The League of Legends has some major Twitch streamers, who stand out for their aggressive nature, like Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp, Julian “Tarazaned” Farokhian, or Ashkan “TFBlade” Homayouni. A Challenger player is now explaining how he suffers under such LoL streamers. But the backlash is huge.
Who is speaking? The player Nikkone is Challenger in the Solo Queue of North America: He is among the top 200 players in the ranking of the region.
Nikkone is a so-called “One Trick” player: He has found a clear “main” character in LoL with Fiddlesticks, which he prefers to play. Nikkone has played Fiddlesticks in 367 games of the current season and has won 56% of those games (via ops.gg).
This currently places him at rank 157, placing him in the top 0.0083% of the leaderboard. At the very top of the USA is still the bot laner of Cloud9, Zven. However, he doesn’t really play “Solo Queue” but often teams up with his bot lane partner.
Twitch streamers are terrible losers
This is his problem: As a Challenger, Nikkone often plays against some of the most famous Twitch streamers in LoL, who are also in this weight class.
The problem occurs when he is on a team with these Twitch streamers and they lose, which statistically is likely to happen about 50% of the time, since matchmaking pits even teams against each other. And the strong Twitch streamers are generally not good losers.
Nikkone showed in a YouTube video how Twitch streamer TFBlade spends minutes after a loss focusing on his own team: The streamer looks up on a stats page to see exactly who was in his team and finds “Nikkone” there.
Then he rages about these players:
- He wouldn’t even be a Challenger, but just “Diamond”
- Such one-tricks would be useless if their main character were banned; they would only drag a team down. They should have the decency to leave the lobby.
- TFBlade reviews the match statistics of the player to further prove that the loss was solely due to that one terribly bad player
The problem is that TFBlade has a massive reach on Twitch and his chat goes after the supposedly “bad player”. Nikkone says that when such things happen, he gets bombarded by fans of this streamer with hate messages. This completely ruins his enjoyment of League of Legends.
In screenshots from the Twitch chat of TFBlade, you can indeed read hate messages against Nikkone, calling him “trash”, telling him to “take a rope”,
This is what he wishes for: Nikkone says that the currently toxic streamers are a problem for League of Legends. Because they serve as role models for the players, creating a bad atmosphere in LoL. He longs for the time of the past.
Back then, the LoL community didn’t let such people rise, but the big streamers were players like Marcus “Dyrus” Hill or Brian “TheOddOne” Wyllie. They would have been better role models for the LoL community.
Player receives approval and criticism for his video
These were the effects of the video:
The video triggered intense reactions in recent days:
- The video was discussed on reddit (via reddit). Many agreed with Nikkone, especially TFBlade was simply toxic
- other top players said that for the last 2 or 3 years, it had indeed been a problem that Twitch streamers like Tyler1 flame them and one has their fans on one’s neck, telling them they are the “worst player in high ELO”
- Several Twitch streamers were mentioned that should be seen instead of the big toxic Twitch streamers
- In the comments of the YouTube video, Nikkone was accused of being toxic himself and provoking TFBlade. Some took issue with Nikkone: he had flamed TFBlade heavily in a lobby. The clip was then surfaced as “defense” of TFBlade, showing how toxic Nikkone himself was:
- Nikkone has now deleted the YouTube video. On Twitter, Nikkone admitted he had indeed exploded against TFBlade in the lobby at one point, but that was an absolute exception because he had been driven that far. Normally he never writes
This is what Nikkone says now: Nikkone seems to be surprised and affected by the massive backlash that his video has triggered. Now he is suddenly the villain. It’s totally crazy. But it also shows him how much time he has wasted wanting to change things. He is now considering quitting LoL.
He did his best, but people just don’t care. The streamers just say something and all their viewers believe it, which shows him how deeply rooted the problem is (via twitter).
Streamers like TFBlade are outstandingly strong players, but they make little effort to control the bad feelings that arise with a loss: This is called tilt.
Instead, their fans now expect them to get terribly upset and flame wildly, as it entertains viewers on Twitch. For a long time, Riot Games seemed to tolerate this behavior, but now there are consequences:
LoL is kicking its biggest Twitch streamers out of the partner program
