The Twitch streamer Maximilian “Trymacs” Stemmler is also participating in the WoW hardcore project Sauercrowd. However, as he has not fulfilled his tax payment obligation, he has now been punished with music by two of the founders.
Tax evasion in WoW? The WoW hardcore project has strict rules. Participants must also pay taxes to the guild. Every day, one silver must be paid per their character level.
Trymacs preferred to pay all the taxes at once instead of whenever they were due. His reasoning was that he was wasting too much time lining up for it: “I go full crashout. Half an hour of guild meeting and then 40 minutes standing in line to pay taxes.” (Source: YouTube starting at 00:09).
Trymacs further stated that his teammates would play so much more than he would. While he had “only” 8 to 10 hours a day for WoW, the others had around 16 hours available. Any time loss, such as that incurred during tax payment, was too precious to waste. After all, he would miss out on things.
“I couldn’t handle it”
How is Trymacs punished? Two of the founders, HandOfBlood and Papaplatte, confronted the Twitch streamer in one of his livestreams with the accusations of tax evasion and directly informed him of his punishment. They did not want to impose an in-game penalty, as that would set back his progress and would be unfair.
Instead, the punishment was twofold and took place partly in real life: Trymacs had to wait until the very end to pay at the next tax payment. Additionally, HandOfBlood and Papaplatte prepared a playlist for him with radio-type songs that Trymacs had to listen to in his next Twitch stream.
All of this for at least 6 to 7 hours. Furthermore, only a handful of songs were added so that they would repeat continuously.
How did Trymacs handle it? For Trymacs, the songs seemed to be a torture. After about 5.5 hours, he announced to his teammates that he would log off and stated:
I couldn’t handle it. I can’t deal with the music, it’s just unbelievable. This is probably much worse for me than for others, it’s crazy.
– Trymacs on Twitch starting at 05:39:57
The WoW hardcore project seems to be hardcore for every Twitch streamer in different ways. Especially newcomers are currently learning how punishing the hardcore mode is: Twitch streamer from Sauercrowd arrives just one second late, thus learns about one of the “deadliest bosses” in WoW
