The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So there’s a new Clan Dungeon about, The Slime Tube. And hey, we haven’t even finished our Hobopolis runs yet! (Although I do have my Hamster now, and damn, it’s pretty powerful, even with just the Hobo Power from Hodgman’s Bow Tie.) But I’ve been checking it out. It’s simple, but it is indeed quite fun, and it’s got some rather interesting items for high-level farming, with huge drop bonuses for certain types of things. It also has some weird skills that are ascension-relevant and buff up bigger each time you use them.

Needless to say, it’s looking like there is a need to speed run this dungeon too, in order to get lots of goodies. The way to make the Slime Tube go faster seems to be to buff Monster Level up incredibly high. This makes you have to do less fights, which can quickly change the Slime Tube from a 1000 turn affair to a 400-something turn affair. The crazy thing is, though, that buffing your monster level that high is extremely difficulty. The fights themselves, once you get it up there, are not, really, but to get buffed up to that point… well, Val was planning out loud and bouncing ideas off of me on how to do this, and it was quickly apparent that it would take at least 6 days of not using any turns in order to get the buffs from food and booze needed to get it up to appropriate levels, not to mention the cost of most of the other +ML buffs, and the annoyance of getting enough turns of, say, Unpopular. It’s a huge undertaking.

Of course, the reward for going that fast? A drop that lets you make gear that slowly, as you get more of it, makes speed-running the thing trivially easy. What?

The concept of difficulty in Kingdom of Loathing is just so weird like that. No fight is ever difficult, besides fights that game the system, such as Uber-Hodge. Any challenge put forth seems to require just gobs and gobs of resources, and it’s not so much difficulty as just perseverance to farm all the money you need, and wait around to get everything set up. That is just kind of fucked up.
At the same time, I realize their problem. You have a game where those who first created characters have characters in the insanely, mind-blowingly high levels. There’s no level cap, so they just keep grinding away, more and more. Creating an encounter that could challenge these characters is no easy task. I mean, I’ve been not ascending for awhile, and I’m over level 30, and there is nothing besides Hobopolis Bosses and a couple encounters in the Sea, really, that are anything more than one click on the attack button. I understand the design issues that make these sorts of problems come about.
I also see a potential benefit to the economy of the game. The economy of KoL is actually pretty damn important to its continued success. People enjoy being able to speculate, invest, and turn money in to more money. Having goods that everyone needs in bulk is always going to be a good angle for people to farm and make a lot of money. Once Hodgman required Pufferfish Spines and Spectral Jelly to defeat, you can bet people jumped on farming them, and created a whole economy out of them. I mean, hell, I bet that if I now started to go out of my way to farm Great Tit Feathers, I bet I could make a pretty decent profit, as I’m sure they’re in much greater demand than they ever were before. These sorts of things do make the economy more interesting and do make for an interesting game.

At the same time, though, isn’t KoL supposed to be a casual experience? I understand that there is an extremely hardcore fanbase that they need to tie into. I also understand that it is completely possible to enjoy The Slime Tube without speedrunning it, because I am right now. But still, it just kind of bothers me that there are such things that are so locked off this way that a causal player without a group of knowledgable friends and a bunch of resources will never be able to experience them.
On the third paw, I suppose the same can be said of World of Warcraft. It’s taken as a very casual game by a lot of players, but you still have to be very hardcore and very prepared to run the high-level raid dungeons. And that’s what Clan dungeons are: KoL’s raid dungeons.

I guess I don’t have a solution to this problem. And Jick and Company are obviously doing a decent job with the game, as it continues to keep going and make money and whatnot. But sometimes I feel like I’m losing what originally drew me to this game when I dive into all this hardcore content. I’m losing the joy I first had about having a short, daily play RPG with funny writing that made me smile. I guess I’d like if they focused on making the game work like that a little too.