Dauntless streams on hold due to bug

After the last update with Dauntless, I realized that I wasn't getting awarded coins when completing weeklies & even if I do get the coins later, this is still restricting my ability to purchase limited items (like aethersparks, merits & keys), which reset each week/day (depending on the item, point being that considering I'm only getting coins on dailies, I'm not gaining enough to be able to purchase those items each week, aethersparks always being the highest priority each week).

Because of this new bug in Dauntless, I will be limiting my gameplay in Dauntless until resolved, which means there won't be enough time playing the game to make it worth streaming it on Twitch.  On the other hand, videos will still be recorded & could still show up on YouTube if I have something worthy of the time it takes to process & upload the video (usually taking around a few hours per video).  Streaming of Dauntless should continue on my Twitch channel once this bug has been fixed (as well as once my health has improved enough to allow me to stream over an extended time again, one of the reasons streams have been extremely limited over the past couple months).

UPDATE:  Interestingly enough, it seems that almost as soon as I started bringing up this issue on their official Discord server (including mentioning the notices I have made that I was putting Dauntless streams on hold until this issue was resolved, as if my Discord status wasn't enough indication of that), they hotfixed the issue mid-session (without needing another patch to fix it).  For the most part this issue appears to be fixed, but as of yet, there are still a few that appear to be bugged & not completable (at least as far as I could tell), one in particular being the completion of dailies counting towards a weekly.

At the very least, weeklies are now awarding coins as they should be (at least those that can be completed), so Dauntless streams are back on when I have the health to run them, however I do have a lot of life issues that I've been dealing with over the past couple months, I probably won't have a lot of time to stream until mid-November (hopefully before then, although they might be limited until later).

Twitch restrictions increased on channel

Due to the obscene amount of "buy viewers" bots & abusive users on Twitch, decided to increase the restrictions beyond just email verification.  This now includes a phone number verification for new chatters, but with a minimal restriction (seeing as bots typically follow & are gone in a split second, they'll never get past this...unless they were actually stupid enough to add a phone number to their accounts).  The account age restriction should block the people creating new accounts just to be abusive in chat.

Anybody who has chatted on the channel in the past (and hasn't been banned) should be exempt from needing a verified phone number on their Twitch account, otherwise they can just wait 10 minutes after following to chat if they don't have a verified phone number.  The account age bypass may be adjusted or removed if it bypasses independently rather than in addition to following.

Restrictions will be adjusted as necessary, but I don't expect I'll have to go much farther than this.

 

Twitch breach of information

On October 7th, I received an email from Twitch stating that all stream keys had been reset on Twitch (being that I use older software that requires manual entry of the key on my PC, this was an important email for me, although I have yet to update it in my old beta version of OBS):

While at the time I was unaware that there had been a breach of information on Twitch (the email not specifically mentioning this), I suspected as much to be receiving an email like this.

The next day (October 8th) I got an email from Norton regarding the attack on Twitch, a web version of this email can be found here.  This email made me aware of the situation & after reading futher details about it on The Verge, I realized that this could not only be the reason why certain functions are getting broken on Twitch, additional steps are likely necessary by creators to secure your account, as well as protect your identity from being stolen...

While I suspect people using 2-step authentication on their accounts are probably safe (with perhaps the exception of using a mobile authenticator, seeing as it might be possible the hackers managed to pull restoration keys to access your account), email & SMS/text secondary authorization methods should still remain secure.  Changing your password might be a smart move if you are not using texting or email 2-step login protection.

The bigger problem is the theft of personal information, which might make sense to protect your identity with an extra layer of protection (like with credit monitoring or through LifeLock).  I personally use the authenticator on my main account, so I expect I will be at least changing my password, if not changing the 2-step authentication method (seeing as I have Norton Dark Web Scanning for my personal information, I'll get a notification if that password gets listed, at which point I'll know it's necessary to change the authentication method beyond the password).

Stay safe out there streamers, do what is necessary to secure your accounts & identities against the technically-advance criminal enterprise that attacked not only Twitch, but every user on their site.

Email notifications now broken as well...

Another thing I've noticed is that email notifications appear to have stopped, so I no longer get notified of channels going live, which limits the amount of hosts I've been able to throw out due to lack of intended functionality (unless this was intended to be broken).  Statements from other streamers I have on my frequent host list would indicate that they are affected by this same issue & this issue would appear to be global (as with which was later to determined with the hosting and auto-hosting issues, as well as listing of hosted channels on their website).

While this appears to be no longer functional through email (my main form of notifications on live streams on Twitch), I have found that notifications still work through my browser (if I have it running & am at my computer when a channel starts streaming).

