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Now, I love Warframe and I enjoy the new content and I can see how they are experimenting with new marketing options, but for the sake of protecting the community I love, I have to raise the voice non significant problems I see with the current experiment:
Misleading
Now, this is the obvious one that probably all of you felt very harshly yourself:
DE heavily advertised their Twitch Drop event by prominently promising rewards such as Nidus, Khora and Rivens. Now, they said you 'could' get these, so one might say that it was clear it was not guaranteed, but the very prominent marketing of those rewards without any mentioning of actual chances certainly gave clear impressions that there rewards were what it was all about and the vast majority of viewers definitely got hooked in by the promise of those rewards.
Now, we do not have any official information on the actual drop chances, but judging from the data that several community members have gathered, it seems to be somewhere in the ballpark of 1/500 to 1/1000 per drop. Needless to say this is abyssmally low and goes to show why the advertisement was misleading: they advertised with big, enticing rewards despite being aware, that the vast majority of players would be completely unable to even get those rewards within the provided duration of the marketing event, and the fact that they did not provide any insight on that low chance (albeit ingame drop rates for everything being publicly available), one could even go as far as to say that the ad was intentionally misleading, actually violating consumer protection rules in Europe.
Exploitative
Another thing that should be very obvious to everyone: DE effectively promoted viewbotting to artificially drive up the view counts in Twitch. It was no longer about content at all. Most players eventually reverted to just letting whatever stream promised to be around 24/7 run in the background, likely even muted and at 160p resolution to save some energy and bandwidth. People did not care about what happened on the stream, they only cared for the rewards. You can clearly see that the streams most online were the most popular because of that and once the event ended, the view counts crashed down dramatically again, with people no longer caring for the stream.
Now, I checked the Twitch ToS and could not find anything on view botting, so I assume it is not against the rules just yet. But it should be clear how such marketing cannot be in Twitch's favor, as fake views do not generate them any revenue while still costing them bandwidth. Twitch's investors and advertisers are interested in viewers that actually engage with the content, as those are more likely to subscribe or click ads. DE was also manipulating the Twitch rankings that way, having Warframe up on top and suggesting it was much more popular on Twitch than it really was.
If Twitch does not yet have any rules against such acts, I would not be surprised if they introduced them soon.
Abusive
This one might be less obvious... and is nonetheless concerning: the whole thing might backfire for streamers. Initially it might seem like a good idea to drive viewers to streamers and DE even issues a bounty program, effectively paying streamers the more viewers they could gather for the promotion.
But this led to several problems:
1) The rich get richer
Only partners were eligible for drops and the bounty. Small, non-partnered streamers effectively lost viewers to the partnered ones, while it would those small streamers, that needed the promotion the most.
2) Degradation of content quality
As mentioned earlier, streams degenerated into a race on who could be online the most. There was frequent afking, boring content, off-topic rambling and even one case where someone had 17k people watch (or actually not watch by having it in the background) him wash the dishes while still generating drops.
But the problems did not stop there. Because then there was the big finale: the new drop system with the "drop monsters".
For those that could not watch the Prime Time stream: DE tested a new system where a streamer would encounter some kind of special "drop monster" enemy and upon killing said enemy, each viewer on the stream that moment would get a drop reward. While this sounds fun on paper and like a way to incentivize streamers to actually play and show the content, it comes with a number of potentially even wanted issues:
1) Viewers will flock to whatever streamer manages to farm the most drop monsters. This would create a competitive and potentially hostile atmosphere between streamers, something I feel would strongly go against the friend and cooperative community we have today. Instead it would be a race to keep viewers (and therefore income). Nobody wants that and I would expect it to quickly leading to streamers getting burned out, causing more harm than good in the end.
2) Streamers will essentially be pressured into showing what DE wants them to show. DE can control where the drop monsters will spawn, so they can easily tie it to some new content they want to show off by only spawning the drop monsters there. The viewers want drops and therefore will only watch streamers doing said content, therefore, by proxy, DE is forcing all streamers to do exactly that.
Streamers will be under much more scrutiny and control like that, will be forced to do content they might not want and it becomes less and less about the actual show or personality, causing long term harm to streamers for a short term profit.
And I am not even mentioning the fact how this is bad for non-US players, as those cannot often be around when a drop monster hunt is in the middle of the night for them, like it happened with the last one.
TL;DR: The new drop system is bad for viewers and streamers, as viewers get false promises and streamers will be forced to show bad content.
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