We reported last week about a weird but amusing partnership between Twitch, KFC, and various streamers that offered viewers a chance to win free chicken dinners—real-world food, not the "winner winner" kind—simply by using a new "KFC Bucket emote" in Twitch chat. Basically, when a participating influencer wins a match, everyone who spams the bucket emote will be entered into a draw for a $20 gift card. Other prizes to be won include a Colonel Sanders ghillie suit, a survival spork, and a "med kit," which is basically a KFC bucket filled with gift cards. 

It all sounds reasonably clever, slightly silly, and perfectly innocuous, and of course the whole thing went sideways very quickly. The problem, as streamer Mychal "Trihex" Jefferson explained on Twitter, is the racist connotations of fried chicken and the fact that its potential for abuse never occurred to anyone before the emote was rolled out. 

"I feel bad for POCs right now on Twitch who can't look past that," he said during a stream. "Come on. Between Snickers and that one, someone's got to get it together. I'm laughing because I'm dying inside. Do no black people work at Twitch?" 

Trihex elaborated on the point in a couple of follow-up tweets, in which he said that even if the emote itself isn't inherently racist—and he doesn't believe it is—it's problematic because it gives racist trolls "more tools that will be be abused endlessly site-wide." 

"Connotations of racial tropes (Blacks love chicken) doesn't phase me cuz I don't identify em as valid (Everyone loves chicken, plus KFC is low-tier trash anyway," he wrote. "BUT that doesn't stop this from being an issue combined w/ streamer accountability of their communities w/ new TOS." 

Twitch's terms of service, updated last month, state that Twitch will not tolerate "conduct that encourages or condones hate or harassment in any way." And that applies not just to members of the community, but to the creators behind them as well. 

"Creators are role models and leaders of the communities they create or foster around them. Creators should consider the consequences of their statements and actions of their audiences; we ask that you make a good faith effort to quell any efforts from those in your community to harass others," it says. 

"Twitch should not be used to incite, encourage, promote, facilitate, or organize hateful conduct or harassment, whether on or off Twitch. We will suspend communities, organizations, and individuals that do so." 

Trihex has a unique perspective on the matter: The face of the Trihard emote on Twitch is his, a fact he discussed in an April 2017 video about the lack of accountability on Twitch. Use of that emote recently led to the second suspension and subsequent release of former Dallas Fuel player Félix “xQc” Lengyel; it was also used abusively against Terrence "TerrenceM" Miller during his hot Hearthstone run at Dreamhack Austin in 2016. 

A KFC rep disavowed the emote's racist connotations in an email statement but acknowledged that there were problems with its use. "We are aware of the instances of abuse of our emote to which we think you’re referring," the rep said. "We will never be enablers of bigotry, and we’re not going to tolerate our brand being used to bully or intimidate others."

The KFC Bucket emote has since been removed, not because of the racist abuse but because the PUBG promotion had come to an end. The big question now is how to avoid these missteps in the future: It may sometimes be difficult to predict what seemingly innocent images will be adopted for abusive purposes—Who could have foreseen that a cartoon frog would become a face of the alt-right?—but this one was obviously going to be abused by certain Twitch users who jump on every opportunity to spam racist stereotypes and slurs, especially when they can use contextual cues like pairing emotes with each other and what's occurring on a stream to ensure their meaning is obvious but not handled by bots.

Getting such behavior off Twitch seems like a matter of strict human moderation, then, as it's easy to circumvent word filters and still send abusive messagessome of them (like this one, for instance) should be obvious, particularly given the nature of Twitch chat. 

It's hard to believe PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is only a year old. After Chris exclusively revealed its official trailer in early March, the battle royale 'em up parachuted into Steam's Early Access initiative on the 23rd of the same month. And, well, you know the rest. 

Now, developer PUBG Corp is celebrating its anniversary by treating players to a complimentary skin. The 'Year One—SCAR-L' jazzes up my (and your?) favourite PUBG weapon with a splash of yellow, the number one and the game's iconic match-winning catchphrase: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner.  

Voila:

This follows news of PUBG's new weapon system and crates, and the fact the developer is "considering" region-locked servers of sorts. 

While researching this story, I rediscovered another article of Chris' titled Playerunknown's Battlegrounds could have a bright future in the battle royale genre he created. It's a great read with today's perspective in mind.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' latest test build introduces a new weapon skin system and new cosmetic crates. Developer PUBG Corp is also contemplating a version of region-locked servers. 

"We are always working towards improving the gameplay environment," reads this Steam Community update post. "This includes providing stable network experience for our players. You all know that we have implemented ping based matchmaking system that has shown great results but we didn't want to stop there. 

"One of the solutions we are considering is operating servers so that only those players who reside in that region can connect and play. These servers will be made invisible to players residing in other regions. But, at the same time, if a player in an exclusive server region forms a team with a player from another region, they can connect to and play on any of the servers available to either of them." 

Last week, Brendan Greene—aka PlayerUnknown himself—appeared to downplay the possibility of region-locked servers in conversation with US Gamer, however the developer reckons this proposed approach aims to offer a "better gameplay experience" and will help improve both network issues and linguistic barriers. 

The post adds: "We are going to run a limited test of this approach as more detailed research and analysis should come before global application."

Elsewhere, the Steam Community post explores the new weapons skins system which comes with a tweaked UI. Skins can be picked up via the paid-for Triumph crate (unlocked with a Weapon Cosmetic Key), and/or the free-of-charge Raider crate.

Drop rates and further information on skins and crates themselves can be found in this direction. The latest update is live now on test servers, while transition to live servers will follow four hours of downtime later today/early tomorrow morning. Details of that are outlined here: