Twitch Plays Pokémon,’ the stream where thousands of players try to control a single trainer in Pokemon Red, is pretty popular — so popular, in fact, that whenever we posted about it, we’d get a number of reports from unhappy streamers who claimed the chat function in other completely unrelated streams were being affected by Twitch Plays Pokemon. Notably, there were reports of extreme chat delay or chat messages never appearing at all due to Twitch Plays Pokemon.
Today, Twitch acknowledges the problem — and says they’re working on a fix.
“The unique nature and huge chat participation in the TwitchPlaysPokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system,” Twitch director Jason Maestas wrote in a blog post.
“Our first adjustment on Sunday was to move the channel off of our general chat servers onto a dedicated event chat server, which we typically use for large events like The International and League Championship Series (LCS). This helped, but there were some fundamental issues with our chat infrastructure that required a review,” he continued.
While some improvements have been made, Twitch is still working on fixing all the issues. For now, it seems kind of amazing that a single stream could become so demanding. At one point earlier this week, Twitch Plays Pokemon had more than 100,000 people watching — and Twitch says that more than 300,000 people have participated in helping Red acquire four gym badges (as of this writing).
Comments
6 responses to “‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’ Is Breaking Parts Of Twitch”
I assume for the past 24 hours people have started using anarchy/democracy spam scripts which probably only heightened the problem, I doubt Twitch cares anyways the amount of exposure this stream is getting twitch is well worth the instability.
i want Nintendo’s comment on this, Kotaku can you ask them there thoughts please?
“What’s an internet?”
haha lol
“We shall introduce Pokemon T as a future product. Play other players characters as a group!”
It’s an amazing experiment – unprecedented, and heaps of fun. Just a bit uncool other streamers are suffering as a result. Hopefully they come up with a fix soon.