As you know, I work for Massively, which is a division of Weblogs, Inc. which is owned by AOL / Time Warner. Yep, we’re sucking from the corporate teat. Guilty as charged. Gotta pay the bills, and as I’ve said, I love my job.

That said, we have only the teeniest of contact with Corporate. Most of what we do is inside our own little area. You know how I can prove that they don’t talk to us? Easy. If you have AOL Instant Messenger, you’ll notice they’ve been pushing their new “gaming platform” recently.

No MMO gamer would ever use these two letters to name a gaming platform:

QQ, for those who aren’t familiar, is the symbol for two “crying” eyes. It essentially is taken the same as writing “cry” — or in MMO circles “cry more, noob” — these days.

So AOL has just named their added a platform for IM games called “cry more, noob” in essence. It is the low-class slam after getting your ass handed to you. Trolls on forums use it, PvPers use it, and all manner of generally unpleasant bastards use it. Oh, and I’d mention that I’ve heard it in FPS circles as well, so it’s not even just an MMO-only thing.

If we actually had any real interaction with HQ beyond getting a paycheck or the occasional talk with legal, I’d probably tell them to smack someone in Marketing to rename this particular platform for a Western market. As it is, all I can do is share this with the rest of you, and we’ll have a chuckle together.

QQ indeed.

[Edited for correction] As pointed out by Leon below, QQ is actually not owned by AOL, but is instead part of a company owned by Tencent America, a division of the Tencent Group, listed as being headquartered in Redwood City, CA. Apparently, they’re connected to a Chinese company of the same name.

It still doesn’t change the fact that it’s an extremely unfortunate name when it comes to Western gamers, IMO.