Twitch is a great place to watch your favorite games played live, chat with friends about a commonly appreciated streamer, or to just laugh along as strangers frustrate themselves with a difficult game. Streamers have repeatedly innovated in clever ways to attract and keep more and more viewers, but the lengths to which some will go have turned around to bite them in the rear. The popular streamer Trick2g recently staged an event known as “swatting”, and has been banned by Twitch as a result.
Swatting is a term coined by the YouTube and Twitch communities, and it refers to events similar to that seen above where a S.W.A.T. team infiltrates the house of a streamer while they stream live. The in-joke has a bit of a cult following and is a popular joke used when responding to what is seen as an overreaction to something said or done on a stream, but the real origin and meaning of the term has to do with hackers. The legend says that there have been hackers that call in fake tips for crimes anonymously and give the name of a streamer in order to see the S.W.A.T. team show up at their house on live camera.
Trick2g is an extremely popular streamer, known to draw in digital crowds of more than ten thousand viewers rather regularly. Perhaps most appreciated about his streams is a sort of game he called “Sub Wars” where his subscribers play against one another and Trick2g streams their game while noting the mistakes they make or how he would’ve done something differently. In this way, viewers get to learn to play certain games better and the masses are entertained as Trick2g jokes at the expense of the inexperienced players in action. It’s all in good fun, though, and he wouldn’t stay popular if the viewers didn’t appreciate it.
The entire event was staged, and fans of the streamer who are out of the loop can be assured that Trick2g is perfectly healthy and safe, but the same cannot be said of his Twitch account. He has since been banned and Twitch refuses to give comments on violations of their terms of service, which is what they claim this to be. Regarding the event, Team2g had the following to say via the Team2g website:
To take that stream ending serious is absurd, Trick was laughing, the person used was NOT in disguise and was the same person who was on the stream all day yesterday setting up cameras and assisting the stream. The ending was scheduled for 3PM which again if thought process was used in any way, one would know that a swat team would not wait until the end of a stream to engage.
We don’t have to always be politically correct to have a sense of humor and we don’t have to hide the fact that we think something is funny simply because someone might not.
While he clearly believes it was all in good fun, Twitch doesn’t seem very flexible when it comes to breaches of their terms of service. Regardless, it’s a temporary ban, so be certain that this isn’t the last fans will see of Trick2g in some form or another.