For weeks, one of the most popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streamers, Grimmmz, has been getting tormented not with guns or frying pans, but with car horns. Yesterday, some players gloated about “stream honking” him and posted a video as proof. Upon seeing this, Grimmmz lost his cool and got the video taken down. He quickly came to regret that decision.
A few weeks ago, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds added car horns. Mere hours later, trolls switched from stream sniping — that is, joining the same matches as popular players and watching their streams to gain an upper hand — to following streamers around in cars and incessantly honking at them. Unlike stream sniping, it wasn’t explicitly against PUBG‘s rules. It was pretty funny for five minutes or so. Then it became a serious annoyance to bigtime PUBG streamers such as Dr Disrespect and Grimmmz, who had stream honkers constantly buzzing around them like deafeningly loud flies.
While Disrespect has mostly taken to hunting down and blasting so-called “stream honkers” and then, er, flicking his tongue suggestively like some kind of mustachioed sex snake, Grimmmz hasn’t been taking it so well. Yesterday, it all came to a head when YouTube channel Visceral Art Gaming posted a video in which they repeatedly stream honked both of the popular streamers, among others. Snippets of the video were from their perspective, but much of the footage was lifted directly from Dr Disrespect and Grimmmz’s streams. It wasn’t long before Grimmmz got the video taken off YouTube with a copyright claim.
This action seems to have burst the dam holding back the PUBG community’s pent-up rage, which has been building ever since a player got banned from the game for allegedly stream sniping another popular streamer, Shroud. Many feel like streamers expose themselves to this kind of treatment by virtue of what they do and should be prepared to deal with the consequences, rather than make a fuss about it and potentially get people (who might not even be stream sniping) banned.
Suddenly, here was Grimmmz, escalating things even further while arguably misusing copyright claims, which is a huge no-no in the YouTube community. Irate threads flooded the front page of the PUBG subreddit, and YouTubers such as Totalbiscuit and H3H3’s Ethan Klein voiced their disapproval.
With the rage deluge showing no sign of letting up, Grimmmz capitulated: In a TwitLonger post, he apologised and said that now even he thought he did the wrong thing, given the situation.
“I snapped,” he wrote. “At that point I was at the peak of my frustration, and I didn’t know what else to do but to hurt them back. Hurt the people that decided it was okay to try to fuck with me on a daily basis, to try to take something away from THEM as they took away from my good vibes from me and my chat. My judgement was clouded and it was just a warpath at that point.”
Grimmmz added that this came after weeks of harassment from stream snipers and honkers, up to and including messages outside the game:
“I’m against this sort of behaviour, and I don’t have an excuse for it,” Grimmmz wrote. “It was plain wrong, and I can understand if it changed your view about me.” He rescinded the copyright claim, and the stream honking video has been reinstated on YouTube.
Since then, however, fans on Reddit and Twitch have been debating exactly how prominent streamers should handle stream honking and/or sniping. Many claim that they have little love for stream snipers, who get their jollies from other people’s misery, but they don’t think it should be a bannable or directly punishable offence, as it’s hard to judge when someone is or isn’t stream sniping. From their point of view, the solution is simple: Streamers just need to set a delay of about a minute or two on their streams so that viewers can’t see what they’re actually up to. That way, stream snipers can’t track down their exact position, and streamers will have probably moved on before stream snipers get there.
But Grimmmz explained in his TwitLonger that for him, it’s a no-win situation. “20-30 seconds [of delay] isn’t enough to deter these types of players from a slow game of PUBG, and 2-3 minutes would demolish community interaction,” he said, noting that he’s had people come into his chat after bad break-ups and things of that nature, making it feel like “my own family on Twitch”.
The debate rages on, and it’s highly unlikely that this high-profile stream sniping incident will be the last.
Comments
18 responses to “Popular Battlegrounds Streamer Apologises For Getting YouTubers’ Embarrassing Video Of Him Taken Down”
Poor Grimmmz. He’s a nice guy and just wants to play video games, but he messed up on this one. He’ll take away a lesson on this one, but not before dealing with the consequences for the next several months.
