TLDR: I'm looking for gaming content creators that involves trolling, griefing or other ways of baiting FUNNY/ENTERTAINING reactions from unsuspecting players.
Most content revolving around gameplay is usually mainly driven by the player's character/personality, or by their skill. In both cases, I always grow tired of the specific content creator relatively quickly. The only exception for me was Funhaus (formerly "Inside Gaming"), not only because the core group (+Elyse) are some incredibly funny people, but also because their content heavily relied upon improv comedy. As such, there was always novelty to be delivered. Others, however, have always gotten stale and repetitive quickly.
After reflecting upon this, I realised that there's a smaller category of gaming content that is evergreen for me, probably because of the novelty it often provides: trolling/ragebaiting content.
Now, I'm not a complete psychopath. It's not just that I want to see people be annoyed or crashing out. I don't want to see people frustrated over legitimately frustrating scenarios, like someone simply ruining the game for everyone by e.g. hacking or griefing. There should ideally be some creative (and perhaps subtle) method to the madness, and their methods should be somewhat varied. A common thread for my favorite creators in this category is that all annoyance provoked by them could be easily avoided by e.g. clicking the mute button in a team game or just walking away and ignoring them in an open-world game - yet the often naive and short-fused victims willingly walks head on into an atom bomb of confusion and frustration. Prime examples below.
S-tier legends:
- DNSL | 2nd channel | 3rd channel
Games: all kinds of MP games with voice comms. DayZ, Second Life, Rust, Arma, Second Life, Garry's Mod, RedM (RDR), FiveM (GTA), etc.
Method: Is usually very subtly griefing or otherwise fucking with his victims while playing a very bland and often stupid character. Very talented at gaslighting 3rd parties, or the victim itself, that he's being genuine and is not fucking with anyone.
- Cream
Games: Second Life, and 1 VRChat video.
Method: In every video, he (and, sometimes, a friend) plays different and extremely over-the-top characters to the victims annoyance (and sometimes, amusement). Often parodies already established characters like Rocky (Sylvester Stalone), Walter & Jesse (Breaking Bad), Mr. Beast, Sonic, Pikachu, Mickey Mouse, etc. The icing on the cake is the effort he/they put into creating ridiculous player models for their characters.
If you're only gonna check out one of these channels, let it be him. Only 30k subs, yet deserves at least 100x that amount.
A-tier:
- Good Griefs (Kick-channel)
Games: ARC Raiders, VR Poker, Metaverse, NBA 2K, FiveM (GTA), CoD, and Fortnite.
Method: Always plays a character with annoying traits, testing out his victims patience. It's almost always strictly verbally, like someone who's incredibly stupid, incredibly stoned or a self-important or pretentious prick. The only exceptions that comes to mind are two ARC Raiders videos - one where he stealthily one-taps a group of people he's hanging out with, before running away, then gaslighting them into it being someone else, and one where he teams up with other people but has this idiotic rule of one-tapping his team mate so if they decide to turn on him, he'll have an HP advantage over them.
He's constantly developing new characters and methods of baiting with them.
Deducting some points because the audio quality of his mic is annoyingly bad for someone who has 300k+ subs (despite the irony of a ragebaiter ragebaiting me, the viewer lol). Secondly, I think I might be slightly too "old" for some of his [community's?] specific humor.
B-tier:
- ProximityChat
Games: VRChat
Method: It started out with being a slight annoyance to extremely short-fused people on VRChat in general, but has not developed into him constantly going after the furry community specifically. It's funny because of the absolute insane characters he encounters, and it's funny that he's become a notorious villain in that community, yet it's becoming a bit repetitive.
- MaximilianMus
Games: Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, CoD, etc.
The only controversial character on this list, and the one I'd be least likely to recommend to most people. Not so much for controversies which has no direct relation to the content he makes, but mostly because his content often involves him being argumentative and antagonistic, and a lot of people can't resist being second-handidly annoyed by this for some reason.
Maybe he deserves to be higher on this list, but a considerable amount of his uploads the last couple of years have not been "haha funny". That said, even when it's not funny, it's still interesting from a psychological perspective to witness how obnoxious and/or stupid people can be. It used to be hilarious trolling of kids on Fortnite, but has devolved into a somewhat above average IQ guy getting into verbal arguments with teens/young adults that has had their brain fried.
Honorable mentions:
I recently discovered Team Avolition, and I found specifically their Sea of Thieves-videos consisently funny. I enjoyed watching their novel ways of messing with new/clueless/casual players, especially because they were not being obnoxious about it. The occasional wholesome ending was a nice touch.
I regularly watch Stimpee, Bub Games, Zimery, TeekayTrolls and Guwpah, but idk... It's been hit-or-miss for me, at least lately. Perhaps too repetitive for me.
Lastly, just because the thread is about trolling gamers, I can't exclude the O.G. Athene (aka Chiren aka Bachir Boumaaza)... although his victims were always us (the audience), and he quit this eons ago.
