Are they called "Adds" or "Ads"?

Ads are commercials, Adds are annoying additional enemies.

Ads are also annoying enemies most of the time, so...

They're Adds. Funnily enough, this is probably a more important distinction to make with how some F2P MMOs are like these days.

I’ve always just called them “mobs” and Giant Bomb is the first place where I encountered the term Adds

You are correct, or at least that's how it was explained to me. Trash enemies that spawn during raid bosses and other tough MMO enemies are "adds" because they are "additional" to the main threat.

FWIW, I learned this term through raiding in Destiny 1.

Admittedly I haven't played an MMO in years, but a decade ago in WoW it was "adds".

Mobs is too confusing because it doesn't immediately convey an understanding that they are an additional threat to the fight.

Adds, for sure. They're additional and added as the fight goes on. I've always disliked "mobs" because I think of a mob as a large group, and that term is used in this context for numbers of enemies as low as 1.

Adds are additional enemies
Ads are advertisements

Mobs are a just any mobile enemy; adds are specifically additional enemies other than the main threat in an encounter

Just as humanity i never heard adds before Brad & Jeff got into Destiny. I guess i didn't do much MMORPGs to really encounter the term. I'm still here in my 'next wave' 'new spawn' corner. And yeah, sure a 'wave' evokes a wave-based game where you beat 1 grouping of enemies and then the next round of enemies start, which is not 1 to 1 compared to how adds work. But at the same time that difference doesn't really matter when you're clearly not playing a wave-based game.

@onemanarmyy: I dunno you start shoutin' about waves in an MMO or something half the party is dead while they figure out what you're saying.

@onemanarmyy: Yah while of course I'm not contesting the correctness of the term, in the end it's all semantics. If you're in a boss room and new minor enemies spawn, it's not like mobs or adds is any different - they are new enemies that will engage you, whether they are "additional" or "any mobile" enemy really has no distinction at this point. So I think it just depends on the group of people you're playing with. Like you I never played MMORPGs so it's an odd term to me and I probably wouldn't use it to describe a boss that is spawning new units, but at the same time if I'm with a group of people that are all saying Adds then I'm not going to dig in my heels and not use the term.

Yeah. I think some of this, as frightening as it may be to realize, is generational as well. I've been playing MMOs since the 90s and terms like adds, mobs, pats, cc, etc. are all pretty solidly ingrained in my brain. You tell me when the boss enrages and I'll know exactly what you mean no matter what the game is. Hell, "sheeping" was a pretty wow-centric term but in the MMO boom of it's heyday I recall that being a pretty universally understood term for crowd control.

If you wanna get real deep in the weeds though you get into the FFXIV community and see what players say they're DPS and which ones say they're DDs. That's when you can sniff out the FFXI vets from the newcomers :P

Was always with you on this. Didn't start hearing "Adds" until I started playing Destiny with folks. I'd never had any MMO experience previous to that, which is where I suppose I would've picked it up otherwise.

Adds for sure. To define some of the other MMO-y terms being tossed around in this thread based on how I've always thought of them:

Adds: Additional minor enemies in a boss encounter- especially ones that spawn after the fight has begun.

Mobs: Refers to standard enemies you encounter in the world or the non-boss portion of dungeons/raids.

Wave: I usually associate this more with a Horde mode style thing than anything in a boss encounter.

All that being said, I am also not above just saying "ah shit, more guys" when adds show up.

Weirdly, GIant Bomb is where I learned that Mob is an acronym for "Monster or Beast".

@sweep: Decades of MMO playing under my belt and this is the first time i've seen MOB written out, so no I've also learned that thanks to Giant Bomb!

I've always called them Adds, largely due to MMOs. That being said, for a long time that was the ONLY place "adds" were used, for some reason strictly a MMO term in my mind. Older games with lots of enemies were just...enemies. Only in recent years, with the seeming MMO-ification of most games, did I finally start using Adds outside stuff like WoW and FFXIV

@sweep: I didn't even know that it meant that haha, I had assumed that it meant like units that were part of a "mob" because they always appeared in groups - which is a weird definition to make up for yourself.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, while I never really played any MMORPGs seriously I DID play MUDs (Multi User Dungeon) for a while there and I can't be certain but I think that may have been the first time I heard the term.

wow, this is incredible! Never even thought about that one. You just gave me a whole new context to mobs. Well it would be "MOBs" right?

Technically mob is for "mobile" but that's some Old Shit.

@sweep: Wow. I had no clue "mob" was an acronym.

A good example of why you should read before voting.

Ads as in advertisement.

@chaser324: @meatsofevil: @humanity: @takayamasama: @sweep:

A mob, short for mobile,[1][2][3][4] is a computer-controlled non-player character (NPC) in a computer game such as an MMORPG[5] or MUD.[1][3]

[...]

Etymology

The term "mobile object" [1][2][3][4] was used by Richard Bartle for objects that were self-mobile in MUD1.[1] Later Source code in DikuMUD used the term "mobile" to refer to a generic NPC, shortened further to "mob" in identifiers. DikuMUD was a heavy influence on EverQuest.[14][15] and the term as it exists in MMORPGs is derived from the MUD usage.[5][1]. The term is properly an abbreviation rather than an acronym.

Huh. After a little digging it seems like the bacronym was retconned in afterwards. Interesting.

First place I heard was in among all the talk of Remnant <hunhng> From Ashes. And it was across the internet, like everyone had settled on it overnight.