Sweet, 5 bucks
Part of his complaint is that someone gave him $5 and told him to stop crying?
I’m just putting this out there, but if anyone wants to insult me while giving me $5, go right ahead. Seriously, I won’t complain and I certainly won’t be offended by such a lame insult. For $5 you can call me anything you want; racial slurs, homophobic comments, anti-Semitic slurs… hell, anything based on race, religion, gender, physical or mental characteristics. It’s all open season folks, for just $5 a pop.
You’d be a lot less happy if I sat down next to you at your source of income and starting using all those slurs, while explaining to your authority figures that you had requested this treatment and were receiving payment for it, though.
The people that are giving him $5 are the trolls chasing away people that would be giving him a lot more. It’s more salt in the wound.
I’d seek help if your self worth is that low.
So the price for your dignity is that low? That’s good to know.
On the contrary, my dignity isn’t tied to what some troll on the internet calls me.
If you feel like your self-worth is determined by what some random thinks of you, then I honestly pity you.
Someone calling me racial (or any other kind of) slurs speaks about their character, not mine.
I didn’t say anything about self worth, I said dignity. Dignity, as in the quality of being worthy of respect. I hate to break it to you, but if you’re happy to let people insult you for a few dollars, the bar at which you’re willing to sell that respect is really low. It’s the price you’ve set for yourself, so of course it speaks to your character.
I feel like you and I are looking at the same thing from totally different angles.
If someone wants to give me money to call me a name, why wouldn’t I let them? Just because someone says something doesn’t make it true. If someone pays me $5 to call me a pelican, it doesn’t make me a pelican. It doesn’t change the way I act or go about my day. It doesn’t impact the way my friends, family, co-workers or anyone else of any importance interacts with me.
By your standards, no one has more dignity than Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un. I mean, they do everything they can to make sure no one says anything bad about them.
Or maybe dignity isn’t anything to do with what people say about you, it’s how you actually carry yourself and the actions you take. Ghandi didn’t care what people said about him, neither did Jesus or Martin Luther King Jr.
In my eyes the one without dignity is the one who’s so afraid people will say something bad about them that they’ll do everything they can do stop it rather than ignore it with decorum and moving on.
But hey, to each their own I guess.
There are a lot of straw men in your response there that I’m not going to touch. You can justify it how you like, but at the end of the day you’re happy to let people insult you for no other reason than they offered you a few dollars. Being paid to stand there and be insulted is one step away from being paid to do something degrading.
You’re absolutely right that dignity is not about what people say about you, it’s about the actions you take. Being insulted doesn’t lose you dignity, willingly selling the opportunity in exchange for a few dollars does. None of the people you mentioned would have ever accepted money to be insulted the way you seem willing to. Ghandi and Dr King fought for their dignity and certainly weren’t about to sell it for a few dollars.
Adding without risking the edit bug: At this point if you don’t understand why what you said in your first post reflects negatively on you, I don’t think anything else either of us says will help. If you want to add anything else, please feel free, but I’m going to leave my side of the discussion here.
I think we just need to agree to disagree.
I personally feel that the negative perception falls on anyone who gets up in arms just because a stranger called them a bad word. It shows low esteem, insecurity and a need for approval from strangers. None of things are dignified. Dignity is saying “I don’t care what you think, I’m happy with who I am and if you want to waste your money yelling otherwise, then feel free to do so”. I’m also happy to take your money while you do it.
Looks like you touched a nerve there.
This kind of gaming community are such an embarrassment. Ruining people’s Twitch feeds like that is such a low act. I don’t blame the guy for cracking it.
Abusing the DMCA system is even lower than what people did to him.
pubgee is serious business
Well yeah, for streamers it is exactly that.
Still boggles my mind that an element of gamers are so lame that they derive pleasure from trolling others and posting videos of said trolling.
Must be incredibly sad people.