Twitch has announced that they’re going to start cracking down on Valorant streams that claim to be live and giving out beta drops, but are actually just reposting gameplay VODs.
Valorant entered its closed beta on April 7, and fans were instantly antsy for access at a chance to play Riot’s new FPS.
This resulted in Valorant skyrocketing as one of the most-viewed games on Twitch – but not every “streamer” in the category was showing live gameplay, as there were a number of accounts simply replaying old VODs to farm drops and viewers.
However, on April 28, Twitch announced changes to its community guidelines that will hopefully cut down on the number of fraud Valorant streams.
“We’ve heard concerns about creators continuously streaming VODs while tagging the channel as ‘Live’ to farm Valorant Drops,” Twitch Support tweeted. “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.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) April 28, 2020
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One of those complaining about the Valorant category was veteran streamer Jaryd ‘Summit1g’ Lazar, who blasted the game’s section as the “fakest” on Twitch.
“This is the fakest section on Twitch!” summit raged. “It’s the absolute fakest section on Twitch right now, am I wrong? Am I f**king wrong? Look at that [viewer] number. Is that real? Not even f**king close! Not even f**king close!”
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“You should all be f**king ashamed,” he continued later on. “You’re not Twitch streamers, you’re not even YouTubers… There’s no editing, you f**king throw up your VOD as soon as you go offline, like I’m playing my outro video… Valorant looks like a piece of shit video game on Twitch right now.”
The fake streams weren’t just leaving a bad impression on summit either – but fans are hopeful that these the new guidelines will allow Twitch staff to carry out some much-needed cleaning on the Valorant page.