Trovo's Over Gamification Problem
Trovo as a live streaming competitor to the likes of YouTube gaming and most notably Twitch, is running into a problem. The over gamification of its service is causing potentially confusion among not only the live streamers, but also to the viewers that are watching these live streams.
Take for example, when you go into a particular livestream on Trovo you are inundated with treasure boxes, PK Arena, Elixirs, Mana, Boost Project, and Space level which has the very real possibility in confusing everyone.
At its core, all these items are there to incentivize the viewer to interact, watch, and be part of the stream in order to get rewarded for their time and effort of doing so. Now this at the beginning sounded like a perfectly good idea. But like with all things that are touched or made by humans. It is going to be abused and abused it was, treasure boxes for example had become a blight on the live streaming service that many live streamers had an issue where they were inflating their viewership numbers, they were abusing the treasure boxes to inflate their follower counts. It's to the fact that Trovo themselves had to cut back and very much paired down the treasure box experience to have it only be usable once or twice a week, instead of every day.
The result of Trovo making these sweeping changes was that the streamers who were abusing the treasure box system left the service. As they left their responses were not inward to themselves but towards Trovo itself. Blaming Trovo for causing them to lose viewership and ultimately their paycheck. Will have to say that Trovo did have a hand in this as they were the ones who implemented the changes and as humans typically do, would find loopholes and abuse the system to create an unfair advantage over the streamers who didn’t want to abuse the treasure boxes. Trovo experienced a drastic fall of viewers and streamers following the change but, for those that remained had the service to claim as their own, without having to compete against those falsified streamers.
Moving into the currencies that one can use while on Trovo. Manna, which is a type of currency that you can earn by simply watching or interacting with the stream. Manna can be used to put in fun spells that you show up on screen or in chat.
They also have another currency that was available called elixirs. These elixirs are a currency that you could essentially exchange real world money for digital Trovo currency which can be used for more spells that provide the same experience as manna spells but gives the streamer a monetary gain. Now, what we have is the ACE program. You can get elixirs, but the problem is there are now two different types of elixirs. You have the regular elixirs that you can get for real world money, and you have ACE elixirs which you receive after signing up to the ACE loyalty program. What happens is when you purchase a Trovo ACE with a monthly fee that you get specially colored emotes and other benefits you could use. The issue you’ll experience with the Trovo ACE elixirs is that you must continue to renew every month in order to continue to use these separate elixirs. You would not be able to use these ACE elixirs to continue your membership or sub to a streamer. If you stop your ACE membership then those ACE elixir become locked into a escrow that will be available for roughly 30 days when after that time, they disappear. This incentivizes the viewer to remain in the ACE program and provides Trovo a monthly income.
Trovo as a whole is stable, fun place you can stream to but, is becoming confusing to viewers and live streamers in regard to methods of supporting the streamer. For now, Trovo doesn’t seem to be slowing down on the gamification options and that will be a problem soon.
