KoLSmoot's Xanga

Lack of...Stuff

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:57:32 GMT

Yeah I've been busy with some stuff lately and haven't had time to craft a new entry. I'll try to get something up for you tonight, and the poll results will recieve an extenstion for this week. I'm gonna get something here tomorrow.

In Case You Missed It 11/6 11/10, 2008

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:26:52 GMT

Here it is, after cramming and storyboarding and gathering 4 hours of stuff and reducing it down to 9 and a half minutes. Anyway, hopefully you folks will appreciate this seeing how two consecutive shows with no Mr Skullhead was just too good to pass up.

In Case You Can't See It:(Alternative Link) (Fullscreen) (YouTube with Hi Quality Available)

If anything interesting occurs on tonight's show, like as to why they ignore my questions, I'll be sure to let you folks know. Friday I'll hopefully have something in an entry form for you. See ya then =)

Poll Results

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:34:46 GMT

Here's the results from this past week's Poll Question:

COMMENTS:

Occasional JD: It's fun! Stickers! [later on] On second thoughts, I can't think why it wasn't foldable into a staff... You guys are all up on game mechanics and this balance malarkey, help me out!

toe76: Meh, I'm really hoping for more stickers, maybe some + and - combat frequencies and familiar weight increasers.

Melon: A staff with no enchantments is just a melee weapon. It still uses muscle for damage calculations, so it's exactly the same as the sword, and so is unnecessary. Well, technically the only difference is that you can't dual wield the sword with a myst weapon, but Jick has said he intends to change that soon anyway, so it would end up being irrelevant. In summary, making it fold into a staff is pointless.

Depravity: It's definitely good

Occasional JD: Thanks Melon!

First off, kudos to Occasional JD for using the word malarkey and using it correctly! Second of all, I can only see this item being good if you don't already have snowcones. If you do have snowcones and pick this up hoping to get something out of it, chances are you'll be disappointed. Mostly due to the tediousness going on with the power on the sword and when to summon it. If it was applied to all weapons, the power issue wouldn't be a problem. Also the bookshelf needs to go otherwise, I'm comfortable with not seeing/obtaining another summon skill item in Mr. Store ever again.

This week I'm putting together an all new video with new stuff in it. In it, will have stuff from last Thursday's and this past Monday's radio show. Hopefully I'll be able to bring that to you sometime within the week and my time is stretched really thin, I'll try to put this Thursday's show in. That's what's going on. I'll try to have a regular entry within the week as well. Until whenever, have a good day everybody.

Raffle House Ruffling Feathers - 2nd FoB Hobopolis Attempt - Wrap Up

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:18:56 GMT

More incredible than CNN making holograms out of reporters...

it's another ent...ok I gotta admit that's some crazy hi tech shit. A bit over the top, but pretty awesome.

In the same day where us Americans made the right decision in electing Barack Obama, the Raffle House was back up and kicking again! Wooo! The celebratory "seeing the penguins being back in business" was short lived after A) not winning a thing in the raffle and B) recognizing the error of my ways when noticing that the grimacite reward wasn't as good as expected.....as in total crap. There's a few things that they're doing that irk the shit out of me cause it's a combination of failure and shittiness. Let's start with the hammer as a good example of how it's not as cool as it should've been. Meaning that instead of having a grimacite hammer that smiths the leftover depleted grimacite into cool various items, we have just have a shitty hammer that gives extra monster level. The next thing that pissed me off is that once the recipe was revealed on the wiki, which by the way is smithing grimacite with grimacite, that upon trying it on my own I was greeted with a...

"It seems like that should work... but it doesn't."

...message. It seems like it's a reasonable thing... but it isn't. So now in order to make the grimacite hammer, you gotta win it from the raffle house to make it. Can they dangle carrots in front of the players' faces any harder? Only instead of mediocre IotM's and the occassional crappy content being the dangling carrot, this time it's "trying to make CDM's work important" that's on the line. Seriously, I'd enjoy "upgrades to managing the game" more if they weren't thrown in my face like....a dangling carrot. Lastly, the thing that gets me is that they're re-opening a meatsink and this is probably a stretch in my theory here but they might've taken notice that recently a decline in price with some of the past and duly noted horendous IotM's and with less meat floating around, the may spark upward a bit. Again that's a stretch and it opens the door to people who'll criticize me but whatever. Another thing that's interesting to note is that the message at the grimacite site has changed once again and hints off to something regarding The Old Man by the underwater failure. Also also, the familiars from the raffle house appear to be the same kind of familiars that randomly popped up from the one-time halloween content week extravaganza. So my expectations of them aren't that high as they're probably just attack familiars as an educated guess.

