This. Twitch is both an awesome and a terrible thing to be part of, because even though there are stellar community members, there is also a huge swathe of tween-through-teen trolls and puerile folks to put up with. So you never know who will get a big fanbase, but said fanbase tends to be vociferous when things do not go their perceived way. As a mod for several of the larger CSGO twitch channels, I just have to let most stuff go because otherwise half the community would not be able to chat.

That is so true! I once had to be a twich chat mod and god was it one hard job. You either censor too much or you censor too little, you just can't make everybody happy. You either censor the big majority of people speaking bullshit in chat, but then noone speaks, or you don't censor them but then you have one or two guys who just write "where are the mods at?" "great job mods...."

At first I thought that quote was referring to James' disagreement that the stream needed to follow the standards of a sports broadcast. After reading the very lengthly document (and I'm a long-winded person as you all know), I realized he meant the entire production team kept screwing up and nothing was done professionally. So to be fair, James agrees with you in two ways. The broadcast was done so poorly, it looks nothing like a professional sports broadcast, and you can feel the stress he was getting when talking about how they failed at giving a good impression to ESPN. The second part he has admitted and therefore agrees with you, is that he should have never been hired for his online personality (I don't know what his real life personality is, and that's not relevant to me anyway), which means he should have never been hired in the first place.

Whoever in VALVe or Perfect World thought it was a good idea to hire James Harding without checking what his style of presenting and followers are like, has now learned a very harsh lesson about hiring personalities who have large followings. It's a double-edged sword (fans watching, but they're watching for material not appropriate for the general audience), and you're supposed to mitigate those risks by watching their stream and find out what kind of audience they serve. Asking them to be polite and avoid doing what they normally do is... Naive.

Also, I find his jokes to cause anxiety, confusion, and nervousness to his guests. I don't really see the loosening up at all. But then again, anxiety would've piled up for everyone anyway, if you're forced to host for over an hour and a half, and the production team had about ten minutes worth of graphical media prepared. From what I'm seeing, everyone was at fault.

James Harding chose his fans over consideration of who VALVe's targeted audience is, as well as making his guests uncomfortable (from what I saw on the stream, they weren't loosened up). And I'm curious to hear what ESPN thinks about your epic game of Tic Tac Toe with your very confused guest.

VALVe hired the wrong company and wrong presenter (and damn it Icefrog, did you think his online persona works with ESPN?). I don't know how easy it is to research Chinese production companies, but I do know researching James Harding shouldn't be too difficult. Sheever was a good choice as a presenter though. This industry could use more presenters like her.

The production company needs to learn how to handle large scale events and come up with redundant systems for both hardware, and show scheduling wise. As in produce an actual backup plan instead of throwing everybody under a bus while fixing anything and everything. This is what gives the Chinese a horrible false stereotype that they don't care about quality in work. This is also what will give them a stain on their reputation for being unable to serve a client as big as VALVe. How many future clients will trust them now after looking like crap in front of Perfect World, VALVe, and ESPN? Maybe small businesses with very little budget to work with will hire them for their likely cheap pricing in the near future.

Perfect World? Actually I don't know where they went wrong. Bit ironic in the name. Only thing I could tell was wrong was they're too naive to think they can force their flown in contractors to share a room. And then fail to understand what is meant by someone is willing to pay the difference. Other than that, they're mostly in the clear when it comes to this mess (because even if they suggested to hire James Harding, does nothing go by VALVe for approval? Did they just greenlight this guy based on popular vote or something? Sorry, couldn't help myself). And what a mess it was, because we had another shot to show the world video games are sports through ESPN, and then this happens. We'll get future opportunities as ESPN has been expressing interest for a while, but the general audience still has some kind of hesitation to accept certain video games as professional sports.

I still remember the entire high school class turning against me when I DEMANDED that we do a debate on whether video games can be sports are not. Then the sheep decided on school uniforms like every other God damned year. I even challenged to take them all on, including the teacher. I was told to stop, and was then assigned the "pro uniforms" team. Education is fun when everyone's close minded and following strict rules on what academics are.

Indeed. You are not afraid of doing your god damn homework and it's great having you around

Why thank you. I try.