Battlegrounds Trolls Are Using Car Horns To Annoy Popular Streamers

“There’s nothing worse than getting stream sniped,” streamers said a mere week ago. Oh, how naive they were.

The latest major update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds added, among many other things, car horns. Suddenly, as though exposed to a moon stone, stream sniping—the practice of watching somebody’s stream of a game and using it to gain an upper hand—evolved. Now instead of stalking their favorite streamers and killing them, people have taken to following them around in cars and honking at them incessantly. It’s called stream honking, and it’s infuriating and/or hilarious, depending on your perspective.

Here’s Grimmmz, one of the most popular PUBG streamers, suffering through it:  

It happened to the man, the myth, the mustache Dr Disrespect, too. He ended up shooting at some and ranting about others:

here’s Twitch superstar Lirik getting stream honked by the same person for multiple games: 

Stream honkers are like flies buzzing around streamers’ ears, but also they have air horns, are giant, and periodically fall out of the sky right next to their targets. Stream honking can be funny, but it’s definitely been getting under streamers’ skin. In the latter respect, it’s similar to the practice that spawned it. Stream sniping has been the talk of the battletown among players of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds since last week, when a player got banned for allegedly stream sniping popular streamer Shroud.The player in question protested, claiming it was just a coincidence. Many others sided with him, saying they believe it’s too hard for developers to provethat players are stream sniping and that a lot of the time it’s just a scapegoat streamers blame when they’re losing. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, however, argued that developer Bluehole has access to troves of game data that provide necessary evidence in cases where they suspect players of stream sniping.

Should stream honking be treated like stream sniping? That’s a tough question. On one hand, stream honkers aren’t technically walloping, shooting, or sniping streamers, but they are, one could argue, intentionally hurting their play experience. Let’s be real here: it’s briefly funny, but then it quickly becomes annoying as shit. Perhaps, then, the moment will pass and the problem will take care of itself. If not, though, I foresee another one of yesterday’s big update additions—a “report” button—getting a lot of usage in the near future.