I don't like it, but they bring crazy exposure to Blizzard - so I wouldn't rule some sort of benefits being granted, or some form of 'sponsored' players. Looking after these key streamers and making sure they are happy playing there, will bring them in millions of dollars - which as a business is crazy to turn down.
Would it be bizarre for Blizzard CM's to hit up some streamers and talk them into dispersing their numbers across servers? Or is it in their interest to have THE streamer server?
Blizzard are probably working on it in the background and just not publicly but only time will tell how they will deal with such circumstances. On a side note, having every streamer on the same server would just make it easier to avoid them.
I don't like it, but they bring crazy exposure to Blizzard - so I wouldn't rule some sort of benefits being granted, or some form of 'sponsored' players. Looking after these key streamers and making sure they are happy playing there, will bring them in millions of dollars - which as a business is crazy to turn down.
Would it be bizarre for Blizzard CM's to hit up some streamers and talk them into dispersing their numbers across servers? Or is it in their interest to have THE streamer server?
I just wonder if it will be alluring for Blizzard to tap in to that 'market' as it requires little to no monetary input with substantial potential benefits. I'm not saying it's right, I just think it's a possibility.
So I had Sodapoppin's Stream on in the background and they were talking about Classic and there was a fairly controversial topic that was brought up. Streamer benefits.
As you can expect a lot of streamers are going to be trying Classic on release, it's all the hype and with that comes a flood of players from their followings. As far as I know Soda already has a large guild planned for Horde on an NA server of choosing (pending realm name releases) which will also include other streamers, notably Shroud, Timthetatman, Soda himself and potentially Lirik+Shortyy. If you didn't know all of these streamers are considered extremely popular each being able to pull 40k+ numbers on particular games and whilst these numbers will split amongst them but they are all in the same guild, same faction, same realm.
Getting to the point -- If they net 150k concurrent viewers together and 10% of those are the "I wanna play with/against my favourite streamer!" type then that's more than what we'd expect a realm to hold at any one time, bringing up the issue of a server being overpopulated and having large queue times. Soda responded to this topic saying that Blizzard will need to either add a priority system to streamers or lock the realm they choose after x amount of time.
Should streamers receive special treatment? Blizzard has locked overpopulated servers in the past so I see that as a possibility but queue priority? I think that's a little bit too much.
Should streamers just have to deal with their decision to all play together? Should they get priority? Should they be able to lock out players wanting to just play with their friend that unfortunately landed on this streamers realm? We live in a time where streaming has a huge impact on a game and its players, good and bad.
What are your thoughts? Personally I see Blizzard doing what they've always done and wait until things go bad rather than being proactive, they are likely to end up locking the realm and opening transfers until the one realm is more balanced albeit unbalancing other realms in the process.
Just an interesting topic for the forums to get dug into while we wait for Classic.
"Should streamers receive special treatment?" Yes. Their servers will be exclusively comprised of their own fans. It serves Blizz, their fans and the servers to have them online as often as possible. If that streamer leaves, the server will collapse. Trust me... You will know you are on a streamer server immediately and if you arent a fan and you wont be there for very long anyhow. The experience streamers have will never be authentic... Fans running up and donating 2-5000g for 2-3 seconds of screen time, hordes of players at their beck and call and simultaneously hordes of trolls and snipers looking to derail the stream. The servers will have massive queue times and crashes and ultimately the streamers will quit at some point and the server will collapse... A streamer gets a temporary ban? The server is a ghost town until they return... I'd actually prefer Blizz communicating with streamers to address their concerns and working together with them to create a mutual solution. Whether that is a pvp streamer invitation only server or a few select servers designed for groups of streamers. Anything we can do to nullify their impact and quarantine their fanbase is for the best.
An Idea would something like 'Streamermode'. Rust has something like that, they hide all the "important" informations about the servers so Streamsnipers cant find the server the easy way.
"Should streamers receive special treatment?" Yes. Their servers will be exclusively comprised of their own fans. It serves Blizz, their fans and the servers to have them online as often as possible. If that streamer leaves, the server will collapse. Trust me... You will know you are on a streamer server immediately and if you arent a fan and you wont be there for very long anyhow. The experience streamers have will never be authentic... Fans running up and donating 2-5000g for 2-3 seconds of screen time, hordes of players at their beck and call and simultaneously hordes of trolls and snipers looking to derail the stream. The servers will have massive queue times and crashes and ultimately the streamers will quit at some point and the server will collapse... A streamer gets a temporary ban? The server is a ghost town until they return... I'd actually prefer Blizz communicating with streamers to address their concerns and working together with them to create a mutual solution. Whether that is a pvp streamer invitation only server or a few select servers designed for groups of streamers. Anything we can do to nullify their impact and quarantine their fanbase is for the best.
You know, this is an amazing idea! They get their fanbase with them, they can stream freely, the fanbase gets to play with indeed only like-minded people, and the rest of us can be left in peace. If only there was some way to actually do this in reality, that would be awesome.
An Idea would something like 'Streamermode'. Rust has something like that, they hide all the "important" informations about the servers so Streamsnipers cant find the server the easy way.
That would depend on how many servers they bring out and would require a lot of servers, else the streamsnipers could just jump between the servers and "brute force" which server they are playing on. Also, since you can't change server, the streamsnipers would only need to find them once.
Only blizzard has the authority of controlling their systems. Twitch is an advertisement platform for games as much as Google's search engine for websites.
Concerns of these systems are already considered by server and authentication engineers. They design systems for more than a twitch crowd. There will always be a population that will naturally form around influencers. Blizzard has already stated that there will be sharding of servers at the start to maintain stability of zones.
My opinion?
No there won't be any special cookie scenarios outside of those who represent or are a part of the Blizzard studios.
edit:
Influencers are a risk and will not be endorsed by Blizzard without incredibly strict NDAs.