I’m pretty sure you have come across a lot of acronyms or words that didn’t mean what they are supposed to mean while gaming, particularly if you are just starting out gaming in any of the highly popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)s.

Well, this handy guide will attempt to explain as many terms that you’ll commonly and generally encounter in any type of MMORPGs as possible. However, please do take note that this guide is by no means exhaustive. If you think I’ve missed out any or that you’re interested to see a Part 2, feel free to comment below!

Add-ons. It is an external program that provides additional functions or managing options to the game and greatly enhancing the gaming experience.

Adds. Stands for additional mobs (Refer to Mobs). This is what bosses (Refer to Boss) like to throw at you, both in your gaming world as well as in your work life.

AH. Stands for Auction House. This is the turf of the more business-minded players and their stalking area of choice. Trying to enter their turf will usually result in you pulling your hair out in frustration as everything you’ve listed on the AH was undercut within seconds of you posting them.

Aggro. Stands for aggressive. When someone has aggro, it means that an enemy/ enemies have locked onto that poor someone and will attack pre-emptively. A player usually gets aggro when they overtook the tank (Refer to Tank) in damage dealt to a single target in dungeon encounters. Sometimes, the player can get aggro just by being a total ass.

Alt. Stands for alternative character. Those players with alts are mostly players with too much time on their hands.

AoE. Stands for Area of Effect. This is the best way to bring a whole bunch of mobs (Refer to Mob) down along with you. This is also the method of choice for detecting stealthed opponents.

Boss. Not to be confused with the boss in your working life. In-game, this word refers a mob (Refer to Mob) that is substantially more powerful than you, though why this particular ‘mob’ is called a ‘boss’ is open to interpretation. Anyway, it will require you to gather a team of players, make them work together, stop their squabbling and threaten to kick them if they don’t behave to successfully kill a Boss. They usually live in the depths of dungeons and instances. Each instance/ dungeon usually has a main ‘king’ boss and many mini-bosses… like in a hierarchy. In addition, they rarely venture out into the world. Those that did are called ‘world boss’ instead.

Buff. Buffs are used to improve the stats of your character and, most of the time, of other players in your group too. Buffs are very similar to misplaced house/ car keys or phones – seriously, how often do you forget where you’ve placed these items? That’s right, I rest my case. Despite being very important to the point of being vital, people tend to forget to buff… until someone reminds them to do so.

CC. Stands for crowd control. When handling more enemies than is possible to take on at the same time, this is when CC comes in and plays its role.

DPS. Stands for damage per second. DPS is also used to refer to the damage output of any damage-dealing character class. Some MMORPGs have add-ons that can calculate the DPS of each player during a fight and these add-ons are usually used to fuel the ego of the person with the highest DPS. It may also result in the kicking of the underperforming player/s from the team.

EXP/ XP. Stands for experience points. This is what you’ll need to level up, but these points seem to like to defy your efforts to make the leveling process faster by creeping in their narrow little bar, pace by pace.

F2P. It stands for free-to-play. An overrated label since every “Tom, Dick and Harry”-games in the online gaming world are adopting this label, although the games are not exactly or fully free-to-play.

Gear. Means equipments, accessories and armor that characters can equip. It is one of the pride and joy of any MMORPG player. It is also one of the most fought after items in the game and sometimes, the fight can even be brought out into the real life…

Gold farmer/ spammer. The scourge of most F2P MMORPG. These spammers are like the plague that cannot be fully eradicated. No matter how fast you ban them, they will have another character (usually a low level one) spamming their wares on the chat channel in a few minutes. Gold farmers, on the other hand, do not use the chat channel as much, but they tend to use robot programs to help them do their farming and will saturate the AH with so many items that it is hard for the average player to make a living in the game. These sorts of people are usually associated with the Chinese.

Grinding. It is one of the most well-known processes of torture, particularly to free-to-play players in F2P MMORPG. It forces you to repeat a certain boring task that even your dog could do! Some players may succumb to the torture and finally dole out money to the developers of the game to rapidly hasten things up.

HPS. Stands for heals for second. Similar in many ways to DPS, except that this is for healers.

LFG/M/W. LF stands for ‘looking for’, while G, M and W stand for ‘group’, ‘member’ and ‘work’ respectively. LFG is used when you are looking for a group to do an instance with. LFM is used when you are the leader of your group and are looking for additional players to join your little band of raiders. Lastly, LFW is used when a professional crafter is offering his or her services to craft items (your mats though) for pay.

Mats. Stand for materials. The stuff that you need to craft other, better stuff. They are usually dropped from mobs and bosses, can be gathered or crafted by other professions/ vocations, or can be purchased from vendors.

Mob. Stands for mobile object. It is used in MMORPGs only and is usually in the plural form. They are also usually hostile. Mobs are those computer-generated enemies that you have to kill, up to a certain amount, to complete a quest. They fill the gap of land between you and that town you’re heading to and they are also the meddlesome enemies that stand between your team and the sweet loot from the raid boss. They do like to stand in the middle of everything, don’t you think?

Ninja. This is in no way related to the famed ninjas of Japan. This word is used in-game to refer to a player who ‘stole’ (the use of the word ‘stole’ here is debatable) an item from another player. There are many ways one can do such a thing, especially when there are no class-restrictions on which class can roll the die for an item. Ninjas usually come out of the closet in PUGs (Refer to PUG).

NPC. Stands for non-player character. It is the people in the game world that stand on the same place or walk a pre-scripted path for the rest of their lives. They repetitively get into trouble and keep asking for help from you, the players. They are also the merchants who will buy up whatever crap you brought to them.

Power-level. It is the condition where a higher level character helps a much lower level character level up by mainly farming groups of mobs. The lower level character can just stand there and do nothing. It is a favorite past-time of certain MMORPG players to repeatedly kill the lower level character while the higher level one is busy taking on massive groups of mobs.

PUG. Stands for pickup group. This word is more commonly used in WoW than other MMORPGs. It means that the group is consisted of random players that you don’t know and, more often than not, it has a high chance of having a couple of really bad players in them. Joining a PUG is like gambling – you may win and you may lose, but the chance of you losing is actually higher and it’ll completely wreck your gaming experience.

PvE. Stands for Player versus Environment. PvE mainly include dungeons, raids and instances whereby you and your team will be fighting against mobs (Refer to Mob) instead of other humans. Some may even list questing as PvE.

PvP. Stands for Player versus Player. So, instead of playing against the game, you’ll be playing against real human players. It will usually result in plenty of QQ by the losing side.

Tank. Also known as tanker. In gaming, tank may not refer to the armored car that we know, unless it is a tank game, instead it usually means the character who is supposed to have the highest armor in the team and is going to take the brunt of the damage dealt mainly by the boss in a PvE encounter (MMORPG).

Toon. Comparable to terms like avatar or character and does not stand for ‘cartoon’.

Twinking. This word refers to a lower level character getting the highest level equipments of his level with the help of a higher level character. These equipments are not attainable if the lower level character had been on his own. Thus, most MMORPGs tagged gear (Refer to Gear) with a level requirement to discourage this. A prime example is twinks running around in the game armed to the teeth with heirloom items in World of Warcraft.

WTB/S/T. WT stands for ‘want to’ while B, S and T stand for ‘buy’, ‘sell’ and ‘trade’ respectively. These terms are the basics of MMORPG trade-speak, but if you want to join in the economic elites in MMORPGs, you will still have a long way to go!