Locations: In game locations are italicized. Getting into the importance of specific locations is beyond the scope of this article. For the truly curious, you can search for more information about a location on Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site or on the public World of Warcraft resource site Thottbot.

NPC: Non-player character. An entity either friendly or not who is controlled by the game.

WoW: Short for World of Warcraft.

Guild: A collection of players of the same faction on the same server who belong to a large collective. Unlike raids, guilds are not specifically used for combat but are socially oriented. Players in the same guild share a common chat channel that is only viewable by people in the guild. There are fewer restrictions placed by Blizzard on adult/objectionable content said in guild chat and generally the environment is reflective of that unless the guild dictates otherwise.

A guild's name appears in brackets below the character's name while in game. Common themes for guild names are Latin phrases, puns, irony and sometimes very subtle humor. For example: <FF Prime> refers to Fruit Fucker Prime, a character/punch line for the web comic Penny Arcade.

Alts: Characters a player keeps on their account to experiment and goof off with, and they are not a player's main focus. As such, alts don't usually have gear equal to that of a player's main character.

/played: World of Warcraft provides this command to keep a running tally of how much time your character has spent in game. For example, 30 days = 720 hours spent in game, not the time elapsed since your first login.

Five man instances/5mans: Events that generally require five players to complete; are not as resource intensive as raiding.

Raiding: World of Warcraft has many events which require more than five players to complete successfully; these events are classed as "raids." Raids can involve between 10 and 40 people and require a good deal of specific knowledge and communication to complete. The average guild would expect to spend between three and four hours to finish a 40 man raid instance with 100% success, provided that the instance is on "farm" status. The term "raids" can be used interchangeably to refer to attempting a raid instance, or having more than 5 people in a group to complete a task. "Are we raiding Molten Core tonight?" and "Come join my raid, we're doing a bunch of goofy shit in Ironforge." are used frequently.

Ganking: When a player of the opposing faction engages you in combat by surprise and wins. On PvP realms, a majority of zones that players spend their time in are categorized as "contested" meaning a member of your opposing faction can attack you at any time without your consent. Ganking usually takes place completely by surprise, often when the target is engaged in another activity that requires their combat focus to survive. Often the attacker has far superior gear and level to that of the target, heavily tipping the odds in the attacker's favor.

Griefing: When another player disrupts your intended game play many times in succession by attacking you or a creative use of game mechanics. Being griefed can involve being ganked repeatedly such that you can not complete your game play goal in a timely manner.

Grinding: Repetitive action to enhance your character. Examples include gaining experience by repetitive killing of mobs, gaining faction reputation, or killing mobs for gold.

Expansion: As of this publication, Blizzard has released only one expansion for World of Warcraft. Titled"The Burning Crusade", it raises the maximum level from 60 to 70, introduces new spells, abilities, talents, professions, races and content. This was a separate purchase from the base game and currently Blizzard does not release one collection of disks that covers the base install plus the expansion. The software cost for both sets of content is approximately $80 USD.

Hybrid class: A class which can serve a variety of roles depending on their gear and talent spec. Some classes are very efficient at dealing damage, others absorbing, and still others healing. Druids are a perfect example of a hybrid class because they are able to change into different animals which give different bonuses to help fulfill various tasks in a group setting. "Bear tanks" for instance are Druids shifted into bear form which allows them to absorb more damage and help to focus the enemies on them. This gave rise to the "bear ass" tactic of embarrassing rival players by sitting on their corpse after druids have defeated them in PvP while in bear form.

Disenchanting: The idea behind disenchanting is that you break an item down into its magical components for later use. Enchanting is a profession which allows you to take component materials and improve select aspects of your own or other player's gear. Rarely enemies will drop some enchanting materials so the only effective way to gather them is to disenchant certain items. Disenchanting items rated above a certain class will yield predictable materials used for enchanting and selling those materials can be very profitable.

Rezzing: Certain items and abilities have the capacity to resurrect players after their death to full or partial health and mana.

Spec/Off-spec: Short for talent specialization, which talents you chose greatly determine the roll your character will fill in group situations. Off-specs are any time you choose talents that mold your character into something their class was not specifically intended for; other times they're just uncommon specs.

Gear: Specifically this only includes items which can be equipped (worn): armor, weapons, non-armor clothing and trinkets. It is sometimes used as a general term for items in a player's inventory, potions, quest items or items to augment aspects of weapons or the abilities of a character.

Drops/loot: Items you can loot from NPC enemies corpses.

Farming: Completing a task or vaquishing a specific set of enemies to obtain a specific item: gold, cloth, quest requirements, etc. Having a raid on "farm status" means that your guild is sufficiently skilled to complete the entire encounter without major hiccups. Rather than exploring new content, you're completing an event to obtain specific pieces of loot.

Miscellaneous chat abbreviations: lfm - looking for more (members of a party), l2p - learn to play (insult), gg - good game/group, lfg - looking for group, QQ more - cry more (Q's look like eyes with a tear drop), noob - a new player/player who made a silly mistake.

If you're brand new to the idea of MMORPGs or fantasy gaming in general, you may need more of a background to understand some of the terminology. A more comprehensive list of acronyms associated with MMORPGs in general can be found here on Wikipedia. The introduction for the Wikipedia entry on Dungeons and Dragons is a good idea of where the RPG genre got started and may give you the extra context you need. The best introduction to World of Warcraft is of course the official site. If you have specific context related questions, feel free to email me.

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