This post is specifically about speedballs/slowballs which pay out unpigmented masterpoints. No one is arguing that high-level competitions shouldn't have a delay. That is reasonable and the Twitch community respects that. However, the purpose of twitch and streaming is community engagement--streams are active back and forth conversations between the people watching and the person streaming. You interact directly, making it a starkly different experience from watching something on Vugraph or youtube. BBO has requested a 5+ minute delay for speedball games. This effectively turns streaming into a youtube video. The streamer will not see any comments made until after the delay has passed, viewers will need to wait that long to hear a response to something they say, and as a result, the streams tend to be unlively, boring, and generally unpopular. As a streamer, without viewer engagement, it is very difficult to keep up an interesting and fun conversation that keeps viewers engaged and watching when you're doing all of the work yourself, and it also removes a lot of enjoyment from making the stream in the first place. By asking for such a long delay in these less serious speedball/slowball games, you are explicitly removing the purpose of streaming to Twitch, which drives fewer people to stream bridge to twitch, which means fewer people will watch bridge there, and eventually bridge streaming will die. Two years ago there were far more people streaming bridge on twitch than there are now, I was one of them. Having a long delay bleed down into speedballs/slowballs is completely unnecessary, and it actively hurts the community who wants to stream bridge.
