There’s a lot of aspects to this, but I’ll take a short quick crack at it.
A first step would be knowing rooms that have common callouts for pk. Places like neon, 2n, shoulder, elbow, downer, rocky ent, camp ent, 4K junc, Roland ent, 4x, narrow, path, wall, etc.
Knowing what is meant by those names will help familiarize you with where pk is happening when you hear them. There used to be a page on the main website that actually gave a list of pk terms and locations, but I’m not sure if it’s gone into the abyss now.
Knowing what sort of zone those rooms are in then informs you what is going on.
neon and 2n means pk is dusty/winding, around FD. The fight is probably there because humans lost or are outnumbered and had to retreat back to a place friendly for them.
Conversely, shoulder/elbow/downer are all in the blight, so DS is the one that felt they needed mob support.
Roland ent/4K junc are down near Caemlyn, so someone is probably raiding.
narrow/path would mean southwest pk, or wall would be around EF. Less likely to be DS PK, more likely to be SS.
That kind of just gives a general “if I hear these names on narrates, what’s going on”
For the zones themselves, mob support and special rooms are important. No hides or no channels can be common regroup points. Knowing where mobs that are friendly to your side, or your enemy, load are important for knowing where to fall back to, or where to check for your enemy. Are the mobs stationary? How strong are they? Is it a patrol that roams?
The most critical part of zone knowledge though is literally the zone itself, by which I mean the rooms in it. Where are doors they I may have to watch out for? What rooms are good dlines? Where are common block points that give good/bad flees to one side or another? What is the layout of the zone? What are the zone boundaries, so I can maybe confuse trolls who are smelling my horse? Can you get from point A to point B without misspamming and giving someone a chance to catch up to you? Walking around a zone (if you have a client with a map that supports it, offline mode is good for this) to get a feel for the layout is good.
When I first started playing I had no maps. In order to get around from city to city, I wrote down the exact spams along the roads and would follow those. This eventually led to me having a tendency to memorize spams from one important location to another. Eg, starting inside gate keep, 7w 4s takes me to 3n elbow. 3s 3w takes me to rock. 2w takes me to allw elbow. s e 2s w s 2s takes me to downer. 4s takes me to orch ent. s e 2s e takes me to ptg. 8s takes me to bush. 2s to MT. 4s 4w takes me to asaw. And so on.
Building up small chunks of zones and becoming familiar with them so you won’t have trouble fighting in them is important. Knowing the figure 8 layout of blight near rock/allw elbow/stedding. Knowing the shape of the blight around culhook. The box of rooms around xroads/orch well/ragan orch. Knowing the shape of dusty/campsite, etc. I personally tend to focus moreso on the shape/layout/exits of zones/rooms/connections, whereas I know others rely lots on room names.
May edit this and add more later, but that’s some first thoughts
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