As I'm sure most of you are aware of, our Greatest Game Villain contest has been and is being tampered with by outside forces bent on ruining the fun for everyone else. Of course I can't explicitly say the name of the forerunner without being instantly moderated, but the fact still remains that the massive troll communities of the internet are unified in their goal of, well...trolling.
More shocking than their interference, though, is the apathetic or even positive response the trolls have received on our very forums. I've seen many a gamespot user emulate their destructive behavior, either by spreading messages across the site like "Yes we RAAM!" or just refusing to be reasoned with; in effect, the troll incursion is beginning to infect our own users at an alarming rate. Others still refuse to believe that the contest is being tampered with altogether despite the overwhelming evidence from the boards of the offending sites, posts on our own forums and the striking fact that two relatively weak villains (General RAAM, Team Rocket) can defeat two of the strongest in the entire contest (Sephiroth, Ocelot).
What is gamespot doing? Well, so far they haven't done a thing. Many arguments have been made that they don't care either way just as long as the contest keeps bringing in an increased number of site views, which in of itself isn't too farfetched, but I find it hard to believe that gamespot would forsake their entire community just for a couple thousand extra site hits.
The worst part is that our own users don't seem to care. They quip that "it's just an internet contest" and "it was boring before the trolls got involved", which is a virtual slap in the face to those of us who actually put in the effort by creating campaign kits, carefully crafting our brackets matchup by matchup and even participated in the forums at all leading up to the invasion of the trolls.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that relatively normal internet users can be converted to trolls and troll supporters at the flip of a hat, but that seems to be what is happening right now.