The First Streamer to Try Aux Battles

A good chunk of what Twitch battles looks like today traces back to one beta tester: Dman. This post is a thank you, and an honest account of what actually came out of that.

How this started

Mid-July I reached out to Dman directly, not for a shoutout, just for an opinion. He's watched and played a lot of aux battles, I'd built an app for it, and I wanted to know what he thought was broken or missing.

The idea that became the biggest feature on the site

Early on, he asked whether the game had any way for a Twitch chat to actually participate, voting on submissions the way chat-driven song games usually work. It didn't yet. Within about a week, it did. Twitch battles, with chat voting and chat submissions, shipped shortly after, and it's still the single biggest feature this app has.

Two rounds of testing

Dman tested the game twice. The first pass was off-stream, early on, just him poking at it and reporting back what felt off. The second was live, on his own stream, with real chat traffic hitting the game at the same time.

That's the kind of thing that's easy to get wrong testing alone and impossible to miss with a real crowd watching: whether the queue actually keeps up, whether the UI still makes sense with chat messages scrolling past it, whether people understand what to do without anyone explaining it to them first.

What actually shipped because of that testing

Before that feedback, Twitch battles only ran in one format, the same round-based structure as the regular game. Dman was the one who suggested a bracket format instead, arguing it made more sense for how a big stream actually plays out than a normal round-by-round battle. That's what bracket mode is: a straight 1v1 elimination tournament, built off that suggestion. Friends mode landed around the same time, a second format aimed at the same problem, giving bigger streams an option beyond the default game.

Two more specifics came out of that same feedback, both still part of how bracket mode works:

• Simpler voting for brackets. He pushed back on 0.5-5 star ratings making sense for a head-to-head format, arguing it should just come down to which song wins. Bracket matches are now decided by a straight 1-vs-2 vote instead of a star average.
• Resubmitting a new song each round. He wanted the option for players to submit a fresh song every round of a bracket instead of riding one submission through the whole tournament. That's exactly how bracket rounds can be configured now.

None of that happened because he filed a bug report. It happened because he actually played the thing, twice, including once live in front of real chat traffic, which finds problems no amount of me clicking through it alone ever will.

Thanks for testing this, Dman. If you're reading this, go check out his stream: twitch.tv/yxngdman.