User blog:Nuclrdmntr/What is the definition of a troll in League of Legends?

A couple days ago, I was watching youtube and found this video: Illegitimate Legends: Mario Zilean

The commentator, AhrtGames, said that the definition of trolling in League of Legends is, 'Playing to lose.' Now, I can agree with this definition of trolling, because that does sound like a generic description of the aim of a LoL troll.

On the other hand, my definition of trolling is, 'Building a champion differently, using a champion in a different role or playing a champion well enough to the point that﻿ its extremely frustrating for the enemy team to play against me (or playing trundle).' One example of my style of trolling is playing mid Malphite with a Divine Edge (Sword of the Divine and Infinity Edge) - based build. Another example is using Fizz's mobility to juke and confuse the enemy team, slowly killing them off at the same time.

I posted a comment on his video saying exactly that and he replied saying, 'I see. So you troll the enemy team, not﻿ your own.' But this got me thinking. So, if trolling is playing to lose, and you troll the enemy team, then basically you are playing to make the enemy team lose, or making your own team win, according to his interpretation of what I commented on his youtube channel.

However, this definition could also be interpreted as trying hard. The problem is that I am not a try-hard LoL player, and I will never be. My attitude to LoL is, 'It doesn't matter if you win or lose a game, as long as you had fun and learnt stuff.' My version of trolling is part of this, as I have fun doing weird and wacky stuff and I also learn whether what I did was actually viable. This is also the main reason why I play almost exclusively normals, because actually trying hard is quite a foreign part of my personality.

For example, I originally tried AP Soraka because I actually wanted to troll my friends in a game, but then I found out that AP Soraka can actually beat most AP mid laners, so then she became my main for the better part of 3 months before I got bored and switched to another champion (Vladimir).

However, I still remember some of the games in which I picked AP Soraka in champion select. In one particularly memorable game after about a month of AP Soraka, I got flamed hard by the other four members of my team (I think they were a premade) for taking AP Soraka mid, especially since I called my lane and picked my champion before one member of the premade even got a chance to call mid (he wanted it).

I was called a troll, a noob, an idiot and other far more choice words that I won't put in this blog post, was told to uninstall LoL and l2p because, 'Soraka is a f**king support and can't mid you f**kwit noob,' got told that my family will be hunted down and slaughtered and that I will be anally raped by them while they laugh at the corpses of my family. No, I am not joking, I really got told this.

Guess what happened in-game? They were still flaming me, in addition to the flame I was already getting, for ks-ing, taking farm and being lucky and actually a, 'noob 500 elo cunt.' I just simply ignored the chatbox, except when there were mia calls, for the entire game, played well and ended up with an individual score of 16/2/15, a team score of 43/17 and a decisive victory.

So, I want to ask you, League of Legends Wikia community. Is my definition of trolling really trolling in the general sense? Was I trolling as AP Soraka? Is me building a champion in a non-meta way supposed to be automatically percieved as trolling, no matter my intent? If I failed while building a champion a different way, am I trolling then? Is it right to completely flame the guts out of someone building a non-meta way?

Think about it.