Let's Talk Trolling in Call of Duty

Since the days of Black Ops 2 I have been in love with Gun Game. If you play any multiplayer games you'll know that team based game modes are usually out of your control. (Unless you play with a group of friends.) Even if you are in complete focus, having a team full of seemingly blindfolded players can still result in a salty loss. But in Gun Game, it's a free-for-all, and your position on the scoreboard depends entirely on your skill (and connection). As an added bonus, the rotation of guns really shakes things up and challenges your ability to use all categories of weapons. With that said, it is not hard to see why Gun Game is my favorite game mode in Call of Duty, right alongside Search & Destroy.

Let me first give you a quick summation of what Gun Game is for those who haven't played before. You spawn into the map with a pistol. No perks. No lethals. You're job, like free-for-all, is to kill as many enemy players as possible but the big difference is that the weapons rotate after every kill. You start off with a pistol and move onto a shotgun and then a SMG and so on and so forth. There are a total of nineteen weapon rotations and the first one to get a kill with a throwing knife wins. Also, to throw you off even more, not only do you get a random weapon in a class, you also get random attachments on that weapon which means if you're luck is bad, you'll get a weapon that is almost impossible to get off of.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

Five Call of Duty games later I am super confident in my Gun Game-ing ability. In Infinite Warfare, my longest win streaks were results of hours of playing Gun Game with only the occasional loss to report. Plus, the satisfaction of a continuous kill streak (like the one below) makes you feel like a badass. Although it may seem like I'm just bragging, I'm just setting up the scene for the topic of this article: trolls. (And not the colorful ones.) But first, I must make a confession; I was once a troll. Those were simpler times, when you didn't have to worry about people monkey jumping over you, and when I jumped into a lobby full of microphone blips I couldn't resist. The K/D grind went out the window and my goal was to simply knife my way to YouTube troll montage stardom.

One of the main reasons I went on demoting sprees in Black Ops 2 was the reactions. Back then there was something about hearing little kids yelling about how their K/D was better than mine or being challenged to a 1v1 on Hijacked that was just extremely fun. Arguably, some of my favorite moments in gaming came from joining a Search & Destroy or Team Deathmatch lobby with some friends and trying to recreate VanossGaming and speedyw03 videos with little to no success. I still clearly remember playing TDM on Carrier where all of us set up traps (claymores and C4s) and hid in the crashed VTOL in the middle of the map. We ended up hiding there the entire game while the enemy team wandered around confused at how they have not seen any of the six enemy team members. In the last few seconds of the match we got up and ran around in celebration before telling the enemy team we had figured out an invisibility glitch in the game. We eventually told them that we were just joking and, surprisingly, most people were cool about it and laughed along with us. But the whole reason why this was fun was because of people having mics and reacting to what we did. 

A small snippet from one of my Gun Games on Infinite Warfare.

With the newest generation of consoles (Playstation 4 and Xbox One) players with mics are hard to find. Either they are in a private party with their friends or, like myself, playing some casual Gun Game while listening to some podcasts. So when I stumble into a troll in Infinite Warfare trying to knife as many people as he can, I cannot understand why. Going "try hard" is actually understandable because you can try to climb the Leaderboards or get that entertaining gameplay for YouTube. But with no reactions from anyone, trolling on these new games feels sadistic more than anything. As if the simple thought of making someone mad is enough for you to go out of your way to just knife people. Sometimes these trolls move in herds, with two or three people joining at once to knife everyone. For me, I have long since accepted the concept of trolls and no longer rage like I used to. In fact, it encourages me to go out of my way to win the game when this happens. Which brings us to the question and purpose of this article.

There is a really cheeky tactic of knifing everyone until they rage quit so that the troll wins by default. But I doubt that works often enough to be a viable strategy so why? To the trolls out there I ask you that simple question. Why do you troll when there is no real entertainment or fun (that I know of) to be attained from it?