Gallery

Monday 27 February 2017

Geeky expressions only my friends understand (and now you will, too)

For most these will just be some random words, 
but members of Asylum will recognize them immediately

The latest 5 Fandom Friday was about "geeky expressions that only my friends understand". I suggested the topic myself, so I definitely wanted to participate, even if the flu kept me from writing anything on the appropriate day (last Friday). 

I don't really talk "geeky" in everyday life, but when I'm at my gaming laptop, I definitely do. Not only am I fluent in "MMO language" (read: Lost in translation: Why my friends don't understand me when I talk about MMOs), I also use specific phrases that don't make a lot of sense to anyone (not even other MMO players) but my friends. 

Those friends all play together in the gaming group Asylum. Originally a kinship in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and now mostly active as a guild in Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWTOR), I've been part of this group of lovely people for six years now. If you spend so much time together, you inevitably come up with your own approach of gaming and inside jokes. In this post I will share five.

LOTRO 2012. Someone (presumably a hobbit, considering the height)
still wears the noob leaf on a kinship picture right after doing the Saruman T2 Challenge

Noob leaf & Green dildo

When someone does something exceptionally stupid doing raid nights, typically resulting in the deaths of all members in a comical way, we mark them up with a specific target marker (normally reserved for adversaries). This was the "noob leaf" in LOTRO (see picture above). When we started raiding in SWTOR we needed an equivalent, which became the "green dildo" (although one polite Englishman in our guild stubbornly refers to it as "the sabre").

"Wipe on trash, one shot the boss"

This is what we call 'the Asylum way' when something doesn't go as planned. We have this tradition of being able to down horribly hard bosses, but now and then dying horribly ("wipe") on easy adversaries (called "trash" in MMOs) when nobody is paying attention. The saying goes back to a night in LOTRO during the Siege of Mirkwood expansion, when the raid group had defeated the Lieutenant (a big achievement) and afterwards wiped on the Turtle (a pug worthy easy lair boss five levels below level cap). This still is a great source of self ridicule.

As I was typing this article, someone was typing 'the dot' in guild chat

.

Originally intended to get people from different LOTRO kinships together quickly in a shared chat channel (for instance if people had relogged to a different character that the other might not recognize), the dot in chat still lives on in our guild chat. The dot may mean "I'm in!", or "This is my alt I was going to relog" or simply "I'm ready for an invite": either way, the expected action is an invite to the group. Newcomers are always mystified when they see those dots appear.

"Kill stuff, don't die"

Some guilds require their members to read up on online guides before coming to a raid night. We don't. We throw ourselves upon the raid bosses until we figure out what is going on. And when we don't know it anymore, we always have this incredibly useful tactic to fall back upon! Usually, the conversation goes something like this. First timer: "Any tactics I should know about?" Reply: "Kill stuff, don't die." The saying has developed into more than our guild's mantra: it stands for the no nonsense way we play our MMOs.

Left: 121 search results for :derp: in Discord chat; top right: the :derp: Discord icon

:Derp:

Old expressions go and new ones take their place. :Derp: or "Colon derp colon" (when spoken out loud) is fresh from 2017! Since the start of this year, Asylum is using Discord to communicate, which works amazing as a sort of out of game guild chat for a multi-gaming group. Discord allows for uploading your own emotes, a feature we have eagerly put to use. I made an icon of one of our favourite pets, the kelldrake (see picture above). This little bugger has a gift for looking really derpy, so he was assigned the code ":derp:", which we now enthusiastically apply whenever someone (be it a dev or ourselves) derps. Conrad and I have even started saying "colon derp colon" to each other if one of us does something stupid - which is probably only funny to us.

I almost feel a bit guilty about writing these expressions down, as they're not so much my expressions, but rather our expressions. These funny little ways of talking to each other is part of what makes Asylum Asylum. Some things are best kept secret, though: if you want to find out who Norman is (another Asylum word), you'll just have to join us!

Do you use geeky gaming expressions that nobody but your mates get?


5 Fandom Friday is a weekly event organized by the Female Geek Bloggers group on Google+. You can look up past and upcoming topics on The Nerdy Girlie.

18 comments :

  1. Replies
    1. Ha, I don't even remember why I received that nickname. Probably because of ordering everyone around, making them collect lore-master data for me and fixing the templates I was too stupid to understand!

      PS It's good to see you're still alive and well. :)

      Delete
  2. Both "Wipe on trash, one-shot the boss" and "Kill stuff, don't die" are sayings that have been uttered in my guild many times... now I feel like we might not be as special as we thought we were, lol.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting. I guess they are kind of obvious phrases for the kind of guild we both are in: long standing raiding guilds that don't take themselves too seriously (no elitist attitude).

      Delete
  3. Us and a couple of our friends have taken up the saying of, "Don't go squish!" This actually got coined back when we all played PSO and there were things that would stomp you dead if you didn’t time your run-through properly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Love that! That's exactly the kind of thing I was going for with this prompt. :)

      Delete
  4. It's been years since I've played with a regular group of people (which was back when I played WoW) but this post made me remember a few phrases:

    Our version of "wipe on trash" was "We wipe on trash so you don't have to!"

