Three useful abbreviations/text short cuts/terms to enhance your online play:
- aggro: Aggression/attention from the bad guys. Presumably this holds true in other online games, too, but in CoH, aggro refers to the focused aggression that the bad guys place on someone based on their actions toward them (varying from walking too close to actually doing them damage). So, for example, an area-of-effect attack like a fireball will damage several bad guys — and draw their aggro, which means they’ll all be coming after you, which is one reason why AoE attacks are a mixed blessing unless the bad guys are all seriously mixed up with more attractive or irritating targets. This is a big lesson for blaster/controller characters to learn in CoH.
- BRB: Be Right Back. The person sending the message has to leave the keyboard and go do something, usually brief. Not be a texting/SMS/online-gaming sort of person, I’ve always pooh-poohed these shortcuts, until I had to use them. When you get really lazy, you start dropping the capital letters (“brb”). Given that my gaming sessions usually take second place to taking care of the immediate family needs, I use this particular acronym a lot.
- AFK: Away From Keyboard. Like BRB, only more of a status, not an intention, and often longer-term.
There are many others, some in common with other online games, but these were three that came to mind for no particular reason.
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“Aggro” ia also used as a verb: “Do not aggro the purple con!” And “con” is from “consider,” as in “to consider the relative strength of your opponent.” (I learned those in Star Wars Galaxies, the only other MMO I’ve played.)
I noticed the other night that, while your spelling was immaculate, you eschewewd punctuation. I still have trouble bringing myself to do this, except in the heat of battle, which is why I like using Ventrilo to co-ordinatew combate orally.
Here’s an acronym I didn’t understand: PBAoE. I knew AoE was Area of Effect, but couldn’t figure out that PB was Player-Based.
PB could also be “point-blank”, which is the same thing. An area of effect action centered around the character initiating the action.
My favourite abbreviation is “bio”.
In the heat of battle, I tend to drop chars and not pay a lot of attention to spelling and punctuation — not when things are grim. Hell, telling “run” can take too much attention to do …
Or as Doyce found out with Gilly the other day (and something that happend to me sometimes. Getting caught in the text box and trying to run only to fill the text box with wwwwrrreeeqqeewwweeqqeewweerr.
most annoying.
Oh, yeah, that happens *way* too often.
Or, conversely, starting to type something and realing that you’ve hit, oh, say, the “R”-for-Run toggle. Which can have very unfortunate circumstances (as I discovered last evening).
Note to self: Read CoH manual on slash commands, macros, keybindings, emotes (PDF pp 103-115, print pp 101-113).
As I was telling Doyce yesterday, I used to have a lot of binds for my characters; I just haven’t set them up for Naivety yet. I had all my primary powers on the unchorded numpad, all my secondary powers on CTRL-numpad and then the rest was variable based on the archetype and power pools.
If you have a Fly or Super Speed character, you may want to consider the Speed on Demand binds. My bubbler (Roughrider Girl… it was a Saskatchewan joke) is a flier and the binds basically toggled you between Fly and Hover based on whether or not you were moving. Similarly, it toggled between Sprint and no Sprint based on whether or not you were moving on the ground. It got confused from time to time, but it was great. Did a lot to conserve Endurance while still allowing you to stay above melee range.
Plus, with me in constant hover, it allowed me to use this emote: “I wear these ridiculous heels because I don’t have to stand in them!”
🙂