Well, at least they aren't removing / limiting access to any other functions for non-suscribers, like some other channels do.

Yeah two way divide, or well three way divided community now, subs/nonsub/streamers Back to the middleages I guess, with the surplus of more highly annoying emotes!

Fun....

there is a few times I laugh because I seen a few chennals use the sub only chat as a chat pause button if chat is going wild and they need to say something important

Hey, if we (as streamers) ever made you feel divided, excluded or not respected, please name the situation! Most of our audience thinks we're one of the most friendly communities found on Twitch and I'm working hard everyday (including making hard decisions) to keep it this way.

Not something I'm interested, but good job GOG!

it creates a division, whether you'd want it or not. The icon reminds you whether or not you are subscribed or not, publically. whether you are plebs or a patrician Together with the emotes.
About the division with streamers/viewers: they are not very active in chat (with an exception of a few) while they can be in the "green room" apparently. The viewers knowing better what has been streamed than the streamers themselves is one example of this.
The subscription, while technically true that 100% of what gogcom gets goes to charity, only a small percentage of what is being paid goes to charity: a quick breakdown for me as a Belgian:
4.99$ is the subscription fee which is 4.47€ + 21%VAT:0.94€ (this is variable to location in europe (17-27%)
Half of the money goes to twitch: 2.24€
Twitch must withold 30% to the IRS -0.66€
So you'll end up with 1.58€ actually being paid to the charity, about 30%. it would be far better to do just a few charity streams
The contract of twitch partnership isn't exactly in the spirit of GOG either, NDA on the contract, contents exclusivity clauses,...
The benefits are mainly for the streamers, having the advantage of main page possibility attracting more people, which, by having over 11000 partners, is not a lot of chance The encoding options have always been there.
But to the current viewers that isn't much of an advantage.
Personally I hate all those emotes on twitch(I don't care about faces I don't know, tacos or cats), the standard emotes ( :) :( :'( :D :p ;) ) is more than enough for me. Adding more of those emotes deteriorates the chat experience even more for me. Especially since subs tend to spam the emotes when something happens...

Now, this doesn't mean I don't want the stream to grow, nor the streamers' channel. I really do. The streamers put a lot of time in it off stream, making it stream-able. Also coordinating a whole team to make sure everyone is streaming at the time slots and having to fill up empty slots. Also all the side things like layouts, organising events, graphics and music.
And yes the community is one of the friendliest around, and helped me a lot having distractions of real life problems.

Thanks

I agree with gryvix. In my opinion while I have poped into GOG streams now and again and the community seems really friendly I think it is going too commercial in that even know it is a company channel I thought the purpose was to show gog games being played so viewers can get an idea of what the game is really like and to entertain the GOG community now I see donate buttons to tip the streamer and such every 10 seconds- I would rather just keeping the chat stream as what it is rather then have a bunch of 20+ streamers who instead of being passionate about games just try and make money out of it and edge for tips every 10 seconds- no matter what you say the people tipping ect. are going to be treated better then the regular viewers.

Also I'd rather a few close streamers with a few streams worth watching then a whole heap of streamers that are bland and miss able, too much content can also be a downside and lead to burn out.

Other commercial streams like Paradox Interactive and other game companies and such don't have this system and I think it is a mistake and GOG should undo it.

Following that also I have heard of some shocking racism towards different cultures such as Portuguese and Australians from some twitch streamers and it is 'hidden under the rug.' I've also witnessed so called moderators telling people to fu'' off because they didn't like cats and try and provoke fights in chat all because one member said he liked dogs instead as pets.

Tips and the sub button are there only if you want to. None of the Stream Team get paid for their time on Twitch, everyone is a volunteer. Tips are a nice way of showing your appreciation but aren't required at all. Subscribing isn't required either.

Just about every stream on Twitch has some kind of donation button or tip thing and some people like to donate and tip. If you want to you can, but no one will make you.

We've wanted to get GOGCOM partnered for a while now due to it's benefits and found that the best way of doing so would be for the money to go to charity. As for "a whole heap of streamers" This is mostly due to time zones and availability. We have streamers from all over the world who can only stream some of the time. More streamers let us have more streams and show off more GOG titles to the public.

There are no real benefits to being a subscriber to GOGCOM other than having helped out The Able Gamers Charity. True, some of the money goes to Twitch but that's how it works for everyone's subscriptions.

As for racism towards different cultures or anything like that, I've not heard of it. If anything was said it would have been said in jest, after all, MatCatPlays is one of our regular streamers and HE IS AUSTRALIAN.

None of us on the Stream Team have really done anything like this before and Twitch is a learning process. We feel this is the best direction for the GOGCOM to be headed in at this time and we've put in the time and effort to get here.

About the last paragraph... Really? I must come around and police more often then! Because I have never seen that
happen before.

