Well, not really that monstrous at all. In the time between then and now, they've moved from these basic examples to griefs as sophisticated as the TF2 quiz. "That move was, I think, motivated by a desire to stand out," says Ryan. "A lot of the griefing videos out there involve someone playing annoying sounds over VOIP, which could be funny given the right reactions but are at the core ... uninspired?" This progression made them hesitant to release an earlier recorded video based around Insurgency because it was employed similar tricks; they opted to quietly leak it out instead. "Now we try to focus on unusual uses of game mechanics or plain glitches/exploits," says Ryan.
They're constantly brainstorming. Case in point, the TF2 hostage situation. It started with the discovery that the door-blocking bug existed, leading Jeremy to examine all the standard maps to discover which would be most vulnerable. It turns out there are only two spawn points in the "Well" map. They started by just blocking the exit and spamming the Scout's "We need a dispenser here" emote, as web memes dictate. From there, they thought of funnier stuff to do with their captive audience. Jeremy started out getting people to pledge their allegiance to Ron Paul and the gold standard. This lead to the trivia ... and finding which questions would get the most extreme and funny responses from different groups of people.
Nevertheless, the bulk of the work lies in just getting the footage. No rest for the wicked. "Most of the time, nobody would react, those who did react didn't use a microphone to do so or we were simply kicked or banned from the server," says Ryan. The editing itself is equally important; they need to make sure to show the whole trick and explain what is happening rather than offer four minutes of people getting inexplicably angry. Quality control is considerable. "To put the editing work into more concrete terms," says Ryan, "we had about 800MB of demos taken for the second video. This roughly translates to 13 hours of footage that was whittled down to nine minutes."
Which leads to a few ethical questions. Thirteen hours of footage is a lot to inflict upon their unwitting subjects for nine minutes of laughs, though they deny that their preference for more imaginative griefing techniques has anything to do with them being more ethically defensible - they're simply funnier. "Personally, I don't think about the past videos we made and think that we should have done things differently," says Jeremy. "It's been part of the learning process in finding a harmonious mix of schadenfreude and humor. The second video had wide appeal due to the fact that it wasn't sadistic to the point where viewers would feel sorry for the players; instead, they reacted with amusement and wished that it was them instead. I think that's a positive reaction, and doesn't result in the divisive attitude that comes with most publicized griefing."
