The "memes" by PoE players, what people really think & what they actually mean

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

I mean Google forgot to update their domain registrar and had it taken away temporarily by an ex-Google employee just a few months ago - this is the least indie company in the whole world.

"

budawpi wrote:

Here are some memes

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

I've come to realize that things that I thought people said ironically and not seriously, aren't actually meant ironically but instead very seriously.
The community is in a very literal sense, toxic.

Majority of PoEs "memes" and jokes are veiled insults towards GGG which in most cases in their essence make a statement that PoE developers are doing something wrong, are out of touch or just buffoons.

"Close your eyes"
Every week we have multiple "Hurrr durr how are your close your eyes" threads in the forums & reddit, implying that such a scenario is non-existent and doesn't reflect reality.
Is that really the case? To me that's just a truism about human nature when it comes to gambling with odds.
When you use exalts, you really do figuratively close your eyes and wish for the best - same goes with all crafting RNG.

"Slam 2 HP regen"
If you don't have a possible bad outcome to juxtaposition with the good outcome, there's no emotion to be found - crafting would become meaningless without this 2 life regen.

"No fun allowed"
This is declared as an interpretation of intention about GGG's wishes for players to not have fun by them nerfing the very strong builds and tools of power.
Is it really most likely plausible that the developers don't want players to have fun?
To me it seems like they try to increase the fun by not having the game trivialized with overpowered mechanics.

"GGG hates QoL" & "Holding QoL hostage"
Is that really the case? We got stash tab affinities this year, individual stash tab upgrades and a dozen of small QoL upgrades this patch, even CTRL + Click Jun was added which was suggested 3 days before the league start.
Currency being in single units and flasks needing piano are intentionally made like that because these affect the game balance. These are not features which they're too lazy to implement or unable to cognize.

You also just recently got 100% free differently coloured and saturated custom cursors to increase visibility of the cursor but this is portrayed as a bad thing by all PoE discussion channels almost univocally because there's an option for a paid feature of it.

"GGG is behind PoE China because of QoL"
P2W elements which provide an advantage in game through picking up items or exapnding inventory is not quality of life because it affects the game balance, the game is intentionally different from the Chinese version.

"TencentGGG"
Is an expression which has an implicit message that something has changed in GGG's structure, similar to the perception of ActivisionBlizzard; in a manner that the alteration has significantly changed the company and the games it operates. This expression is almost never followed up with evidence of how that would be the case - if anything, the only metrics available for measurement only show an increase - population & revenue.

"Small indie company"
Means that they should have been grown out of the ability to make mistakes, as if only small indie companies have bugs and crashes. Is that really the case? No. Every game and service in the world has bugs, crashes, DDoses, bots, crackers, hackers, spammers and delays.
I mean Google forgot to update their domain registrar and had it taken away temporarily by an ex-Google employee just a few months ago - this is the least indie company in the whole world.

--

One can say that players don't say these things seriously but in my opinion this is far from being the status quo; plenty of people actually do believe that GGG are either malevolent, unreasonably incompetent or completely out of touch with reality by using the memes, quotes and jokes as rhetorical tools to advance arguments on these subjects.

I personally don't really care much about the game as I think it's just a game to spend time and that's it. I do like philosophy though so I'm just providing a linguistic interpretation of the discussion around it for fun.