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I'm quite rich too so I don't need to donate to get every IOTM. But now that they're deeper in the hole I try to buy more of them and sink Mr. As. I also bought Word Realms because it looked cool but mostly because I figured they earned my 11 bux. They really need to find something to get them more cash. They can't continue on this model. If they had a working store which gave them revenue instead of the craptastic thing they had going, they would have made a lot of cash. Even stupid webcomics have better stores then them.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:08
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tripwood posted:They really need to find something to get them more cash. They can't continue on this model. They mentioned trying to set up something with TopatoCo, but they aren't taking new clients until after the holiday season for obvious reasons, so it'd have to wait until January or so.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:16
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I can't shake the feeling that KOL has become too complex to hook new players. I came back after dicking around with it... five years ago, and needed to check the wiki virtually every time I came to a new area. Between the limited number of actions, sub-zones of zones that may or may not have mobs or events that drop things you need, and the occasional obtuse puzzle, it feels like even the early sections are designed more to challenge an already familiar player base than they are to attract and establish new blood.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:43
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Bieeardo posted:I can't shake the feeling that KOL has become too complex to hook new players. Yep. The act of ascending has gone from a few days of focused play with a reward of "new skills, permanently" to a horrible recursive loop of trying to remember how to do each quest in a way that doesn't take a full day of adventuring. All of the new quest re-designs absolutely punish you for not knowing the mechanics or the optimal way to play them. Yeah, you can grind through it without being optimal, but that makes ascending a week of indentured servitude rather than a mere chore. I can't imagine a new player, with no skills, familiars, or resources built up having any fun, at all.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:56
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Capntastic posted:Yep. The act of ascending has gone from a few days of focused play with a reward of "new skills, permanently" to a horrible recursive loop of trying to remember how to do each quest in a way that doesn't take a full day of adventuring. Just about every quest these days has a timed out that kicks in after dicking around in an area for too long. There's some missed coverage in the Hidde City and the Filthworms/Gremlins for Level 12, but that's about it.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:08
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ayn rand hand job posted:There's some missed coverage in the Hidde City and the Filthworms/Gremlins for Level 12, but that's about it. Filthworms are a pain in the rear end if you don't have lots of +item or some way to force drops, and everyone should get an Ice House for the sole purpose of perma-banishing the A.M.C. Gremlin.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:53
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Choronzons son posted:Hey, I wasn't serious. It's an inherent problem with the business model and game economics though, that a lot of the old guard will never feel any need to donate because of some good investments and being-there-at-the-right-time. Nah, it's cool, I wasn't trying to start a shitstorm. I was just pointing out that back in the day when I failed on no less than two attempts to do a one-day ascension prior to NS13, I was doing my part to help the company. Now I'm just leveraging years of browser-based poopsocking into more important poo poo like "paying bills" and "buying gasoline". Don't feel bad about buying me from me, or not from me, I understand why someone wouldn't want used meat.
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Nov 19, 2014 03:14
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The game exploding in complexity is what killed me. Even doing my turns using Mafia or simply meatfarming was a chore by the end of it. There used to be an old automatic ascension script that you could pay a Mr. A for in the old Kolmafia forums but even that didn't do it for me.
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Nov 19, 2014 04:16
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I always played KoL on and off but my permanent off was when they started redoing some of the later main quests. I never automated the game--in my view it's not really playing it if I'm automating it--and I just became frustrated with the extra bulk added to all the quests. Too many new zones, too many new objectives, too many new puzzles that are designed to be obscure because the solution will end up on the wiki.
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Nov 19, 2014 04:27
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I like the complexity and I think all the quest revamps have definitely made for a net positive more interesting game, but I just don't have the time for them. It doesn't help that you get get punished, not rewarded, for coming back to the game after taking a break -- if you take some time off from WoW you're rewarded with double XP for a while since your character is "rested" (or at least this used to be the case? haven't played in years) and if I boot up Diablo 3 on PS4 after not playing for a week I'll have a mailbox full of new legendary items that my internet friends have found for me while I've been offline that might break me out of the rut I was in or tempt me to try a new character build. Every day or month that I don't log into KoL, the idea of logging in again gets less & less compelling
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Nov 19, 2014 04:44
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The Picky path reward (picky tweezers) has just become usable - once per day (don't know yet if it's "per pair") you can pick an untradable 'single atom' which is a spleentastic item that I haven't seen values for yet.
