In recent weeks, we have reported on MeinMMO about a Twitch streamer with a long sub-marathon and players being boosted. In doing so, our editor Alexander Leitsch recalled a curious situation from his past. Back then, he was paid live to die in raids instead of making progress.
What was going on there? Before my time at MeinMMO, I was the operator of the GW2 fan site Guildnews.de and very active on the streaming platform Twitch. There I presented content about Guild Wars 2 several times a week, including various raids that I ran with a fixed group.
On a Monday evening nearly 4 years ago, we had the curious idea to challenge our community. The rules were very simple:
- Whenever someone subscribed on Twitch, our group had to wipe.
- It didn’t matter how far we were in the boss fight. No complaints, no delays, no last-second kills.
- In Guild Wars 2, this can be easily done with the command /gg.
We knew in advance that some of our regular viewers would probably extend their subscriptions that evening, as they had just expired. But how cruel the community would be surprised us completely.
Numerous wipes under 10% health and the slow madness
How did the viewers react? Although our community has always been very positive towards us, they were really cruel that evening. For their 5 euros that a subscription costs on Twitch, they wanted a lot in return.
At the beginning of the raid, everything was still quite harmless. We had our first wipe at 70% of the boss fight, probably just because the viewers wanted to test if we would actually stick to the rules. After that, the subscribers became bolder and let us drop to 30% or 20% health.
The longer the evening went on, the more cruel they became:
- Again and again we had to give up the boss fight at under 10% remaining health
- Suddenly, viewers came up with the idea of even having us wipe during the preparation for the boss. So we would run to the boss, buff ourselves and were just about to start when the subscription came in
- One individual user left a subscription that evening with 8 different accounts, which was completely crazy for us
How did this come across to the raid group? Although we expected many wipes in the team, we were surprised that we were not even granted the kill of the first boss for a long time. It was relatively easy after all. We would have expected them to let us fail against more difficult bosses.
Repeatedly running against the same boss led to totally absurd situations over the course of the evening:
- Some started to scream their frustration, wrapped in a thank you for the subs
- Others started playing crazy music in the background, like the “Nyan Cat” song or death metal
- The seriousness was also lost because we expected to die right before the end of the fight. This led to several wipes that even happened without a subscription. We simply messed up
After all, we had 2 boss kills, we ended the livestream about 3 hours after starting. Normally, we would have easily managed 5 to 8 bosses in that time.
What did this action bring? Loads of fun…. and money! My raid group was a bit annoyed by our weak progress, but in the end, there were just a lot of laughs and curious scenes, like a subscription that came in about 2 seconds after the boss kill due to the stream delay.
The relief in that moment in TeamSpeak could be heard by all viewers.
About 100 euros were collected through the subscriptions. By the way, my raid group did not see any of that money. It was primarily used to cover server costs. However, the wasted buff food I sponsored in the game, after all, I am not an inhuman person!
People spend huge sums for entertainment and progress in gaming
How did I even come up with the idea for the article? There were two triggers for this article:
- On the one hand, we reported this week about the Twitch streamer Ludwig. He streams for 20 seconds longer for every subscription completed. So far, he has already spent 200 hours live and probably earned $400,000.
- On the other hand, there was a WoW streamer this week who openly admitted to being boosted. For money, she had her arena rank improved, even though that is exactly the opposite of what we did.
Such curious stories about gaming and huge sums emerge time and again.
I myself have been on the positive side, even though we only generated a small three-digit amount from our action. However, “dying for money” was a lot of fun for us and our viewers, and no one was forced to do anything.
But what do you think about it? Have you ever invested money to support such challenges? How cruel would you have been to my raid team?
