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Zack "Asmongold" toyed with the idea of Blizzard view-botting Dragonflight's recent trailer to build hype for the latest expansion to World of Warcraft. After reacting to a post on his dedicated subreddit, the streamer tried to theorize ways in which the large disparity between views and likes could be explained without any shady tactics.
As a veritable giant in MMORPG games, Zack is considered quite an authority in all things World of Warcraft, and with the community looking forward to Dragonflight's release next week, his inputs were greatly appreciated by fans.
While acknowledging the disproportionate viewer-to-like ratio, Asmongold was open to other explanations and tried to theorize possible explanations of the phenomenon. He stated:
"I will say this, 23 thousand likes for six million views is extremely low. However, it depends on how the embedding works."
Asmongold defends Blizzard from accusations of view-botting latest Dragonflight trailer
On today's stream, Asmongold came across a Reddit post titled "Blizzard viewbotted the new DF trailer." The trailer in question currently has about eight million views and 24K likes at the time of writing this piece.
In any case, the OTK founder was quite stumped when he first read the post, wondering why people were accusing Blizzard of view-botting. He quipped:
"2.9 thousand [sic] views, and then this came out four days and has six million views and has 23 thousand likes. Um... I'm confused. Why do they think this is view botted?
Asmongold scrolled down to peek at the comments to understand the sentiment behind the accusations and read aloud a couple of comments relevant to the post:
"View botting is a basic strategy market agencies use."
After comparing Dragonflight's new trailer statistics with the old one, the streamer summed up the situation and stated:
"So there's more people that watched it, and there's less likes on the video."
While Asmongold admitted that the like-to-viewer ratio was not comparable to the videos, he still thought there might be other reasons for the discrepancy. He listed examples, such as using embeds on other websites that are driving up views without giving viewers the option to like or dislike the video. The streamer stated:
"For example, if you go to Battlenet and then the trailer plays and you see it there. That might count as a view, but you're not able to like it, or it's not an actionable view in terms of liking or disliking. You see kind of what I'm saying?"
Timestamp 3:51:25
Asmongold had another theory about the low views on the first one, saying that views were split because the video had two iterations. He opined:
"Also, I remember whenever the Dragonflight announcement happened, what it was, was that each of the different views got split. Like, half of the views went to one video, half went to the other video. Because of the fact that they livestreamed the announcement and then they took that part of the live stream, and then they made it a video."
He also entertained an alternate theory of viewer-like disparity from an audience member who suggested the video was being run as an ad, stating:
"'Views come on the video from ads on YouTube.' Oh, so it's an ad on YouTube. That makes sense. But wouldn't they put this one as an ad too? I don't know."
Asmongold, however, was not impressed and told his chat that fans of the game have received the second trailer favorably, thus the high viewership. He ultimately dismissed the view-botting accusation, stating:
"Either way it's not really a surprise. I think that people are more positive about the second trailer for sure. But yeah, this isn't really evidence of view-botting in my opinion."
Fan reactions
Here's how his fans reacted to his proclamation with some giving their own theories:
Dragonflight will be the ninth expansion to the World of Warcraft MMORPG following Shadowlands. Fans of the game are understandably excited to get their hands on it on November 28 when it releases.