These notifications have displayed a problem for some time with multiple notification throughout a stream (the longer a stream ran, the more notifications you would receive).  It's possible these could have been disabled to battle this problem, however the same issue also affects other forms of notifications (mobile app & browser notifications) so disabling the email notifications just cut off those that relied on them, it didn't solve anything...

In addition to the lack of email notifications, this is also cutting off the time I watch, host, lurk or subscribe to other channels because I simply don't know they are running unless I am already on Twitch (unless I'm using my browser as the time & don't have those notifications muted, as I have them muted while playing, recording or streaming other games myself).  I do check every so often to see if anybody is streaming, but I've noticed that I am not getting full use of my Amazon Prime sub as often as I could due to broken auto-hosting, hosting & notifications on Twitch..

Further hosting functions broken

As I continued to mess with it, I found that there were additional functions broken with Twitch hosting, not only with auto-hosting, but also with manual hosts.  What I found was that in addition to auto-hosting not working, manual hosts also were not showing on the website.  I did however manage to find out that hosts were still being listed over mobile & Shield apps (Google Play).  It's possible that host listings might still be working on the PC client, but I haven't used this in several months (only using it for a short period to test whether it got past certain buffering issues when I was using my primary browser to get other things done while watching/listening to a stream on Twitch, removing it when I realized that the PC client shared modules with my primary brower & still buffered when using Firefox, resorting to Microsoft Edge to double-lurk channels when I still needed to get something done in Firefox).  So while manual hosts may seem pointless if you use Twitch primarily through a PC browser, it still has some use if you have followers that may use a mobile/media player (such as the nVidia Shield/Shield TV) app.

Other Twitch function cutoffs

In addition to the cutoff of being able to stream as subscriber-only (as well as marking VODs as subscriber only) I've found that other functions on my account are also getting disabled (and not functions that are affiliate specific).  2 more options I noticed to have been disabled as early as 8/29/2021 include stream summary emails from Twitch (after completion of a steam, still receiving these from StreamElements however) & auto-hosting (these appear to no longer be kicking in; I've double-checked to make sure it's been turned on, as well as making sure that channels I believed should be getting auto-hosted when they are live are still only my list).

It's pretty clear something is happening here that Twitch is neglecting to inform me of in regards to my channel & I fully expect this is a result of falsified reports...  In the mean time, there's little I can d about it myself to get it resolved when I am being given the run around other than making publications on my channel & blog so people are aware that it's not my doing that they may appear to have been gotten cut off from my constant support of their channels (despite my ability to be able to continue streaming)...

Fortnite once again broken, Save the World streams dead until fixed

The update to Fortnite on 8/17/2021 once again broken launching of the game, similar to an issue back in 2017.  Because of this, Save the World streams are dead on my channel until Epic Games can get this issue resolved (I'll be publishing a video of this issue later, as I have done in the past).

In addition to Save the World streams dying on my channel due to my inability to even start the game, I'll also be holding off any other purchases of games over the Epic Games launcher, any games where Epic Games is the developer/publish of that game or any other games that were developed using the Unreal Engine until resolved.

As with the last time Epic Games busted something so I couldn't run it, I've also disabled auto-hosting on my channel until the issue can be resolved.  The reason for this is most of the people that stream on my auto-host list are people that stream games from the Epic Games launcher, as well as games that tend to get auto-hosted usually are developed using the Unreal Engine.  When I see a game that is being streamed that I want to host, I will first research it to make sure the game is not developed/published by Epic Games, not on the Epic Games launcher & not developed using the Unreal Engine before I give a manual host to those channels.

Note that my channel has become primarily a Dauntless channel since the degradation of Fortnite.  While I do not intend on stopping those streams, I do intend on removing supporting information from the Now Playing section of my channel (and this blog) that could lead to money going into the game until I see launching of Fortnite has been fixed...

UPDATE:  At the beginning of my 8/17/2021 Dauntless stream (finding something else to stream because I can't even get Fortnite running), I opened with what was happening when I started Fortnite, repeating this crash 3 times before switching to Dauntless to show it wasn't a fluke:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1121778371

Note that embedding from Twitch has been busted for a few years, I have not been able to embed anything from their site since they changed their API.  The embedded version is from YouTube (a lower quality export from Twtich), but at least allows viewing from other sites without having to go to the site itself ot allow viewing (viewing on Twitch is still recommended if you want the higher quality version or are having trouble reading text in the YouTube version).

The Twitch version of this video was later shared in the bug report filed on the official Fortnite Discord server, editing in the link seeing as the report had been filed with a screenshot prior to this stream even starting.

As of yet, still no fix to the issue, only confirmation I have gotten is that there are a lot of upvotes on the bug report on their Discord server (last I checked, 9 up, 0 down, including my own upvote, not including the initial votes that are added after a bug report is filed), so it seems there may be others that are also running into this same issue.