Trolling is quite a new topic for a lot of people. For others it is part of day-to-day life. The issue is that even those who have experienced trolling, usually only experience one side of it. So, we have presented both sides of the trolling story and we’ll let you form your own opinions.
I was Trolled
I only wanted to play…
Every day I would log on and every day I would get put in the same lobbies with the same sorts of people. They made it impossible for me to escape. That’s all I wanted to do, find an escape from the stresses of school. I wanted to sit down for a few hours and just play.
A first person shooter was my first choice, I would spend hours upon hours trying to get the best KD I could. That’s when it started, it began with being trapped in the corner. They would find me on the mini map and follow me shooting at me giving away my position. So to get rid of the problem I played on hardcore servers (this blocks the mini map) simple fix right? Wrong. On hardcore, ‘friendly fire’ is enabled. Activision tried to stop spam team killing by setting it so that if you kill your own teammates more than once, you get kicked. This was the issue, gangs of trolls would prowl through servers, their groups so big it would leave space for only one other teammate. This was usually me – meaning each of them got one kill on me and if I were to kill back, I would get kicked.
I decided to sell that and buy a football game. My reason being, if I didn’t have any teammates then I couldn’t be trolled, right? I was wrong. Players would score, then spend the rest of the game passing the ball around their defense making it impossible for me to get near the ball. By this point my patience was wearing thin and I didn’t even want to bother trying to find a way around this – so I moved on.
My last try
I tried something completely different this time. But once again I was wrong and the trolls found a way to ruin my experience. This time it was by way of ‘griefing’. Griefing in its simplest form is destroying someone’s stuff. Usually stuff they have spent a long time on, or in my case, weeks. The game was fun, you could play it for weeks! I would play on an open server with dozens of people and I came on everyday, 3 hours a day for 2 weeks until it happened. I logged in to find that everything I had built, everything I had put so much effort into, was gone. Trolls had logged in and broken all of my buildings…
Maybe online gaming just wasn’t for me.
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I Trolled
It was brilliant fun, I would make everyone laugh by trolling people. My friends and I would go around chasing people in the game and blow their cars up. It was great, there was no downside.
In other games I would spam the chat, telling everybody they were awful and I would call them the most ridiculous things I could think of. It was really funny, everyone liked it.
I would find open-servers and wait for a player to go offline, as soon as they did I’d creep in and set up. Then when they came back online I would blow it all up. Everyone thought it was hilarious, all my friends would tell me how funny I was. It made me feel really special. Eventually my friends stopped talking to me. I wasn’t sure what I did wrong but suddenly they all stopped wanting to hang out with me. I looked in one day to find that they had done the very thing I was doing to others, destroyed everything.
Now I know what it feels like to be trolled and in hindsight, maybe it wasn’t funny, maybe I wasn’t making everyone laugh, maybe I was just being a dick. I don’t troll people anymore. I now realise that it’s wrong and I was a bullet in the foot of the gaming community, and I’m sorry.
Hopefully this opened some eyes to the issue of trolling. Have your own opinions on trolling? We’d love to hear them and if you would like to learn more about trolling, check out this piece where I give my opinions on the subject!
