Unpopular opinion: Contestants in tournaments should be disallowed from streaming their matches

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I know that tournament matches make good streaming content, but I feel that doing so leaves open the possibility for unethical contestants (for instance, SongSong before he was banned) or viewers of the contestants to stream snipe and gain a significant advantage. Banning any kind of streaming of the tournament matches for contestants while the matches are live eliminates both the act of stream sniping and being stream sniped.

What do you think? Do you think that pros should still be allowed to stream their tournament matches? Or do you think the risk of stream sniping is far too great?

2

who are you to tell tournament hosts what rules they should make in their tournaments?

3

Dude, it is a suggestion and a recommendation based on a personal opinion. I’m not telling TOs to do anything. Cool your jets.

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4

The pro community is relatively small and tight knit. They know and trust each other and are therefore comfortable streaming. If that were to change then they might stop streaming.

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5

Yeah, that’s true. I suppose I assume the worst after what SongSong pulled…

6

I think the economic benefits for the pros outweight the chance of someone streamsniping since the game is kinda small and tournaments attract viewers

And either way you could watch the caster anyway

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If someone chooses to be in disadvantage by streaming, let them. For the tournament organisers, it is just free exposure as their channel isn’t followed by everyone.

Overall stream sniping is something that will just hurt your skill long-term. It isn’t like stream sniping will give you 300+ elo or anything.

8

There’s a lot of income and incentive to stream tourney matches, its when the pros play their best and matches are of the highest quality. Is there a chance there’ll be stream sniping? Yes. But the pro community is really small, and not much to lose on so much just for winning one tourney, especially when its not exactly that hard to spot stream sniping. This is a really weird unpopular opinion.

9

additionally many tournaments are played with 3-5 minutes spec delay, there is nothing to be gained from watching what your opponent did 5 minutes ago

if anything streaming players are reducing the chance of cheating since we can see that the streamer isn’t cheating

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10

Wasn’t this how it came out that some player watched the map prior to a restart in a tournament last year? I remember some screenshots from a stream in which a second monitor was visible, but I cannot quite remember the exact circumstances / when that was exactly.

Edit: I think I ment this incident involving SongSong in which they were discussing the opponents strategies prior to a restart in a turney on stream.

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11

Yes, the incident with SongSong was what raised my concerns, but I suppose there are enough countermeasures to prevent a repeat.

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Actually, we prob will not discover that Songsong cheated if he did not stream.

(He looked at the revealed map when there was a disconnection)

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13

Songsong didn’t cheat through stream. He spec-cheated with his friends who were on voice on discord and were spectating the game and reporting that information to him. Other than that when the game was saved and the map was revealed he saw the entire opponent map and build on stream.

Usually streaming doesn’t lead to cheating because there’s a delay and the mods delete the chat messages if someone tries to reveal something. And a few exceptions like Songsong apart, almost all high level players are ethical and fair to the competition. Makes no sense to punish them for what a very few terrible people did.

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