The streamer Sebastian “forsen” Fors has deleted some emotes on Twitch. Normally, these emotes are a significant part of his community, but the streamer fears a ban.
This is what happened: forsen announced in a stream that he has to remove 4 emotes. These include ForsenTake, forsenA, forsenBreak, and forsenDED. He cited the new regulations on Twitch as the reason and did not seem particularly happy about it.
The removal is a significant blow, as forsen’s viewers are known for being a strong community that has established several emotes worldwide.
Twitch bans emote chains – forsen must react
Why do the emotes need to be removed? The reason is regulations on Twitch that took effect on January 22. These regulations ban certain emote chains, meaning multiple different emotes in a single message.
This aims to prevent these emotes from being used maliciously. While individual emotes may not be problematic, chaining them together could result in a malicious message.
One such emote chain is also used by forsen in his streams. 4 emotes together create the message “Stop Streaming” and an icon that shows 0 viewers. This could particularly be used maliciously against smaller streamers as a call to stop streaming because they are not successful.
How does forsen react to this? He seems to not fully understand the regulations. He says: “I have to remove 4 or 5 emotes that can be used to harass other streamers” and drags it out in a way that makes it sound as if he finds it somewhat ridiculous.
However, forsen has had some missteps in the past. Most recently, he was banned at the end of November 2020 when he accidentally opened an image that showed sodomy. Twitch responded with a permanent ban, which they lifted only a month later. Further violations of Twitch’s regulations could have more serious consequences for forsen.
Why is this a blow to his community? forsen’s community is considered particularly active. Although the streamer has “only” 1.5 million followers (ranked 123 worldwide) and is significantly smaller than the big names on Twitch, his community is all the more active.
They regularly come up with new memes and emotes that they then establish worldwide. forsen mentioned that his community invented the memes pepega, omegalul, and Peplaugh. These are now actively used worldwide. The meme forsenE was the most used emote on Twitch worldwide in 2018 – it also comes from his community.
Now, a few emotes from forsen are being removed because Twitch bans them in combination. They are indeed popular emotes, which is why it’s a blow to the community.
forsen himself used a WoW comparison to describe himself and his emotes. In doing so, he explained how important he is for Twitch:
Streamer uses WoW comparison to explain how important he is for Twitch
