Profile of shadowwada

Streaming the Tournament


We would appreciate it if you do not stream our tournament, so that we can attract as many viewers for the official stream as possible. Consider it a donation to the tournament.

^ This is was written on the UTT tournament page originally by a close friend of James. Someone who was a 3 year sub to Hans... You can do your own morales on that and if you believe Hans made a valuable contribution to the the community then fine.


Also how is it not wrong? It's the same concept as going to a boxing match and livestreaming the event to Twitch. It's not your content. It is factual unauthorised broadcasting. You don't need to make your own moral judgements about this. It is written on the Twitch terms of conduct so that you don't have to guess what is right and what is wrong. Hans didn't even bother to observe the game he actually opened AE's stream to cast from it.

For someone who's entire income is based around Twitch I would have thought stepping into this territory might be considered risky. It might be worth reading those guidelines.

With regards to donations, streamers make money from advertising revenue, subs and donations. All things that could have been denied. Tournament Organisers have a right to schedule and run their own event. I'm fully aware we can't stop people broadcasting it. But it's written in the rules and it's about a level of human decency which is what this post is about.

Any of you could be streaming this event. But most people and players don't because they have the concensus on what is morally right and wrong to do. Stream 1v1 or another game. Don't s*** all over your friends and people who put on tournaments for you to play in.

You should have mentioned in the OP that there was a statement prohibiting rebroadcasts prior to the event as that gives you more authority since there wasn't ambiguity.

As for the boxing match analogy and rebroadcasting in general, I clearly stated the content creator usually is able to successfully DMCA rebroadcasts but if there was initial ambiguity, it is considered poor taste to jump straight to reporting people rather than telling the streamer to stop rebroadcasting. In a post about manners and etiquette, I felt it was important to point this out (Again I was unaware that there was a statement regarding rebroadcasting). Hans is a long standing member of the community and, to the best of my knowledge, your friend so handling this misunderstanding in private or a more magnanimous public post would be better than dog pilling on hans.

As I said in my original post, I would side more with the organizers but I objected to the OP's harshness towards Hans. It is the first time Hans rebroadcasted anyone's stream and he did stop rebroadcasting (which was left out of the OP) and he casted using the in-game spectate feature, which is 100% ok (which was also left out of the OP). In Han's defense, I doubted the severity of the damage he caused while showing how Hans potentially helped the official stream. I think a longstanding positive member of the community should be given more leeway on a potential first infraction.

As for the morality around casting games through the client, I mainly talked about the legality of it. Sure, you can say it is a crappy thing to do when the official stream is going on but it can be argued having more casts of the tourny games improves hype and will lead people to the official stream. As i pointed out before, Hans is a full time variety streamer so a good portion of viewers may not know about the tourny.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said but in how harsh you said it and how far the accusations went. You didn't just say Hans was being a dick for restreaming but stealing viewers, donations, and breaking TOS, implying he could be banned and you might do it. I just thought Hans deserves a bit more leniency than that for a first time offense done without malicious intent.

As for people shitting on each other, can the mods deal with the blatant toxic trolls insulting me instead of engaging in meaningful and civil discourse

I see a lot of misinformation in this thread (and everyone is dog piling on hans) so I feel compelled to come to Han's defense since technically he didn't do anything wrong. Things could have been handled better but that can be said about both sides.

Firstly, people are citing twitch TOS on restreaming and rebroadcasting but I'd argue Hans didnt break the TOS. While it would have been polite to ask if he could restream, Hans is under no obligation to do so. If the official broadcasters didn't prohibit restreaming beforehand, it is considered fair game. We have seen this countless times on Twitch as streamers have rebroadcasted Blizzard, Valve, Nintendo, and Twitch Interactive streams and, most importantly, other twitch streamers' streams. Now speaking of etiquette, it is considered poor taste to retroactively revoke restreaming rights after the fact and/or claim copyright. In regards to copyright, Hans added his own commentary so it can be defended under fair use since hans transformed the original work by adding his own commentary; no one is taking this to court so it is a moot point but I wanted to show the ambiguity in this. Ultimately if the content creator wants to go down this road, they can usually get the rebroadcast removed but it causes needless bad blood with the rebroadcaster & the community. As stated before, this situation could have been avoided if the broadcasters explicitly stated the event couldn't be rebroadcast.

