#Twitch

The chat of Twitch channels usually are deluges of data, emotes and 'trash text'. However, we can use it to identify some features of the community, such as its vocabulary.

Fig.1 — Word cloud of popular terms on chat

Terms like Kappa, GG and Pogchamp are well know and widely used during the streams and are closed related to emotions about in-game moves and casters/streamers. The Figure 1 bellow highlights most popular terms (we excluded teams and players’ names to show only terms without subjects). If you have no idea about the Twitch emotes, you can find info on: http://mashable.com/2014/08/08/twitch-emoticons/.

Fig. 2 — Word cloud of players mentioned on Twitch chat

Investigating the player’s popularity (Figure 2 and 3) we found TACO from Luminosity Team as the most mentioned player. His popularity is related to the nickname VACO (a junction of VAC + TACO due to their highlights). It’s interesting because Fallen and pashaBiceps are the most popular on social media. In addition, despite the finals (Luminosity x NA’VI), players of other teams still remain between the most mentioned ones, such as s1mple, Hiko, JW, tarik, etc.

Fig. 3 — Mentions to players on main Twitch Stream (twitch.com/mlg)

Special mention to Hiko and s1mple from Team Liquid (eliminated during semi-finals), both were mentioned more than Fallen (captain of winner team) and coldzera (most valuable player of the event). It is important to highlight a possible bias on main MLG Twitch channel (broadcasted in english). Furthermore, Team Liquid is the current best team from North America scene and the last representative of NA.

Fig. 4 — Mentions to teams on main Twitch stream (twitch.com/mlg)

Regarding the popularity of teams (Figure 4), the "surprise" was Virtus.Pro and NiP figuring in 3rd and 4th despite their eliminations during the quarter-finals. However, it is not a big surprise because those are veterans of the scene and have thousands of fans, even in bad seasons. Figure 5 shows the cumulative timeline of team mentions during the broadcasts. Naturally, the mentions are close-related to the live matches.

Fig. 5 — Cumulative timeline of mentions

Fig.6a — MLG main stream on Twitch

The Figures 6a shows the timeline of main stream and additional streams (other languages) during the event. Because of presentation, we limited the number of streams according to their number of viewers. The main stream showed separately was the most important and grouped the largest amount of users, but the Polish and Russian (Figure 6b) streams got huge number of viewers during all time. As mentioned before, Virtus.Pro has a legion of fans and they are the best team on Poland, so it explains why Russia exceeded the number of viewers during the finals (NAVI is partially from Russia and Virtus.Pro felt on semi-finals).

Fig 6b — Additional and alternative streams on Twitch

Other streams, like BRMA TV (Brazil) and 99Damage (Germany), grouped 10k of users on average, just in the finals the Brazilians reached more than 25k users, naturally because of Luminosity team as finalist and champion. Additional streams did not transmit the entire event, like Hitpoint (China), but showed expressive set o users.

Other important observation about it is despite the huge popularity of Poland and Russia on streams, it is hard to detect their representativity on social media (maybe is necessary to use alternative ways to identify those fans beyond the language and geolocated data).