Recently I have been playing and streaming Albion Online on my Twitch channel. Its a F2P sandbox mmo with a player run economy that has some similarities with EVE Online. It most likely has one of the best reoccurring twitch drops program on the twitch platform. Albion Online partners use to have the drops as a exclusive perk but that recently changed and now anyone can submit to be added for the drop campaigns.
Here is a screenshot of what a typical Albion Online Twitch Drops campaign looks like.
As you may notice, in order for viewers to get all the rewards they would have to watch Twitch streams for 24 hours and 15 mins.
This campaign starts / ends on a Monday, here is the exact timeframe in the following screenshot.
On Monday 2/13/2023, Albion Online had an extended maintenance update that lasted for about 6 hours. During the 6 hours no one is able to play the game, so many of the usual channels in this time slot were not streaming.
My Twitch channel runs 24/7, with live sessions followed by reruns until next time I go back on broadcast.
Since not many other channels were on, my channel which was playing a replay vod was one of the top slotted in both "High to Low" and "Recommended" sort functions on the directory (including api queries). Generally which ever channel is listed at the top of the game directory usually gets the bulk of viewers who are looking for the drop rewards. ( Note: This is not 100% anymore due to the default sort being "Recommended" and not "High to Low" )
The anomaly hit my channel and I can share screenshots of what happened via Twitch Analytics.
- Unique Viewers for that day, 328,311 which normally would take my channel months to achieve
- Live Views chart, shows the spikes
- Average Viewers, shows how the anomaly didn't effect the viewer counter number ( CCV )
- New Followers, shows how the anomaly didn't effect followers, nothing really added
- Viewer Discovery - Followers, this is extremely interesting, Twitch analytics is saying the anomaly was ALL from followers, which is impossible since my channel only has 47k followers in total.
- Views by Location - This shows that the anomaly is from Russia.
So this isn't your typical viewbot, it doesn't effect CCV but it does effect video views which normally no one really cares about on Twitch.
My guess is this maybe some exploit being used to farm the Albion twitch drops with out watching the streams.
Hopefully with disclosure, Twitch can investigate this reoccurring anomaly happening in the Albion streaming directory.
