Overused terms in MMO gaming

EricDanie

Feel free to throw in terms you believe are overused and have pretty much lost their original meaning as of when you first knew them. There's a lot of subjectivity as to when your first knew the term and what meaning it had since there are constant mutations going with these terms, so we may see a lot of interesting things in here. I'll start off and really look forward reading other people's terms, even if its about a same term there can be different views.

"Closed Beta X", "Open Beta Y", anything to do with "Betas" - There were these days betas were like sacred shrines, getting into one of these would take a lifetime of work. Nowadays, Betas are just excuses for releasing unpolished games, Closed/Open Beta Number XYZ are just reasons to place your game name in game sites front news pages again. Character wipes aren't even something expected anymore, item malls are already seen at full scale sales in Betas and people expect perfect gameplay in Betas.

"Free to Play" - Fairy Tale: There was this first legendary game in the middle of a P2P-only gaming environment that used this word to advertise itself. It was a non-profit game that survived purely on donations, like a fan game. Since then, if your game doesn't have this word in a banner, it simply isn't in the "cool game list". It is now used for anything regarding P2P game trials to F2P (yeah, a whole genre took that term to brand itself).

Jenuviel

I can think of a lot of terms that have lost meaning, but I don't want to focus on the negative today. There's one term that I think has actually gained meaning:

"<MMO Name>'s  webpage."

When I started Everquest in 1999, their webpage just had a blurb about the game and a place to sign up for an account. Things have changed. Just using LotRO as an example, they have forums, dev blogs, social networking, and an official wiki with gear, guides, patch notes, et cetera. It's a world of difference. Sanya/Tweety may have started it with the Camelot Herald, but other companies have been running with the ball. These days, you get RSS feeds constantly updating you about everything, whereas you used to only know your game's server status by running a traceroute through a DOS prompt.

Tarkovsky

I think this could be said about public relations experts and propgandhists in any industry right now, but people use the term innovation very liberally. Every god damn game producer under the sun, car company, wheat cracker manufacturer, and toothbrush brand is trying to push how their product is so god damn revolutionary.

Like when Gillette shocked the world with the Mach 6, offering new innovations in shaving by providing an unprecedented 6 blades to adjust to the personal contours of your own face to a degree of precision that's never been witnessed before! Thanks, because 3 really weren't enough already.

Since when did innovation become synonomous with an extraneous marketing gimmick? Because it feels like that's what a large chunk of the MMO industry has been churning out.

Locklain

WoW clone . . . single most overused term in all of MMOdom.

Tarkovsky

Originally posted by Locklain


WoW clone . . . single most overused term in all of MMOdom.

 

Fanboy is rather annoying, as well. It's so overused and out of context, it often feels like the  MMO communities equivalent of calling someone naive or dumb in real life. Aimed to be a quick little ego blow, and ego boost to the one who pitches the insult.

kakarotrage

The term "WoW Killer" + any threadlogarticle trying to be philosophic about the term and this post included.

Scot

The problem is that PR speak has moved out of the PR department. It is now the lingo of every member of staff in a MMO. Deveolpers, producers etc feel they are marketing themselves as much as their product. So everything they do is groundbreaking while still ticking all the old MMORPG must haves.

Effectively MMO companies are in a PR arms race which no one can win, but which feeds on itself to make the companies claims even more outrageous and absurd.

Solo games are not as effected by this trend, game companies know that if your are a FPS shooter fan you are likely to buy both their own game and a rivals. But in the world of MMO’s very few people play more than one MMO at a time, or play more than two in the same year. So they really need you to think their MMO is the best thing since MUD’s came online.

Zorvan

Soon.

haratu

I agree, it seems "Beta" for many games no longer means "testing period", for many it just means "Free trial". Personally I think this makes life harder for the games that seriously want proper beta testers, especially when they want to know what betas you have previously been in.

For example: a WoW beta back when it first started would show more experience in testing than An Aion beta now because Aion was tested before the current "beta".