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[Thad]

I STILL hate the MMO use of "mob".

[sei]

It's a fuckronym for mobile (object), not deliberate misuse of an English word.  Dates back to MUDs.  You probably already knew that and just don't care, though.

[Brentai]

Do MMOs use "MOB"?  I thought they had aggressively dropped every reference to just being pretty MUDs.

[sei]

Players definitely use "trash mob."  Context muddies the intent of their usage; there're usually a lot of trash monsters to clear.  A mob of mobile objects.

A lot of people who played MUDs play MMOs.  Old habits die hard.  Even if the developers drop the term, you've still got bored, old housewives from the south who refuse to update their vocabulary and wind up spreading the meme.

The MMO term I like least is "toon."

[Brentai]

It's useful for telling who's from Britain or Australia though.

Or just a tosser.

[Thad]

It's a fuckronym for mobile (object), not deliberate misuse of an English word.  Dates back to MUDs.  You probably already knew that and just don't care, though.

Actually, I did not, and that DOES make it much less irritating.

All I remember about MUDs is they're where I first encountered "chown".

[Kayma]

The MMO term I like least is "toon."

Agreed. I think it's a bit of a stretch.

[Brentai]

Like most things that are lame, it's related to VRML.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

"Mob" is still in common use; it's the default term for an enemy, mobile or not.

MMOs have a fascinating vernacular, and when you've played an MMO for any period of time, it's easy to forget just how curious and specialized so many of the terms are. "Proc" is a good example of this. It's not derived from any "real" word (best etymology I can find is that it's from "Programmed Random Occurance"), and it has very little use outside of an MMO context.

I'd also really love to know what the real etymology of "train" is. I've always supposed it to be like training a dog to attack strangers or something, but it could be all sorts of things.

[Kashan]

"Mob" is still in common use; it's the default term for an enemy, mobile or not.

MMOs have a fascinating vernacular, and when you've played an MMO for any period of time, it's easy to forget just how curious and specialized so many of the terms are. "Proc" is a good example of this. It's not derived from any "real" word (best etymology I can find is that it's from "Programmed Random Occurance"), and it has very little use outside of an MMO context.

I'd also really love to know what the real etymology of "train" is. I've always supposed it to be like training a dog to attack strangers or something, but it could be all sorts of things.

In older MMO's enemies and players often moved at the same rate, such that when a raid was about to wipe, rather than everybody sitting and taking it, everyone would run out of the instance and because everything moved at the same speed nothing would catch up, so there would be this huge line of players and enemies heading towards the exit. At least that's how it was explained to me. I guess it was just faster than saying congo-line.

[Kayma]

I'd also really love to know what the real etymology of "train" is. I've always supposed it to be like training a dog to attack strangers or something, but it could be all sorts of things.

Um, isn't it just getting a lot of things to follow you, like cars following a locomotive?

[Burrito Al Pastor]

No, just running away from things is kiting (because they follow you around like a kite). Training is when you kite a mob in such a way that they then aggro on to some other, unsuspecting player.

[Sharkey]

Intent to grief has little to do with it in my experience. I've heard train just as frequently used in reference to some poor schmuck fleeing for the zone boundary, where the mobs will get cut loose and just happen to aggro on anyone nearby. Pretty sure it's just the resemblance to a line of train cars. Kiting is usually in reference to a single, controlled mob. Trains are more a matter of OHSHITZONEIT.

[Kayma]

In my experience, training has been about amassing as many mobs to follow you as you can; end result be damned. Of course, I've had throngs trained (train wrecked?) on me in Final Fantasy XI. Kinda funny.

[Thad]

I knew a guy who used to play UO who claimed it came from there.  As I recall his explanation, there were multi-level dungeons with harder monsters lower down, but aggroed monsters could chase players upstairs to where the weaker players were; when this happened people would global "TRAIN!" to warn the people at the top to start running.

[Brentai]

Proc I'm pretty sure is short for procedure.  I couldn't tell you exactly why they use that term, but my best guess is that there's some scripting language out there (probably for DekuMUD or some variant) that used it as its calling syntax - PROC Move, PROC ScratchAss, PROC AttackPlayer, etc.  It makes a bit more sense in a programming context, i.e. activating a mob is calling a proc of some sort or another, but how the hell it got out into public use is one of those mysteries of memetic mutation.

[McDohl]

Someone's gotta have those screenshots of CEO of Earth aggroing the entire mob population of Perez Park.  Because that's funny.

[Ocksi]

proc is process on action.  a process that occurs when performing another action.

a train is exactly what it is when it's run on your mother or anywhere else: a group is led by one engine (player pulling aggroed mobs).  training onto someone is classic griefing.  round up many mobs that will aggro whatever they see, run them to another player (i'm the engine!) and then fanish/feign death/die just so they die, too.  you just hit them with a full train of monsters.

kiting is definitely when you control a mob or player from a distance, pulling them along from well out of harm's way, to whatever end.  you can kite mobs to train them on others!

[Brentai]

Alternately, proc can be short for proctology because that monster's coming to rape your ass.


And yes, I know my avatar makes this post creepier.  Thanks for telling me.

[AČ]

I hate how raids are "20+ people do the work so a few people get shiny things"

I want rare drops in a raid to be "one for everyone in there"