I’m feeling particularly snarky at the moment, and not in the mood to write anything even remotely useful, so…
A couple weeks ago in LOTRO some people in my kin and in general chat were discussing the game’s Fellowship Maneuvers, referring to them as “conjunctions” or “CJ” which is what they were called back in beta, in 2006. If I recall, the name had officially changed to Fellowship Maneuver (FM) by the time the game entered its final stages of beta in 2007. It’s 2008, live in the present, people.
Recently we’ve had John the Ancient Gaming Noob and Van Hemlock’s episode #17 discuss “shards” referring to servers, not to mention the hundreds of blog and forum posts I’ve read using that phrase over the years. From my recollection, Ultima Online is the only game ever to actually use the phrase “shard” to describe its servers. If that is incorrect, by all means enlighten me.
Most games simply use the phrase “server” but World of Warcraft has always used the phrase “realm” as its official name for its servers.
Therefore, if you all get to use old phrases such as “shard” to describe any server in any MMOG, then I get to make the following utterly preposterous and ridiculous statement:
[SNARK]
World of Warcraft was doing two-faction “realm versus realm” PvP (Dark Age of Camelot had three factions) in 2006 when they added cross-realm battlegroups to their PvP system.
[/SNARK]
Ha!
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You damn kids, get off my phraseology!
Shard was the first generally accepted term. Old folks use it, just the way we use the word “group” even if the game we’re playing has substituted in the word “party” or “fellowship.”
The reason some people (not me) avoid the term “server” is that in most cases, a Shard/Realm/Whatever is technically a cluster of physical servers.
I’ve seen it in a number of places. Maybe final Fantasy Online. Certainly Chronicles of Spellborn.
The argument of using shard or realm rather than server to mean a server cluster fails my logic. Shard and realm are both refer to singular entities whereas cluster refers to many. While the word “server” itself is also singular, I don’t see it as too much of a stretch for the 21st century lazy human to shorten “server cluster” into simply “server.”
As for TCoS, I haven’t been keeping up (at all) with that, but my impression last year was that the world itself had been destroyed and was comprised of multiple chunks or “shards” floating around, rather than having continents or zones like we’d see in any other game. So in that respect, a single world is many shards of rock, rather than using the phrase “shard” to mean server. I could be way off-base, and in fact calling the servers “shards” could even fit TCoS’ lore as well.
I use it cos I’m lazy, impressionable and have a cohost/producer who tends to edit while watching Grand Prixs, so it helps to try and get it all on one take, or end up with it all on the Left Channel only again. Grumble!
Glad ya got the audio back on both channels, I just hope #18 got the volume back to normal. I normally listen to podcasts while I’m doing my daily walks but #17 was so quiet I had the volume maxed and it was barely above a whisper.
By the way, I’m not pickin’ on ya, mate! Seriously! But not… Yahoo Seriously…
*runs from Bildo*
I lol’d.
Very nice.
Using the word “server” to describe a game world instance is something I try to avoid simply because I do not want to re-use a word that has different meaning which would still make sense in this context.
So I tend to use a mix of realm, world, sometimes shard or game world instance. Server do slip in from time to time, but I try to avoid it.
Similarly I use a mix of group/team/party and for some specific games change it to squad or fellowship or whatever may be used there. I prefer team, since I think that is slightly better than the other for representing the entity we usually refer to here.
And then there is the quest. I typically only use quest in the context of fantasy games and in others talk about mission. And for Guild Wars I get to use both, since they have different meaning…