Veteran streamer Jaryd ‘Summit1g’ Lazar has blasted the Valorant section of Twitch as the “fakest” section of the streaming site, as hyper surrounding beta access rages on.
Valorant’s closed beta is fast approaching one month old, with thousands of prospective players still doing their best to get their hands on an access drop.
Closed beta drops are issued to players who have watched over two hours of Valorant on Twitch, but summit1g, who has streamed exclusively on Twitch for close to a decade, has suggested that this system may be doing more harm than good.
During his April 24 live stream, while exploring the new Sea of Thieves update, summit grew frustrated with the state of Twitch’s Valorant section.
He suggested that streamers are lying about drops to entice viewers, as well as criticizing viewers who are manipulating streams in order to watch multiple at once.
“This is the fakest section on Twitch!” raged summit, hovering his cursor above the Valorant section, which sat at 276,000 concurrent viewers. “It’s the absolute fakest section on Twitch right now, am I wrong? Am I f**king wrong? Look at that [viewer] number. Is that real? Not even f**king close! Not even f**king close!”
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“You know what that numbers does?” he continued. “It helps me burn out, just a little bit quicker… I don’t wanna be in that category – look at this chat. Just stare at this section. How many 24/7 drops, how many 24/7s can you see… how many f**king 24/7s are on this category?! It’s disgusting.”
In a second clip, he continued his criticism of streamers who are pretending to be live: “You should all be f**king ashamed. You’re not Twitch streamers, you’re not even YouTubers… There’s no editing, you f**king throw up your VOD as soon as you go offline, like I’m playing my outro video… Valorant looks like a piece of shit video game on Twitch right now.”
While initially praised as a game-changing idea to access a beta, some have criticized the way players get access to drops, arguing it promotes fake viewing and fake streaming. Summit clearly falls into this category, and explained why he doesn’t want to contribute to its ‘fakeness’.
Riot have commented in the past on measures they are taking to combat viewers and streamers manipulating the system to try and get access, but summit clearly feels they need to do more.
