The Fundamentals And Psychology Of Professional Dota/hon/etc. TrollingNote: See this thread for some background http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=57967544&f=215On a serious and perhaps far too intellectual note for this forum, I'm going to take a break from discussing professional trolling itself and fixate on WHY the type of trolling I do actually works on Dotalicious. Now, you might think "but Smack, nobody gives a fuck about Dotalicious, its pretty much dead now". Well, you might be right, but the fact is there's a recurring pattern found in many gaming communities/clients of which Dotalicious is merely an example. To understand the reason why trolling like this works, and why most of these platforms such as Dotalicious, Dota-League (RIP), TDA, HoN, DR.IH/COMM on RGC, etc. punish the good players and reward the bad players and/or trolls, you must identify which parties are doing the punishing/rewarding. Clearly, the moderators / unpaid volunteers are the ones that ban players in the vast majority of these platforms. "Well no shit Smack, OBVIOUSLY moderators review cases and ban people, and these guys are unpaid volunteers from the community. So?". Well, we have to look one level deeper. Firstly, a vast majority of the time, the moderators are people who actually play the game, right? Now, in a very generalized sense, there are two kinds of players:
- Good Players.There are many different types of good players, and many different reasons why people excel at game. However, they can be summarized as follows: they enjoy playing the game, and have invested alot of time into it. Many of them are at least fairly intelligent in real life, allowing them to make better decisions in strategy-type games (such as dota), and to learn new concepts / metagames quicker. They may play the game copiously or infrequently, but either way they have a certain level of skill they like to use against their opponents, and in general play the game for the game itself, and to try to outplay the opposition. They play to win and enjoy the essence of the game and the challenges / excitement it brings, and that is generally enough for them, meaning they do not often seek boring, superfluous positions such as that of a mediator.
-Bad Players. These are split into two categories:
=Casual gamers. These guys suck at the game, but they don't care. They play very rarely, and when they do they don't really play to win or lose, just for the fun of it and to kill some time here and there. They never devote real dedication to the game, so they clearly don't bother applying for positions which would require them to invest large amounts of time, such as a mediator / unpaid volunteer.
And, ladies and gentlemen, this is where we get to our final category, which also brings us to a stunning realization:
=Bad, yet addicted/ no-life / unintelligent players.These guys spend lots of time on the game, but never seem to excel. Perhaps they aren't really trying to learn, and simply have nothing better to do. You have to ask yourself, "how can someone spend thousands of hours on a game, yet still be terrible?". Well, the answer, sadly, is they are just dumb, and have several negative traits which prevent them from succeeding in various areas. They are often anti-social, unintelligent, and lack creativity, meaning many aspects of their lives suffer, including gaming. They play many hours a day, but find themselves mostly being frustrated / losing, or getting carried. They'll often pay for lessons from pro players, will spend lots of money for any in-game / cosmetic advantages to feel special, and in general are a fairly pathetic form of human life. Unlike the two aforementioned examples, these players are PERFECT candidates for moderators. They have hours to kill, want to feel special / in-power, want attention and respect they don't get in real life, and want to be able to boss around / play with better players to feel like they are good at the game.
Now, let's focus on this final category of player. Since they are pretty much the only type of people who are dumb enough to waste hours of their lives moderating some no-name dota community or trash game forum for no pay whatsoever, they make up a very overwhelming majority of the moderator / unpaid volunteer pool. Because they aren't too bright IRL, and don't have much social experience or a well-rounded life in general, their judgement is often lacking and incompetent. They will follow the rule book explicitly to the point of stupidity, because they are unable to exercise discretion or logical reasoning. This hurts good players, because if someone is carrying a game hard and some idiot is feeding 0-25 on his team, the moderator will go ahead and ban the good player for flaming the baddie, while leaving the obvious troll untouched, because "the good player broke rules explicity, the bad player didn't".
and THAT, boys and girls, is what I base my trolling off of. I haven't trolled more than 20 Dotalicious games in my life, but each time I have gone uncaught and have inflicted huge punishments upon my teammates/enemies who certainly did not deserve them, given that I was obviously being a huge prick and trolling as hard as I could in an attempt to instigate them. To truly succeed at it, I've found, all you need to do is understand the PSYCHOLOGY of the people who will ultimately be passing judgement (the moderators). Once you do, you can cater your trolling to ensure they act as you want them do. They'll think they're doing their job correctly, they'll think they are in power, that they have control and that they are the "big men" regulating the community. But in reality, they are succumbing to your every whim, and acting just as you want them to, without even knowing it.
Hopefully, after reading all this (TLDR, I know) you will understand the core principles behind trolling in communities such as Dotalicious, and will be able to use them to take advantage of clueless, lowly moderators for your own amusement. Best of luck.
This post was edited by sMACKTRiCKz on May 7 2012 06:21pm