I was mostly speaking of classic herding of course. "I'm gonna herd to here! Wait for me!" THAT kind of herding.
Some of the other points are quite valid. Making sure people don't spam holds and the like prematurely -- valid. Pulling one group forward into another group -- VERY valid. Using a second tank (brute/scrapper) to pull other groups to the kill point -- VERY valid.
To be honest, the tanks I like best herd quite a bit, they just don't corner-pull every single group or announce everything they're doing. They just try to make sure the majority of enemies are bunched up in one place. I'll usually wait a few seconds for them to accomplish this, then unleash death. Or, if I'm on my scrapper, I'll aggro stragglers and go stand next to the tank. Normally this doesn't involve corner-pulling and it certainly doesn't involve pausing to make sure everyone is on the same page and then having them wait while you go get the bad guys. It just means letting the tank rush in and draw aggro for 2-3 seconds so you can AoE more effectively.
Not classic herding, but it's what any good tank does.
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
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Originally Posted by SuperFerret
Aside to your aside: I prefer English to gamespeak, and "mob" as a singular enemy grates my nerves a bit.
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It's still incorrect to refer to a group of enemies as a mob. Call them spawns or groups please. And mob is an abbreviation, a perfectly normal English construct.
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
As I play a tank sometimes, it's easy to get nervous about your team and want to be as careful as possible. A lot of deaths (team or personal) in the pre-20 levels can make folks overly cautious.
Hearding like that, what I call corner pulling (as opposed to fighting the mobs in place or pulling them forward), works when you need to be very careful. If you have a pug and you want to see how they perform, when you've got some folks with lag, when you don't have as much control as you'd like, if spawns are close together and might aggro easily, those are times when it's reasonable to corner pull stuff away from its spawn point. Aside: MOB = mobile. That's one dude. Spawn or group = lots of mobs all together. Some folks are calling a spawn a "mob" like it means a mob of people. Just kinda grates my mental nerves a bit. |
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
It's still incorrect to refer to a group of enemies as a mob. Call them spawns or groups please. And mob is an abbreviation, a perfectly normal English construct.
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In perfectly "normal" English, guess what, "mob" is a WORD! Meaning :
- a disorderly crowd of people
- syndicate: a loose affiliation of gangsters in charge of organized criminal activities
- throng: press tightly together or cram; "The crowd packed the auditorium"
- gang: an association of criminals; "police tried to break up the gang"; "a pack of thieves"
So, deal with the fact it has meaning(s) other than those you care for which are still perfectly applicable in game.
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CoH is the only game where I've seen people refer to spawns as "mobs". I am not sure why it happens here but not elsewhere. I'm guessing it's one of those things where, because you basically kill "a spawn" at a time, people heard the word used and couldn't tell which it referred to, and the obvious English meaning would have been to refer to the group rather than to the individual critters in it.
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It's a mob of MOBs. >.>
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
It's still incorrect to refer to a group of enemies as a mob. Call them spawns or groups please. And mob is an abbreviation, a perfectly normal English construct.
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In this game, most attacks we use have a side-effect called "NotifyMob" (attacking one enemy may notify the rest of the foes it spawned with).|
Originally Posted by gameboy1234
It's still incorrect to refer to a group of enemies as a mob. Call them spawns or groups please. And mob is an abbreviation, a perfectly normal English construct.
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I'd say that using the term "mob" to refer to a group that spawned together is quite appropriate.
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That is why I call a group of enemies a mob, because they're a mob.
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Originally Posted by Rajani Isa
An abbreviation might be a perfectly normal English construct, but MOB as an abbreviation is not normal English. It is either game or military (IIRC. andprobably why it's game) terminology.
In perfectly "normal" English, guess what, "mob" is a WORD! Meaning :
So, deal with the fact it has meaning(s) other than those you care for which are still perfectly applicable in game. |
[U][URL="http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=251594"][/URL][/U]
When I played the original EverQuest, MOB was the word almost exclusively used to name an enemy.
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That's my theory, too.|
Originally Posted by seebs
CoH is the only game where I've seen people refer to spawns as "mobs". I am not sure why it happens here but not elsewhere. I'm guessing it's one of those things where, because you basically kill "a spawn" at a time, people heard the word used and couldn't tell which it referred to, and the obvious English meaning would have been to refer to the group rather than to the individual critters in it.
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CoH was my first MMO, but I was exposed to "mob" as "MMO-speak" early on. When I'm talking about things CoH, I use it to refer to a single "critter", and a group of "critters" as a spawn.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
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Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Originally Posted by call me awesome
i recall one teammate asking another on one of those runs what i was doing and the other teammate saying "making nvidia more money" as i came around a corner with 300 mobs in pursuit.
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rofl!
