5 Gamers Who Turned Trolling Into An Artform
If you're extremely old, you might remember the days when internet trolling was fun and imaginative and done purely for laughs. It's a far cry from today, when the closest thing to "lighthearted" is someone adding a big Comic Sans "LOL" to the death threat they've superimposed over a picture of your house. But as it turns out, some gamers are still practicing the long-thought-forgotten art of trolling because it's funny (as opposed to "because people with vaginas are enjoying my hobby and I'm so angry all the time").
And to those mischief-making troll-ass souls we say, "Shine on, you crazy diamonds."
Players In GTA Online Are Constantly Getting Blown Up With A Space Cannon
For a long time, an online version of GTA was the dream for many players -- an open world where they could steal, pillage, and race against actual people instead of the cookie-cutter facsimiles that populate the main game universe. Nowadays, however, it's an unusable garbage land full of spammers, hackers, rich doofuses tooling around in tanks, people with terrible taste in music, more spammers, and ... orbital cannons?
One recently released update to the game, The Doomsday Heist, added an orbital cannon that players can access and use to target other players. That sounds ... problematic, but Rockstar was sure to add a countermeasure against malicious-minded hooligans: the fact that it costs between $500k and $750k per shot, making it cheaper to beat players with stacks of bills instead. This places the cannon outside the price range of the vast majority of people playing the game, and only within the grasp of those who truly put in the time and earn this rare perk. Oh, and spammers who can generate infinite amounts of money at will.
You can see where this is going.
Because there is no obstacle the human spirit can't overcome, trolls are using a variety of workarounds in order to go hog-wild and wipe out players who are just, like, trying to play the game without being turned into piles of pixel dust. It's a situation also compounded by the fact that the cannon is more than overpowered; it's unstoppable. With the exception of the bunker from where you control the cannon (and, somehow, your avatar's apartment building), it can find and kill you anywhere and everywhere. Of course, with all those nukes falling all over the place, we wouldn't be surprised if the next GTA looks more like a mutant-filled Fallout landscape.
The only thing that players have going for them is that there's a 48-minute cooldown period between shots, which gives them more than enough time to find and eviscerate the bastard responsible for blowing up their epic ride. Also, you know, Fallout's pretty good.
Trolls ScrewedA video game hasn't really launched until something has gone terribly wrong with it. Sometimes it's the servers melting down under the sheer volume of sign-ups. Sometimes it's the developers leaving the game a buggy, unplayable mess. And sometimes, the thing ruining the experience for the players is ... the players. Ubisoft's The Division suffered from the latter, but at least it was funny to watch.
Following the game's opening, The Division decided that it was a good idea to dump all of the players into a single lobby, because these attempts at realism never go awry. As it was launch day, however, the lobby was nonstop stream of players arriving and walking into the next room to get their game on ... until some of them realized that you could stop everyone from starting the game by simply standing in the doorway linking the two rooms. Jumping jacks optional.
The trick to bypassing the trolls, as it turned out, was to run on the spot and eventually phase through them (you know, as in real life). This knowledge didn't trickle down to a lot of players, however, so the launch day lobby wound up resembling our local gym, populated by one guy doing jumping jacks and a bunch of angry people staring them down.
Still, all the pain and aggravation of getting through the door was immediately worth it, right?
Someone Named "Iron Pineapple" Is Turning
Dark Souls has gained a reputation as history's harshest video game, which is weird, because we don't remember creator Hidetaka Miyazaki showing up in our room and murdering us every time we died exploring the Tomb of Giants. He might have broken a few bones, sure, but nothing to warrant the belief that Dark Souls is a game for masochists.
That said, it's a completely different story if you run into a player known as Iron Pineapple. He's a difficulty level all on his own, someone who does nothing except troll the heck out of anyone unfortunate enough to stumble into one of his schemes. His antics have included steamrolling players to death using armor covered in spikes ...
... scaring (and murdering) players via a freaky door-based murder cult ...
... pushing treasure-hunting players into a pit containing a murderous monster and blocking the exit ...
... and dressing up as Shrek and -- with friends dressed as Donkey and Puss in Boots -- defending his swamp from invaders.
It's so hilariously dumb that it's kinda hard to get mad at him. By his own admission, he never hunts down players -- they have to come to him first, which he takes as an invitation to royally mess with their heads. So there you are, kids. If you want to start a successful gaming channel, all you need is friends, a sense of humor, and a methodical, serial-killer-esque nature.
People Are Tricking Online Casino Dealers Into Saying Raunchy Words Through The Magic Of Fake Names
Whether it's because of the addiction-cultivating nature of mobile games or the well-engineered adrenaline rush that you get from loot boxes, the line between gambling and video games is growing smaller and smaller every day. This phenomenon is best exemplified by the arrival of real-time online casino games, which allow you to replicate the experience of playing blackjack and poker in a casino setting without also experiencing the stale stench of desperation that permeates every pit floor like a wind from the sadness dimension.
It's quite fitting, then, that these games also have to deal with the same type of immature trolling that the rest of us do: rude names. It's way funnier than it sounds, trust us.
When you enter most online casinos, the dealer is required to greet you by name, presumably in the hope that your heart will be so warmed that you'll open your wallet wide and let them take it all. Some mischievous tykes, however, take advantage of this fact and, well ... remember how the high score tables old arcade machines used to be dominated by "ASS" and "FUK"? It's like that, but with names like "P. Ness" ...
... "V. Gina" ...
... and, of course, good ol' "Suk Mike Hok."
The fact that at least one dealer keeps falling for it makes us feel like this is now part of their business strategy.
We're hoping those are actual fake names, not people trying to gamble away the family fortune in revenge for whatever hell their school years must have been like.
PUBG Players Are Going Up To Popular Streamers And Drowning Out Their Audio With Honking Sounds
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds -- or PUBG to people who value their time -- is either the greatest game in the world forever or an OK-ish game that you're sick to death of hearing about because the internet can't simply let a good thing exist without bringing it up every 20 seconds (see: Overwatch, Cuphead, bacon). As a possible reaction to the latter, one type of dedicated troll now haunts the game's servers, determined to drive every streamer and notable personality insane in the most benevolent, innocent manner possible: with car horns.
It's known as "stream honking." Trolls and mischievous types join the same server as a popular streamer and obsessively follow them around the map in cars, holding down the horn like a dead man's trigger. The horns aren't loud, but the effect of having someone stalk you around the map while also blasting the equivalent of white noise makes attempting to communicate with watching fans into a hilarious mess.
This is related to another big problem within the game, "stream sniping." Instead of following streamers around and blasting horns into their ears, players use popular streamers' own streams to gain an advantage. The worst/best thing (depending on your perspective) is that there's no real countermeasure except to be crazy paranoid about not giving away what server you're playing on. It's not as if you can run and hide, because cutting off their source of information on your position also means cutting off those sweet, sweet donations on Twitch.
It's such a problem within the community that the drama flows like red-hot streamer tears. Players have been banned from the game for "stream sniping," despite that not being a provable thing, and one streamer launched an ill-fated copyright takedown against a group of honking trolls for recording his on-stream meltdown at their antics. He eventually apologized and realized that he was being a big freaking baby over video games -- which, to be honest, is the most gamer thing imaginable.
Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you should definitely subscribe to.
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For more, check out The 5 Most Hilariously Creative Video Game Trolls and 6 Hilariously Creative Ways People Are Trolling The Internet.
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