    Our version of "green dildo" was an orange shield marker that a number of people said looked like a condom. Which is how we ended up having lighthearted arguments over who would get to be the condom.

    We also came up with some weird names for raid bosses, such as the Vagina Dragon, a pink dragon whose horns were shaped in such a way that it looked like a...well, you get the idea. There was also the Pop-up Boss, a giant in Ulduar that sprang up in a gap in the walkway as if he was in some sort of newbie-scaring pop-up book. My personal favourite was probably Ragnaros from the Firelands. Due to me accidentally calling some adds he spawned Sons of Sam (rather than Sons of Flame) and someone pointing out that it looked like Ragnaros was appearing from a toilet (complete with lifted seat), he became Sam Ragnaros, Lord of the Toilet.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "We wipe on trash so you don't have to!" That's brilliant!

      It also feels good that we're not the only one with some measure of 'teenage humour' (even if only just one word in our case). You guys totally beat us at that! Sam Ragnaros, Lord of the Toilet is a true inside joke. ^^

      This all reminds me of a particular hat in LOTRO. The leader of a befriended kinship (LOTRO's version of a guild) always wore it and was teased with it being a 'condom hat'. Once you'd heard that you couldn't un-see it: it really looked like just that. :)

      Delete
  5. I'm one of the boring players that sticks to fairly normal comments like LOL and I always say Good Hunting when I log off. But have to admit that "Kill stuff, don't die" in so many games - most recently in Trion's Defiance a 3rd person shooter that came out at same time as TV series; some of achievements linked to the series when it was still on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I noticed your "Good hunting!" earlier on and always thought it was quite charming, not boring at all. :)

      Delete
  6. Hm. Not many regular phrases with me and my friends either. The closest to it was something that started during this one time when we decided to go to an old dungeon as most of us never saw it. Since it was old content we were able to make our way through it without much challenge and got to the last named (that is EQ2 lingo for boss-like enemies). Once we got there the named started to make a really long villain speech. You know, the usual, "I am so great", "any attempt to kill me will be futile", "you will all die", etc. I started to get annoyed waiting for him to stop talking just so we could fight him so I said in chat "Blah, blah. You are going to die anyway!". That made one of my friends laugh so hard that when a similar situation occurs in a MMO she asks someone to say that phrase.

    Another one, but that is more a thing from another friend, is the "Hug a Ratonga Day". Ratonga are the rat people in EQ2 and they are more towards the cute/pet hamster side than the usual scary rat-people in other games. Anyway, she says that "Hug a Ratonga Day" is a holiday that the ratongas made where it is all about hugging ratongas. It also happens that *every day* is "Hug a Ratonga Day". So if she sees a ratonga she will inevitable hug them while reminding people of the "holiday".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Haha, "Blah, blah. You are going to die anyway!" sounds like such a typical Rakuno thing to say. I love it! It sounds like you had a lot of fun with your friends. :)

      Was the "Hug a Ratonga Day" invented by Rebecca by any chance? I vaguely remember reading about something like that in the comment section of your blog ages ago. Your friendly annoyance in response to being assigned the role of character to hug is hilarious. I'm not surprised *every day* is "Hug a Ratonga Day". xD

      Delete
    2. We had a lot of fun running some dungeons and joking around, yes.

      Yeah, it was Rebecca who invented "Hug a Ratonga Day". She also goes by Sabine or Sabinerak in the interwebs. She just have an urge to hug anything that is cute and furry. Or even not so cute and/or furry, like the Charr in Guild Wars 2 or the Sarnak (a hybrid race created from dragons and the Iksar (the lizardman race in the game). It may sound weird but it makes some kind of sense in the lore).

      The friendly annoyance response to "Hug a Ratonga Day" is just my thing though. Every other ratonga is usually pretty happy to be hugged.

      Delete
    3. We had some "Ratonga pride" guildies back in EQ2. I was playing a Kerra, the cat race, and my Kerra's tradeskill was cooking. As you might imagine, I would chime in with "I love ratonga's! Especially lightly sauteed and fried in a pan!"

      Delete
    4. Ahahaha. Awww, poor rantongas. They had to suffer through a lot in that game. ;)

      Delete
  7. This was so much fun to read! Definitely makes me miss the days I used to raid with my friends in WoW. I'm with a new guild now, but they don't have any fun, special offers or anything. 'Kill stuff, don't ' is so dang perfect:P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm happy to hear it's not just fun for me to write! I'm enjoying everyone's stories in the comment section as well. I guess the social side of MMOs is something that always intrigued me.

      I hope your new guild will develop to have the same camaraderie - it might just! Mine has been around for so long, with the same people at the core... I think that really helps to get that kind of atmosphere.

      Delete
  8. The Senate Guard has some private expressions as well, like "doing a Murder" when one gets online just after the raid group is full and has pulled the first thrash, "doing a Weels" when beeing completly lost and not knowing where to go, "do a Chim" when we are planning something and someone jumps ahead without waiting, but not to confuse with "do a Rarr", that's when someone wants to push to talk and presses a key that starts an attack. "Doing a Dorrys" is starting a boss fight and get stuck outside the room. I wonder how we come up with all of those names....
    -Murder

    ReplyDelete

You can insert links, images and videos to your comment using these tricks.