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Nov 19, 2014 23:20
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The game isn't really meant for a large chunk of the gaming population. I have moderate OCD (an actual diagnosis by a doctor) which helps explain why I enjoy it a lot. But a casual gamer is going to get discouraged at the intricacies of some of the quests. The fact that you can brute force them may help a lot of people play through one or two ascensions, and say "That was a really cool puzzle game, lots of nice humor. Maybe I'll do it again sometime in the indeterminate future if I get bored." Ascending can be a grind, and like Bieeardo said, it seems like a lot of the revamps were to challenge and entertain an already-dedicated player base than to attract new players. Don't get me wrong, I LIKE these challenges. It's my favorite game and I've donated a lot of money over the several years I've played. On a personal level, I'd be fine if they did roll out NS-15, but from the standpoint of bringing in new people who will consistently play to a level of being willing to donate, it's not that friendly.
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Nov 20, 2014 05:15
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If there were a new way to ascend (perhaps with mitigated rewards) without needing to do an increasingly long chain of increasingly complex quests, or there were ways to earn karma without needing to 'ascend' as an arbitrary goal, and if there was more content that wasn't bound between the level 1-13 area, I could see myself playing a bit more. But the truth of the matter is that KoL has finite content, and I and many others have done most all of it- perhaps dozens of times.
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Nov 20, 2014 07:55
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I kinda wish that the quests would change between ascensions. Like, each level quest could have two or three different quests that are randomly selected for each ascension - all designed to take roughly the same time. Would probably gently caress with speedrunning/paths, though?
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Nov 20, 2014 08:18
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Draile posted:I always played KoL on and off but my permanent off was when they started redoing some of the later main quests. My permanent 'off' was when I missed a particular IotM during an extended break and came back to realize that it was going to be hugely important and that my choices were to do without and suck for the next 2 years of challenge paths or to drop a significant chunk of change on the IotM... and then do that every time a break made me miss something important. I've never been a competitive speed runner, but I like pushing myself and I like going as fast as I can and I hate knowing that my break has crippled my potential. Well, actually, that was my "probably permanent off". My "definitely permanent off" was when I got banned for posting about how the game is collapsing under its own weight in that thread about donation habits.
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Nov 21, 2014 00:02
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Khizan posted:...a particular IotM...going to be hugely important If you're referring to the Smithsness tome, I can totally see that. It can produce such a variety of items and every one of them is useful in some way, I'm glad I was back in the game briefly and able to pick one up when it was current. There's only... I think four things I still use Clip Art for since picking up Smithsness - buckets of wine, time halos, cold-filtered water, and familiar jacks. m2pt5 fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 00:17
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I felt that way about the Smithsness Tome, but I was (foolishly) willing to
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Nov 21, 2014 01:23
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:The game isn't really meant for a large chunk of the gaming population. No matter who it was meant for, KoL's actual popularity used to be enormous. I learned about it from a friend and played it for years (back in high school), and I don't think I ever ran into someone who hadn't at least heard of it, if not played it. Jick & Co could have kept it going, but I really think they shot themselves in the foot when they left behind expansion style updates like NS-13 and the sea, and started focusing more heavily on events and revamping existing quests. Every few years when I log back in to see what's up, there's more and more obstacles in the way of getting my momentum back and really getting into it.
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Nov 21, 2014 01:27
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Khizan posted:I felt that way about the Smithsness Tome, but I was (foolishly) willing to *shrug* I wasn't playing when the DNA lab hit, but missing it doesn't bother me that much.
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Nov 21, 2014 01:45
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DolphinCop posted:they shot themselves in the foot when they left behind expansion style updates like NS-13 and the sea, and started focusing more heavily on events and revamping existing quests. NS-37. Try not to revamp any more quests on your way across the parking lot.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:58
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All of the revamps were bad, make you more wiki/kolmafia dependent, and were generally balanced around a full suite of IOTMs/a ton of skills. The result is that the only people who can still play the game are people who have been around for years and don't have to donate for IOTMs anyways/don't actually have to buy them (hence "type 2".) They made their own bed.
