Epic Games account locked, Fortnite & Dauntless streams on hold

Attempted to log into the Epic Games launcher today, got this error when I had to log back in (which was unsuccessful; normally I stay logged in, but occasionally I am forced to log back in). My expectation is somebody who knows the registered email address was attempting to brute-force my password, either with a password generator or got stopped short because they hit the 2-step authentication step & repeatedly attempted to log into the account despite the additional authentication step, retaliation was to get the account locked so it couldn't be used by anybody. Whatever happened, the account is locked, I currently can't get into it, any streaming to Twitch will have to be of a game on another platform until I can get back in...

Follower-only chat enabled due to harassment

Follower-only chat is once again enabled due to harassment...  This harassment ended up coming from an individual that was orignally banned for the same type of harassment, that individual has now been banned over 3 different accounts on Twitch & blocked on Epic Games (the last 2 bans happened as a result of attempting to have me add him again when they were already on my block list; considering I keep track of name changes on blocked people on Epic Games, I already knew both why he was blocked & why he was banned & only became aware of the ban-evasion after the last stream).

Full account history & details can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fI1DCNSK2mT39AfqPkCPMiamUTWvhMExHhWgblexMQc


A report was filled to Twitch about the harassment & ban-evasion, but as expected, they chose to fully ignore the reports filed against these 2 new account, which is why I made it a point to make the report public in the detailed description on Google Docs, which I am also going to duplicate that report here (I may eventually just publish a new pages regarding this individual to my personal site:

Individual has been banned from my channel in the past for harassment after I stated I was not going to build their StormShield for them & leaving the StormShield until he had it ready to go (originally helping him with a defense earlier), this was back on 7/13/2019. The individual has been following my channel under a secondary account for a while, but didn't realize the account of mrcrazy89 was him until he attempted to get me to add him to my Epic Games friend list tonight while helping another viewer with an endurance defense. When I realized this, I stated that I would not play with that individual, which immediately resulted in retaliation from the individual (over the second account). Directly after banning this secondary account, he came back on the third account of mrbann7637, leading to 2 bans of (out of 3) in less that 2 minutes. Video & chat log evidence have been published online, the offline description for these videos (this became standard when Twitch started hiding descriptions & titles) with full details & profile/video links can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fI1DCNSK2mT39AfqPkCPMiamUTWvhMExHhWgblexMQc

Follower-only chat will remain enabled for (at least) the next 2 streams & be downgraded from a 10-minute minimum in the next stream, to just needing to following in the stream after than, then eventually removed again (this is provided the harassment doesn't continue even with the mode enabled, in which case the minimum will be increased & the time it is fully removed will be prolonged over even more streams).

It would be advised that while follower-only chat is enabled to help mitigate this harassment, that supporting streamers do not raid my channel, as users from their raids will find that they will not be able to chat unless they are already followers (normally I don't allow spamming, but emote-spamming is pretty common when it comes to raids, so it's one of the exceptions I make to the "No Spamming" rule on my channel).

Sub emotes due for a change

Due to lack of interest in the channel (the last subscription being on 9/7/2019), I've decided to start switching around the sub emotes on my channel to something more relevant to recent streams. Currently I only have 3 emotes (1 for each tier), one is expected to be for Fortnite, the other for Dauntless (I haven't decided on the third one yet; I was considering KickBeat, but with the constant audio vandalism on Past Broadcasts due to music in the game's soundtrack, it's more likely it will be from XCOM 2, even through that's been being streamed more on Steam than Twitch). A change on the emotes will be considered any time there is a month with no subs, this can be considered as a standard from this point forward.

Have an emote you would like to see, feel free to voice your opinion either here or on the channel, I will consider other emotes any time I don't have subs & as long as it's from a game a play.

Health update, surgery may be needed, streams will be spotty at best

After looking into the blood loss issue further, it appears that another surgery may be needed (hopefully with better results than the one back around mid-2018).  I'll have to start with some doctor appointments & work up from there, but I at least know where it's going (this will mean more downtime after the surgery).

Regarding the back problem, I'm still having problems with my left shoulder, but may attempt to do a stream here & there when the pain isn't too bad (trying to avoid oral pain killers because it's believed that they are thinning my blood & causing more severe bleeding issues; I have cream for this, but it's difficult to apply it on my back on my own), they just might be short streams until I can get the pain to subside completely (the pain on my right shoulder disappeared after a couple days, so the pain on the left should eventually disappear also, but it's been nearly a week & it's still almost as bad as when it started).  Console system games (or PC games with a gamepad) may be more appropriate until the pain has subsided on my left shoulder, I might consider doing some streams on them until the worst of this issue is over.

