kingdom-of-loathing
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Is there a city of hobos in your cellar?
The world's most popular stick-figure meat-trading MMO, Kingdom of Loathing, takes a bold step into history with the release of its new hardcore raid expansion, Hobopolis. Where before, your interactions with other people were limited to trading barbed quips in perfectly formed haiku, or robbing their camps when you felt pretty sure the owners might be away, now you can gather to explore the subterranean metropolis of Hobopolis, the City of Hobos.Seal Clubbers, Disco Bandits, Accordion Thieves and all the other peoples of KoL are now able to come together to take on challenges that are too much for any one Pastamancer to meet. Such are the dangers when clan leaders decide unwisely to build basements in their clan hall, and then wonder what lies behind that door ... that smelly door.Kingdom of Loathing is a free-to-play, browser-based MMO that doesn't require Flash or special clients or anything, really, but a sense of humor, a taste for puns, and a desire for some surprisingly deep gameplay.
Time is money, friend!
MMOs have a variety of currencies. WoW, Dungeon Runners, and dozens of other games have gold, EverQuest one-ups that with platinum, Final Fantasy has gil, and EVE Online has ISK. Like real-world economies, MMO economies can exhibit a variety of interesting characteristics, from inflation to deflation to complete death. Inflation in particular seems quite prominent; in my WoW experience, everything has gotten more expensive over time on every server I've played on. More expensive in terms of gold, that is.Tobold argues that this inflation is, in effect, not real. His thesis is that time is the real currency of MMOs, not gold or ISK or whatever. And with respect to time, most in-game economies undergo deflation, not inflation. While it may cost me twice as much gold to buy a stack of Netherweave now as compared to when the Burning Crusade launched, I make gold five times as fast, so in fact it takes me less than half as long to get the Netherweave as it used to. Low-level characters are better off as well, because there is now more of a market for what they have to sell, so they'll have more gold to put towards items and training.
