Asa booming game, Path of Exile has quickly developed a vibrant and thriving community around itself. And as with any good community – there are some great memes to go around. Say hello to the PoE Toucan!
Where Did PoE Toucan Come From
Perhaps the most notable of all the memes the PoE community has seen over the years is the “Le Toucan” ASCII copy paste. According to Know Your Meme, the earliest known instance of this meme supposedly takes root on a DOTA2 thread of the NeoGAF forum bulletin board. In this thread, a member of the community cited the ASCII drawing of a tropical bird as his favorite copy pasta among the ones they’ve seen on Twitch.Tv.
Since then, the PoE toucan one bird wonder has roamed gaming communities far and wide, including Twitch. Tv, League of Legends, Dota2, Counter-Strike, and even World of Warcraft. However, while it quickly let up its rightful place to other memes and copy pastas over the years, the Path of Exile player base just never seemed to let it go. Going back to 2015, if you didn’t have the global chat muted, it was pretty much a spam-fest of PoE Toucan being pasted with the words “Le Toucan has arrived,” and a horde of other players would then spam back the words “PRAISE!”
Le Toucan’t – The End Of An Era
However, as per the age-old adage – “All good things must eventually come to an end.” As so did our beloved avian ASCII-clad hero.
The issue of global chat being absolutely mindlessly spammed with the copy pasta and ensuing responses got so bad that Grinding Gear Games eventually announced that spamming the chat to announce the “master’s” arrival could lead to a ban or a temporary verbal timeout (soft-mute) for the unruly culprit.
But, as you would expect – this only fueled the PoE Toucan’s reign of spam, and the wave of mutes being handed out left and right did little to cease the global chat spam. Only this time, the Toucan’s less-frequent appearance revealed another pattern. The global chat was being spammed with by-mentions of RMT (Real Money Trading) websites where users could purchase in-game items, currency, and even entire pre-built characters along with powerleveling and atlas unlock services for real-world cash. And worse off, the majority of these mentions were laden with ASCII characters.
So what happened next?
GGG decisively limited the type and amount of ASCII characters that could go into a message. And as a bystander harmed, the PoE Toucan took flight for the last time on the night before the 3.7.4b patch release date.
However, while many players were upset about the loss of their favorite Path of Exile mascot (who spawned a lot of PoE cosmetic item fan art), the community has since moved on to find better memes and new ways to spam the living crap out of the global chat.
With that, let’s toast to the one Toucan to rule them all!
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