As for some of the other accusations being levied against Hans, most of them don't hold water. Stormless said the tournament organizers & casters are denied viewership and donations but is this really the case? Let me point out the simple fact that HelpingHans is the only full time CoH2 & variety streamer as well as being a signed Complexity streamer. It is easier to argue that Hans directed viewers to the official stream rather than the other way around. If you're watching the official stream, you wouldn't notice that Hans is restreaming it but if you're watching Han's stream, you might not even be aware there is a tourny going on or know of the casters. Let us not forgot Hans' contribution to the community by introducing his variety stream viewers to CoH2 so even if Hans was "leaching" viewers, Hans still contributed a net positive gain to CoH2 viewership; as the saying goes, a rising tide raises all ships.

As for denying donations, I don't see how this makes sense or how Stormless came to this conclusion. If I wanted to donate to Hans, I'm going to be donating to Hans regardless of who else is streaming. The opposite is also true, I'm going to donate to the tourny pool regardless of who else is streaming. As stated before, if anything, Hans probably helped the official stream get donations since Hans introduced a portion of his viewers to this tournament and of these new viewers, it is conceivable a portion of them donated to support the tourny. These theoreticals aside, Hans has access to the donation log. He can tell us if he saw some insane 1000% increase in donations because he "leached" donations or as I expect, they remained constant with his usual numbers. If this remains a point of contention, Hans can always just give the donations he made in that hour to the official stream.

Speaking of points of contention, Stormless tried to slip this in unnoticed and it should stick out to you due to the implicit assumption. Im referring to Stormless' quote, "If you would like to cast or broadcast games from the event, we would ask anyone who wants chances to cast or wants to get involved to send us a message just to politely ask for permission first." The implicit assumption in asking for permission is that you need the official broadcaster's permission because they have exclusivity rights to these games. For someone getting antsy about streaming rights, you should know that no one owns the rights to these games. If they are on the spectate list, anyone can spectate & stream them. This is what Hans did that the OP forgot to mention so within this controversial stream, Hans stopped rebroadcasting to do his own broadcast from the game client. It is unfair to leave this point out since the OP makes it sound like Hans rebroadcasted the entire stream.

I agree it is polite to ask for permission but no one is under an obligation to do so. If the tourny organizers want more control & exclusivity over their tournament matches, they should password protect the game lobbies so they can stream them live or with a short delay while people, without the password, would have to stream it on a much longer delay. I forget what tourny did this but it has been done before. If this isn't possible anymore, talk to relic for better broadcaster tools (It should be noted the main reason Hans rebroadcasted the official stream is because relic's spectate tools are outdated as you can't skip forwards or backwards). The tourny organizers can also seek for exclusive rights to these specific games or push Relic to DMCA spectator streamers, similar to what Riot did to StarLordLucian (which was predicated on exclusivity rights).

In closing, Hans could have been more courteous and ask for permission first but he is not under a strict obligation to do so due to the official tourny organizers not putting these simple preventative measures in place. I would be more on the tourny organizers' side if they didn't misrepresent Hans & make some dubious accusations. If the tourny organizers wanted to be judicious, they should have just made a blanket statement that future restreaming of the tourny is prohibited rather than single out Hans as well as the thinly veiled threat of DMCA takedown against Hans. If the OP was worded more magnanimous, I don't believe Hans would have responded as hostile as he did.

Balance doesn't trickle down that way, or at least not necessarily. Throughout CoH2s lifecycle, 1v1s have usually been balanced-ish. But because that balance was built around clock-dominance, it really screwed up 3s and 4s. A strong allied early game became a brutal game-ending nightmare at the upper levels of AT. Strong German late game became nearly insurmountable auto-wins after 30-35 minutes, especially below that tippy-top.

Even before the game came out, the frontline network did a 1v1 tourny that showed how OP clown cars were so 1v1s were never balanced.

As for your specific example, it is Relic's poor implementation of asymmetrical balance. These fundamental systems need to reworked which is one of the reasons why they never touched it; it is too hard to pull up the foundation and rebuild it. Look at the DLC factions. USF is a prime example of shitty asymmetrical balanced: No T0 mortar (until miragefla got it in the game), No non-doctrinal mines (besides m20 that doesn't last past 20 mins & on a weak tier), no non-doctrinal late game arty, no non-doctrinal late game armor, no non-doctrinal flamer, weak AT gun, weak handheld AT, ect. Firstly you can't go every commander in the game so you're going to be lacking major tools in the toolkit. As for the asymmetrical balance, Germans have the best armor, AT guns, and handheld AT shreks. Germans should have the best armor while weaker AT and allies should be strong AT and weaker armor.