About the streamer tipping, thats completely optional. Personally I think it would be nice if that list was seperated and the tipping page for each streamer put into the streamer info with the !host command, but that's just me. I don't see the !waffle being put up much at all. And if it is, it's most often triggered by chat, not the streamers themselves. Actually I have never heard a streamer say: 'Hey you can tip me if you type this in or follow this link'. Games are still being showcased on the channel. Sometimes it's a serie but there are standard slots for showcasing promo/sales.

1. Waffles are my idea. I gave our streamers ability of getting tips from audience, so they can have the same rights as they do on their own channels. They're doing an awesome, *volounteer* work promoting GOG.com and their games - if I could, I would pay them myself for this (which I often do via waffles myself) because they totally deserve this.

Waffles are not mentioned anywhere except for the bottom of the stream (seriously, who reads that?) and moobot command which is NEVER triggered by streamers. I've never seen a streamer writing !waffle on our chat. It's always our audience's work.

None of our streamers ask for money, too. Did that ever happen, really? They're silently working heavy hours to provide entertainment and they don't ask for anything in exchange. This alone is worth a little respect for the fact that they do - and they should! - have a chance to earn a tip once in a while.

2. "a whole heap of streamers that are bland and miss able"
We have a strict stream team policy of inviting new people. Either most of the stream team or our audience have to say "yup, they're entertaining and we can spend hours watching them". This is the rule. I watched (or watch) everyone currently in the ST and I find none of them bland or miss able - but if you don't want to see positive traits in someone, that person won't be able to convince you.

Naturally, if you have feedback for any of our streamers, feel free to write to her/him. We listen. We usually forget 100 positive comments to think about and analyze 1 negative one.

3. Yes, AbleGamers would get more money if you go to them directly and pay them money. We have to pay taxes. But, would you really do that just by yourself if you didn't know about them from our channel or if this topic wasn't brought up? If we can give them visibility and if people will willingly go there and donate instead of subscribing to us, we really won't be sad about it - on the contrary!

Subscibing is a part of Twitch community. It's fun for most people to use emotes, it's extra-fun for me to make them. We are a different channel than your regular broadcasters though, so we won't give any priviledges to subscribers (like priority in game invites or streamer replies).

And boom - quality of streams is instantly better after we got a sub button. We tested it and compared few VODs. You have better quality in exchange for nothing, as you don't have to subscribe.

4. Any situations that you can call racist or offensive - screencap or timemark and message me immediately. I only know about the "Australian case", I watched the VOD, asked chat regulars and our StreamTeam (including Australian streamer) about the situation. Everyone claimed they remember it and it was not offensive at all. Anyway, the person "guilty" of the case is not streaming for us anymore, so I'm not sure where the problem is.

Cheers, guys. We're working our best to provide a better channel fitted to modern Twitch standards. We know changes are hard for everyone, but I'm thrilled to see a major percentage of people being extremely happy of what we do. We will just keep on going and grow while remaining the basic principle: we do it for fun. And games.

:)

Being in a partnership with Twitch allows viewers with the Video Transcodes so people who don't have very fast enough internet can lower the video settings while streamers can max out there output there are a few that on purposely has a lower upload so more people can watch

So I slept a night over this and in the end decided to type a reply.

First of all thank you for writing a comment here, while I don't agree with you on all accounts I do appreciate the feedback a lot. People see things from different angles and if everybody kept quiet we'd never learn about those different perspectives and might miss out on an opportunity to learn something.

I also believe that Chat is awesome! And we still play exclusively GOG games (of course!), although admittedly we have added a few more slots for series as people kept asking for those.

Every 10 seconds seems to be an exaggeration...
The !waffle command is mostly triggered by Chat when we raffle out game codes. Admittedly there was a bit more talk about the !waffle command in the past week, but that was because people had questions about it in connection with partnership and subscriptions.
And none of us would be doing what we're doing on stream without being passionate about games. No way.
We don't just stream the most popular games and rage in the hope of becoming popular as you might see on other channels. We play games we like, we play niche games, we play old games, we try to showcase everything GOG has to offer.
And yes, some of us have received stream tips. As one of them I can honestly tell you that why I appreciate them VERY much, nobody would put that that amount of work into a project if he/she was doing it it for the money. (Please also note that a couple of us don't even stream on their own channels, we do it only for GOG.)

How would we streamers do that? Greet them more friendly? We don't even have the tools to treat them better.

Here I agree. Having many different streamers and a lot of streams on a channel can be a downside.
If you have a channel with only one streamer, you know exactly what you get (and most likely follow the channel because of that) and often get an amount of streams that you can watch easily without spending all day (and night) in front of the PC.

With having many different streamers as we do, doing many different things on the channel (we recently added a speedrunner to our team for example) and trying to cover more timezones, things are different.
But exactly because we're all volunteers and because GOG is a different environment than other channels who exist for one streamer and his/her audience alone, we're going a different way.
This will never appeal to everybody, but we try to have something for everybody on the channel.
And if you have ideas on what you would like to see, please let us know!

