Trolling

lol u mad bro?

"In The Art of Trolling, published on the web, it is suggested that in Usenet usage, a "troll" is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers by, but rather a provocative posting to a news group intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses. The content of a "troll" posting generally falls into several areas. It may consist of an apparently foolish contradiction of common knowledge, a deliberately offensive insult to the readers of the news group or a broad request for trivial follow-up postings"

Trolling, whether we like it or not has become an integrel part of nearly any internet community. Most people including myself will quite happily admit that they've taken huge amounts of joy in spending hours, and hours, and hours (etc.) winding people up by enforcing opinions that may not be our own, but are damn sure to piss someone else off. Nearly every guild in the world of warcraft has at least one person which makes it their mission to irritate anyone stupid enough to take them seriously. The best trolls however, are the ones that make you wonder "is this guy serious or just retarded", bordering on that fine line is a huge success for any troll.

Different types of trolls

The "RUS??" guy -

This guy will usually write in broken english but you can never be quite sure whether he's from a third world country with 12kb net or just fucking with you, when someone takes the bait from this kind of troll they're usually just trying to help but end up being made to look a fool as no matter what you say they'll always come back with a nonsensical response designed to raise more questions.

e.g: attackyou from the d2.net forums that some of you may remember http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=501786 http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4700370#post4700370 ,your local russian/polish/middle east guy which may be a troll, but who knows, jeffk (sadly most of it is gone these days but you can find it in the google cache).

The "is this guy serious or just stupid" guy -

A lot of wow players fall under this category, when comments such as 'but lsd requires coordination to land kills' are being thrown around the forum is quite hard to tell if they're actually serious or just trolling as many players do actually believe that wizard cleaves are hard comps to play elemental damage is fine and destro locks need more defenses vs melee.

e.g markwin, we still don't know if he's trolling, slappywags videos, my own videos, wcm comments for these are are full of people who are being completely trolled and taking it seriously.

The 'i fucked your mum' guy -

Whilst many cliques will chuck such insults around in jest, some trolls do attempt to offend people with comments about their mothers while telling them to kill themselves. As seen in the lovely gameriot comments, many people will go out of their way to call you ugly/shit/bad/tits or gtfo and to kill yourself for the aformentioned reasons. Why do they this? Well in many opinions it's not funny and a lot do actually take offense to these things, whilst it can have humerous reprocussions this is most likely the worst type and least effective of troll as anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes on the internet is fairly desensitised to what these trolls can throw at you.

The "newbie baiter" guy -

This guy goes out of his way to lure newbies into doing stupid things and generally telling them the wrong information for humerous results, as long as it's not taken too far it's often one of the funnier and more harmless forms of trolling. Although people who take everything seriously may end up like this guy with a true belief that strength http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Chromaggus&cn=Mahoi IS a good warlock stat because your pet will scale with it and do insane dips.

The "lol wat happen" guy -

Most commonly present in raids, he's there to wipe you, get people killed and fuck with as many people as he can in the short period that you'll be raiding with him. Wonder where that misdirect/tricks came from on trash? probably this guy, that bop when you're about to set a new wol record? again probably this guy, 'ops I di'd the tank' and various other situations are also fairly common. This is most effective when used on slow/unattentive people who most likely won't notice that they're being tricksed/md'd on every single trash pack and will just eat the repair costs wondering why they keep ripping agro, possibly blaming it on the tanks and shouting on vent WHY CANT I ATTACK GUYS I THINK SOMETHING IS BUGGED when they're bopped. Could also be the guy that feeds/takes retarded item builds/steals your kills/farms deep into lanes when the entire enemy team is missing in HoN/DoTa.

e.g

The blatent ninja

Every server has one, the king of discussion in the trade channel 'omg blabla has ninja'd x' being said time and time again yet he never fails to make a full group which lets him take what he wants and disenchant/sell it in front of rightfully deserving raiders. Not once do people think to listen to the warnings being spammed on the realm forums. It is however very much worth joining his raids to get a first hand experience of the drama that comes out of them.

e.g. 

Hosties - a lesser known CSS mod ripe for trolling

For those who don't know what Hosties is, it's a counterstrike mod in which the Ts must do what the CTs say. Failure to do this is met with death. This creates an amusing sub-game of killing random Ts and watching them rage the server down, whilst most of this is done over voice com, it also happens in the chat window. The act of freekilling is an art which has many methods, from just shooting the same guy every single round to avoid suspicion and a ban to just killing everyone which is usually met with a swift ban or a lot of shouting about how everyone 'must' voteban you. Bonus points are awarded when you make someone who you can tell is blatently prepubescent

upset/angry (this is not uncommon in the world of hosties).

To add to the insult, remember to take a name which involves them insulting themselves, as seen in the picture above, people have no problems proclaiming themselves balless or gay when they're trying to get you banned. For bonus points throw a gun at them before you shoot them, then you can claim they had a gun which is enough of a reason to shoot them, which results in more angry ranting about how you threw it at them. Anyone with CSS should check Hosties out as it's provided me with hours of entertainment at the expense of other peoples keyboards.