I'm not trolling.
How to know who is a streamer ? Make them whitelist themselves, like a checkbox in their options "streaming account" or maybe a hotkey to toggle "currently streaming" i f you prefer. Or anything else that does the job. How to play without them ? add a matchmaking option for that.
Account name is public -> add an option to randomize it. Like : account name "Barnaby" displays as "Max145" and changes regularly, like each game or each session, picking from a given pool of reserved anonymous names.
As i said it was written in my first post. I feel sorry you didn't catch that.
If that helps you understand, if some small streamers don't bother whitelisting themselves and the feature misses them, it's not much of a big deal, say these guys have 5 viewers each, it's not a problem that is on the same level as if the guys who brought 100k viewers didn't click it.
I mean... game streamers would just have a box to check or something equivalent. Doesn't look like something too hard to ask for.
And if you think that makes the feature incomplete, people who don't want them could just blacklist the remaining ones they happen to know as well.
I'm not even asking for a perfect solution. If i could just filter most streamers from my games it would already be something, even if they don't declare themselves and i miss 5% of them. Say i reduce the people watching me to 150-200 people in a 128 player match, that would be good. I just don't want 1k, 10k or 100k additional people to watch me and so on. Same goes for recorded videos.
Also to reply to the guy above, i feel sad having to state obvious things, but i'll reply. I don't believe all people pay attention to me specifically and all the time.
What i know is some idle 100k viewers pay 1000 times more attention to me than the usual 100 regular players who also already have their own game to play and are necessary to my game, and all these viewers mutiply all kinds of risks and possible problems.
As i already said, numbers matter. Do you take the same risks when you go fishing with noone around in the countryside near home and when you go to a late night world tour concert of *insert your music star here* ? I don't see what's difficult to grasp here.
1 k people is already a lot of people. And that's just for one streamer, nothing prevents a match to have several at once. Also streamers often post recorded videos of their streams on YT etc and the number of views for each record can increase another time and reach much higher numbers.
And avoiding being in the stream would avoid me being in the video as well.
