Leroy Jenkins, O RLY owls, Chuck Norris. These three catchphrases easily annoy the majority of World of Warcraft. They may be played out, but we have a new trend popping up that’s way more annoying (to some) and quickly on its way to being the next annoying catchphrase. It’s a little bit lesser known, but it’s on the rise. It’s called “Ventrilo Harassment”, a series of YouTube videos that are mostly audio of someone entering a Ventrilo server (a form of voice communications) for World of Warcraft and playing extremely annoying sounds. These “hilarious” sound bites are used in order to grief users attempting to talk to one another through voice chat.

To understand this a little better, we have to examine the original source. A person by the name of “VideoCompiler” appeared on YouTube about four months ago posting various videos of his invasions into various Ventrilo servers. At the time it was rather unnoticed, but recently in the last few weeks it has gained massive amounts of attention. Just a quick word of warning for those young ones out there or anyone offended by foul language – these videos aren’t for you. They do contain some PG-13 and R rated language. Not that YouTube isn't full of that stuff, but that’s another discussion for a differnt site.

An example of one of the videos can be easily pulled from the first one. A recording is taken of someone talking about a level 18 belt then doing a “nerd snort”. While everyone is discussing something on Ventrilo they are spammed with the sound clip of the guy talking about the level 18 belt. Other videos include sound clips from Duke Nukem, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Simpsons, etc.

The response to the attempt to the person playing the sound clips is random, from people laughing at the humorous sound bites to a river of cursing. All of this comes from mostly public World of Warcraft Ventrilo servers. The popularity of these videos can be measured in views. Each video has about 10,000+ views with some having way more (100,000 / 200,000 +).

Now, we aren’t here to debate VideoCompiler’s work. Most then likely these are either staged or done to his friends. It’s wrong to do, but that’s not our business. I mean, Leroy Jenkins was staged. We’re here to debate how this has taken on to a catchphrase legend.

There are now leagues of people emulating VideoCompiler’s work, joining various Ventrilo/Teamspeak servers and spamming annoying sounds. The majority of it is nowhere near funny or interesting. It’s actually kinda childish, but that’s my opinion.

Now we come to our real debate portion of this. Is really alright for people to take something entertaining and copy it? Does it really contain the original humor or message?

Personally I feel that every time something is redone, it looses a little bit of the original flavor. Someone running around with 40 monsters behind them shouting Leroy Jenkins is quite hilarious the day after the video was released. After the same thing is done about 40 million times… it looses its original appeal. At least to me.

This Ventrilo harassment that’s taken many VoIP users by storm is about the same. I have to admit, I laughed at the videos. They were funny. They were wrong, but at the same time very funny. After hearing some of the copycats I don’t really get the real humor and see it more of another Chuck Norris joke on the rampage. That and what people are doing is kinda harmful, especially to people who are just trying to chat with one another.

Everyone has their own opinion though. Chuck Norris and Leroy Jenkins wouldn’t be beat into the ground if people didn’t find it funny still. This and that, here and now and all that.

So what’s your opinion? Are people who drag these catchphrases on really funny or should they just go awaywhen the joke is dead or especially when the joke can be harmful?

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