Blizzard is working alongside Twitch to create a pilot programme to combat livestream racism, harassment, and abuse.
The news comes following an incident at last week’s DreamHack Austin Hearthstone tournament which saw an unprecedented amount of racism thrown at black finalist Terrence "TerrenceM" Miller.
"We're extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last," says Blizzard president Mike Morhaime to Polygon.
"One of our company values is 'play nice, play fair.' We feel there's no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community."
A report last week detailed how mods became overwhelmed by an avalanche of hate speech. Twitch moderator Carling "toastthebadger" Filewich believes the main problem was there simply wasn’t enough moderators to contain what was happening. Twitch’s R9K mod to block repetitive spam would be turned on only to be turned off. Likewise, slow mode, too, would either be enabled then disabled or the length changed.
"I have thick skin. It doesn’t personally upset me," said Miller after the event. "But I don’t think it should be happening. As far as what they should do about it, there should be a stronger punishment for it. If you’re just banned from one chat, you can go somewhere else and continue to do it. Maybe a bigger punishment for constantly doing things that are just meant to be malicious."
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Wesley Copeland is a freelance news writer who writes terrible bios. For more obvious statements and video game chat, you should probably follow him on Twitter.
