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The Perfect Ten: Literal kill 10 rats quests
Webster's Dictionary describes "kill 10 rats" as "something nerds do, now shut up and read a few intelligent words." I think the editors are getting a little lazy there at Webster's, but that's nothing compared to the OED crowd that routinely slips in paragraphs of cut-and-pasted Hunger Games fan fiction just to pad the volumes. Anyway, we all know that "kill 10 rats" is a derogatory term for those quests that make you slaughter a certain number of things to make life happier for the quest giver. Why that quest giver has a very specific number in mind has always fascinated me, but never mind. It stems from a long-standing RPG tradition by which lowbie characters typically start their career by doing a little rodent culling in the basement of a tavern. That's how all great people got their start, Abraham Lincoln included. With "kill 10 rats" already being a trope, developers have this habit of trying to be coy and meta by actually putting quests in their MMOs where you, yup, kill 10 rats. I get the feeling that they think they're doing something clever and cheeky, even though practically all of their competitors have done the same. So here we go: ten literal "kill 10 rats" quests that you can find in your games today.
Kingdom of Loathing celebrates its tenth birthday
Happy birthday to Kingdom of Loathing, which is turning (or has turned, or is about to turn) 10! That's 10 years of Disco Banditry, Pastamancing, and Turtle Taming. Ten years of mysticality and musculature. Ten years of adventuring with your favorite Sabre-Toothed Lime familiar or Hovering Sombrero. It's almost hard to imagine life, 10 years and a day or two ago, without those simple joys. To celebrate the blessed occasion, Kingdom of Loathing will be rewarding players with the knowledge that the game's been up and running for 10 years and is now working on an eleventh. [Thanks to moxious tipster Kevin!]
Choose My Adventure: How I fell in love with The Kingdom of Loathing
Well, it's time for me to say goodbye to The Kingdom of Loathing. It's more accurate to say that it's time for you to say goodbye to the KoL diary that I've been keeping over the last several weeks. Perhaps we can meet in-world to discuss the game further? Before you go, allow me to recap what I learned from my time with this odd browser-based MMO. I guess it'd be easiest to tell you what kind of player I am and why this game fits my playstyle so well. That way you can ask yourself if it sounds like the right fit for you, based on a comparison of our two personalities. No matter what conclusion you come to, you should still try the game. I don't know how someone could not want to try any new game he came across, but that's getting into my preferences. Even then, there is no denying the convenience of a free-to-play, browser-based, multi-platform sandbox MMO that also offers years of content and a very unique fanbase. It all started several weeks ago...
Previously on MV TV: The week of August 18th
Ah, livestreaming. It's not for the faint of heart. Streaming a favorite title requires knowledge of technology, a solid internet pipeline, and the willingness to have your noobnessocity pushed live for all to see. It's not a thankless job, however. We livestreamers get to show viewers our favorite titles or titles that the audience might not have seen before. For me, it's a challenge to find new and interesting games, while the other streamers tend to enjoy showing off classic titles or new parts of modern hits. Variety is the keyword when it comes to our livestream lineup! So what did we show off this week? Well, let's start with MJ running through The Secret World and EverQuest II, followed by our favorite little Piggy taking on an hour's worth of Champions Online. Mike followed up with an hour in his favorites World of Tanks, EVE Online and Drakensang Online. I steered into worlds unknown by streaming some Vendetta Online and followed that up with an exclusive (first!) livestream of Pirate101, KingsIsle's soon-to-be-hit. Check it out, but be sure to bookmark our livestream page so you don't miss a thing going forward! Feel free to add suggestions in the comments section while you're here. We get a lot of our ideas from readers and always love to hear more.
