Games by Blizzard have been so successful, they also spawned a host of memes. In fact, World of Warcraft and Overwatch have their own pages.
Please add entries in the following format:
- The meme. [[labelnote:Explanation]]The explanation behind the meme, if necessary.[[/labelnote]] Explanation Like this.
- Further mutations and successor memes, if any.
Diablo- Hello, my friend! Stay a while and listen!
Explanation The most famous quote of Deckard Cain. - Turns into a bit of a Tear Jerker with Deckard Cain's death. We never listened...
- You've found a Horadric Staff! That's quite a treasure you have there in your Horadric Cube! I'M DECKARD CAIN!
- Error 37 Explanation On the launch of Diablo III after an eleven-year-long Troubled Production, everybody trying to log in received a error called Error 37 which basically prevented them from logging into the game, and since the game uses always-online requirements, they were prevented from playing the game at all.
- "Is this an out-of-season April Fool's joke?" Explanation During the BlizzCon 2018 reveal of Diablo Immortal—a Free-to-Play mobile game unveiled to an audience of PC gamers (which went about as well as you'd think it would)—a fan put this question to the developers during the Q&A segment, receiving cheering and applause from the crowd that massively outshone the response to the game itself. It quickly became memetic, helped by the fan's red shirt reminding people of the Red Shirt Guy of World of Warcraft fame.
- "Do you guys not have phones?" Explanation After the crowd booed the developers' statement that no PC version of Immortal was planned at the time of announcement, lead designer Wyatt Cheng responded with this question. Many fans viewed it as tone-deaf and dismissive, with comparisons being drawn to EA's infamous "sense of pride and accomplishment" response on Reddit regarding the hero prices in Battlefront II. This briefly returned after the launch of Overwatch 2 when it was fully understood that players would need to attach a valid phone number for authentication and anti-cheat purposes, and certain types of contracts (such as prepaid) wouldn't be considered valid (though Blizzard thankfully took the hint and eventually did not go through the plan).
- Diablo II: Disconnected Explanation Diablo II: Resurrected has been the subject of mockery on release due to the unstable servers, leading to several emergency maintenances and loads of technical issues, resulting in people being unable to play the game online and mockingly referring to the game by this moniker
- Diablo Immoral Explanation Diablo Immortal quickly became infamous for its incredibly predatory monetization, featuring an intentionally enjoyable early- to mid-game to get players emotionally invested, before introducing insufferable amounts of grind in the end-game so as to encourage players to pay real-life money to progress faster; Legendary Crests, which are dolled-up Loot Boxes capped at three per month unless the player purchases them with real-life money; and, as YouTube user echohack found out and revealed, decreased drop rates per day after a certain number of times—which the game doesn't tell you about—encouraging players to spend real-life money on Microtransactions. It has been calculated that it would take approximately $500,000, or several decades of grinding, to fully upgrade one character. As a result, Diablo Immortal has been severely criticised by hardcore Diablo fans for having some of the worst monetization practices on the market as of June 2022, and subsequently became the second one of Blizzard's games to plunge to the bottom of the Metacritic review table, this time falling as low as 0.2% in fan reviews at one point. The name of the meme not only resounds with just how devoid of morals the game is, but it's because how easy it came to be: It's as easy as taking out one letter from the word 'Immortal' (it's the 't', by the way)
- "Do you guys not have wallets?" Explanation In response to the crippling monetization of Immortal, dissatisfied Diablo fans have quoted this spin on lead designer Wyatt Cheng's infamous "Do you guys not have phones?" question asked to booing PC gamers attending BlizzCon 2018.
StarCraft
- Mayday, mayday! Mah trope has taken terrible, terrible damage! Explanation Dustin Browder, SCII's lead designer, had a habit of using the phrase 'terrible, terrible damage' when commentating games. The fandom ran with it and Blizzard noticed to the point it became the game's godmode cheat and was actually said by Horace Warfield in a Wings of Liberty mission.
- "You must CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS!◊" and "WE REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS!" Explanation These two are annoying for players, and have been remade into a Voice Clip Song.
- WARNING! Additional pylons under construction!
- "SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS!"
- "Zerg Rush kekeke" Explanation "Kekeke" represents the sound of Korean laughing.
- "LURK MOAR"
- Nuclear Launch Detected.
- "My Life For Pylo!"
- "FLOSS THE ZERG!!!"
- From the Legacy Of the Void Cinematic Trailer: "proxy pylon 100-gate all-in" Explanation The trailer depicts a small task force on Aiur, planting a pylon while holding their ground against the Zerg. A minute later, the pylon is finished and countless reinforcements warp in as the lone remaining Zealot prepares to charge the Zerg.
