Really early on in my streaming career I was a big Elite Dangerous player, basically all I ever streamed and I had a pretty dedicated audience of hyper-focused Elite players who came to watch and fly with me.
At this point I’d barely reached affiliate, and I made a point to do community hangouts while flying with people in chat.
I had one guy turn up who seemed like a really nice guy, kind of boomer in how he talked about stuff but ultimately a pretty nice dude, part time streamer who was always offering advice when I needed it and just seeming pretty wholesome.
At the same time, I was steadily developing an increasingly large number of openly trans audience members. I was still new to the whole concept of trans people at the time, but I was open and supportive about it and I was a very strong proponent of lgbt identity in my audience in general.
The guy in question as I mentioned was kind of boomer about a lot of his thoughts and opinions but ultimately a pretty chill, and he seemed to interact with everyone quite genuinely and respectfully including my growing trans audience, so after a few months I thought it would be fine to have him in VC with me to yap while he taught me things about the game.
Was going pretty good until about 2 hours in. Bro starts laughing and says he had a joke he wants to tell but it might offend more sensitive audience members.
Realistically that should have been a red flag for me but he’d been so chill up to that point I didn’t even think about it and assumed it was some kind of bawdy or suggestive joke so I told him it was fine.
Anyway, he ended up dropping probably the most transphobic joke I had ever heard up until that point.
It wasn’t even a ‘reluctantly funny haha but still awful’ kind of joke where you laugh because the joke is so absurdly dumb, it was just downright so offensive and vile that I couldn’t believe he’d -wanted- to tell anybody that he thought it was funny.
I straight up had a mental bluescreen upon realising what he said and just kinda stuttered for a few minutes and between the joke and me finally figuring out how to talk again he appeared to realise how poorly the joke was received and said ‘I should probably go.’
He left the call, I apologised profusely to chat, and I think my follow count at the time dropped by like a quarter.
I ended up reaching out in private DMs to every trans person I knew who’d been watching to apologise directly for what had happened.
About half of them were pretty understanding but others just straight up blocked me, which sucked but I kinda just accepted it as consequence for not properly vetting someone before letting them into VC.
Anyway I ended up removing him from my community and stopped all playing with chat/streamer engagement entirely for about a year after that, and to this day I still get very nervous about letting anyone I’m not deeply familiar with have access to my VC while in stream.
All in all, easily the worst collab/playing with audience experience I’ve ever had.
Do you guys have any bad collab experiences?
My worst one was a couple years ago with a VTuber. We were supposed to play Valorant together, but something came up on their end. They canceled less than an hour before we were scheduled to go live. I get that emergencies happen, so I reached out to reschedule… and got completely ghosted. A short while later, they even unfollowed me.
We had similar-sized audiences, so it wasn’t like I was a nobody to them. I was just left hanging with nothing. I hope they were okay, but it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth.