The Stack

If there’s one thing that starting to play World of Warcraft has given me so far, it’s a greater appreciation of its influences in other games. In particular, several aspects of Kingdom of Loathing that I had taken to be simply drawn from CRPGs in general turn out to be direct imitations (or satires) of things in WoW. Which is a little strange, because KoL was in fact released first. But both games have changed substantially since launch.

For example, one of the more noticeable additions to KoL from about three years ago was an optional alternate combat interface. Before this, combat was done with a simple HTML menu with a couple of drop-down lists. The new interface used DHTML to present a row of numbered boxes, into which you could drag icons representing skills or combat-usable inventory items, which you could activate by either clicking on them or by hitting the corresponding number key on your keyboard. It also supported multiple banks of such icons, with buttons for paging up and down between banks. In short, it was an awful lot like the WoW action bar, except for the fact that it only applies to combat. In WoW, it’s the main way you perform any action in the game.

One of the more useful icons you can put on the KoL action bar represents the command “repeat last thing” — either repeat the last action when in combat, or, afterward, adventure again in the same location. The icon for this is the number 1 in parentheses — “(1)” — which is sort of a joke on the notation used throughout the game to warn players that an action will cost an adventure. The zones on the maps are all marked with strings like “The Spooky Forest (1)”, but this icon obviously doesn’t know what zone you’re adventuring in, so all it can display is the “(1)”. Anyway, now it seems to me like it’s also poking fun at WoW‘s “!” icon in its action bar, the icon for accessing the quest log. It similarly takes a piece of UI typography and elevates it to the status of symbol.

KoL doesn’t have or need a quest symbol of this sort, because questing of the kind you do in WoW isn’t a very big part of the game. But there’s one thing that’s very much in the same vein: the Bounty Hunter Hunter. The BHH’s job is to find and hire adventurers willing to go after specific monster types for a reward. You can approach him once per day to start hunting something, with the choices available varying from day to day. In other words, it’s what WoW calls a “daily quest”, and like several of the WoW dailies, the reward is a special pseudo-monetary token that can only be spent at the same premises that awards it. But the biggest WoWism here is the way that questing for a particular creature makes it drop a special quest-redemption item that it never drops otherwise. I thought this was very strange when I first encountered it in KoL, but it turns out to be one of the fundamentals of WoW. It should be noted that before 2007, the Bounty Hunter Hunter worked completely differently: he just bought a daily assortment of ordinary monster-leavings for twice the usual price. But this didn’t encourage people to go out and hunt the day’s selected monsters; it just encouraged them to hoard their trash until it the BHH wanted it. So switching to the WoW model here was probably a good idea.

I don’t want to imply that KoL is just a WoW imitation. They’re very different games, and most of KoL‘s mechanics are either original or cribbed from other browser-based games. But they do occupy more or less the same niche in my mind, of a game that’s as much a social experience as a gaming one, and that gives you the feeling that you have to play every day to really keep up.

It turns out that the lack of visible halos is isolated to the server we play on at work — which is mysterious, because we didn’t do anything to disable them. At any rate, the halos are still around, and stirring up all manner of trouble on the Steam TF2 forums.

I don’t normally read these forums — good gravy, why would I subject myself to that? — but one of my colleagues drew my attention to them. He was trolling them. Fanning the flames, so to speak. He hardly needed to, though. I realize that pretty much any change to any online game is going to produce angry forum posts, but this one drove out all else. People saying that they’ll ban anyone with a halo, refuse to heal them as a healer, etc. I haven’t seen any evidence of this behavior on the servers I’ve played on, though, which seem to have gotten used to them pretty quickly. That doesn’t stop the vocal minority from declaring that “Valve is tearing the community in half”. It’s all pretty childish. Some people were threatening to stop playing. Considering that Valve isn’t charging subscription fees or anything, I can’t imagine they’re much concerned. If these people do stop playing, it’ll probably improve the experience for the remaining players.

My trolling colleague pointed out the thing that really sticks in the vocal minority’s craw here: These are completists. They cheated precisely because they wanted all the special items in the game, and now there’s one that they don’t have and can never get. Well, I self-identify as a completist too, so I can sympathize a little, but not very much. Cheating, to me, defeats the point of completism. The virtual items in your virtual inventory are just tokens of the feats performed to acquire them. Heck, I’m even a little leery of acquiring pokémon by trading with people who aren’t actively playing.

And ultimately, if you’re going to be a completist, you have to learn to discern which games, and which aspects of those games, are and are not suitable for completism. Take Kingdom of Loathing. There are a number of collectibles and unlockables there, many of which have been available only for a limited time. The most extreme case I know of is a trophy that you could only get for being logged on and not wearing pants at the stroke of midnight on New Years Day 2006. There were apparently some oblique hints about this beforehand on the forums, but the vast majority of players are simply ineligible for that trophy. Some players grumbled when the developers started pulling stuff like that, but in the end, it set a precedent that probably altered the tone of the game for the better. The completist will was broken. I suppose that that’s what Valve is trying to do now. I hope it’ll be successful.

It’s now been well over two weeks since my last post. I didn’t plan to take a break from the Stack, but it happened anyway, so I think I should take a moment to talk about how I’ve been spending my gaming hours lately. I’ve been playing Kingdom of Loathing, the humorous free browser-based RPG with stick-figure art and surprisingly deep gameplay, for… ye gods, the in-game stats say it’s been four years. I haven’t been playing it steadily over that time — I’ve taken substantial breaks — but lately I’ve been giving it a lot of attention.

The main audience for this blog has probably had some exposure to KoL already, but in case you haven’t, let me start by describing the mechanics a little. The main thing you do in the game, as in most CRPGs, is fight stuff. You initiate contact with monsters by choosing a zone on a map: with a couple of exceptions, there’s no exploration within encounter zones, just randomly-chosen monsters appropriate to the zone. (The Goatlet, for example, is populated exclusively by various kinds of goat, while the Misspelled Cemetary has skeltons and zobmies and the occasional grave rober.) Each encounter uses up one turn, or “adventure”, as they call them here (probably to more easily distinguish them from combat rounds). By default, every player gets 40 adventures per day, but there are ways to get more: certain items grant more adventures at rollover when equipped or installed in your campground, and consuming food and drink will grant a number of immediate extra adventures depending on its quality. (Cooking is an important skill in the game for improving the quality of food and thus getting more adventures out of it. Cocktailcrafting does likewise for beverages, producing ones with a better adventures/intoxication ratio. At the more advanced levels, Cocktailcrafting lets you enhance drinks by means of special ingredients like little paper umbrellas and coconut shells.) This whole system is a fairly brilliant bit of design, if you ask me. Most multiplayer games have a flaw that they wind up being (perceived as) “unfair” to casual players, and dominated by the few who are obsessed enough to spend all day playing. KoL gets around this by making it impossible to play all day, ¹Unless you use multiple characters, which is frowned upon and considered an abuse by the developers. but still provides some leeway for the dedicated enthusiasts to play longer. Enthusiasm has an effect, but it’s capped.

The overall goal of the game is to rescue King Ralph XI, who has been kidnapped by the Naughty Sorceress. Once you do this, you can “ascend” and start over from level 1, using a different character class if you desire. Ascension is not mandatory, and you can just keep on gaining levels if you want, but there are certain advantages to it: ascending players get to choose one skill to keep permanently (thus letting you have skills from more than one class simultaneously, like in the FF5 Jobs system), and may receive other rewards on the basis of voluntary restrictions. If you choose to go “hardcore” for an ascension, for example, you don’t get access to your items from previous runs — they’re kept in a mini-storage unit until you free the King. Your reward for completing a hardcore run is a special piece of stainless steel equipment, determined by your class. Swear off food and drink as well (that is, become “oxygenarian” for an ascension) and you get an even better item, forged from plexiglass.

Although each player proceeds through the plot of the game independently, there is a certain amount of interaction between players. Players can open stores in the Mall of Loathing to sell items to each other, cast spells to buff each other, create “clans” to share resources. The most recent big development in the game was the addition of Hobopolis, a dungeon designed for a clan to tackle as a group. The mechanics of the game mean that you’re basically adventuring solo all the time, but your actions in Hobopolis can have effects for everyone in your clan.

Hobopolis is one of two recent developments that got me investing more time in the game than usual. The other starts with the Traveling Trader. The Trader is a sort of special event: once every few months, he shows up for a day, always with one new item to sell. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but always he leaves with his wares at rollover. Back in January, for example, he was selling “strange shiny discs” for the exhorbitant price of 10 Twinkly Wads apiece. ²Wads, which come in several flavors, are kind of like concentrated magic, and are mainly obtained by pulverizing powerful magic items. They can then be forged into new items, or simply eaten. The discs had no obvious use, and looked suspiciously like AOL CDs ³The first letter on the label was smudged, raising some suspicion that it actually read “KOL”., but I bought one anyway, figuring it might be a setup for something later.

And it was. Three weeks ago, the Travelling Trader showed up again, selling a book called Rainbow’s Gravity, which contained the secrets to a new skill, one that lets you take one of each type of wad and smush them together into a Prismatic Wad. The price for this book: 50 strange shiny discs.