Lastly stop looking at Relic & CoH2 to disprove what every top tier game & esport is able to achieve. Obviously balance wont trickle down in CoH2 since they can't even get balanced enough as is. LoL, Overwatch, SC2, DOTA2, Smite, ect all have very balanced games at the competitive level as well as very popular games for the casual audience.

Are you sure you don't mean what a tiny fraction of players who call themselves the community think is important?

There seems to be a vibe that their business model should be:

1) Make 1v1 perfect
2) Appeal to competitive players
3) Magic
4) Sell loads of games
5) Swim in dosh

That's the impression I get on these types of forums. Maybe I'm wrong. But it's a self perpetuating fantasy.

People watch eSports because they play the games, they don't play games because someone plays eSports. eSports are just reinforcement. Brand awareness. eSports makes literally no sense to someone who doesn't own the game.

As far as I'm aware the game box definitely lists 8 player games as a feature. And people want to play big games. They don't want to play creepy 1v1s with randoms. They want to play with their friends in bigger games. The culture of turning noses up at what most players want to do is just that... culture. And that's going to have to change if the game is going to be popular and for Relic to have any reason to care about it's development long-term.

I don't want to be mean but you're wrong. Look at the top games, LoL, CSGO, Overwatch, ect, they all have thriving esports scenes. In regards to RTS, SC2 is the king with a healthy esports scene. Simply put there is a direct correlation between size of esports scene and size of profits. Last time i checked these games are real and not some "fantasy"

If people only watch games they play, I didn't know there are sooo many soccer, football, and basketball players out there. While there is a burden of knowledge to understanding a game, visually a random viewer can understand the basics. In regards to coh2, you have army men and tanks shooting at each other. Not too complex.

Lastly if we use SC1 & SC2 as a case study, you can appeal to the masses while also having a highly compepetive esports scene. The main reason why SC2 had problems with their casual scene is because they gutted custom games & mods. Even still SC2 is kicking COH2's ass. It ain't even a comparison. Back to CoH2, it is very easy to get a 4v4 casual game going so there is 0 reason why creating a balance esport game would kill or hurt the 4v4s. The balance from 1v1s would trickle down, creating an overall balanced game.

So setting aside the word-salad nonsense about leadership, culture, and horrible analogies about high school quarterbacks.

This all amounts to wada crying that he didn't get into the beta.

Every single stream of yours has at the very least more whining about balance and typically devolve into nonsensical flaming of Relic (particularly when you're getting your shit pushed by better players). If I were employed by Relic, I would not want "pros" (LOL) of your caliber to even purchase my game, much less bend over backwards to give you an invite to a closed beta.

In short, you reap what you sow. Relic doesn't owe you shit.

My resume speaks for itself: 10 yr competitive gamer, top 10 clan leader in WiC, LoL meta forecaster, top 3 NA coh2 esl champ. I could go on but these are just some of my major accomplishments.

Meanwhile Relic's resume is a total inverse of fail. Lets look at this past year: Lead balance dev Brad broke the AEC & took a month to patch OP AEC & OP brit arty call in. Despite this being during the biggest & first relic sponsored tourney, Brad takes a week off because he had a cold but was healthy enough to 1v1 Queen Ratchet on Momo's stream. Vetereceny was broken during ESL. The hotfix broke the game and had to be reverted. Miragefla fixed vet in his mod before Relic. Maxims were broken during March ESL. Von Ivan abused them to victory for an entire month but no balance fix to them or a ban on the partysans commander (since maxim strat relied on partysans), also NA esls had caster problems - One final didn't even have an official ESL cast so momo & von ivan had to step up to cast it.

