I've never heard it in my life and I play games (not Dota) and get around on the internet generally. My first association was clank from hermitcraft's decked out, but that didn't quite fit. Farming is what I figured from context, though

It's such a common term around mobas that I doubt you haven't heard it before. Considering the popularity of the genre it's statistically unlikely that it hasn't come up.

Unlikely things happen all the time :)

I don't play mobas specifically, though

Not for people who’ve never played MOBAs.

The term predates moba, it's early RTS, early MMO stuff, around late '90s, early 2000s.

MOBAs are from the 90s. But yes the terms are from RTS games (MOBAs started as custom maps to starcraft)

Aeon of Strife being the first one from 1998.

Good to know, but based on numbers, most people would have been exposed to the term through MOBAs.

Most people have never played a MOBA.

We’re going in circles here.. where did I say most people have played MOBA?

Well you said "most people" without clarifying whether you meant that generally (the way the other commenter assumed and so replied) or whether you meant "of people who know it, most of them..."

In internet comments, if you're not really specific with your words it's likely at least somebody will misunderstand your intent, partly because they can't read your mind and partly because with so many potential readers the odds of misunderstandings goes up.

In internet comments, if you can’t follow the context of the thread discussion, don’t reply.

Your comment was not clear even with context. I read it the same way as the person who replied to it.

I played RTSes from the late '90s as a kid but still don't know the term

My memory of this long ago is fuzzy, but I believe the word itself is originally from LA gang subculture and was spread more broadly via gangsta rap in the late '80s/early '90s or so (cf. the trend of people spelling certain words with "ck" changed to "cc", which was a feature of Crips tagging). The earliest documented use I could find referred to someone selling fake drugs, but I seem to recall that as it spread it turned into a generic placeholder for just about any offense from petty theft to cold-blooded murder.

Yeah it's just slang for some kind of nefarious action. It's in a lot of rap songs, west coast origin seems possible for sure but been around a long time. East coast version is juug.

In the early 90s in NorCal, we used gank to mean "steal" or "snatch", and you can still find this definition online. I don't think it ever meant murder until it got used in PvP games.

Aren't these murders for stealing though, like don't you kill the people and they drop stuff. I don't remember the game but I know people used to sell in-game items of high value on eBay then stalk people for a bit and kill them to steal it back. One guy got mad about it and went and killed the people in real life.

It was a heavily used term in early WoW pvp.

I hadn't encountered 'gank' before these comments.

But I had to look up MOBA too :-)

And I used to write multiplayer battle games for a living! And my favourite recent game was a MOBA without me knowing that was a term! Which goes to show, times change, words change, and it's easy to live outside gamer subculture, even while playing.

thats surprising, its such a ubiquitous word in multiplayer games. i think i first heard it used back in the early 2000s in wc3 or wow.

It is only ubiquitous in MOBAs which are, frankly, a small niche of the small niche that is multiplayer competitive gaming, which is a small niche of the small niche that is online gaming, which is a small niche of the small niche which is computer gaming.

That's really interesting to me. MOBAs are notoriously new player hostile, just with the sheer amount of knowledge the game demands, and the fact that a team really does rely on its members which is too much pressure for a new player (which can translate into verbal abuse from your team depending on the game's culture).

So what's the MOBA that got you interested even though you're not familiar with the genre?