I often hear the phrase, "That is imba" in the video gaming community. It seems to refer to something powerful or unskillful:
Hunters are so imba.
Grenade launchers are imba!
But I have also noticed that it is often used tongue-in-cheek or sarcastically to mock people complaining about something being altered in the game:
"Waa… they nerfed my class! Now that other class is imba!" QQ more, please.
What does "imba" mean and where did the term come from? Is it used outside of gaming? My first encounters with it related to Starcraft which has a well known Korean professional gaming league. Is "imba" a loan?
Best Answer
It comes via real-time strategy games, where one goal of the designers is to keep things balanced for all the various players; deviations from that goal are carefully scrutinized by the community that plays the game. More precisely, it comes from the regular complaint from certain types of gamers QQing over their losses — usually due to their inferior skill at the game — that the game's mechanics are broken or imbalanced.
Using imba, then, as a shortening of imbalanced, is a facetious way of mocking that attitude, by declaring even acknowledged essential parts of the game — such as the Hunter class in World of Warcraft, or some of its top players (usually insanely good ones) — imbalanced because in a way, if you don't know how to handle uber classes or uber players, they "break" the mechanics, albeit in a legal way.