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Mike Morhaime on Combating Racism in Hearthstone
There's been a lot of discussion regarding the recent DreamHack Austin Hearthstone event, but unfortunately not all of it has been positive. During the event, Twitch chat was filled with blatant racism during matches featuring Hearthstone Pro, Terrence Miller, which was not moderated well.
Today, Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment's President and CEO, issued a statement about the event and clarified that the company is investigating ways to deal with discriminatory behaviour in the future.
- The use of a Twitch pilot program to help moderate streams/ban evades is being looked into.
- Esports tournament partner policies will have stricter checks and penalties to provide a better chat experience.
Quote from Mike MorhaimeWe’re extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last. One of our company values is “Play Nice; Play Fair”; we feel there’s no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community. This is obviously a larger, societal problem that affects us on many levels. We can only hope that when instances like this come to light it encourages people to be more thoughtful and positive, and to fully reject mean-spirited commentary, whether within themselves or from their fellow gamers.To help combat this type of behavior during live events, we’ve reached out to players, streamers, and moderators, along with partners like Twitch, DreamHack, and others, to get consensus and collaborate on what to do differently moving forward. To that end, we’re investigating a pilot program that Twitch has in the works to streamline moderation and combat ban evasion. We’re also updating our esports tournament partner policies with a stronger system of checks, balances, and repercussions to provide a better chat experience around our content.
We believe these are important steps to take to help address the related issues, but we acknowledge that they only address part of the problem. This is ultimately an industry-wide issue, and it will take all of us to make a real impact.
Additionally, GamesBeat reached out to Twitch who had the following to say.
Quote from TwitchWe take harassment very seriously and understand how important this is for the entire Twitch community. We currently approach chat behavior by providing broadcasters tools, education, and autonomy to police their own channel. While in this instance the broadcaster was unable to fully prevent the described behavior, Twitch has a responsibility to broadcasters and players to provide a welcoming environment. As such, as Blizzard noted, we are exploring new tools and processes to increase awareness and mitigation of these issues, and will continue to take action against chatters who committed reported violations. We can’t comment on specifics at this time, but we do have a team dedicated to improving these aspects of the chat experience with a lot of internal progress already that we hope to share with the community soon.
People are anonymous in the internet an there is nothing you can do about that. Banning accounts just makes them create new ones. This reaction is the worst, that could have happened, because now those idiots see, that they are noticed and have the attention they wanted. They might even be more racist in the future, now that they know, that racism is noticed. You don't get attention by commenting on good plays or pointing out misplays/better alternatives. That is something you can do in channels with less than 1000 viewers and the reason why I like smaller streams. In large channels (>10000) your message is only noticed, when multiple people spam the same shit within half a second. So those attention-w**res feel better when they assume that their spam is read by 10000 other people, even if 100 other people write the same in the same time.
Many big streams (Kripp, Forsen) also have "civil chat"-rooms where you actually can make comments on gameplay and other interesting stuff. You just have to get invited ;).
And this is wrong! It should be the other way around. Get the spamers in one fcking channel who nobody cares about them anymore. Not the main channel where new people join and see the spam. Because then they think, hey, Spam is OK. Racism is OK. Bad speech is OK. Let's do this as well on other channels!
the chat really was terrible to look at. Calling overweight people fat americans, the one black guy racial slurs. It really was a shit show, like the worst people came to ruin it for everyone. I don't know what it is about twitch that brings out the worst in people, maybe because the chat goes so fast they feel like they can hide their hateful comments?
Twitch Chat continues to prove we as a species do not deserve absolute freedom... People man...
It makes the community look bad, and definitely worse than it actually is. This may not effect people who casually play Hearthstone, but depending on media coverage it can effect the public's view of Blizzard as a company and more importantly, it can hurt competitive events, teams, and current / potential sponsors.
All because of a silly meme-infested chat. That's shitty.
How does it make the community look bad? Like, who in the whole world does not know that twitch chat is shit? It's magma rager level obvious. You take a look - you realise that it basically has a giant red "CANCER" word printed all over it.
It's sort of like how gamers aren't taken seriously as a whole in media. People only see what is reported to them and if they see nothing but "oh hearthstone community is wildly racist" not understanding the dynamic twitch chat fosters (anonymity, general stupidity), then the majority of people will think that the hearthstone community is wildly racist. It sucks, but that's what happens.
This is goddamn twitch-chat we are talking about. But in the end somebody like Wes Fenlon is always taking something seriously that isn't meaned to be seriously taken.
Ironically this seems only to be a problem in hearthstone. But LoL has the same problem, and does somebody write about this too? Not until now. And everyone can simply turn of twitch-chat. But like before people needs to create issues where there aren't no one.
But in the end this is only a clickbait for PcGamer. They want to make money, so throwing something like this in the room brings them clicks and more money. So in the end the Author did make it right. It's a storm in an Water Bottle, but more money from advertising.
To conclusion: Is racism a problem? Naturally yes, and it's stupid, but so are people too who takes twitch-chat seriously.
Meh.
Well.. Nothing to be expected from twitch chat..
Disgusting behavior, really.
To my knowledge, no Asian players have decided to call it out before, and it's never been quite so public as it was at Dreamhack this year. There's a lot of factors that are bringing this to attention now.
And people like Controlado are the reason twitch chat is so cancerous. I don't frequently use that term but it's utterly atrocious how bad it's become.
Triggered by an emote.
TriHard
It wasn't the emote, it was the people calling the player in question a Nigger and a Monkey in the public chat. If you're gonna make a comment like that, at least educate yourself first.
Better yet, educate yourself and still dont make that comment