Dota 2's annual tournament, The International, is currently taking place without a live audience, which resulted in onlookers being given the option to add fake applause to livestreams. After much criticism from fans, it seems the options has been altogether removed.
As reported by PC Gamer, fans watching The International, Dota 2's yearly e-sports world championship tournament, were given the option to add "Spectator Cheering" whenever they saw something impressive in-game.
Before The International kicked off properly, Valve described the feature as, "We take all of the cheers from the entire audience and sum them up, then represent them visually on screen as well as with the roar of the crowd. So while we can't hear you in person, your passion and voices will still have an impact on the event".
Despite the good intentions, as you'd probably expect fans took the cheering system and ran as far as they could with it to annoy other players. Spectators took to spamming the command whenever they wanted to, leading to streams that were full of cheering and fake applause. Worse yet, spectators were given no option to disable the feature, leading to streams that were mostly just intense clapping, and then total silence during the tensest moments of a match.
Although some players grew to enjoy the feature and how exciting it made matches, the Dota 2 subreddit was mostly full of complaints from spectators who were trying to watch the games without any kind of interruption. Taking a look at the subreddit now shows that most of the posts have been deleted by moderators, with the only remaining posts targeting those who found the feature annoying.
As reported by Redditor CrispyTangos, the feature has now been completely removed from streams, with no option to turn it back on. The post announcing that clapping had been disabled has a mixture of reactions, ranging from players who were enjoying it to suggestions that it should be run by a moderator.