The fascinating thing about Kingdom of Loathing is its in-built progress points. It’s easy to waste 40-45 adventures if you don’t think about what you’re doing, but a little bit of considered strategy allows me to stop every day with a satisfied feeling, of having progressed in the game.
Early on, it was easy to do quests for the Toot Oriole and Council of Loathing, so you felt you were progressing. Trying to get the meat car built was a major problem for me, the RNG refused to cough up tires, but it was a good time to start experimenting with the game and doing cooking and so on.
Then there were unstated goals to make a chef-in-the-box and so on so that I would be able to rustle up some more grub. Eventually the meat car got built.
Then I found the enchanted bean burrito loop. Heh, so easy to make burritos and so fun. Oooh, spices make it spicier, how cool, and then there was a mad run for spices for a bit. And the dear RNG kept giving me dry noodles. :P Well, least Kelizendis got more pasta out of it.
It started getting tougher to complete quests. Kept getting beaten up. Time to meat farm. Found the treasury, great source of meat, did the ten leaf clover thing for a teensy bit to get some dense meat stacks, and kept buying a skill every day. Progress points again.
Experimenting with saucecrafting yielded some really good results, like figuring out I could conjure 3 scrumptious reagents every day. Then I realized that I could artificially kick up my moxie and other stats by fiddling with potions.
Today I tried it out. Kicked ass. Got the bonedragon slaughtered, hardest fight of my life, lil shit kept dodging my spells so I had to attack 5-6 times and nickel and dime him to death. FINALLY got the goblin king dead. Not to mention it yielded enough for me to go pick up Saucestorm, yet another skill. Very gratifying to hit so many progress points at once.
Now I have a way to survive the mine without getting beaten up by 7-foot dwarfs.
Things I like about KoL:
Really whacky humor
Many in-built progress points
Nice ‘crafting’ system
Things I don’t like about KoL:
Min-maxing and getting too hardcore – I’ve seen the forums. I tried reading the forums. I flung my hands up in despair and am content to wander on my spoiler-filled but unbuff-botted, un-merchant-minded way, strolling along to see the scenery.
It’s insane. We’re talking gazillions of meat amounts, dunno how many short-day ascensions, and other jargon that’s beyond me. It’s a rich/poor divide that has exploded thanks to effectively infinite remort attempts. And there are buff bots. *groan*
I think they ruined RoD’s game. Suddenly every lowbie /needs/ the buff in order to compete effectively. And no one bothered exploring for potions that gave the buffs, cos the free bots were right there. I dunno how much of an effect they have on KoL, but I sure bet that those short-day ascensioners are either buffed out the wazoo, or have lots of ‘help’ from alts and friends, or have lots of RL money.
Which is the other thing I dislike about KoL. The ol’ “donate” syndrome. Granted, I’m still playing because the non-donating game is still playable and fun. Competitively though, you probably don’t even rank on the ladder if you don’t donate and get Mr Accessories.
An somewhat unrelated thought, but it’s suddenly occurred to me that a lot of games these days are designed for people who already know each other, and can build clans/guilds/organizations in-game, which then proceed to help each other and rampage through a particular world. You see this in FPSes, in MMORPGs, and so on.
The fascinating thing about RoD is that we pretty much started out as strangers to each other. But somehow, the friendships were made.
How come?
One thing is the presence of truly ‘global’ channels, as well as channels for a sub-type in the game. Chat. Racetalk. The more talkative types will forever be on it, and people will seek help, people respond, and in that way, you become familiar with people’s names.
There’s the presence of an encouraging clantalk channel in Auto-Assault. I think it’s a good thing. Every race has a shared identity based on having this tribal channel. I’ve seen people just exchanging info on it and moaning about their quests, etc. You don’t really have this in CoX because the globals are all separated, you can only have five of them and people make hard choices as to which to keep. Broadcast is limited to zone, etc.
RoD started out with a small world. These days I regret encouraging the Shattering to occur. I was excited to have a new world to explore. But there’s a design reason why a small area with limited rooms provides more opportunity for chance encounters to happen, and for people to meet each other. That’s how we used to RP in the old days. Bump into each other. Woot, spontaneous RP.
Hell, these days with area sizes being what they are, people probably can get lost in the Sanctus Irae castle and not find each other. :P
This is something I don’t see any MMORPG embracing. Probably because it can’t be a /massive/ multiplayer experience without the massive. Perhaps if there was one town area to meet, but then you’d have the problem of massive lag as well, and that really throws a spanner in the interaction works. An advantage MUDs have over the big games, I suppose, and a problem that I can’t solve just thinking about it now.
There were regular quests held by immortals on those said global channels. Those were great. Why? Everyone could participate, and feel like the whole world was doing the same thing, you got to know the regular questors, and so on.
I suppose there’s a problem again translating this to an MMO because of the insane scale involved. I hear some day some MMO is going to give /smaller/ server sizes a try. Not sure if Hero’s Journey will do it, or Conan or some other one whose name I forget. Or it could have been the unfortunate WISH, which is now in the crapper. You can get to know a server with a population of 500-1000. A community could be formed. Not one with 10000 people though. That’s more like a city with people passing by each other like motorboats in the night.
Lastly, there were the guilds. And yes, I mean guilds. Not Orders. Orders are elitist, they pick and choose their recruits. But RoD guilds for whatever reason had an understanding that they were pretty much open to everyone (in your class, shared subcommunity again) who wasn’t a total abusive idiot from the get go.
This was a good stepping stone for people who wanted a community but didn’t know how to go about getting one. It’s pretty much engraved in rock as a goal from the start. Want to meet people? Join a guild. No hard decisions to make, about which to choose, cos it’s inbuilt into your class. You just find the damn noticeboard, read the notes, and get your app done.
A class-based organization cannot die simply because there are always people playing the class. :P Influx of newbies and so on.
I’d love to see this implemented in future MMO’s. I think it’s viable to have a shared ‘class’ channel, at the very least. And a shared gathering ground for people of that AT/class/etc. CoX tankers used to have a similar thing going, minus the clan intitation rites of passage, but the spirit got killed when the uproar about the nerfs started.
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