Acronyms

Haha, pllaying just about any MMO (massive multiplayer, another acronym hehe) game today, you pretty much need to learn some of them if you're not already used to them, especially WoW (World of Warcraft, sometimes abbreviated WOW) (it's more annoying when someone sends you a tell in chinese, usually asking for food/water, or trying to send you a tell about a gold selling site). The bad thing about asking peeps about what they stand for is, you'll sometimes get some crap for it, but oftentimes it's repeated enough that you'll start learning a lot of them after a while.

Heck, I remember when I first started out, I had no friggin clue what BWL, UBRS, LBRS, BRD, UD/Live Strat, Scholo, ST, SM, MC, AQ, ZF, or ZG meant. But after playing the game for a while, I slowly began to realize those are the acronyms for dungeons in WoW (mostly high lvl ones).

The problem I see mostly is when words begin to use the same acronyms. For instance, in WoW, DM could stand for either Deadmines, or Dire Maul. When I first started out, (on a new server) DM pretty much meant the low level dungeon, but increasingly, peeps have been referring to Deadmines as "VC", for Van Cleef, the boss of that dungeon. The reason why is DM = Dire Maul to many peeps in the game, and Dire Maul is a high level dungeon, so when peeps get higher lvls, they don't want to say "LFG for DM" (Looking for group), and mean deadmines (if they're referring to the low dungeon, then they say "LFG for VC").

Another thing that's interesting, although slightly off-topic, is words, phrases, or names that are relevant and familiar to some people, but to others just totally makes no sense. For instance, in Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC) I used to hear "Leeroy Jenkins!" a lot, usually right before we attacked something en masse (like storming a keep/tower). Since I hadn't played World of Warcraft at that point, I had no idea what that meant. After doing some online research, I finally understood what shouting that name meant (not to mention the semi-hiliarious video it was in).

Jam it back in, in the dark.