Troll WADs are WADs that are made purposely bad in order to troll those who download and play them. Somewhat similar to a Joke WAD, these wads use a false description or story that doesn't fit the levels in order to fool people into downloading them. Terry is the author who created this genre himself. 2012 saw the general rise of Troll WADs with Doomguy 2000 and followers of Terry uploading these types of wads onto the /idgames archive to troll people. This genre of wads is panned by the entire Doom community for being offensive and/or pointless, and since 2012 no longer get reviews on the /newstuff Chronicles. Ty Halderman, manager of Doomworld's /idgames, has recently deleted many Troll WADs, including UAC Military Nightmare because they mostly contained useless lumps that bloat the file size, while some were removed because they can mess with the player's Zandronum settings, and a few more for other reasons. However, not too long after that, some Terry WADs returned without the useless lumps, while the rest of them got moved to their own theme.
Types of Troll WADs
Terry Style
These type of WADs use a false description that is generally too good to be true in order to fool the player into downloading them and mostly consist of single incomplete levels that seem normal until the player enters a certain room, picks up a certain object, or presses a certain switch, at which point the WAD springs a death trap consisting of a badly textured room with either the Carnevil texture ("SOMEMONG") or a custom texture taken from the pictures that are random or even NSFW/NSFL. Some wads of this type feature inappropriate level designs (upon using an automap). These death traps usually use vulgar dialogue and extremely loud sounds that annoy the player. As well, some wads of this style even consists of flashing colors, which are prone to giving players a seizure. Even if it appears that the player has beaten the level, the game might restart, crash or advance the player in question to a trap level with Arch-Viles or other overpowered custom monsters (most of which are bosses and enemies that have a sky-high health, specifically 2147483647 HP). Upon being killed by them, the player receives an inappropriate-sounding obituary message (seen in terminal in the upper screen). Some of them contain malicious scripts that mess with the player's configuration settings or even autosave multiple times. As well, some Terry wads features a script that detects if the user uses kill command (on Terry-related boses) or uses Brutal Doom (or similar) in playing that WAD, which results to the user being immediately thrown to a Terry trap after being greeted with the on-screen text, Most of these wads were deleted by Ty Halderman during the archive cleanup of bogus content because most of the them contained bogus lumps that would inflate the wad size to what it actually was, while others were deleted because they contained malicious scripts that would configure the player settings. The rest of them were moved to their own theme.
- Belly of the Beast
- Unholy Demise
- Temple of Chaos
- Joey's Challenge Pack!
- Touhou: Hell on Gensokyo
- Magma Tower
- Angry Video Game Nerd in DOOM!
- The Main Server Outpost
Zip Bombs
Some troll wads when unzipped become much bigger than the zip file itself. Infected Base was the first of this kind, when unzipped, becomes an entire gigabyte. All of the known ones are also Terry style with the same elements that are included in these type of wads. When viewed in an WAD editor they contain multiple text lumps that become large in size, so when compressed in zip files, the wad themselves become much smaller in size. The largest of all them was 1.5 GB and when that user uploaded the wad to idgames, he became banned shortly afterwards. The wad can be found here. As of May 3, 2014, all wads that are essentially zip bombs have become banned.
- Infected Base
- Dementia
- Desert Assault
- Death of Mars
Doomguy 2000
Doomguy 2000 is another known troll and much like Terry, makes bad wads on purpose to Troll others. He does this in a variety of ways such as, taking the Doom engine to bad extremes, maps that include monsters from Doomguy's Warzone, or are made to be completely pointless. His style to some can be considered avant-garde, since he doesn't use the same jokes over and over like Terry.