Hate (video gaming)

Hate and aggro are a mechanism used in many MMORPGs, as well as in some RPGs, by which mobs prioritize which characters to attack. The player who generates the most hate on a mob will be preferentially attacked by that mob. The act of initiating such situation is called "getting aggro" or "pulling aggro."

The character with the highest amount of hate relative to their allies has aggro. Some mobs have fight mechanics that will ignore hate completely, change which player has aggro despite hate or periodically reset what is called the threat list, resetting all hate to 0. The threat list or threat table is the ordering of players by the amount of hate they have generated.

Hate is an undesirable side effect of the player's attack on an enemy. In MMOs, it is job of the tank to manage the aggro of mobs. To do this, he or she is the first to attack an enemy, may have powers or skills designed to draw the enemy's attention and has a high amount of defense and health to survive constant attacks of mobs.

Hate calculation

A game may calculate hate generated by a player on a mob based using factors such as:

• Whether the mob is set to attack players on sight (aggressive).
• The distance between the mob and the player. The area in which a player automatically gets hate or aggro is called the Aggro Radius.
• The relative strength of the player compared to the mob.
• How much damage has been dealt to the mob by the player.
• Debuffs and status effects inflicted on the mob by the player.
• Heals and buffs given by the player to other players or NPCs (such as pets) who are attacking the mob.
• Status effects on the player, such as invincibility, sleep, and death, which make him or her more or less favorable to attack.
• Hate generating or reducing abilities (such as taunts or invisibility) used by the player.
• Time elapsed since the player last generated hate on the NPC.

Hate can also be manipulated to deter a mob from attacking. A player may use a hate reducing ability, ask another player to generate more hate than himself, run away or move to a distant position, or stop generating hate and wait for the mob to attack someone else. In many games, a player who is defeated or killed has the hate mobs have on them reduced to zero.