Hearthstone: Genug ist genug – Wenn der Twitch-Chat zur Jauchegrube wird

This was too much for the moderator of the Twitch chat of the Hearthstone Dreamhack event – the chat simply went too far this time!

Anyone who watched the Hearthstone tournament at the Dreamhack on Twitch.tv and did not hide the chat will probably know exactly what this is about.  According to a chat moderator of the event, the Twitch chat was full of racism, sexism, and generally derogatory comments. Now the typical Twitch viewer thinks “It’s all the same, what’s the problem?” – This time it was even worse than usual.

“The Twitch chat is rarely mature, but that was too much!”

Carling “Toastthebadger” Filewich has long been a community member of Hearthstone and was asked if he could moderate the chat during the Dreamhack weekend. He says: It was not just about making fun of people because of their descent, weight, or appearance. It was even bad for some people in the chat how someone held their pen – simply everyone who was shown on the stream screen was insulted by people in the chat.

Although the entire Dreamhack tournament was well thought out, Filewich says, not enough thought was put into the Twitch chat. Even Moobot (a chat bot that can automatically ban people when forbidden words are written) was set so that only the Tryhard emote was banned – everything else was okay.

“The Dreamhack did not think enough about chat moderation for the Hearthstone channel, and the moderators (myself included) failed to handle the Dreamhack.” The selection of moderators was already not good. If you logged into the chat at the right time over the weekend, you could even see moderators participating in the racist spam. Those moderators even offered to unban banned users, regardless of how racist they had previously expressed themselves.

Such a thing must not happen again in the future

The organizers of such tournaments should prioritize chat moderation more. While you can’t expect the highest level and intellectual conversations with several thousand viewers, it should never again unfold as it did over the weekend in the chat, says Filewich. However, he does not want to blame the Dreamhack organizers for how inhumane it was in the Twitch chat of the Hearthstone tournament. The users who wrote the messages, which Filewich himself did not want to quote, are solely responsible for that.

There were too few moderators, and those who were there were not the right ones and did not have the necessary tools to control the chat. Filewich says he hopes that in the future more attention will be paid to planning an experienced moderation team for the Twitch chat. Even if it is not the majority of the community, this toxic behavior casts a bad light on the community as a whole. He hopes that readers will agree and decide together “Enough is Enough!“