- Wood League. Explanation The player versus player ladder has six separate leagues: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Masters. Excessively bad players (don't scout, take extremely long to create units, etc) are stated to be not good enough for Bronze League and deserve to be in Wood League.
Warcraft
- "What? WHAT? STOP POKING ME!" Explanation When playing the orcs and selecting the same orc unit enough times, it will evoke this reaction, with said unit being clearly annoyed at you
- Warcraft III: Refunded Explanation The Updated Re-release of Warcraft III, Warcraft III: Reforged, was deemed so laughably underpar due to cut content, unwanted features, questionable graphics, removing the ability to play existing custom campaigns and preemptively claiming ownership of any future custom campaigns that make any sort of noticeable impact, causing the game to fall to the lowest score on Metacritic in a matter of days and causing many players to get their pre-purchase refunded.
The Company
- A recurring fan opinion regarding Blizzard is that "they should just make a movie already", considering they make awesome cinematic cutscenes and trailers comparable to high-quality movies.
- Fun detected explanation Blizzard has gained a reputation over time for taking elements players enjoy, such as harmless cosmetics and quality-of-life options that reduce monotony in irrelevant content, and nerfing them until they aren't enjoyable anymore seemingly out of spite (For example, a World of Warcraft toy that changes your appearance that lasts 30 minutes with a 10 minute cooldown, will likely be changed to a duration of 10 minutes with a 30 minute cooldown). Similarly, the penultimate mission in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a choice between a unique mission controlling four heroes or a standard "eliminate enemy bases" mission. The former is considered more fun but makes the final mission far harder than doing the latter. There's also the perception that Blizzard is nerfing harmless fun instead of fixing broken mechanics and Game-Breaking Bugs. Thus when something fun is discovered there will immediately be people demanding that it be kept quiet, lest too many people start having fun and make Blizzard nerf it. On the flip side there are also jokes about how the best way to get broken mechanics fixed is to start enjoying them.
- The Revered Saint of the Brack Household, Gloria Steinemexplanation After a major lawsuit from the state of California against Activision-Blizzard was announced, related to a very hostile, toxic work environment for female and non-white employees, J. Allen Brack (the company president at the time) released a statement in which he mentioned that feminist theorist and author Gloria Steinem was a "revered saint" in his household. The reference to Steinem made no sense, came completely out of left field, and had barely anything to do with the actual situation — many speculated Brack had simply googled "famous feminists" and picked a top result. The statement was quickly memefied to the Brack family keeping literal shrines to Steinem, as well as certain character deaths and story beats from Blizzard games being "sacrifices to Gloria."
- The Diversity Space Tool Explanation In May 2022, Activision-Blizzard published an article about a 'Diversity Space Tool' used to monitor character creation and development in their games, using Overwatch as an example. It was instantly ridiculed both by the public and Blizzard developers for boiling such things as 'culture', 'race' and 'sexual identity' into scores from 0 to 10. What made it worse is that people began to realise that since people with low intelligence and ugliness were rated higher, negative stereotypes of certain races would be ranked higher than if they were depicted as being “normal.”
- China kicks out Blizzard / The Blitzchung AvengerExplanation Diablo Immortal, after all its efforts to appease the Chinese fanbase, ended up ironically banned from the very country when a Blizzard official Weibo account manager made a post that indirectly committed the known mistake of 'Do not refer to Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh'. This prompted Xi to give out the order to ban the game for an indefinite time, even if the ban is one day lifted, Blizzard would already be owned by Microsoft that they couldn't reap the fortunes, making all those alienating efforts extremely pyrrhic. Most end up hailing that Weibo account manager as a Memetic Badass, savior of gaming that delivered karmic justice to Blizzard on purpose or being imagined someone who got pissed at the Blitzchung incident at 2019 and decided to get hired to Blizzard in China to one day sabotage them from the inside as a revenge for Blitzchung.
- “What Have They Done This Time?” Explanation Whilst the initial LGBT+ representation of the company’s licenses, particularly Overwatch, was met with overwhelming praise, due to the proximity of these reveals to controversies that hurt the company, many people started to believe that these representation reveals were only done to mitigate backlash, especially since they were only done so in media that wasn’t part of the mainline games. This habit of revealing that characters were gay all along lead to not only many LGBT fans assuming Blizzard was pandering to them without actually caring about the LGBT community, but other fans began to believe that any new LGBT character meant that the company had done something horrible in secret.