After ESL, the entire dev team was fired since thats the best way to build your esports scene /s. After that, took them 3 months to copy & paste miragefla's balance mod changes into the game and somehow broke the USF mortar. Took a week to hotfix & a month to nerf (and some would argue it is still OP). Combined arms bug made usf able to see and shoot everywhere at an insane rate of fire. In august/September, warpaint happened and was herpa derp. The brackets got leaked & controversial seeding (if this happened in LoL, SC2, CSGO, people would be losing jobs). The finals were anticlimactic: finals pushed back for in-person finals & naggano got disqualified because he couldn't get there in person. The pre-final stream a day before wasn't even fullscreen hd webcam. On the day of the finals, they were able to get a fullscreen webcam but poor audio & lack of any production (no face cams on players or any type of in-person venue). The opening rounds had more viewers than finals. There was absolutely no way to tell it was in-person, except for the post game interviews, which could have been done over skype. Not even a trophy was there. In closing, Warpaint was an excuse to drum up hype to give people an incentive to buy skins. After warpaint started, and no reason to buy skins, Relic didn't really care about promoting it; tourney organizer & community manager Kyle went on vacation before warpaint even concluded.

Following Warpaint, we were told there would be a patch road map in august. Relic goes on radio silence until the end of october where they said there would be a winter patch. Three community members are making the patch since its cheaper than paying devs to do it. Its spring and there is still no patch and really, the patch boils down to much needed nerfs to t70, sniper, stugE, and 222, which is all stuff we've known were problems for 6+ months. Also a skin patch in december breaks the game by allowing squads to have infinite weapon upgrades & art assets dissapeared.

Lastly this doesn't get into the major problems that need reworks rather than just balance changes: RNG, USF rework, UKF rework, callin rework, ect. When it takes forever for basic balance changes, there isn't hope for reworks and coh2 is probably dead once dow3 hits.

I've said relic can redeem themselves with DoW3 but when we are less than 5 weeks from launch and there isn't an on going beta, only a beta week, and ALL pros weren't invited including Relic's right hand man stormless, it don't look good.

As for my personal feelings towards Relic, I've given so much to this game & community over the past years and have gotten NOTHING from Relic in return. They have even been negative towards me. Relic, specifically kyle, went out of his way to rig my warpaint bracket by seeding me 32 out of 32 so I would be against a certain individual, I'm not naming since I don't really care about it anymore. However at the time, I had more than enough evidence that this person's actions constituted harassment and cyberbullying. Despite "fighting against bullying" Relic gave no statement or punishment. Not because they think this person did nothing wrong but because its an action against me. As show by these tweets even months later, kyle's personally feelings keeps me blacklisted.
https://twitter.com/CompanyOfHeroes/status/827618681047748608 https://twitter.com/CompanyOfHeroes/status/827657924038123520
https://twitter.com/relicgames/status/834825236470194176

With the end of coh2 and the beginning of dow3, Relic needs to give me an incentive to care about their game & esports scene. As it stands, there are better games & esports than CoH2 and probably DoW3. My main focus is on LoL because it is a better game & esport and I've been showed much more respect and appreciation by Riot than I've ever gotten from Relic AND IM NO ONE IN LOL. When I get treated better by riot as an average player than by relic as one of their top tier players, I know who I'm siding with. However, even after all this, I'm still willing to give Relic & DoW3 a chance if they can at least meet me halfway. If they give some indication that they care about their esports scene & are committed to TRYING to make DoW3 great, I would give them support & a more favorable appraisal.

Lastly to address your accusation that im not a "pro" and get beaten by better players, Its because it is physically and emotionally draining to play this game. For a long time, I've gotten nothing from playing CoH2 but I did it because I believed CoH2 had a future & because of the support I received from my stream community & the coh2 community at large. After warpaint, I realized this game isn't going anywhere & I can't help it because Relic/Kyle don't like me. I've always believed if I could prove I was better, not just top 3 NA esl champ but top 3 world player, we could work together because all that matters is winning. It doesn't matter if we like each other as long as I can get the job done & we can make coh2 great. After warpaint, I realized it doesn't matter how better I become. I take it as a personal failure and a failure towards the community that I can't make coh2 great again. For the rest of 2016, I was depressed. I hate to lose and I hate to have failed my community.

So my "flaming" isn't nonsensical. I'm very justified because of the poor job Relic has done with CoH2 & our community. CoH2 is a good "fun" game but it could have been a great game & a great esport. My "flaming" is passionate because I care about CoH2 & our community. I may be overly harsh in my presentation due to all the pain I've experienced but the message is 100% true.