The .io Games Glossary: FFA, Farm, Kite, Bots…
"Stop farming, they've been kiting you for two minutes!" If that sentence sounds like noise, this glossary is for you. .io gamer slang mixes borrowed English, abbreviations, and repurposed words — and nobody ever takes the time to explain it. Here are the essential terms, defined simply, with concrete examples. After this, the meaning of FFA will hold no more secrets, and neither will the end of a match.
Modes and match structure
- FFA (Free For All): everyone for themselves. The default mode in most .io games — no teams, everyone's a target. The literal meaning says it all.
- Leaderboard: the ranking shown on screen, usually at the top. Appearing on it makes you famous... and a target.
- Lobby / room: the game instance you're in. Some games allow private rooms with friends.
- Spawn / respawn: your character appearing at the start of a match, and reappearing after death.
- Bot: a computer-controlled character. Some games populate their rooms with bots to guarantee action at any hour — Dovion, for instance, sails dozens of AI ships alongside real players, and owns it.
The match economy
- Farm / farming: repeatedly and safely gathering resources or XP — eating orbs in Slither, breaking shapes in Diep, mining rocks in Dovion. The opposite of hunting.
- XP and level: the experience that grows your character during a match. In progression games, certain levels unlock major decisions.
- Build: how you allocate your stat points and evolution choices. Two players at the same level can have radically different builds.
- Grind: long-haul farming, across multiple matches, to unlock lasting progression.
Combat
- Kite / kiting: hitting while backing away, staying out of reach of a stronger melee opponent. The art of winning without ever getting touched.
- Hitbox: your character's actual collision zone — not always the same as what you see on screen. A big hitbox means an easy target.
- Burst: dealing maximum damage in minimum time.
- Last hit: landing the finishing blow — and pocketing the reward, even if someone else did 90% of the work. An endless source of grudges.
- Kill steal (KS): stealing that finishing blow. See: grudges, endless.
- Focus: concentrating attacks on a single target.
- AFK: "away from keyboard" — an inactive player. Easy prey, but a victory with no glory.
Meta-vocabulary
- Nerf / buff: weakening or strengthening something in the game during a balance update.
- Meta: at any given moment, what the community considers the most effective choices. "Playing the meta" means following the crowd; free spirits play "off-meta."
- Ping / latency: the delay, in milliseconds, between your action and the server registering it. Lower is better — we dug into this in ping, latency, reflexes.
- Sweat / tryhard: a player who goes all out, all the time, even on a Sunday morning. Said with a mix of annoyance and respect.
And the local dialect?
Every game adds its own slang on top of this shared foundation. On Dovion, you'll hear about hold, broadside, barricades, or bounties — we made a house glossary for it: Dovion's vocabulary. And if you're new to the genre, the Dovion FAQ answers the questions that naturally follow.
Vocabulary is learned by playing, not by reciting: go farm a few rocks, kite a corsair, and aim for the leaderboard — Play Dovion for free.