UPDATE

 
Patreon got back to me on 10/21/2019 & confirmed that while my personal content may not be adult-oriented, certain terms in certain posts were the expected reason for this creator page getting flagged as such. They gave me the option of deleting those posts & re-appealing to have the page reverted.

Unfortunately the terms they pointed out were a part of the names of those games (in a number of the Free Game updates) & I don't feel like leaving patrons in the dark on those giveaways.  Another option would be to move them to another site & restricted by account login (should be simple enough through Blogger, but would require the patron to contact me with a valid Google account to give them access).

For the time being, I've decided I'm going to leave the page in the inaccurate classification until those giveaways have expired, then I'll consider appealing again after the adult-content posts have been cleared.  I will allow patrons to voice their opinions on this (contact me privately if you wish to remain anonymous, as some have already voiced that concern before becoming a patron).

One other thing of note is that it appears they are going to take into consideration my suggestion of allowing singular age-restricted posts on creator pages that are not age-restricted; if this happens, this will mean less time that this page gets stuck in an inaccurate classification due to giveaways with terms in the game names that are going to trigger what happened on the 19th (and still remains).

Inaccurate Adult Content classification (Patreon creator page)

As of 10/19/2019, I received an email from Patreon stating that they were classifying my creator page as adult-only:

Hi WonderGamer,

This is from the Trust and Safety team at Patreon. We are contacting you because we noticed content on your page that looks like it should be marked as Adult Content. It’s critical that any Adult Content on our site is marked as such to keep the browsing experience safe and considerate for everyone. Please see our Community Guidelines.

We have selected the Adult Content setting for your page as a precaution. If you did not and do not intend to post any Adult Content, you can appeal this decision. You can find more detail and instructions here: read about it here

If you have other questions or concerns, please contact us at guidelines@patreon.com.

Patreon Trust and Safety

Note that I do NOT provide, nor stream adult-only content (not like Twitch or YouTube would allow this anyways; I do however age-restrict some of my own content as they are published on YouTube when language might be an issue), however this classification is expected to come from the fact that some of the game freebies I have been locating online by reputable sources for game giveaways (gave giveaway listings being a perk for subscribers of $5 or more, or in the case on Patreon, "patrons") were being listed against my better judgment.  The option to avoid this would have been to not list these freebies (which was my original gut response to listing these freebies), but I made the mistake of not listening to it & listed them anyways, which appears to be why Patreon has decided to incorrectly classify this creator page as being an Adult Content creator page.

I am intending on appealing the decision, but at the same time, I'm not expecting the decision to be reverted & in some cases, it might be best to just leave it at that classification (I never expected to run into freebies of an adult-only nature, but ultimately, it ended up happening regardless; I either have the option of keeping patrons in the dark on those giveaways & not listing them to prevent the page from being misclassified as adult-only, taking the listings elsewhere & restricting access to it by login name of that network & subscriber status on Twitch/Patreon or listing them as I have done & facing the full penalization of the creator page over a few posts that probably should have been age-restricted...not like a kid is going to have a card to gain access to them anyways). The game giveaways that were listed by these sites will eventually disappear when they expire, but this page (if not reverted after the appeal) will always be misclassified as adult content & there's not a lot I'll be able to do about that unless I decide to remove the listings for those giveaways to stay in accordance with what got the page misclassified to begin with (although I do have options to list those freebies for Twitch subscribers through alternative methods, but it would require a Twitch subscription to access them even if they were to be listed over Discord & ultimately a higher minimum on Patreon to be able to request a gift sub on Twitch, unless the patron just decided to sub on Twitch instead of Patreon).

I will be posting another update on this later when I have a decision from Patreon.

Brief hiatis (health & personal matters)

I'm currently dealing with some issues that is preventing me from spending long periods of gaming, therefore there hasn't been any streams over the last few days & it might be a couple more before I'll be able to get back to streaming as I would like. 2 of these issues are health related, the first related to back issues (having heat on my back to try & deal with this). The second is a semi-severe case of anemia (if it gets much worse, I may find myself in the hospital to replenish lost blood), which has resulted in a lack of energy to even stay awake for very long spending much of the last 3 or 4 days resting (focusing on high-iron foods to replenish lost red blood cells, already taking iron supplements for this specific reason).

Additionally, there's been some personal matters I've had to deal with (billing errors, insurance-related & family issues mostly), which wouldn't normally take all day to take care of, but with the health issues on top of the personal matters, I haven't had the energy when I get finished & instead find myself resting in between dealing with those issues.