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As a developer, I think you could easily be applying rules of common-sense English usage to something where they probably don't apply.|
Originally Posted by Master-Blade
In this game, most attacks we use have a side-effect called "NotifyMob" (attacking one enemy may notify the rest of the foes it spawned with).
I'd say that using the term "mob" to refer to a group that spawned together is quite appropriate. |
If I was looking at code for a system where interacting with a Widget had a side effect of notifying other Widgets, I would reasonably expect to find a Widget had method called notifyWidget(). I would totally unsurprised to find either that notifyWidget() did work suggesting it should instead have been named "notifyWidgets" (plural) or that there was no explicit method for multiple notifications, and that each action that caused such cross-Widget notification instead explicitly iterated over multiple Widgets, calling notifyWidget() for each one.*
The effect of notifyMoB could easily be to run something like this.
for (MoB in spawn) {
notify(MoB);
}
* The object oriented nature of the example is just for simplicity. My understanding is that CoH is not written in an OO language.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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From that perspective, I'm sure you are right. It probably runs the function on any foe in the area that was part of the same spawn.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
The effect of notifyMoB could easily be to run something like this.
for (MoB in spawn) { notify(MoB); } |
On a side note, I just did some further research in the official knowledge base, and found something related in an unrelated article. lol...
"What does the color of my enemy's name mean?"
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| There is a system in which you can determine the strength of a mob compared to your character. When you target a mob, the mob's name will appear in a color. Considering targets in this way is typically called "conning." |
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Originally Posted by Rajani Isa
An abbreviation might be a perfectly normal English construct, but MOB as an abbreviation is not normal English.
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Well, it is. This being the internet, people don't often capitalize words or use punctuation, but the word mob is a perfect valid construct. People should be saying MOB or mob., but they just don't because folks shorten a lot of their typing on the internet.
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| So, deal with the fact it has meaning(s) other than those you care for which are still perfectly applicable in game. |
Deal with the fact that not every facet of the language is found in a standard dictionary. Read some of the replies above; you can see the term mob is used by a lot of folks to refer to a single creature. It does come from MUDs, and was used a lot by the EQ developers (arguably the first successful 3D MUD).
I also come from a technical background, and I'm used to invented or re-used terms to describe things that have no real name in the vernacular. (Input and output as verbs are the classic example.) Really, it just makes folks using the term look kinda silly. It's for your benefit, not mine, that I point out correct usage. Otherwise you look kinda rube-ish.
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
MOB = mobile. That's one dude.
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Originally Posted by SuperFerret
I prefer English to gamespeak, and "mob" as a singular enemy grates my nerves a bit.
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
mob is an abbreviation, a perfectly normal English construct.
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Originally Posted by Rajani Isa
An abbreviation might be a perfectly normal English construct, but MOB as an abbreviation is not normal English. It is either game or military (IIRC. andprobably why it's game) terminology.
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While true that powers in this game have a "notify mobs" flag, "mob" still means "Mobile OBject". The power notifies only each MOB that it hits. Each of those MOBs then generates an 'aggro shout', which notifies allies close by. This can chain to pull an entire spawn.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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Yea. It's not like people would naturally see a group of enemies and then pick "mob" as the word that would stick to describe them. People were already using "mob" to refer to something specific and then less informed people picked up on it and used it incorrectly.
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Originally Posted by gameboy1234
Deal with the fact that not every facet of the language is found in a standard dictionary. Read some of the replies above; you can see the term mob is used by a lot of folks to refer to a single creature. It does come from MUDs, and was used a lot by the EQ developers (arguably the first successful 3D MUD).
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"Mob" means "group", and is often used in conjuction with "angry". Provided that my role in this game is to hit them in the face (thus angering them), calling a group of enemies a "mob" makes sense.
Also, the less I'm smacked in the face with gamer terms and technical crap, the happier I am with this game.
It's not an acronym. An acronym is an initialism (a word consisting of the initials of other words) which is pronounced as a word, but mob isn't an initialism. It isn't "Mobile OBject", it's just "MOBile".
... And yes, I personally worked on Abermud II and IV branches back in the day.
I don't think it makes any sense to play a game and object to people using "gamer" terms. We're playing a game; we are by definition gamers. We refer to a patrol as a "pat" and to an NPC we can attack as a "mob" because short names let us communicate quickly in combat.
"Patrol" and "that guy" seem to work fine with me.
Also, (and I know this isn't the case in the majority, and that kinda saddens me) I play this game because I'm a fan of superheroes, not because I like MMOs.
Oh, I love super hero stuff. I just figure that gaming implies gamers.
Basically, if you always view gamers as Them, you're going to have less fun than if you identify yourself as being some kind of gamer. Maybe you're a gamer who only likes superhero stuff, but you're playing games, so you're a gamer. If "gamers" become "Us", you'll enjoy hanging out with them more.
