Plain-language definitions for the EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Old School RuneScape terms used across the course's lectures, sessions and assessments.
Glossary#
The lectures, sessions and assessments lean on real terminology from the course’s three case-study games — EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and Old School RuneScape. This page defines each one in plain language. It doesn’t cover the course’s own vocabulary (faucet, sink, and the like): those are concepts the lectures introduce and define themselves, not borrowed jargon.
None of this course’s assessments require you to have played any of these games — everything is explained here or cited from published sources. But some of it is easier to feel than to read about. If you have the time, EVE Online’s core client is free to play, so a short session there costs nothing but time; for World of Warcraft and Old School RuneScape, a market-focused stream or a short “how the auction house works” video gets most of the same intuition without a subscription. Neither is mandatory, but either is a fast way to make the terms below feel less abstract.
| Term | Game | Plain-language meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ISK | EVE Online | EVE Online’s in-game currency — earned and spent inside the game, never officially convertible to real money. |
| Null-sec | EVE Online | Null-security space: regions with no automated in-game police protecting ships there. Ownership and safety are entirely player-enforced. |
| Corporation | EVE Online | A player-run organisation — this course’s rough equivalent of a guild, and the base unit alliances are built from. |
| Alliance | EVE Online | A coalition of corporations, usually formed to hold and defend null-sec territory together. |
| Hangar | EVE Online | A corporation’s shared item storage. Which members can see or take from it is a permission the corp’s leadership sets. |
| Blueprint | EVE Online | An item that specifies what a manufacturing job consumes, and how long it takes, to produce something. |
| Moon mining / moon-goo | EVE Online | Mining the rare ore compounds (“goo”) found on certain moons — the main scarce input to the game’s higher-tier manufacturing. |
| R4–R64 (ore rarity tiers) | EVE Online | The rarity ladder for moon-mined ore, from common (R4) to rarest (R64), where each tier is roughly half as common as the one before it. |
| Xenotime | EVE Online | One of the rarest (R64-tier) moon ores. |
| Dysprosium | EVE Online | The material Xenotime refines into — an input Tech II capital-ship construction can’t substitute away from. |
| Tech II (T2) | EVE Online | The higher, more capable and more resource-intensive tier of ships and modules, above the game’s base “Tech I”. |
| Grand Exchange (GE) | Old School RuneScape | The game’s central, game-run marketplace, where trades clear against a game-set guide price. |
| Auction House (AH) | World of Warcraft | The game’s player-to-player marketplace for listing and bidding on items. |
| DPS | Cross-game | Damage per second — a standard measure of a character or item’s combat output. |
| EHP | Cross-game | Effective health pool — a standard measure combining raw health with defensive stats into one “how much damage can this actually absorb” number. |
| Bot / botting | Cross-game | Software playing the game automatically — often to farm currency or items around the clock — in place of a human player. |