I'm hoping I'll be back to normal streaming in a couple days, no guarantee on that & especially if I find myself hospitalized due to excessive blood loss, so fingers crossed that I'm able to get through this without a hospital bill to deal with in addition to what I've already been dealing with over the past few days...

Archived videos on Twitch set to be subscriber-only in 2020

It's been determined that with the degradation of highlights on Twitch due to hidden titles & descriptions making them pointless to really keep on Twitch at all (outside of being backups to the YouTube versions in case they get deleted for some reason, YouTube now being the primary means for viewing highlights on my channel due to lack of descriptions on Twitch), that I will be setting all archived videos on the channel to subscriber-only in the near future. I'm going to give it until the beginning of 2020 before this is done to see if descriptions/titles happen to come back before that point (also to give Epic Games some time to view the videos that were previously linked to them in violation reports; even if the descriptions are missing, the videos alone might still serve some purpose for those that were already informed of the reason for those videos being highlighted); if not, all archived videos on the channel will be getting the subscriber-only restriction due to lack of purpose caused by negated descriptions.

EDIT:  One thing I forgot about this is that there is still a 24-hour period of exclusivity I have to give to Twitch if during that session, a recorded video being uploaded to YouTube was at the same time being streamed to Twitch.  For this reason, there will be 24-hour windows when videos on Twitch need to be used in violation reports (of course since descriptions are no longer available on Twitch, the reports are instead pointing to pre-written Google Docs that have links to the video evidence on 3 different sites, rather than directly to the Twitch version of the video & stating that specific details are in the description as I have been doing in the past).

The PlayStation 3 Twitch app is finally fixed!

As of 10/13/2019, it appears the Twitch app on PlayStation 3 has finally been fixed. I contacted Twitch roughly a year & a half ago to find out if they were ever going to fix it & they stated they had no intention in it, so I started a petition on iPetitions.com to get that issue fixed. It took over a year to get 101 signatures & another signature was added after I submitted the petition to the suggestions boards for Twitch (the petition sat at 102 signatures by the time the app was fully fixed). I've noticed for roughly a week & a half that it appeared that they were attempting to fix it, but the primary function of being able to play videos & streams was still not working. Now it appears to be functioning properly & I have to thank everybody who took the time to sign that petition, we wouldn't have gotten this far without your voices to show that this app still serves a purpose & it would have continued to be used over the (roughly) 2 years that it remained broken if it had been given the same importance as the PlayStation 4 app when it got updated. The app is finally functional again, take a bow for making it possible.

Live streams on Twitch, highlights on YouTube

At this point I have gotten tired of fighting the decision by Twitch to hide descriptions & titles, later pulling the ability to search from those hidden descriptions as well.  I will be directing viewers to my YouTube channel rather than trying to hold onto Twitch highlights as a reputable function of the site, which is now degraded to a near useless state if any video requires a description to explain what is going on in the video or in finding them through searches.  YouTube so far is the only service I'm registered with that still has not restricted descriptions/titles (first Steam did by freezing them so they couldn't be changed, now Twitch has just dumped the function for anything other than viewing the video itself), so YouTube will remain the primary method of viewing videos saved on Twitch until something is done about the current condition regarding highlights.  Should YouTube also take this route, I expect I will be opening a DailyMotion account to start uploading to.  Eventually it may come down to the point where all descriptions may need to be published & those videos embedded on my personal site as a last resort...

Missing descriptions & titles on videos

It's come to my attention that Twitch has now negated titles & descriptions from videos on Twitch (this includes any form of vides on their servers, not limited to just Past Broadcasts, Highlights, Clips or otherwise). For this reason, this means I am going to need to get that information published elsewhere & makes it more important than ever to have those descriptions on external sites (something I started doing within the last month due to various problems or lack of functionality between Twitch, YouTube & Steam). For Highlights, I may need to republish descriptions & titles to my personal site on individual pages to get that information public. For Past Broadcasts, I had started adding viewing statistics to those videos to show how the channel was doing (or not doing due to lack of viewers); these statistics will start getting added to a spreadsheet on Google Sheets & will be held indefinitely as apposed to disappearing when the Past Broadcast expires on Twitch. Ultimately, it's going to be easier to find videos listed on Twitch through external sites, rather than on Twitch itself with what they have done. Checking a few other channels, it seems this wasn't just done to my channel or my account, but done globally. This also causes a major problem with the reports I have been filing against players for violation sin games (seeing as the reports would indicate "specifics can be found in the description", I will need to start providing links to the written descriptions on Google Docs rather than to the videos until I see that this missing descriptions & titles issue has been resolved on Twitch (this isn't far off from the frozen descriptions & titles issue I started having on Steam in August of 2019 & am continuing to have to deal with).