Since CoH is very heavily built to encourage team play and hanging out with the other players, this might be pretty rewarding.
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Acronym and initialism* are both specific forms of an abbreviation. Your definition of initialism is correct, but an abbreviation is not necessarily an initialism (though it can be, such as NATO). An acronym is an abbreviation which is spoken as its own word (SCUBA: \ˈskü-bə\) rather than speaking each individual letter (CEO: \ˌsē-(ˌ)ē-ˈō\).|
Originally Posted by seebs
It's not an acronym. An acronym is an initialism (a word consisting of the initials of other words) which is pronounced as a word, but mob isn't an initialism. It isn't "Mobile OBject", it's just "MOBile".
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Since MOB is an abbreviation generally spoken as \ˈmäb\, rather than \ˌem-(ˌ)ō-ˈbē\, it is by definition an acronym. You can argue over whether it abbreviates "MOBile" versus "Mobile OBject", but it's still an acronym and not an initialism. (For my own part, while I have never written nor maintained a MUD/MUSH, I am friends with a few people who currently do, and they all use Mobile OBject.)
For an example of a non-gamer acronym which is not an initialism, look at RADAR. It abbreviates "RAdio Detection And Ranging". Acronyms can also abbreviate things using letters from the middle of the word (AMPHETAMINE stands for "Alpha-Methyl-PHEneThylAMINE"), or drop entire words from the letters of the abbreviation (INTERPOL stands for "INTERnational criminal POLice organization").
* 'Alphabetism' is a less commonly used synonym for 'initialism'
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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I know that not every facet of a language is found in a standard dictionary. I know that it comes from MUDs/Early MMOs (I played EQ). But what you need to understand is, you can't force everyone to use terms in game lingo ONLY in the meaning of the game lingo when they have other, more longstanding meanings. ESPECIALLY in an MMO which gathers many new to MMOs as this one does.|
Originally Posted by gameboy1234
Deal with the fact that not every facet of the language is found in a standard dictionary. Read some of the replies above; you can see the term mob is used by a lot of folks to refer to a single creature. It does come from MUDs, and was used a lot by the EQ developers (arguably the first successful 3D MUD).
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The list of definitions I posted was not intended to be all inclusive - just showing some of the more common ones. My apologies if I gave off a sense of "all inclusive" in listing those definitions.
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Originally Posted by seebs
I don't think it makes any sense to play a game and object to people using "gamer" terms. We're playing a game; we are by definition gamers. We refer to a patrol as a "pat" and to an NPC we can attack as a "mob" because short names let us communicate quickly in combat.
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Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
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No, an acronym is an initialism. It has to be formed from leading letters, as SCUBA is. If it's not formed from the initial letters of the words in a longer phrase, it is not an initialism, and therefore is not an acronym.|
Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
Acronym and initialism* are both specific forms of an abbreviation. Your definition of initialism is correct, but an abbreviation is not necessarily an initialism (though it can be, such as NATO). An acronym is an abbreviation which is spoken as its own word (SCUBA: \ˈskü-bə\) rather than speaking each individual letter (CEO: \ˌsē-(ˌ)ē-ˈō\).
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| Since MOB is an abbreviation generally spoken as \ˈmäb\, rather than \ˌem-(ˌ)ō-ˈbē\, it is by definition an acronym. |
Otherwise, it's an abbreviation but not an acronym.
"Fridge" is not an acronym. It's an abbreviation which is pronounced as a word, but it's not an acronym. The distinction between acronym and initialism is interesting because both are formed in the same way, only the pronunciation differs.
Followups to alt.usage.english.
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Originally Posted by seebs
No, an acronym is an initialism. It has to be formed from leading letters, as SCUBA is. If it's not formed from the initial letters of the words in a longer phrase, it is not an initialism, and therefore is not an acronym.
No. To be an acronym, it would have to be a short form of a three-word phrase, where the THREE words started with M, O, and B respectively. Otherwise, it's an abbreviation but not an acronym. "Fridge" is not an acronym. It's an abbreviation which is pronounced as a word, but it's not an acronym. The distinction between acronym and initialism is interesting because both are formed in the same way, only the pronunciation differs. Followups to alt.usage.english. |
HEY! No sidetracking our argument over the proper use and/or definition of one or more words with your argument over the proper use and/or definition of one or more words!
Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
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42
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Originally Posted by Rajani Isa
HEY! No sidetracking our argument over the proper use and/or definition of one or more words with your argument over the proper use and/or definition of one or more words!
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I guess it's to some extent a tradeoff between speed and reliability, although sometimes the tank off by his lonesome with no support just dies, which is always a sign that it's about to be funny.
And yeah having been on the other side of the herd(watching the tank gather) and seeing that green bar go red...uh oh.