Geeky expressions only my friends understand (and now you will, too)

For most these will just be some random words, 

but members of Asylum will recognize them immediately

The latest 5 Fandom Friday was about "geeky expressions that only my friends understand". I suggested the topic myself, so I definitely wanted to participate, even if the flu kept me from writing anything on the appropriate day (last Friday). 

I don't really talk "geeky" in everyday life, but when I'm at my gaming laptop, I definitely do. Not only am I fluent in "MMO language" (read: Lost in translation: Why my friends don't understand me when I talk about MMOs), I also use specific phrases that don't make a lot of sense to anyone (not even other MMO players) but my friends. 

Those friends all play together in the gaming group Asylum. Originally a kinship in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and now mostly active as a guild in Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWTOR), I've been part of this group of lovely people for six years now. If you spend so much time together, you inevitably come up with your own approach of gaming and inside jokes. In this post I will share five.

LOTRO 2012. Someone (presumably a hobbit, considering the height)
still wears the noob leaf on a kinship picture right after doing the Saruman T2 Challenge

Noob leaf & Green dildo

When someone does something exceptionally stupid doing raid nights, typically resulting in the deaths of all members in a comical way, we mark them up with a specific target marker (normally reserved for adversaries). This was the "noob leaf" in LOTRO (see picture above). When we started raiding in SWTOR we needed an equivalent, which became the "green dildo" (although one polite Englishman in our guild stubbornly refers to it as "the sabre").

"Wipe on trash, one shot the boss"

This is what we call 'the Asylum way' when something doesn't go as planned. We have this tradition of being able to down horribly hard bosses, but now and then dying horribly ("wipe") on easy adversaries (called "trash" in MMOs) when nobody is paying attention. The saying goes back to a night in LOTRO during the Siege of Mirkwood expansion, when the raid group had defeated the Lieutenant (a big achievement) and afterwards wiped on the Turtle (a pug worthy easy lair boss five levels below level cap). This still is a great source of self ridicule.

As I was typing this article, someone was typing 'the dot' in guild chat

.

Originally intended to get people from different LOTRO kinships together quickly in a shared chat channel (for instance if people had relogged to a different character that the other might not recognize), the dot in chat still lives on in our guild chat. The dot may mean "I'm in!", or "This is my alt I was going to relog" or simply "I'm ready for an invite": either way, the expected action is an invite to the group. Newcomers are always mystified when they see those dots appear.

"Kill stuff, don't die"

Some guilds require their members to read up on online guides before coming to a raid night. We don't. We throw ourselves upon the raid bosses until we figure out what is going on. And when we don't know it anymore, we always have this incredibly useful tactic to fall back upon! Usually, the conversation goes something like this. First timer: "Any tactics I should know about?" Reply: "Kill stuff, don't die." The saying has developed into more than our guild's mantra: it stands for the no nonsense way we play our MMOs.

Left: 121 search results for :derp: in Discord chat; top right: the :derp: Discord icon

:Derp:

Old expressions go and new ones take their place. :Derp: or "Colon derp colon" (when spoken out loud) is fresh from 2017! Since the start of this year, Asylum is using Discord to communicate, which works amazing as a sort of out of game guild chat for a multi-gaming group. Discord allows for uploading your own emotes, a feature we have eagerly put to use. I made an icon of one of our favourite pets, the kelldrake (see picture above). This little bugger has a gift for looking really derpy, so he was assigned the code ":derp:", which we now enthusiastically apply whenever someone (be it a dev or ourselves) derps. Conrad and I have even started saying "colon derp colon" to each other if one of us does something stupid - which is probably only funny to us.

I almost feel a bit guilty about writing these expressions down, as they're not so much my expressions, but rather our expressions. These funny little ways of talking to each other is part of what makes Asylum Asylum. Some things are best kept secret, though: if you want to find out who Norman is (another Asylum word), you'll just have to join us!

Do you use geeky gaming expressions that nobody but your mates get?

5 Fandom Friday is a weekly event organized by the Female Geek Bloggers group on Google+. You can look up past and upcoming topics on The Nerdy Girlie.