The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So the other day, Val and I were talking about all the stuffs that be going on in KoL, what with the floaty sand and the Rock Monsters and whatnot. And then, as we’re talking, she’s like “You should be farming sands!” and I’m like “Yeah, I should be.” But I haven’t been.

See, a long time ago, I decided that KoL, and all these Browser RPGs, were a game, and that games exist to make me have fun, and thus I didn’t need to play them every day due to some sort of compulsion that just takes the fun out of them by making them mandatory. So I stopped worrying about wasting turns, and I had a lot more fun for it.

But these wasted turns were basically turning into an incredible expense if I ever wanted a Rock Lobster. I needed to be trying to farm me up some floaty sands.

So I tried something I’ve never tried before: KoL Mafia.

You can’t be all listening to the podcasts and fairly involved in KoL without hearing about Mafia. It is basically a separate program that acts as an interface to streamline KoL playing. This includes setting up a bot in order to run your turns in a particular way. Just click and go. It’s a godsend to people dedicated to playing many multis or who do a lot of farming, because instead of wasting a lot of time, you can just set up a good bot script and click one button every day, then rake in the profits. It’s exactly the kind of thing I needed to farm some floaty sands without the time investment.

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up Mafia is that this is totally a program made for huge nerds (a term I use in the most endearing way possible) by huge nerds with no real accessibility in mind. It is a daunting program to look at, and I can only imagine how scary it would be for someone newer to the game who heard about it and wanted to try it. I mean, I can’t fault them. It’s a free program, and it’s not like every open source thing has to have the ease of use of OpenOffice or Ubuntu. But still. Man.

It kind of made me sad then that, when I looked at this thing, it seemed like most of the botting stuff required you to actual write code in their little code type. This is not something beyond me, but this was a path wrought with frustration that would make me very angry to figure out. Not something I needed.
So I turned to the more basic combat scripting, deciding that I didn’t need to program the bot to switch areas and all kinds of crazy stuff, just to adventure and not die. Setting up a combat scenario was significantly easier, and in no time I had the thing running, collecting floaty sands. Soon all my turns were burned effectively.

My favorite part, though, was the “Purchase Buffs” button. With a couple clicks, I could buy any buff from any buffbot without having to look at any annoying tables or anything. It made the buffbots so much more usable. I could get used to that. Maybe there’s a Greasemonkey script that does something similar…

Still, it really does kind of take the fun out of the game. I mean, I get why people use it. There is some really strong utility in there if you can figure the thing out. But man, I’m not going to make it a normal thing. I’ll use my Greasemonkied browser, thanks. It’s slower, but then at least I get to read the text, and have a little more fun.