EVE General Discussion

You can actually read that both ways

You fools...it's because CCP has an office in Newcastle, which of course is known as the Toon.

Solved.

Hi,

I've been here since the beginning of EvE when mains and alts in EvE were still just called 'chars'. There was no term such as 'toon' in the early days of EvE, the 'chars' were not even distinguished into mains and alts in the general talks about and in eve back in those days.

The first time I ever heard the term 'toon' used in conjunction with eve's 'chars' was when a rather big influx of Earth and Beyond refugees arrived in EvE when that game was announce to become abandoned. Those refugees banded in rather large groups of unskilled pilots in EvE (I believe to recall them being called CLS, THEMM and the likes)

This banding together as low skilled players should have happened even before the Goon movement coming from Something Aweful.

The term 'toon' got to to be as widespread and accepted within EvE when a second influx of players appeared from StarWars Galaxies, bringing with them their terminology for characters to play with.

Hope it helps.

The term toon was popularized sometime after Ultima Online and probably some time during WoW.

In the WoW beta test I don't remember people using the term toon though.. so it may have gone mainstream after WoW started up fully. I didn't play a lot of Everquest although I had friends who did but they never used the term toon. So my guess is that it crossed over into common vernacular in WoW.

It may have come from another MMO and just grew in the WoW environment or maybe someone just thought it was an easy way to refer to their characters.

EVE's community has always been fairly resistant to the term 'toon' and there's a pretty quick and strong negative reaction any time someone uses it so it's use in the game been limited which I like.. since I never liked the term toon.

Nightcrawler 85 is correct. The term was first coined in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was in use in the early 90's on social gaming networks such as Sierra Online (even before The Realm).

Also, nice to see an Earth and Beyond fan here. I worked in support for that game.

Oh, and not to nitpick with a previous poster, but Doom was not around before the internet. It was around before the web. We were playing Tradewars 2000 on ascii BBS systems long before Mosaic and the first web protocols.

I think the term came from a moron but I can't confirm it. I think character is a better description.

That led me back to this thread. Checkmate.

It comes from the ancient greek word "kharaktun" which had the meaning of dress-up doll appealing to kids.

In latin it was later divided to "character" and "toon", which respectively denoted dolls for boys and dolls for girls.

I prefer avatar myself. It's from a movie by James Cameron, where people incarnate some 3D animated intelligent life-form.

Jill.

The term is definitely pre wow. We used that term in everquest years ago. It is probably pre everquest too. Earlier MMOs often had cartoonish graphics. In everquest it was not unusual for the women in game (and yes there were actually real females who played the game) to pick their armor and equipment based upon the color coordination they had in mind for their "toon" instead of the statistics given by the piece of equipment "oh these pink boots go well with my wizard's robe!"

I find it hilarious that your link to google (you obviously couldn't be bothered to "actually" google for the answer yourself) gets the top hit for this very thread. The others are also very speculative to the origins of the word Toon as well, meaning this isn't something you can just google and get a definitive answer for.

Being that Toon was definately not used in EvE "back in the day", its almost certainly something that has been imported from other games. Where it first started though, is anyone's guess.