The American Zepla is one of the biggest streamers for the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Now her account was apparently accidentally blocked by Twitch – a mistake that almost cost her her followers.
This is Zepla: Zepla has joined the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV dedicated and shows it almost exclusively on her Twitch channel. She is known as a friendly and helpful streamer who is happy to give her viewers tips about the game.
In this way, she has built up a community of 243,000 followers on Twitch, with an average of almost 2,000 people watching her (via sullygnome).
Zepla is passionate about playing Final Fantasy XIV and also likes to wear bunny ears on her streams, which are a nod to her character, a Viera bunny girl. What else you need to know about the MMORPG, you can see in the video.
Everything you need to know about the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV – in 2 minutes
Zepla loses thousands of followers to ban
This ban is about: On September 15, the suspension of Twitch partner Zepla was announced via the StreamerBans Twitter account. It was unlocked after exactly 1 hour, 8 minutes and 36 seconds, but the damage was already done.
The ban had these consequences: Zepla initially started their next stream unsuspectingly. But her viewers made her aware that they had to follow her again. Zepla then noticed that Twitch had deleted more than 150,000 of her followers.
This is how Zepla reacted: The streamer shared her unblocking on Twitter and also announced the deletion of her followers. She called this “devastating” and demanded responses from Twitch. Particularly incomprehensible for the streamer: she had not streamed at all in the days before the ban.
Twitch bans streamer for allegedly impersonating herself
This is behind the ban: Shortly after announcing her ban and unban, Zepla shared a message from Twitch stating the reason for the ban as impersonation. Such a ban can be obtained by impersonating another streamer or a Twitch employee.
Due to the alleged seriousness of the offence, the duration of the ban was given as indefinite. Apparently it was a misunderstanding, as Zepla had indeed struggled for years with copycats trying to trick their viewers with phishing links.
Zepla had already addressed this problem in a YouTube video in 2019. Now it appears that Twitch accidentally blocked Zepla’s real account while attempting to crack down on the copycats. She can’t afford this nonsense at the moment, according to Zepla (via Twitter).
Fans also suspect that the streamer’s sudden change of location may have caused distrust on Twitch. Because Zepla had only recently left her adopted country, the Ukraine.
This is the current status: However, numerous users also assured that the followers can usually be restored in such cases.
In fact, the number of followers on Zepla’s Twitch channel is now back at 245,000, their channel has recorded an increase of 170,000 followers in the last 3 days (via sullygnome). However, it is still unclear whether all subscriptions have been restored.
At least Zepla doesn’t seem to have lost her sense of humor: The streamer has already joked that she was probably banned because she just looked too much like herself. But maybe she is also an imitator of herself because she is constantly changing (via Twitter).
The Twitch streaming platform has recently been criticized for its ban policy. Because streamers cannot always understand the reasons for their bans.
This can be life-threatening, especially for somewhat smaller full-time streamers, because they are dependent on the income. The VTuber Shylily also spoke about this problem after her spell.
Twitch bans VTuberin and she doesn’t know why: “Losing everything from one day to the next is scary”