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Stream snipers are a hassle in the life of a Twitch streamer. Michael “shroud” Grzesiek constantly has these players watching his streams to get his position and eliminate him in Playerunknown’s Battleground, Apex Legends, or whatever game he’s playing.
But shroud ran into a hilarious, borderline bizarre kind of stream sniper in a PUBG match yesterday.
He was playing on Sanhook with fellow PUBG streamer Jake “chocoTaco” Throop, but with his in-game voice communications turned off. Chocotaco told him to turn the sound on because there was “some wildlife” up in a tree that the two of them were walking by. When shroud did so, he could hear the sounds of monkeys.
There’s no wildlife in Sanhook. Instead, there were two players in the tree making monkey sounds while looking at the duo. Shroud stared at them laughing, but he was speechless for a few seconds before shooting the two players down. They stayed in character and screamed as if shroud had just taken down two monkeys.
This unexpected interaction in the game between a streamer and his fans is rare. Most players who do that prefer to hunt the streamer down and ruin their match by catching them off-guard. This time, though, shroud could laugh a bit during the stream and experience something in PUBG that would probably never happen if he wasn’t streaming.
The bad kind of stream snipers are leading Twitch streamers to debate if game companies owe them protection against these players. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Tim “TimTheTatman” Beta, and Ben “DrLupo” Lupo talked about this during their Fortnite stream together while being tagged by players who knew where they were thanks to their streams. This issue is so common in Fortnite that Ninja has turned off his stream several times during professional online competitions to make sure stream snipers can’t try to ruin his run, such as in the Fortnite World Cup Qualifiers.
Shroud’s interaction with these “monkeys” could be the beginning of a new kind of stream sniping, where fans only jump into a match to interact with their favorite streamers for fun. Otherwise, it might take a long time to see something similar again.