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Nov 21, 2014 03:02
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I don't think all the revamps are that bad. I'm mostly okay with Spookyraven and like the new Hidden City. But I really hate the desert revamp. It's bad enough that the added complexity is simply annoying and it's become some a boring slugfest. The fact that it was changed from a clever subversion of this is actually insulting.
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Nov 21, 2014 13:45
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Coming from a new player that started a few months ago and doesn't have a huge stack of skills and IotMs, here's how the stuff stacked up to me:
Guild Quests:
Nemesis Quest: These items need to be looked at because a lot of the rewards are utter poo poo compared to the effort put in. Miscellaneous Quests:
Other stuff:
I think that's enough keyboard diarrhea for now, but you get the idea.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:14
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I think the Copperhead Club is why I ended up wiki-ing everything-- that persistent stat debuff was an enormous gently caress-you pain in the rear end, and it almost made me permanently quit right there.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:35
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The level 12 quest hasn't been revamped yet, so expect the war to change. No ETA yet but probably some time in the new year, after crimbo is over.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:59
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I never even noticed that The Shirt Off His Lack of Back thing before, it just seems like a way to give anyone who doesn't have it the shirt skill. Cool people permed torso in Bad Moon anyway The war is pretty much fine as is and if they dramatically overhaul it just to make it more needlessly complex then 
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Nov 21, 2014 21:15
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Toshimo posted:
The common way to do the flyers is to increase Monster Level and finish quests/zones that you didn't complete before reaching level 12. Ed the Undying, the hole in the sky, goblins, filthworms* and the beach can get you there.
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Nov 21, 2014 21:19
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I do it the lazy way and set up the GMOB
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Nov 21, 2014 22:04
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Kurvi Tasch posted:The common way to do the flyers is to increase Monster Level and finish quests/zones that you didn't complete before reaching level 12. Ed the Undying, the hole in the sky, goblins, filthworms* and the beach can get you there. To be fair, before I had enough skills and items to comfortably handle a certain amount of +ML, I often had all other quests done or even had to grind before I hit Lvl 12. These days I always have enough stuff left to do after starting the war that I can just flyer on the side. Oh, and Toshimo: while pirates/frats are definitely superior for speedy ascensions, it really doesn't hurt to do an extra lazy run sometimes where you just don't care about finishing fast and simply enjoy different content. Do Copperhead, the Hippies, hell, do the junkyard for your boat. Have fun and collect new stuff. Oh, and the Legendary Beat quest is pretty fun, so do that if you are bored by the grind and have some meat to spare. The reward is quiet nice as well. (Well, if you remember to actually use it...)
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Nov 21, 2014 22:32
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Kaboobi posted:I do it the lazy way and set up the GMOB Yeah, I suspect most people that don't have access to Cyrus use the GMOB if they don't have any other areas of significant ML that they need to work on by then. As for the Island War quest, the one part that sucks the most is the ducks. (Yes, I know it can be shortened by using a chaos butterfly and getting your ducks in a row.) All the other island sidequests can be shortened drastically. (Flyers to <10 via Cyrus, Junkyard to 4-8 by perma-banishing AMCs with an ice house, Sonova Beach to 5 with faxing and other copying, Filthworms to 4 with pickpocketing/etc., and Nuns to <10 with obscene amounts of +meat drop.) But nothing can shorten ducks to less than 25 adventures. If you're fighting for the frat side, by the time you get to the farm, the number of adventures you'll save on the battlefield by doing the ducks is minimal, if any at all. Seriously, the frat side quests are so much easier to do, it's hardly worth doing the hippy side at all. (Last few runs I've ended up YRing a hippy earlier in the run for the hippy suit, and later YRing a war frat to get the outfit.)
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Nov 21, 2014 22:44
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m2pt5 posted:(Yes, I know it can be shortened by using a chaos butterfly and getting your ducks in a row.) I was just about to ask if there was any way to even guess at this in-game, if it was some obscure reference or something that I never got. I never realized how it was a pun on "putting your ducks in a row" until just this moment, so I guess the answer is at least in part "yes". I still don't get the involvement of the chaos butterfly with this specific trick reference-wise, though. Why a tornado and ducks?