Choose My Adventure: Once more into The Kingdom of Loathing
Wow, how time flies. Here it is, the second-to-last Choose My Adventure for The Kingdom of Loathing. I have to admit I am surprised at how much I am enjoying the experience so far. The reasons I am enjoying it might be surprising, but it's possible that my time with KoL is nothing new. After all, the game is one of surprises and twists as well as options for play. I've also discovered that the world of KoL is a steady one. I really expected it to be much more loosely assembled because the variable pace and lazy artwork seemed indicative of a developer that doesn't care. It turns out that quite a lot of care has gone into The Kingdom of Loathing, whether the developers are aware of it or not. Judging by the podcast they host twice a week, I suspect they are too consumed by developer details to notice just how deep their own world goes. (Developers often get a bad case of tunnel vision.) I find the communication each week to be refreshingly different from what I see from many other developers. Most seem too afraid to say anything at all, much less to host a scheduled podcast on which they curse and discuss game mechanics. So in this last vote of the run, be sure to make your voice heard! Give me advice!
Choose My Adventure: Out of breath but not out of meat in The Kingdom of Loathing
Here we go into another week of The Kingdom of Loathing, a wacky, free-to-play, browser-based MMO published by Asymmetric Publications. The community proved on the first day of voting just how strongly its members feel about this stickman world, and I've learned over my short time in playing the game that the community is really the game's number-one feature. Sure, there are tons and tons of items to collect, adventures to go on, areas to explore, and terms to memorize, but the community really binds the game together. Without its help, I am convinced my time in The Kingdom of Loathing would have been a confusing blur. I am slowly getting the hang of the pace of the game. Last week's votes showed that most players enjoy the game at about the same pace I do. It's only an hour or so a day that many of us play, but that's because of how the game is built. I can guarantee that a lot of that time is spent hanging on the forums, chatting it up with other players, and generally staying connected to the game while not necessarily playing it. It's a good pace, especially for someone like yours truly who cannot sit for several hours a night playing a single title. So let's recap the last week and get to voting!
Choose My Adventure: You're nobody till somebody loathes you
Last week's Choose My Adventure poll was not really much of a race, was it? Almost from the beginning, The Kingdom of Loathing took the lead and held it, eventually winning the day. In my experience with the column, the strong front-runner can sometimes be overtaken by a slower community. In this case, however, it was a knockout. I shared the link to the article across the community boards for each game (save one that wouldn't allow me to for fear of linking to other games), and the response was immediate. It just goes to show that sometimes the largest communities have the least active forums. So here I go into the odd world of The Kingdom of Loathing. I played it before and enjoyed it somewhat, but in hindsight, I think the game is just not really newbie-friendly enough to make a week's worth of play worthwhile. I found myself a bit turned off by the attempted humor, but as I have read more about the game, I've realized there's much more depth in store for me. So click past the cut and get to voting. And hurry it up -- that meat won't gather itself!
Choose My Adventure: The indie edition
It might be your time up there, but it's my time -- my time -- down here! For this latest edition of Choose My Adventure, I get to hand out a selection of odd little games for you to vote on, and then for the next month and change, I will stumble my way through the title. At your direction and with your help, of course. The trouble is that I have already played darn near everything. I've downloaded and tried so many games that I simply can't remember them all. So, what to do? Well, I decided to give a mix of games a chance at several weeks coverage here on Massively. I picked out an assortment of browser games, independent titles, and lesser-known client-based MMOs. Hopefully you will steer me the right way, and if I am lucky, I won't even have a horrible time. I chose games that I know have a robust community in the hopes that plenty of voters will turn out. The key is to get the word out there, so if you have a favorite, go tell your community! But first, click past the cut and vote on the game you would like to see me tackle for the next several weeks. Just don't expect to see triple-A games on the list!
