The Call of Duty League officially returned to streaming on Twitch today after using YouTube as the exclusive broadcast platform for the league for the last three years. The switch to Twitch has been positive in terms of viewership, but the opening match of the Modern Warfare 2 season highlighted a major flaw with the game returning to the streaming service.
Atlanta FaZe fans trying to cheer for star player Chris “Simp” Lehr soon found that any attempt to mention the player’s name in the CDL chat instantly resulted in their messages being deleted.
Earlier this year, Twitch added “simp” to the list of banned words on the platform when used as an insult alongside “virgin” and “incel” in order to cut back on negative language being spammed in chats. The term simp formed into a trend on Twitch and social media referring to an individual who is too obsessed with or heavily invested in another person.
While the word was never hard-banned from being used by Twitch, many channels and creators banned it in their chats in order to make sure they didn’t run afoul of Twitch moderation settings. And it seems like it’s certainly been a long time since the Call of Duty Twitch channel has had to think about the word and how banning it in their channel could represent a problem for the CDL, as the channel still has the word flagged.
The irony of the Simp debacle is that Simp’s name far predates the word being used as an insult. Before this term was popularized on social media, Simp was already one of the biggest names in Call of Duty history. The 21-year-old has two world championship rings and countless tournament wins in his career so far.
Before his rise to fame as a rookie in the Call of Duty World League, Simp was formally known as Simplicity but later shortened it. But as it stands, any fans trying to cheer for Simp in chat will need to find some other name to call him by. Any mention of “Simp” in Twitch chat will be immediately deleted with the alert “Your message wasn’t posted due to conflicts with the channel’s moderation settings.”
Adjustments will most likely be made in the CDL Twitch channel to allow viewers to freely talk about one of the most famous players in the game. Until then, fans of Simp will need to be creative if they want to… well, simp.
