What is a "Mob"

A "mob" is a group. I constanlty hear people refering to single enemies as mobs.

"I killed all of the mobs in the group" vs "I killed all of the monsters in the mob"

Does this drive anyone else nuts?

i never heard of anyone refer to individual monsters as "mobs"

maybe they are referring to groups of mobs?

it comes from the early days of RPG's, referring to a monster as a "mobile" it just means a "bad guy" or monster.

think this is correct

found this from wikipedia:

"The most commonly-held belief about the origin of the term is that it derives from mobile or mobile object. In many early MUDs, there were three basic structures in the game: rooms, objects and mobiles. The latter were objects that can move (i.e. they are mobile), can be attacked and thus removed from the game, can be aggressive (may attack the player), and which wander through rooms when permitted. The term, mobile, was later replaced by NPC to cover a broader spectrum of mobiles: dialog or quest givers, vendors, trainers, and now mobs, to name a few."

mob is just the term for a single group of enemys. and since most mmos have you fight one enemy at a time a single enemy can be called a mob.

and because of that people tend to mix up the names, whihc is why some people may call every enemy a mob in guild wars. just liek some people call characters toons despite that term not being for this game

I know of it from MUDs, Multi User Dungeons. Which were early text based RPGs

Mob is short for mobile which is just a term for an enemy. Its singular as mob and plural as mobs.

Yeah, "mob" is from MUDs. I played one extensively for years, and that's just general terminology. Maybe people are saying it in GW and don't know what it really means, but it's not really incorrect usage.

I think either usage is correct, but personally I use mob to refer to a single enemy and mobs as a group based on the following.

from http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Mob

Mobile object, or "MOB", is the slang term given to any non-player character (NPC) or combatant in a video game. The term has been in use since the early days of online gaming, in the MUD community, then used in the more general sense that any NPC was a mob. The most common usage today is to refer to a monster, or a non-player enemy that may be hostile and can be killed.

Note that many players will use the word "mob" to refer to a group of enemies gathered at a certain point (following the basic meaning of the English word "mob"). The two meanings can often be interchanged seamlessly in a sentence with one person using "mob" to indicate one meaning but another person understanding the sentence clearly while thinking of the other meaning. An example would be: Go attack that mob over there.

They aren't "mob" or "mobs"... they're "annoyances", as in 'I must clear all these annoyances from my path to the shiny (read: gold)'.

Kade's definition from wiki is the most accurate, of course as with all things, time tends to slur things a bit. It used to refer to mobiles, which were creatures that moved around, as opposed to objects which stayed in one place. Now it's just a generic term.

I was involved with a few of the larger MUD's back in the day *shakes cane* building, planning and of course playing. Heck, I see Medievia is still going strong.... yikes. 0_O

This is correct.

It's short for "mobile" or "mobile unit/enemy".

It's a term older than dirt.


efb

It's always nice to see some completely uninformed and baseless explanations in amongst the obviously correct and justified responses. Adds a bit of flavour to the forum.

No wait, get out.

uh yah thats a resonable response. I have to leave just because i didnt know the exact origin. Why dont you go outside and take a break from the computer, its making you cranky.

Exoudeous' explination is also valid.

Mob is an actual word, meaning a large crowd, often violent (the term mob violence, speaking to the mob, etc)

The term "mob" was used as sort for mobile in MUDs, but as more and more younger games that had never heard of those games before began to play games online, they began using the colloquial definition of "a large crowd of enemies" since they kept hearing older gamers refer to "mobs" as enemies.

Thus why the term has taken on BOTH meanings, a single enemy or a group of them, in video games.

Agree with Hawk. Language evolves, after all, it started out as grunts and body/facial expression. A word can have one terminology at birth, and grow and change into another. A word's definition is kinda like a democracy - if the masses deem it so, it is. Live and learn, I guess.

don't wanna be rude but what's the point with this grammer check? Let them call them how they like (i myself call them bastards, bitches etc.).

Mob has never, in online gaming, been a slang term for groups of enemies - that is "mobs". In the English language "mob" very well means a group of people, but in this context it doesn't. As was said, the term originated in MUD's and ran from there, it never implied a group and still doesn't (hence the OPers topic).

The most narrow definition is an enemy combatant AI construct. You rarely hear another human player called a mob and non-combatants are NPC's (though mobs are also NPC, not all NPC's are mobs). If you go much outside of that definition nowadays people will tend to understand (after all, it takes some level of understanding context to know if you mean the English word or slang), but it isn't the standard usage.

Personally I'm usually not that great a fan of this type of slang. However, if the slang specializes then I tend to find it OK and use it (I also forgive, and unfortunately use, colloquialisms as they tend to be learned from birth and reinforced every day). In this case it has a very narrow meaning that there is no single easy word that captures the whole thing "Monsters" is too narrow on the species list and too wide on the combatant and AI part, though I will sometimes still use that term as it is generally obvious from the context what is being discussed.

Its what Al Capone was apart of and what killed and burried Jimmy Hoffa so that no one has ever been able to find him.... oh u mean monsters in game. my mistake...

Whoa, you mean all those times I used it in that context, or seen others use it in that context - it never happened? After all, it does take usage of a word in a context in order to be deemed "slang", does it not?

Issue discussed, a mob refers to mobile, not a 'pack', etc. This thread now has no purpose (not that it did).