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: Joshing with Jick
Here at the Game Archaeologist Labs, we've been dissecting just what it takes to make a hit MMO that defies normal conventions -- a homemade startup that loves its wordplay long time even in an age when only about 12% of internet forum posters are fully literate. Kingdom of Loathing is an anomaly for all these reasons and more, and yet it's succeeded when MMOs boasting $100+ million budgets have bit the dust. Like Batman and Robin, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Taco Bell and grease, and "That's what" and "she said," the two creators of Kingdom of Loathing are absolutely inseparable. Where there is Jick, there is Mr. Skullhead, and vice-versa. The pair comprise the public face of the game and are so adored by Kingdom of Loathing's fans that I received a ransom note the other day telling me that I'd never see my cat again if I didn't lavish enough praise on the duo. This was weird to me, as I don't own a cat, but that's neither here nor there. In our final week of plumbing the depths of Kingdom of Loathing, I had the pleasure of probing Zack "Jick" Johnson's mind, and I haven't quite recovered yet. I have looked into the abyss, and it looked into me -- and winked. Oh, you flirty abyss! So let's do this thing -- hit the jump and find out just what makes KoL tick from the inside out!
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: Interrogating Mr. Skullhead
I'm sure that after last week's introduction to our Kingdom of Loathing retrospective, many of you out there were going, "What? What is this tomfoolery? Where are my three-dee em em ohs?" Yet I guard a tiny flicker of hope in my heart that a reader or two out there felt their curiosity tingle, then burn, then spontaneously combust as he or she gave KoL a shot. In contrast to many of the other MMOs we play today, Kingdom of Loathing is downright old-school in terms of development and staff. There's no huge company here, no six floors of cubicles or corporate softball leagues. There's just a handful of gamers and writers who turned a pet project into a long-running success. Today I got the privilege of putting Josh "Mr. Skullhead" Nite to the question, and it was a treat to end all treats. An armageddon treat, if you will. So what's it like being one of the masterminds behind the most insane MMO in the world? And are the stories of its boozy origins true? Hit the jump and find out!
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: The highlights
It is, in so many ways, the antithesis of a modern MMORPG. It has crude stick figure drawings instead of lush 3-D graphics. It limits your daily activities to a handful of encounters. It often mocks, belittles and berates you for your stupidity. It uses meat for currency and has a character class that dabbles in pasta-based magic. It's been in open beta for the better part of a decade now. And its endgame is actually an end-of-the-game instead of an eternal raiding grind. I speak, of course, about The Kingdom of Loathing, one of the oddest online RPGs on the net -- and one of the most beloved. When I mulled over the game for this month's retrospective, I found myself really wanting to talk about KoL but a little unsure whether it truly belongs in the pantheon of accepted MMOs. At best, it's on the fringe; while you do play in a world populated by hundreds, if not thousands, of other players at any given time, it's mostly a solo exercise apart from the chat channel. However, it is a persistent world, it does hold many of the trappings of MMORPGs, and the creators have come up with clever ways for players to interact within a turn-based RPG. I'm also a huge fan, having dabbled in KoL off and on for over four years now, and I love recommending it to friends. So what the heck -- we're doing it. Kingdom of Loathing is a great success story in its own right and has a lot to teach the rest of the MMO industry about unconventional methods of structuring and presenting these games. Hit the jump and we'll run down eight highlights that separate KoL from the rest of the pack and make it a game well worth your spare time.
One Shots: You must first pass the test
Normally we likely wouldn't generally add in a 'screenshot' from a browser-based, primarily text MMO, but we're such huge fans of the Test of Literacy that we simply couldn't resist posting this Kingdom of Loathing screen that was sent in to us by Harmen. Here's what he had to say about this extremely funny screenshot - A One Shot of something completely different: Kingdom of Loathing, browser-based, stick-figures, is hilarious, free, really rather hard and even includes PvP. It has been running since 2003, and is still actively expanded. This is a screenshot of the 'tests' you need to pass when you want to enter the chat channel the first time. One of the tests is the difference between 'their', 'there' and 'they're'. Really, we think more MMOs should have literacy tests.If you're playing a funny, independent, off-the-beaten-path MMO, we want to see a screenshot and hear a bit about why you think this is a really cool game! Who knows - you may recruit some new players to check out your game. Just email those screens to us at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the game, and whatever you'd like to say about the screenshot. We'll post it out here and give you the credit for sending it in. %Gallery-9798%
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.
