Blizzard has always been pretty good when it comes to special events and promotions…but this time they decided to have a rather exclusive one. Specifically, D.VA’s Nano Cola Challenge is only for a select few streamers.
Blizzard teamed up with the most popular streamers here, and most fans have counted it as a success – over 100.000 people watched one of Seagull’s streams in hope of earning themselves some sweet, sweet in-game loot. You have to watch around 8 hours of a qualifying stream to get the in-game sprays that are up for grabs this way.
Sounds like a pretty solid deal, doesn’t it? Relatively straight-forward and nothing out of the ordinary for Overwatch – at least that’s how it was supposed to be. A few semi-creative streamers decided they wanted a slice of that nice viewer-pie too though and decided to fake it.
The Nano Cola Challenge offers in-game rewards for winning matches and for watching certain streamers. Only a handful of streamers had been selected, and in order to make it easier for fans to know which ones, they put ‘drops enabled’ in their stream titles.
Now, in a perfect world, this is where this story would end. As it is though, streamers who weren’t chosen by Blizzard decided to do the same thing and amend their stream titles. So far, the highest-profile offender here is Dafran. He is an incredibly high skill player…but also a troll who has previously been suspended from Blizzard’s Overwatch Contenders series for griefing and streaming hentai content.
Now obviously, this guy is a known troll, so it’s no surprise that he put that in his title and then added a little GIF of falling raindrops in the lower left corner of his stream – compared to streaming porn, that’s a pretty clever way to troll people.
Of course, people who watched his stream didn’t think so. People were quite upset, although, at the end of his stream, he went on to host streamer Mirage and told his viewers to watch that stream for ‘real drops’. In other words, he may be a troll but at least on this occasion, his shenanigans had a happy ending.
Of course, he wasn’t the only one to do this. Plenty other, far less popular or well-known streamers did the same thing – at least ten that have been confirmed to not be part of the promo, all of them nowhere near as well-known as Dafran.
Now it is worth noting that for these people, it isn’t exactly working – none of them achieved particularly high viewer numbers, so whether they were trying to troll or to increase their viewers, it didn’t pan out too well. In the meantime, Blizzard has taken action and genuine participants in the event get a green ‘Drops enabled!’ maker in their stream window. This can’t be faked, so if the stream you are watching doesn’t have this and you are watching for drops, you are wasting your time.
