In the German Prime League for League of Legends, a conflict escalated over the weekend. One of the participating Twitch streamers, Frederick “NoWay” Hinteregger, announces that he will take strong action against his own fans who have become “overbearing” towards the LoL team Unicorns of Love and the Prime League. He says he will permanently ban many accounts.
That was the conflict: We reported on this at MeinMMO: In the cup final of the Prime League for LoL, there was a dispute in Game 3 between NNO and Unicorns of Love. The Unicorns of Love had demanded a cancellation of the game after a bug occurred with the Ultimate of the champ Sion. The Prime League agreed to the request.
The Twitch streamers that NNO owns and who commented on the game found the decision unfair. They argued that the bug must have been noticed by the Unicorns of Love beforehand. However, the team only complained about the bug after they had lost a team fight. This was seen as “grossly unsportsmanlike” by the Twitch streamers, including NoWay.
But the outrage from the Twitch streamers over this decision stirred up significant waves.
Agurin is one of the streamers that NNO owns:
LoL fans say terrible things
That was the problem: As a result of the Prime League’s decision, many fans of NoWay and NNO expressed hate and harmful comments towards representatives of the Prime League and the team Unicorns of Love.
Especially in the fleeting chats of the Prime League and Unicorns of Love streams, where messages are often only visible for seconds, things apparently got particularly bad, as the streamer NoWay explains in a video about the Prime League’s statement.
Many messages were apparently already banned live, as evidenced by the archive of the streams.
NoWay says: One must be concerned about the behavior of one’s own community
NoWay announces: The leading German Twitch streamer for LoL, NoWay, says that he finds the behavior of his community extremely uncomfortable. While he also criticizes the decision of the Prime League and the Unicorns’ statement, he says that the hate against them is now unnecessary:
The players of the Unicorns are not at fault at all, nor is the production team. They don’t make these decisions.
He elaborates: This hate and these copy-pastas were “very unpleasant.” This is something that as a community, we need to be concerned about.
They will now go through the different video on demands, including those from the Prime League and the Unicorns of Love, and identify community members who have expressed hateful comments:
We will have to issue a lot of permanent bans. People who have become overbearing […] and make sure that those who have written really terrible things, and some have, are all permanently banned on all our channels, because that is of course unacceptable.
NoWay takes responsibility
This is what’s behind it: When one considers that some German Twitch streamers even refuse to moderate comments under their own YouTube videos because it is “too much work”, and deny any responsibility for their actions, NoWay’s behavior, taking on such extra work, is admirable. This is truly an example of real outreach responsibility.
It is also noticeable that NoWay feels somewhat uncomfortable in retrospect about how emotionally he reacted to the game interruption and the Prime League’s decision at that moment. He must somewhat douse the fire he himself helped ignite: The German league for LoL is sharply criticized, especially by the top streamers on Twitch.
