Hi, it’s me again. I wanted to clear up some doubts regarding the difference between the terms Joke and Troll when used talking about SMW Hacks.
· Why we did decide to use another term instead of Joke:
To avoid confusion, we decided it was best to use two different terms to better define Joke hacks and Troll hacks. Therefore, decided to borrow the term Troll to indicate this “new” type of hack that was going to be accepted. I know modifying terms can be controversial at times but sometimes it must be done for the sake of clarity and user-friendliness.
· What’s the difference:
There is a big difference between what you would call a “Joke Hack” such as Chaos CompleXX, YUMP or Diagonal Mario 2, and a Troll Hack. Joke Hacks have the clear intention to make the player laugh by intentionally abusing broken game mechanics, glitches, graphical garbage, bad level design, punchlines, jokes, memes and the list goes on. A Troll Hack, on the other hand, tries to trick the player with misleading obstacles, clever traps and setups. A Troll hack tries to play on the expectations of players, reversing what the player might think it will happen and so on. Troll hacks don’t abuse graphical garbage, intentional lag, bad level design and so on. They still use clean graphics, cool level design and other things you would expect from a “regular” hack.
Lastly, I would like to say that a Troll Hack is 99.9% of the times as difficult as a Hard hack at worse. You’ll rarely, if at all, see Kaizo-like difficulty in a troll hack, simply because high difficulty doesn’t usually go along with the way a Troll Level is built.
· Things to watch to understand exactly what we mean when we say Troll Hacks:
There are several videos you can watch if you want to see someone play through an SMW Troll Hack. I’m going to list some of them here. All of the ones that I’ve linked required dozens of hours to be made, as well as custom music ported specifically for them, as you can tell, effort was made.
1.CarlSagan42’s troll level.
2.Juzcook’s troll level.
3.MM102’s troll level.
4.Dtothefourth’s troll level.
These are just some videos, and you can find a lot of other ones around. I think they will suffice as an explanation as to how Joke and Troll are different.
· Why we decided to create another difficulty instead of just accepting them along with everything else:
We decided to do this because we warranted them different enough from everything else we hosted to be worthy of their own difficulty. I’ve seen some people mentioning Kaizo: Medium and Puzzle as well as other categories that need to be created, but the main difference is that most of those “categories” wouldn’t add anything to the section because they are already accepted under the current difficulty selections and they would most likely further the confusion of newcomers and visitors to this site.
If you’ve come here from the Q&A Troll Hack thread, please use that thread to give suggestions, while being polite and giving constructive criticism (e.g. saying “troll hacks are stupid” is not constructive nor polite).
· Why we did decide to use another term instead of Joke:
To avoid confusion, we decided it was best to use two different terms to better define Joke hacks and Troll hacks. Therefore, decided to borrow the term Troll to indicate this “new” type of hack that was going to be accepted. I know modifying terms can be controversial at times but sometimes it must be done for the sake of clarity and user-friendliness.
· What’s the difference:
There is a big difference between what you would call a “Joke Hack” such as Chaos CompleXX, YUMP or Diagonal Mario 2, and a Troll Hack. Joke Hacks have the clear intention to make the player laugh by intentionally abusing broken game mechanics, glitches, graphical garbage, bad level design, punchlines, jokes, memes and the list goes on. A Troll Hack, on the other hand, tries to trick the player with misleading obstacles, clever traps and setups. A Troll hack tries to play on the expectations of players, reversing what the player might think it will happen and so on. Troll hacks don’t abuse graphical garbage, intentional lag, bad level design and so on. They still use clean graphics, cool level design and other things you would expect from a “regular” hack.
Lastly, I would like to say that a Troll Hack is 99.9% of the times as difficult as a Hard hack at worse. You’ll rarely, if at all, see Kaizo-like difficulty in a troll hack, simply because high difficulty doesn’t usually go along with the way a Troll Level is built.
· Things to watch to understand exactly what we mean when we say Troll Hacks:
There are several videos you can watch if you want to see someone play through an SMW Troll Hack. I’m going to list some of them here. All of the ones that I’ve linked required dozens of hours to be made, as well as custom music ported specifically for them, as you can tell, effort was made.
1.CarlSagan42’s troll level.
2.Juzcook’s troll level.
3.MM102’s troll level.
4.Dtothefourth’s troll level.
These are just some videos, and you can find a lot of other ones around. I think they will suffice as an explanation as to how Joke and Troll are different.
· Why we decided to create another difficulty instead of just accepting them along with everything else:
We decided to do this because we warranted them different enough from everything else we hosted to be worthy of their own difficulty. I’ve seen some people mentioning Kaizo: Medium and Puzzle as well as other categories that need to be created, but the main difference is that most of those “categories” wouldn’t add anything to the section because they are already accepted under the current difficulty selections and they would most likely further the confusion of newcomers and visitors to this site.
If you’ve come here from the Q&A Troll Hack thread, please use that thread to give suggestions, while being polite and giving constructive criticism (e.g. saying “troll hacks are stupid” is not constructive nor polite).