The currently largest streamer on Twitch, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, struggles with his life as an anger-driven criminal on the roleplay server for GTA 5. Allegedly trapped in the role, he beat up a police officer in the game, played by his girlfriend in real life. This got him into trouble. He was called out in front of 160,000 Twitch viewers when the dispute shifted from the game to real life.
This is the situation:
- The Canadian xQc is currently by far the most-watched streamer in the world. On the roleplay server “No Pixel 3.0” for GTA 5, he plays “X”, a rogue with impulse control issues. When xQc is not banned from No Pixel and is allowed to stream there, an average of over 100,000 people watch him explore the world of GTA 5 for between 10 and 16 hours.
- The Twitch streamer “Adept” (27) lives with xQc. For a long time, it was unclear what their relationship was, but at some point, xQc cuddled her on stream, and since then it has been publicly known that they are a couple. Adept also plays on No Pixel, but as a police officer.
This is how the dispute began: The police officer Adept wanted to release the rogue X from custody. xQc was messing around with glitches – the police officer Adept seemed to want to take her time and deliberately delayed the release of xQc, saying she needed to look for her handcuffs and complete important paperwork. xQc shouted out that he was being unreasonably held up.
This is typical for xQc: He often accuses streamers playing police officers in GTA 5 of unnecessarily holding him up because they want to have him, the big Twitch celebrity, in their own stream to generate more viewers and attention. This is called “stalling”.
Once, xQc got so angry about it, that he shot two police officers from a prison cell.
This is how the dispute escalated in GTA 5: At the moment when the police officer Adept releases the rogue X, he turns around, rushes at her, and punches her. Adept says: “I knew you would do that, you damn little bitch.”
Adept calls him back to order: “Stop it now, stop it now,” but X kicks her several times while the police officer is already on the ground and then runs away.
Streamer Adept sobs after the incident, ends Twitch stream
This is what happened after the action: In the game, the police officer Adept talked with a colleague: During a conversation about her “boyfriend”, the mood gradually escalated. Adept actually wanted to continue playing, but the incident with xQc seemed to be bothering her, and about 20 minutes after the incident, one could hear in her voice that she was emotionally upset and began to sob.
In real life, Adept ended the stream and marched into xQc’s room to confront him. xQc was still streaming himself, had the microphone on, and said: He was in character in that situation and was angry at that moment. He was just playing.
But Adept did not accept that. xQc shouldn’t even start with that. He couldn’t excuse his actions by saying he was just acting as a character in GTA 5. His viewers wouldn’t know what kind of nonsense he was doing when there was no stream and no viewers present.
After that, xQc said nothing more, and there was an awkward silence. There was no facecam on, so we can only speculate whether xQc gestured to Adept to let her know that everything was going out on Twitch or if he had found the mute button after all.
In any case, xQc ended the Twitch stream a few minutes later after ten hours on air.
The dispute took place live on Twitch in front of about 160,000 people.
xQc wants to stop roleplaying in GTA 5 or play a less severe character
These are the aftermaths: Adept apologized to her viewers on Twitter for ending the stream early. She said it’s not right for her character in service to cry. That would go against the role-play. But sometimes she could endure the “dogshit” and sometimes she couldn’t.
xQc tweeted last night, as usual in all caps: Everyone thinks everything he does is “out of character”, that is, as xQc: Everyone is trying to make him look bad. Meanwhile, he is trying super hard to do good role-play.
But apparently, no one likes his character “X”, so he will either create a new character or completely stop role-playing.
Role-playing has its dangers, as can be seen from xQc’s example. A problematic example of questionable role-playing can also be found in the MMORPG World of Warcraft:
