A Bit Of HistoryWe’ve been here before, back when we were speaking about Promo Codes, Secret Codes, and Twitch Drops.
When we were handed the reins to the monthly livestreams last Summer, the giveaway structure was primarily locked to giving away one of the champions to a lucky few who were only watching on Twitch when prompted to post the keyword in the chat. Every so often, a promo code was given for a Legend Crystal, and sometimes you’d get a juicier prize from them, but that was pretty rare.
The Promo Code ConundrumThe original intention for Promo Codes was to use them as an engagement tool to encourage people to come watch the stream to be given the code, and that worked for a short time. As you might imagine though, with anything given that only suggests something in return, we found many opting out in favor of waiting until someone else watched and eventually shared the code. Of course, this did not align with the initial goal and was not a great way to grow our audience. And to be frank, it made for a pretty disengaging chat experience for everyone else between promo code and keyword spamming.
Also, due to the wide reaching nature of Promo Codes, this really hampered our efforts to juice up the items we were granting outside of a few outlier situations like Jax and myself departing as the main hosts of the MCOC livestreams. Especially since this is a recurring monthly event. This is also why you saw more valuable rewards during our experimentation with Secret Codes.
You’ll probably notice Promo Codes are now used more often than not as, well... Promo Codes. They’re largely attached to promotions, or as part of big events. Sometimes they’re pretty juicy, like the Promo Code for the Founders War 7-Star Nexus in the Regal Ravagers Event, or other times they might be targeted towards a certain progression or player type. But their use case for Livestreams is simply not a good fit for what we’re trying to achieve and thus will not be using them as our main reward vehicle moving forward.
Enter Twitch DropsTwitch Drops gave us a way to tie each person's viewership directly to a reward. If you watch, you get. Pretty fair, right?
However, this created a challenge as it was only rewarding viewers who showed up live exclusively. While in theory this served the goal, it left out many viewers in different time zones or with tough schedules creating an unintended pain point. It was also in sharp contrast to the more forgiving nature of Promo Codes, where they could be entered without such strict time restrictions. We weren’t going to go back to Promo Codes, and we were consistently asked to provide either longer streams or restreaming to fulfill the Twitch Drops for those who either couldn’t make it live, or had just a few more minutes to lock in to get the final rewards. Our answer? A 24-hour loop of the live`stream for anyone who wished to land those Twitch Drops if they missed the initial stream. Problem solved.. Or so we thought.
Enter Summoners FestI really wanted to do something big and special that included some very different rewards for watching Summoners Fest live. I was pretty happy with the items I was able to get added to the list, as there were many things we’ve never been able to give away via Twitch Drops before. As for watch time milestones, this was based on what we’ve done in the past in terms of percentage. 1-hour livestreams with the final milestone at 45 minutes is about 75% of the duration of the stream. When we were planning out Summoners Fest, we knew we had a schedule of 8 hours a day, for 16 total. We decided to keep it simple and go with the same conversion of time for our normal streams, so we settled on 12 hours, despite the final show ending up being 15 hours. The plan was to run re-streams all week to make sure people had ample time to watch the show and get all their items.
Okay, So You Got Banned For This Right?Not at all. Please find the details about that
[here]. I can see how one would come to that conclusion (that story spread far, wide, and fast), but that simply wasn’t the case, and I would say we got pretty lucky in that too, particularly that it was only for 24 hours. You see, we restreamed in this fashion for almost the entirety of 2025 with no issue. As for Summoners Fest, we were supposed to stream Day 1 followed by Day 2 in order on a constant 15 hour loop, but there was an issue with looping for that long, so we quickly pivoted to showing just the MCOC: The Next Evolution Segment. Unfortunately, this segment had the bulk of the flagged content. We would jump into the chat every so often to interact and engage, but honestly, knowing what I know now, I have no idea how we were never flagged for this throughout the year. Re-reading the Twitch TOS, I thought maybe we skirted past earlier flags because we were in the chat sometimes. Having it actually be a copyright strike from royalty-free tracks that didn’t clear a white list is almost poetic. Because, for one, the idea that we blamed that on anyone but ourselves made absolutely no sense in contrast, BUT this mishap really opened up the door for us to fast-track some plans to expand Twitch Drops much wider out of immediate necessity. Life is funny that way, because when we opened it up with the Alternate Drops plan following Summoners Fest, we had a significant number of participants, to our surprise and delight. I know, I know… we should have done this sooner, but hey, that’s on us with our light experience with Twitch (we were always YouTube guys). But we know now!
Alright then… So What’s Next?Well, a bit of experimentation. Summoners Fest was our most ambitious Twitch Drops to date. That being said, I would like to experiment more with Twitch Drops in our livestreams, how we build out our campaigns, and how we can be much more inclusive, especially with our Exclusive 7-Star Tuned Up Thor (Ragnarok) being added to Twitch Drops in 2026!
Moving forward though, I would very much not like to poke the Twitch bear. While we technically were never flagged for our restreams, my attention being called to that part of the ToS, and our growth tells me we shouldn’t do that anymore.
So, for our upcoming livestreams,, we’re playing with some different ideas and rewards, but open for the entire month, so you can watch our stream, AND the streams of our community, to get your rewards. We’ll make sure names are more clear and are a better description of the rewards. Keep an eye out on our Dec 5th Livestream for more details.
For 2026, I would like to do 2 campaigns. One for our Livestream that is initially opened up to a handful of creators covering the livestream in watch parties and follow-up streams, and a second Campaign for all to lock in some additional items over the course of the month. This however is very early and not final. Details and tuning of the drops and milestones are still WIP at this point, but we will give you more information as soon as we’ve got this nailed down!
Thank you all for your time in reading this Dev Diary. Feel free to ask any questions and discuss in the Forums and on Discord.
-Kabam Dork
