A recent Fortnite tournament had some pretty bizarre rules surrounding banned former Twitch star Dr Disrespect, especially considering he was hosting the $100,000 tournament. Because of the ban, Twitch streamers couldn’t show his face or even mention his name in their own streams.These rules came from tournament organizer BoomTV, as posted by tourney participant Jake Lucky of Full Squad Gaming. The rules seem designed to allow streamers to broadcast their games without running afoul of Twitch’s strict rules surrounding banned content creators. "It is prohibited to use your channel to knowingly feature or advertise a suspended user," reads the rules. "We understand that there may be instances where suspended users may appear on your stream due to circumstances beyond your control, such as through third-party gaming tournaments, but we expect that you make a good faith effort to remove them from your broadcast, mute them, or otherwise limit their interactions with your stream."
Perhaps understanding the almost impossible position this put tournament participants in, BoomTV offered some "helpful tips to navigate this tournament if you are a Twitch streamer." These included referring to Dr Disrespect as "the two-time" or "Blockbuster video game champion," two titles that related to Disrespect's supposed wins at the Blockbuster World Video Game Championships in 1993 and 1994 (which fans have not been able to find any evidence to support and seems to just be part of Disrespect's wrestling-style persona).
However, tournament participants were also told to avoid showing images of Dr Disrespect, playing any audio of Disrespect, and any footage of Disrespect MCeeing the tournament.
The Dr laughed at these rules on Twitter, but to Twitch, these rules are no joke. Chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura recently earned himself a temporary ban for rebroadcasting a perviously recorded game featuring Dr Disrespect on his own channel.
Details of Dr Disrespect's June 2020 Twitch ban remain murky. We know it touched off a nearly two-year lawsuit that ended with a settlement in March, but neither Twitch no Disrespect offered any details of the settlement and the Dr remains banned from the streaming platform to this day. Now, Dr Disrespect streams on YouTube and runs a triple-A game studio that's making games using NFTs.