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Nov 21, 2014 23:56
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Idran posted:I was just about to ask if there was any way to even guess at this in-game, if it was some obscure reference or something that I never got. I never realized how it was a pun on "putting your ducks in a row" until just this moment, so I guess the answer is at least in part "yes". I think it was just a good place to put in a butterfly effect joke. (The butterfly effect originally refers to a hurricane, but close enough.)
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Nov 22, 2014 00:06
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Good rundown, Toshimo.Toshimo posted:Level 10 - Giant Trash Quest ("The Rain on the Plains is Mainly Garbage") : [...] The largest complaint about this quest is that the rewards are such COMPLETE AND UTTER DOGSHIT. Why? It's a fairly lengthy quest, why are the Glad Rags such absolute poo poo? Partly power creep, but even back in the NS11 day they were a wash, because they are literally garbage and it's supposed to be funny. Toshimo posted:Nemesis Quest: These items need to be looked at because a lot of the rewards are utter poo poo compared to the effort put in. Power creep. There's also so much MORE equipment than there used to be, with such a wide variety of enchantments, that +mainstat stuff is now just kind of blah. I remember when the star shirt was Best in Slot. Hell, I remember when there was no torso slot. (Regarding the torso thing, I agree that new players should just have the slot already. For a long time the only way to get Torso Awaregness was from the Gnomish Camp, and you had to buy the skill for a whole 5000 Meat, and then perm it with your very valuable Karma, but I'm willing to leave those dark days in the past. Even if I won't be allowed to complain about How Hard We Had It Back Then.) Toshimo posted:Sea Quests ◦"An Old Guy and The Ocean", Sea Monkees Quest ("Hey, Hey, They're Sea Monkees") : Nothing about this seems like it's worth the lovely hoops you have to jump through to do Sea content. Feel free to let me know if I'm wrong. The first time you do The Sea is frankly loving awful. Building an aerated helmet sucks. Getting Grandpa to actually loving show up COME ON I HAVE -28% COMBAT YOU OLD TURD sucks. Building the costumes sucks. Scraping together seahorse-taming supplies sucks. Having to scrutinize the wiki to figure out how to "solve" the Mer-kin Deepcity and how to not die immediately to the Sea Boss sucks. The first time you do the second of the two paths is also pretty horrible, because that's another aerated helmet and costume to build and another Deepcity and Sea Boss wiki page to read and as you may have heard, they suck. After that, you're at least partly coasting on equipment, familiars and combat items you've earned (or bought) before, you've done the Deepcity path at least once, and it just becomes easier from there on out. The frustration is largely artificially induced by the "1 adventure for the price of 2" constraint. That said, one or two of the rewards are actually useful. +Rollover adventures gear is always handy. The Staff of Simmering Hatred is +200% spell damage with a 125 Mys requirement, i.e. a good aftercore Killin' Stick, and you're probably using spells to kill Sea creatures anyway so get this one ASAP. The Fuzzy Slippers of Hatred are yet another source of equippable -combat. And if you have consistent agua de vida access, I don't know why you haven't gotten the Secret From the Future accessories; equipping each set takes up all 3 slots, but if you don't have a suite of IOTMs they're pretty strong +meat and +item boosters. If you're just buying one agua per ascension to get to Cyrus, though, then it's understandable. Toshimo posted:Housing: You pretty much go Tent->House. None of the other stuff is worth fooling with. That's a shame. It would be cool to see the other housing stuff sometimes. I guess the Cottage is pretty easily doable, but what evs. If a cottage falls in my lap Day 1, I sometimes set it up, but usually I plan on being level 9 by mid-Day 2 at the latest, so I agree with you here. Even in extended Aftercore I almost never replace the house, just maybe a furniture piece or two.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:27
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Re: Agua de Vida Once you've gazed the bottle once, you can just pull the empty bottle and gaze it every ascension and it never goes away. Probably not the #1 most efficient thing, but if you are at level 12 and have a pull to spare...
