5 Gamers Who Turned Trolling Into An Artform

5

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?

MrBossFTW/Rockstar Games

MrBossFTW/Rockstar GamesRemember when this franchise was about realistic stuff, like shooting bazookas while wearing jetpacks?

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.

KotakuWe're starting to think that acquiring large amounts of money without having earned it correlates with being a jerk.

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.

4

Trolls Screwed The Division's Launch Day Simply By Standing In A Doorway

A 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.

3

Someone Named "Iron Pineapple" Is Turning Dark Souls Into A Surreal Nightmare

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 ...

Iron Pineapple/Bandai Namco Entertainment

... scaring (and murdering) players via a freaky door-based murder cult ...

Iron Pineapple/Bandai Namco EntertainmentOld-timey bachelorette parties were wild.

2

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.

1

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.