Undo having many streamers and many streams?
Paradox "only" (it's not really "only" because what they do is great) showcase their own games with a very few streams per week/month - see here: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/profile
That is totally different than what we do on GOGcom Twitch, that's true.
I personally at this point in time am not convinced that it is necessarily "better", but I'd also be interested to hear more opinions about that from our viewers.

The claim that there was racism against Australians has been investigated. Problem back then was that we had to find out which stream it supposedly happened on and then watch the whole stream as we also didn't have a time mark. The reason we didn't have this information is that the complaint wasn't even sent to the StreamTeam.
If you see any inappropriate behaviour from streamers or mods, please contact others of the StreamTeam, preferably Outstarwalker! We WILL look into it.
In case of the complaint concerning Australians we looked into it and couldn't find anything offensive. (And I'm somebody who easily shouts "Offensive!")

We have also heard that there was some kind of racism towards Portuguese but again we only hear rumors about it, nobody contacted us. We don't even know which streamer on which stream is supposed to have said something which makes it nearly impossible to investigate.
If you have any information that could us help look into this, please contact us!
We want to clear it up!
Racism is not acceptable!

And I hope it is known that I wield my banhammer against regulars and newcomers alike if they cross certain lines in Chat and I'm there.

Are you sure this wasn't some playful fighting between people who know each other?
Again, no complaint reached us.

Our streams often have Re-Chat and on many other times we have Chatty take a chatlog in the background. That still doesn't cover 100% of the streams but quite a lot.
Again: If anybody could provide it with information of when this happened we could look into it.

We want to have a great atmosphere in Chat and we're willing to do a lot for that but without getting any information about who and when it is really difficult to look into it.

I hope my answer is OK for you.
Please always feel free to contact me via Twitch PM if you like. I don't check them everyday but at least several times in a week.
And thanks again for your input!

I have to address this, too:

We repeated it few times here, but streamers on our channel are volounteers. They work, they have kids, families and things to do to earn for a living besides of streaming. I can't just force them to spend time on chat by a rule. For example, Vlad has a hard time working overhours and he uses all the little time he has for himself to stream (doing that twice a week in a late night on our channel is a BIG commitment for him, believe it or not).

There are also many myths about so-called "Greenroom", so let me explain. It's basically a Skype group in which streamers can discuss future stream ideas, channel growth, comments, also forum posts like these ones. Writing in Greenroom MEANS caring for you as audience. We use Greenroom to discuss through things like "Australian" case, partnership, to exchange requests to fill moobot and schedule. If streamer spends time in Greenroom instead of chat, he's actually working (again, for free) to make chat's experience better, most of the time.

Evidently there are screen shots around of some of the Portuguese racism cases and it also went into being against Spanish/ Italian people as well but I don't have them and only know what people have told me, I'm not going to name specific people as that would be bullying and I am sure they can get in touch with gog themselves and evidently have and the streamer has been removed.

Next time I see a mod behaving like that if I am in chat I will screen shot it myself and send it to gog, It was a while ago so I don't remember the mods. name accurately and it is something a person needs to be accurate about it certainly happened though and wasn't playful another member told the mod to calm down and was told to fu** off as well.

I remember the Australian case because I was emailed it a little while after it happened along with a few other Australian people and it had the right time points in the stream video were it specifically happened, I can't access it now though because the gog archive on twitch only goes so far back but I recall the streamed game and who streamed it if gog can access old streams and there is a point to dealing with it now.

David, I'm the Twitch coordinator working for GOG.com and I'm the person responsible for the StreamTeam, including ending cooperation with its members. It's not some "upper anonymous GOG.com people" - it's me, you have this person right in front of you.

I removed the streamer (you refer to Classicor here) from the team and it was totally not connected to this case. No-one contacted me about any racism coming from him. I believe I was on the mentioned stream where he simply fought, in-game, againts Portugese people. He conquered them, as the game was just about that. If I would play Commandos and say "I have to kill all those Germans!", would that be considered racist against German people?

Send it to me, I am responsible for mods and streamers. Again, no-one told me anything, so I have no idea what happened. Streamers and mods are clueless as well.

Alright, so there is a mailing list where you guys exchange information about moments when you were offended on streams, but it's not actually send to the stream team, nor me, so we can do something about it? Why?. I was sent a private message about this incident, but without any timemark, so I had to rewatch the whole 2 hours of a stream just to hear one single sentence about Australian people that was laughed at by our fellow Australians (including Mat and Cat).

If this makes it any "better" for you, both mentioned streamers are not a part of StreamTeam anymore - so I'm not really sure where the problem lies now. Someone currently in the team was offensive towards you?

Also - as long as you can't precisely say what offended you, I won't be able to help anyhow, it's just impossible.