Trolling is a time honored tradition among social misfits and other internet miscreants. Trolling can range from a relatively benign activity to aggressive and highly intrusive behaviors. One of the most prominent form of trolling in eSports is the act of gaining access to televised games in order to display inflammatory statements on stream. These trolls have attacked many tournaments including Destiny I, the WCS Qualifiers, Dreamhack, and most recently IEM. The two users did not tell me their names, and instead used the handles "scary" and "[myg0t]A_Cow", but they were able to verify their identity by sending me screen shots of an account history that only the trolls themselves would have.

I should add that throughout our conversation these two were more or less civil and quite generious with their time. I was somewhat conflicted on whether or not to publish this story. I had a thought that on some level by giving a troll more exposure and coverage I would be rewarding them for their detrimental behavior. On the other hand if they're merely seeking attention they've proven themselves masters at the art of grabbing the attention of thousands of stream viewers. With that in mind I decided that sharing some insight into the mind and motivations of someone who trolls like this was worth the risk of “rewarding” such bad behavior. The italicized text represents my thoughts after the fact, while my bolded questions are the questions I asked the two trolls during the interview. This piece contains partially censored racial slurs used by the interview subjects and as such reader discretion is advised. 

I wanted to begin by getting some insight into why they did what they did, so my first set of questions set out to explore their motivations.

So what's the motivation for this kind of action? What do you get out of it?

[myg0t]A_Cow

destiny pays me to do it

[myg0t]A_Cow

$$$$

scary

^ true

[myg0t]A_Cow

no, its just fun and losers take dead games like g**kclick 2 seriously

scary

also the things i snipe

scary

have to have a lot of viewers

scary

promoting our gaming snacks is important

I was unsure of what they meant by “Gamer Snacks” as they did not seem to sell any snacks on their website so I asked a follow up question to clarify

So its an attention thing then? As far as I can tell you don't actually sell anything on this site

[myg0t]A_Cow

(This was a link to a cheat program which I have decided not to include)

[myg0t]A_Cow

there's that

scary

its not an attention thing

scary

nobody knows its only me

[myg0t]A_Cow

the shit we sell isn't really sold publicly

[myg0t]A_Cow

exploits to bypass CS:GO overwatch bans and stuff to people we know aren't going to leak it on smaller forums like mike.wf

[myg0t]A_Cow

or our private wargame cheat since i think the pub one got blocked

scary

we do private cheats mainly

[myg0t]A_Cow

not that it matters since advertising does nothing and it's all within a circle of friends

[myg0t]A_Cow

it's just fun

[myg0t]A_Cow

not for attention, not for sales

[myg0t]A_Cow

who cares

scary

im actually a grandmaster player in sc2

[myg0t]A_Cow

he's not even joking lmfao

This surprised me, I didn't expect someone that had put the time in to become a StarCraft Grandmaster to also have the time for such high profile trolling. This interesting turn in conversation prompted me to ask if they were in any way related to the StarCraft hacking scene.

Out of curiosity do you do StarCraft privates at all? I know that the infamous drophack is still private

[myg0t]A_Cow

you can cheat in sc2 with public stuff on (name of site removed)

[myg0t]A_Cow

literally the first result if you google sc2 hacks

[myg0t]A_Cow

idk why people play that game seriously at all online

scary

we could never do this to actual organized shit like csgo or dota

scary

blizzard hasnt cared about this game since 2011

You think Valve has a better handle on their competitive scene than Blizzard?

scary

obviously

[myg0t]A_Cow

and that's saying something considering how much of a joke everything valve has ever done in the last 10 years

[myg0t]A_Cow

...is

Without any type of prompting the pair began discussing how much of the theories as to how they were joining the lobbies that have been floating around /r/StarCraft were wholly incorrect.

[myg0t]A_Cow

It's kind of funny that everyone on reddit are coming up with like 30 different exploits to join a lobby

[myg0t]A_Cow

and none of them end up being ours

scary

truth

At this point I'm going to provide an incredibly vauge explanation for how they join the games. They claimed they do not join the games using the StarCraft client, and that the StarCraft lobby system actually acts as a front end for a more archaic communications protocol. Their exploit relies on this. I won't provide further information as I do not wish to write a handbook for trolls. I was curious as to what their connection to the StarCraft scene was so I asked them as such You obviously have reasonably good knowledge of the StarCraft scene given the accuracy of your fake account names and account details. Is this because you're a fan or because you're dedicated to your "trade"?

scary

fan

[myg0t]A_Cow

how u fell fan

At this point both of them went on a rant about how StarCraft is broken and Blizzard doesn't care enough to fix it. This rant contained tech details that could help other trolls, and honestly if you've seen one dead game rant you've seen them all, so I won't bother publishing it, but it did lead me wonder if at some level they saw their trolling as a positive action in that it would put pressure on Blizzard to “fix their game”.

As fans of starcraft does your trolling have a productive goal or is it just for laughs?

scary

youtube revenue

[myg0t]A_Cow

we're sitting in a dead irc network

[myg0t]A_Cow

while someone spends his saturday night playing 20 questions with us

scary

^

[myg0t]A_Cow

so ofc we don't care about blizzard fixing sc2

scary

honestly id like to drive a ryder truck into their hq

scary

except im not in the states

scary

so i guess someone else should do it for me

It seemed I'd exhausted their interest in talking about StarCraft the game, so I decided to learn a bit more about them as people before I let them go.

When you were spamming you used a lot of racial slurs. Also your homepage has the "Le Happy Merchant" meme, and your IRC has an auto-biography of a "red pilled man going his own way". Does this accurately reflect your politics and ideology or is this just for increased shock factor

[myg0t]A_Cow

lmao nobody here believes in /pol/ bullshit

@[myg0t]A_Cow

you can flat out ask if we're from /pol/ if you want to save yourself the time

I should explain that /pol/ here refers to politically incorrect. A discussion board on 4chan that is centered around white supremacism, anti-semitism, and other highly regressive ideologies.

scary

racism is bad dude

scary

my message is purely satirical

[myg0t]A_Cow

also for the record that "red-pilled man going his own way"

[myg0t]A_Cow

is the result of someone i pissed off so badly he wrote a book about me

[myg0t]A_Cow

and published it

[myg0t]A_Cow

i printed out a couple pages from it and framed them

I found the claim that this was satire to be dubious. Even if I were give these two the benefit of the doubt and believe them when they say “racism is bad”, this type of humor (along with requesting I use the term n***** instead of person of color) is hardly satire. As there does not appear to be a topic they are actively satarizing. At best it is crude shock jock humor. They ended our conversation with both a shoutout and a threat

[myg0t]A_Cow

on the record we will stop destiny 2

Destiny II is an upcoming StarCraft II tournament being run by popular StarCraft streamer Steven "Destiny" Bonnell

scary

shoutout to ratzdeezer

[myg0t]A_Cow

RATZ stay RATZ

This concluded one of the strangest interviews I've ever had the dubious honor of performing. When I began this process I was hoping to get some deeper insight into the mindset  into someone that gets their jollies from denying other people a good time. I ended this interview only slightly more informed than I began it, and still cannot shake the feeling that in some small way I was being trolled the whole time.