90 million in its first month – that’s amazing!”
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“But, I guarantee it wouldn’t have been that successful if it wasn’t for those streamers who promoted it, they need to be valued more than a normal person who plays that game – you take care of your customers.”
Ninja believes that Fortnite could suffer a similar fate to H1Z1 unless drastic action is taken against stream snipers which might force him to quit the game for good.
“Stream snipers got so out of control [in H1Z1] that I stopped playing the game,” Ninja explains.
“Putting on a delay isn’t streaming – I shouldn’t have to put a 30 second delay on to stop people getting into my game.
PUBG got out of control – I stopped playing PUBG. It’s the same thing with Fortnite. Epic needs to go above and beyond for the top content creators to have the best experience they possibly can.”
Fortnite have added a hidden matchmaking delay as well as an anonymous mode in the past to reduce the problem but players are still able to queue up with the top streamers easily.
Stream sniping ruins the experience for both the streamer and viewer and more does need to be done to eradicate the issue once and for all.