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Nov 22, 2014 00:32
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Toshimo posted:Re: Agua de Vida As long as you don't use 10 adventures there in a single ascension, it won't consume the bottle.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:46
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Applied as Larzm42.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:03
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Ok, armchair design enthusiasts: If you had it all to do again, say as KoL2, how would it go? What things worked? What didn't? Could a repeatable game system like ascensions be sustainable? How do you deal with power creep? Is Type 2 inevitable? Were IotMs a good method for monetizing? I'm actually interested in The Goon Opinion on this stuff. I am a terrible person who giggles every time I equip the Wonderwall shield or drink some Champagne Supernova.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:14
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Well that sort of thing is always going to be subject to personal biases on what we enjoy but here's wot I think. More focus on the bad parts because that's more interesting to talk about : What KoL did right: *It's very funny, and the goofy and wacky aesthetic works really well. *The turn based design with limited daily turns was appealing and kept the suspense up during those early days that kept me interested, and helped kep away burnout during the days when turns were actually meaningfully limited. What KoL did wrong: *The very early decision to not cater to collectionism killed a number of potential long-term goals for people. Trophies, tattoos and familiars seemed to be basically designed as the primary avenues for epeen and collectionism but were killed off as being such very quickly in the game's life. I don't know about anyone else, but I felt that treating these things as any sort of worthwhile goal was completely pointless very early on in my KoL "career". *The ascension game is a great idea for extending the game's lifetime and is a lot of fun, and for game's that make you essentially play the same content over and over again randomness is needed, and KoL is a a very random game. But it embraced the wrong type of randomness. How often did you end up in a situation during an ascension where your gameplan changed based on what happened during an adventure, that might cause you to make a different meaningful decision to last time or even change where you adventure? Basically never. This is partially an issue with the long linear quest design the game eventually adopted, and partially the fact that most things monsters dropped were garbage. KoL's gameplay needed to be more "reactionary", if you know what I mean. *Sort of tied in with the previous point, but for a game whose top-end gameplay was resource management, there was very little in the way of resources to gather. Anything that you cared about that didn't come from a skill or familiar came from an IotM. Without a suite of IotMs you eventually came to the realisation that there was hardly anything for you to even do. Need to boost item drops? Pull out your familiar, cast your skills and then.... well I hope you have a libram that gives you potions. Maybe you could decide to adventure in a zone where monsters drop potions that boost ite- hahaha just kidding that doesn't exist. Need to decide on where you're going to source good food? Who cares, two of the three ingredients for reagent pasta, one of the best foods in hardcore, you pull straight out of your rear end. The other comes from a zone you're forced to adventure in. The remaining space can be filled from your garden / tome summons. No meaningful decisions for you! Now go grind those quests.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:03
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Things that worked well: I love the mall. I love just about everything about it and how it's been handled. A quick search turns up just about any tradeable item in the game, at the lowest price. Things that didn't work well: A few early meat-generation bugs and the lack of worthwhile meat sinks really set the tone for a really lopsided economy. Exploiters of the meat vortex bug were never for want of Mr. Accessory items, and a lot of the top-heavy wealth of the game still persists to this day. It doesn't help that a lot of the best meat-generating strategies revolve around overpriced old Mr. Accessory items. Turn generation in the last few years has just been ridiculous. Probably around the time spleen items became common. This lead me to decision fatigue - a full session of straight ascending could take upwards of three hours. Eventually, I started scripting my ascensions. Then, I just started farming and only doing the challenge path a few times. Now, I just double click a macro on my desktop that logs in, runs my farming script, and then quits. It gets me enough to buy the new Mr. Accessory item every month, even though I rarely actually use it much.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:33
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It would require some major restructuring and it's way too late in the game now, but if I were designing a KoL ripoff or reboot I'd make an "adventure" do a lot more, but you'd get a lot less of them via rollover and food and booze. Let's say you get 10 adventures every rollover but if you choose to spend one in the pirate's cove you get a series of fights, a non-combat or two, and maybe a resolution to the string of encounters in the form of a guaranteed outfit piece or something. Basically spending an adventure "unlocks" an area and initiates a randomly selected little mini-quest in said zone. You can hop between different zones you've spent an adventure in freely but once you complete an adventure (maybe 4-5 encounters on average?) you're booted out and have to spend another adventure to run through it again. I'm sure there are some issues with this implementation but at the end of the day what I'm saying is that the game would benefit from less decision-making while increasing the importance of each individual decision made.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:49
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