Hololive Vtuber Usada Pekora had a rough time in her FFXIV stream last night, as players watching her stream decided to crowd around her.
(Skip to 2:05:07 to see it at its worst)
In the stream, multiple players can be seen summoning their car mounts to surround the vtuber, who’d played the smallest race, Lallafell, to the point she couldn’t even see her character.
This wasn’t even a case of her having just happened to pick a populated zone, either, since multiple players can be seen expressly chasing her once she moved out of the way to see her character.
Pekora hasn’t addressed the issue directly, though did reference it in a tweet, saying that she would continue to play the game off-stream, though she didn’t say the crowding was the issue.
“My first time in FF14 and I’m laughing so hard”, she says. “Thank you very much for teaching me a lot! I’ll try to have fun behind the scenes too! I’m full of motivation PecoFire”
This isn’t the first time this has happened- popular WoW streamer Asmongold had the same thing happen to him when he checked out FFXIV earlier this year, sparking a discussion of if this behavior was deemed toxic and a form of harassment.
Obviously, there’s a lot of problems with this behavior, especially for streamers- ultimately, they’re playing the game as work, and having to throw whatever progression goals they had away simply because they can’t even see the screen is a big problem.
There’s also the fact that they can’t exactly cuss out their viewers for it either, due to the unfortunate nature of having to play along.
Unfortunately, whether out of malice or love, this continues to be a problem with streamers who want to play social games like MMOs- they’ll always have to factor in that their current game information will be viewable, and the possibility of them getting popular enough for it to be a problem.