Lakshmi.Jaerik said:
Leviathan.Yokhai said:
Toon as a moniker came from EQ and transfered to WoW, as most the EQ elite now work for Blizzard, their official name for the play characters is toon.
The standard industry term is still "avatar," in reference to the physical representation and underlying customization system, with "character" being the term most used for stats, abilities, gear, etc. By comparison, "toon" came about entirely within WoW, mostly as a reference to the art style, and back-ported itself to EQ and EQ2 purely as a user meme.
Also, most of the Everquest developers either still work at SOE or Trion, which has friendly relations. There is no preponderance of EQ devs working on WoW over any other MMO.
(Edit: It's worth noting that no MMO dev wants to go home after a long day of work and play their own MMO, but most do play other companies' games -- especially WoW. Every MMO dev I know except me has a WoW account. So it's possible there is some vocab creep going on over time.)
The three people who are responsible for my addiction to MMO's all started in EQ, and then played WoW, and told me the word toon came from the EQ community and was moved to WoW, i can see how it was ported back.
Either way, its still a community standard for WoW to call their avatars toons while FF just refer to them as simply characters.
