Wednesday 24 December 2014

Fnatic "Cheating" at Dreamhack Winter 2014 - Twitter Visualisation

A little while ago I was attending Dreamhack Winter 2014 as a producer for the League of Legends BYOC tournament, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing that happened on the event. During the quarter final of the CS:GO tournament Fnatic used pixelwalking (when you use an invisible pixel that should not be part of the game) to win the third map.




The other team also used a “cheat” to win some rounds, but eventually Dreamhack decided a rematch was the best option. The community was outraged about the boost Fnatic and expressed their feelings on different social media sites. Using Naoyun and Gephi I scraped the interactions on Twitter for five hours to show the magnitude of the conversation on Twitter. Only using the keywords fnatic, ldlc and overpass gave me over 55.000 tweets (including retweets) sent by over 10.000 Twitter accounts. Making the story trending on Twitter for several hours. Every dot (node) in the picture is a Twitter account and every line (edge) shows that there was an interaction between those accounts (mention or retweet).





Interesting to see that Fnatic and Dreamhack is mentioned more compared to several LDLC accounts. Even with the knowledge that LDLC also was using boosts to win some rounds.