this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Burner feels like such an old school term. I've more often heard "alt", "Smurf", or "finsta". The last being a portmanteau of fake Instagram account
An alt account is one for a different purpose. For example, work and personal, not necessarily for espousing an opinion. A smurf account is one of many designed to overwhelm a system. A finsta is for satirizing yourself or shitposting.
And in World of Warcraft they called accounts "toons". I've never understood that one.
I always remember “toons” referring to your character, rather than your account. Kind of like the “cartoon character” you’re playing is how I understood it.
Does it let you have multiple characters under one account? I never played it, so I don't know.
Either way, that name never really made sense to me.
Last I played years ago I think you could have 10? And that was per server, there were tons of servers to choose from, so if you wanted more, you could.
Yes, up to 10 per server, and you could have characters on multiple servers.
I remember seeing the term even while playing pre-WoW MMO’s
Isn't a smurf supposed to be an account from an experienced user/player that's meant to make them look new or lower ranked?
Smurfing is when a high-level player trolls the lower ranks below their skill level.
Lots of players have smurf accounts for games where high- and low-ranked players don't get paired together, so they can play on the same team as their lower-ranked friends.
This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.