A PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds player was "falsely" banned for stream sniping popular streamer
What a messy world online games have become. It used to be simple - kill the bots, top the leaderboards, feel good about yourself, and then go to bed at 9pm because you’ve got school in the morning. Now games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have masses of real humans hunting each other, some of them streaming it to thousands of viewers online. That can end poorly if you annoy them and their communities, as player Lotoe found out last night.
As an introduction, stream sniping is where you tune into a streamer’s broadcast while in the same game as them, and use that information to defeat them..
Last night, two popular Counter-Strike-turned-PUBG streamers, Shroud and Summit1G, were duoing together. They were killed by a group of stream snipers a couple of times and were understandably a bit annoyed about it. After a short gunfight in which Summit died but Shroud took their mutual opponent out, Lotoe strolled up and killed Shroud.
“I was just outrunning the blue [the name given to PUBG’s ever-decreasing kill field] trying to get to the edge of the circle, which was [next to] the fight that Summit and Shroud were having with a duo of stream snipers,” Lotoe explains to me via Discord. “[I] heard all the shots being fired so I went to go [and] get some loot. When I got there, Shroud killed some guy on a hill and went to go loot him and get out of the blue, which is when I shot and killed him.”
You can see it from Shroud’s perspective in this (rather explicit) Twitch clip. Lotoe says that about 20 seconds after that he got sniped himself. He then loaded into another game, eventually died, and was booted to a screen that said he was banned. The assumption is that mass reporting from stream viewers - a fairly common practice - led to the ban.
Lotoe then got in contact with Hawkinz via Discord, a community coordinator for the game, who told him that the ban was for stream sniping and would last seven days. As Lotoe explained then and to me, “I don't even watch Twitch, if I do it’s normally some ESL thing or whatever.”
Lotoe has submitted a ban appeal but hasn’t been contacted by anyone on the PUBG yet. Lead community manager Sammie (PoopieQueen on Twitter - hey, I just write the news, I don’t judge) says there should be a statement soon:
Huh, how can you prove a 'stream snipe'? :)
Our team have been looking into this specific issue and it will be addressed soon.
@poopieQueen has responded to the incident:
Regarding accusations that the @PUBATTLEGROUNDS community team falsely banned a player for stream-sniping...
https://twitter.com/PLAYERUNKNOWN/status/891315798488240128
