During a recent stream, New York Excelsior Overwatch player and impossibly pleasant married person Jong-ryeol “Saebyeolbe” Park came up against a particularly unpleasant foe. Another player decided to use Overwatch’s in-game notification system to spam Saebyeolbe with a racist message he couldn’t immediately block.
The racist assbag in question continuously sent Saebyeolbe friend requests using a handle that contained slurs and threats, seemingly relying on some sort of exploit to get around Blizzard’s language filters.
Typically, when people pull this kind of thing during somebody else’s stream, they take advantage of stream extensions — say, an on-screen text or audio message they can prompt by donating — which a streamer can immediately shut down. In this case, however, Saebyeolbe did not have that luxury.
Saebyeolbe’s solution was as elegant as it was on-brand. After a period of frustration, he grabbed his own image from his live camera and dragged it from the bottom right corner of the screen to the top-middle, where the racist message kept appearing. Then he changed the dimensions of his own face so it perfectly covered the message.
“Let’s go, guys!” he said with a grin that was impossibly wide only in part because his face was stretched like it’d been smooshed up against a fun-house mirror. “Don’t care about that. Just watch my face, wheeeeee.”
At that point, even the attention-hungry-hungry hippo of a racist troll realised they’d been outplayed. They gave up shortly after.
Comments
19 responses to “Overwatch Pro Blocks Racist Message With His Own Face During Stream”
How is this remotely newsworthy?
You have to admit, its an elegant solution to a problem Bliz hasn’t managed to get under control yet. Doesn’t hurt to give some publicity to the solution for others who haven’t yet figured out how to prevent their stream being spammed by it.
Absolutely positive contribution to a pervasive issue. And an unintended Richard D. James homage is always welcome news.
Pervasive issue? It really only matters to streamers. The rest of us can’t get fired from seeing something racist lol. Words can’t hurt you.
Try watching something like that happen in the breakroom at work and have your boss walk in right behind you to see that splash across the top of your screen. Guaranteed, it won’t end well 😉
Words can’t hurt you, but they can sure get your ass fired if its the wrong words at the wrong time.
lol, what a stupid analogy. If you are watching streams at work you’re clearly not working if you are doing that, and at the very least should be docked pay, max fired. What’s on the stream is not even relevant in that situation.
“In the breakroom”. You’re on break. Try reading what I wrote instead of jumping to inaccurate conclusions from briefly skimming it.
Yeah, nah, racism is a massively pervasive issue and novel or effective ways to protect against or halt it altogether are absolutely positive contributions.
Words have a fairly long history of bringing harm to people and harm is more than just physical violence.
Remember, the nazi party started with just words
GET GODWINS LAWED YA RACIST TWATS
I don’t want to be a rude Ronjamin but if you can’t figure out how to hide sensitive information while streaming, be it usernames, server names, CC info, passwords or people being racist in chat, maybe you shouldn’t be streaming.
Actually, I believe that is the point of the article. He figured out a way to hide the spam crap. The UI in games, in Twitch, is often not under the control of the streamer. The fact he had to deal with it, and did so in a humorous way, gets him a +1 from me.
I might note, the streamer isn’t the one “tooting his horn” on this. Its something Kotaku, that bastion of awesome gaming journalism, picked up on.
Exactly
I believe this falls under the “Human-Interest Story” section of journalism. Either that or it’s a dead donkey story.
Why is there almost always one person asking this? Obviously it is newsorthy for a site about gaming and game culture. I’m personally glad I got to see this. It’s funny and a nice antidote to the constant negativity that a lot of games journalism seems to fall into.
This article is basically “a person was racist in the internet”. That’s not news, that’s sadly just background noise at this point. “Streamer uses element of overlay to hide something” isn’t remarkable either. Combining them both doesn’t make it any more interesting.
You didn’t like it and that’s fine, but maybe next time just move along without trying to impose your criteria for what is and isn’t worth publishing on the rest of us who actually like it.
Funny and adorable 🙂 well done!
Summary: Guy A trolled Guy B, guy B ignored guy A.
If a news article was written and posted online every time this happened somewhere on the net, there would be more redundant and uninformative news articles out there than there are stars in the known universe. This doesn’t constitute ‘journalistic news’ any more than the fact I did a crap this morning does! Fail!
What a good guy, and a clever solution
Wish i could send him internet hugs