Now, I felt a little put out by that. I probably could have obtained 50 discs when they were available if I had known that I would need that many, but I had only bought one. So I felt like I should have this skill, but had been denied it. There were shiny discs available in the Mall, of course, but with the demand for them what it was on that day, I couldn’t possibly afford enough to buy the book. (I did, however, manage to make a small profit by buying some discs from the shops owned by players who hadn’t yet heard that they were suddenly valuable, and putting them in my own shop at a markup.) The book itself also started showing up in people’s shops in short order, but the asking price teetered around 6 million meat.

(I should explain: Meat is the main currency in the game. ⁴There are a few other kinds of money that are only usable in specific situations. For example, bounty hunting gives you Filthy Lucre, which can only be spent on special bounty-hunter items in the bounty-hunter store, and can’t even be traded to other players the way meat can. I imagine this is was developed in reaction to the absurdity found in a lot of RPGs, where you kill a wild animal, such as a wolf, and it drops gold. It is, of course, entirely reasonable that killing the wolf would yield meat. Of course, just swapping “meat” for “gold” creates opposite absurdities, such as when you find meat in treasure chests, but these are absurdities that KoL enthusiastically embraces. At any rate, it’s more or less equivalent to gold pieces as far as gameplay goes, except for the addition that meat can be pounded into meat stacks and used to craft meat-based weapons and armor.)

So. Six million meat. As it happened, I had a couple million on hand already, the remnants from when I sold my stash of Zombie Pineal Glands to buy some Time Trousers (both of which are no longer available except from other players who hoarded them). Could I cover the rest? Well, there are some skills and special items that increase the amount of meat you get from monsters. I don’t have them all yet, but I have most of them, and a little experiment showed that in my current state, I can easily make more than a million a week. I was surprised at this: I’ve been doing most of my recent adventuring in Hardcore Oxygenarian mode, which severely limits one’s ability to get extra adventures and spend them meat-farming. But outside of that mode, I can get upward of 200 adventures per day, and spend most of them hunting the meatiest creatures in the game by means of Transcendent Olfaction — a game-transforming tracking skill, and a recent acquisition for me. Specifically, I’ve been hunting the Cubist Bulls that show up in the Haunted Gallery. If there’s a more efficient way to meat-farm, I’d like to hear about it — the bulls have one of the highest yields in the game, but you don’t get them all the time even when you’re tracking them, and several of the other monsters in the Gallery yield no meat at all. It’s also possible that I’d be better served by farming for items to sell. Still, just doing as I’m doing, I’m making meat faster than I thought possible.

Of course, once I started on this course, I started wondering: Is Rainbow’s Gravity really the thing I should be spending all this meat on? There are a host of other items that I’ve generally thought of as out of my reach, mainly Items of the Month. This gets into the game’s revenue model. See, a $10 donation to the developers gets you an accessory called “Mr. Accessory”, which is a pretty nice item in its own right (+15 to all stats, no prerequisites), but which can also be traded at “Mr. Store” for various things. And one of those things is a new thing every month. I personally bought a Mr. Accessory early on in my KoL career, only to have it stolen when some griefer guessed my account password, which left me with a distaste for spending more money. But there are people who send in their $10 every month to get the new item and its associated content — it’s sort of like the monthly fees charged by conventional MMO’s, except completely voluntary. There are even people who buy more than one Item of the Month every month and put the extras up for sale in the Mall for millions of meat. And now that I know that I can produce millions of meat when I want to, these special items suddenly seem accessible.

I still haven’t bought Rainbow’s Gravity — its mall price has declined quite a lot as the Prismatic Wads lost their patina of novelty, and is still going down as of this writing. But I have bought the item from this last May, the Mayflower Bouquet, which seemed like the best buy for its price. I’ll probably go for the Naughty Origami Kit next, but maybe not before I ascend.

In fact, I’ve been fairly well agonizing over the decision of what formerly-unattainable thing to try for next, and when to try for it. A complete list of past Items of the Month can be seen on the KOL Wiki, which is an invaluable resource — as with Nethack, familiarizing yourself with the literature is key to success. ⁵Incidentally, the developers are familiar enough with Nethack to pay it tribute in a special Nethack-in-joke dungeon, where the monster illustrations are drawings of letters of the alphabet. And there’s a certain commonality of spirit there, of simple presentation on top of complex gameplay. There are also areas that are tributes to, or satires of, early text adventures, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Final Fantasy series — in decreasing order of respectfulness. And it’s all too easy, once you’re out of adventures for the day, to spend time poring over the list, checking the prices at the mall, and considering your options.

This reveals something unexpected: the limitation on the number of adventures can actually increase the amount of time spent on the game. In any other game, I’d spend my time actively pursuing my goals. I’d farm until it was possible to buy something, then I’d decide what to buy (if I hadn’t decided already), then I’d buy it. But these forced pauses in gameplay give me endless opportunity to make plans, and then to re-evaluate and reconsider them.