Trolling players in the City of Heroes for science!
When most players fire up the popular City of Heroes, they hop into a massively multiplayer world of Heroes and Villains that duke it out against computer-controlled AI characters for a certain amount of time, until they're strong enough to enter a shared space.
Once they're in there they are supposed to attack each other with a lack of mercy, applying all their heroic rocketboots and evil capes to the best of their abilities - but what really happens is that most wind up simply chatting or working together against the AI.
When David Myers went into the game as his Hero character Twixt, he followed the norm of killing AI until the shared space; but followed the rules of the game and attacked the Villains in there with wanton glee and declaring victory after every opponent defeated.
This lasted for quite a while, with other players getting mildly ticked off at the noob, and gently reminding him that his behaviour was unwelcome. So he kept killing them.
With roughly 150,000 players in the game getting to be more and more pissed off, the Twixt character was simply too strong to be defeated by single Villains - so groups of Villains and even some Heroes banded together to attempt to defeat him.
Even that didn't work, causing a huge uproar all over the interwebs and filling forums with less-than-friendly comments:
When Twixt celebrated his victories, lobbing messages like "Yay, heroes. Go good team. Vills lose again," in the game's chat box, users like Hunter-Killed responded, "U are a major sh--bird." Another player added, "I hope your mother gets cancer." Yet another wrote, "EVERYONE HATES YOU."
When Twixt celebrated his victories, lobbing messages like "Yay, heroes. Go good team. Vills lose again," in the game's chat box, users like Hunter-Killed responded, "U are a major sh--bird."
Another player added, "I hope your mother gets cancer." Yet another wrote, "EVERYONE HATES YOU."
Myers didn't create his Twixt character simply for lolz though, and instead actually was studying online community reaction to someone who followed the 'rules' as set by the game rather than the generally accepted behaviour of the players.
The abuse wasn't just limited to comments on forums and ingame, spreading to a wide range of places all united under one banner - they all hated Twixt to the bottom of their hearts.
There's a lot that went down here, including some less-than-true rumours created about Twixt and more, so head over to Nola.com to read the full story.
Have you run aground of someone like Twixt ingame? If so, how did you deal with them at the time?
Issue: 133 | February, 2012