This past week I tried to do an overcoat run and fell a little short. Though I did average another 1000+ turn day. Here's a screenshot of it:

Not as impressive as the 1060 turnout from last time!

The link escapes me but there was a forum link that could possibly make the overcoat/stick run easier. All you have to do is blow a fuckton of turns like I did, and then ascend casual and (if assumingly there's no consumable caps) rack up a fuckton of turns and do the same thing which would lead you up to hodgman as well as possibly knocking out a sub area or two. Though I'm sure there's some flaws with that plan like, when you ascend you automatically eliminate yourself from being the hodgman/super hodgman killer. Anyway, I might give it another shot on the Thanksgiving Feast of Boris assuming that they manually trigger the holiday on Thanksgiving which was something they were frowning about for some reason. However for right now, I doubt I'll try again unless I'm persuaded.

That's it for me today. I'm still getting the other videos together to be uploaded onto YouTube. Also, I signed up on twitter for some godly unknown reason. I'll share my thoughts on it at a later time. Anywho, I'm gonna sit back and enjoy our newly elected African American overlord for a bit. Join me Friday-ish when the implementation of box tops falls flat on its ass. I'll see ya folks next time

Thoughts on the Stickertome - CDM Strikes Again - Poll Results - Wrap Up

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:59:12 GMT

Better than this kid's tactics to get under Barney Frank's skin:

...okay I probably can't top that but nonetheless it's another entry by me, xSmootx.

Alright so we have another Tome on our hands, which means of course that it gets butt-diddled by the bookshelf. Aside from that it doesn't really bring much to the table if you already have snowcones. If you don't have snowcones, it's a must get for you newer players. Right away I can see how people will go totally off the wall bonkers and wind up getting asthma and silicosis through all the smoke and mirrors that they might digest so let's take care of this first. When this idea was brought up a few months ago, it was a rough sketch of what the sticker tome was going to be. So I'm a little surprised to see the rough sketch get directly implemented into the game with very little changes. Obviously there minds were set to this from the get-go. Things start to go a little downhill from here. Upon summoning stickers, you get a vanilla sword that allows "bedazzling" which means that you can only apply stickers to the sword given to you and not to any that you already own. This plays an important role later. Each summon grants you 3 stickers and you can summon from either tome 3 times a day. So you can get 9 stickers or 3 snowcones (could possibly be 9 snowcones upon change, unsure at the moment). The sword can be folded into a crossbow and back into a sword. Thus giving a middle finger to myst classes looking forward to a staff. The sword itself cannot be traded/discarded and gets the kiss of death from the seal of failure better known as "Quest Item". Nothing can be more rooted than giving it the "Quest Item" label. It is however, a one handed item where the power scales to your level if that makes any difference. Seeing how I'm typing this on opening day, obtaining more than one is currently unknown and can throw a wrench into dual wielding these sticks. That's right I said sticks because once I saw what the enchantments of what the stickers do, the Sticker Tome immediately turned into a Tome of...

...Fun Dip.

Which flavor are you going to dip your white bland sword/crossbow into? Before you pick, lemme break it down for you to choose

RazzApple Flavors:
+25% meat drops
+25% item drops

Other Shitty Flavors That Aren't RazzApple:
+2 stats per fight
+3 spooky, hot, sleaze, cold, stench damage
+10% all Attributes
+20 melee damage

Now you can apply three stickers at a time on the sword where the effects do stack. Meaning that you can have 75% meat or item drops on, or be a putz and walk around with shitty stat gain, triple obsidian dagger, nonpercent melee damage, or beefed up stats. I'm sure there's some that'll argue the latter 4 effects can be good in some situations, the same way that I think other certain things are good in certain situations. However at first glance, those effects really aren't all that great. especially the damage ones and the stat gaining. A couple other things that I don't like is that after awhile you'll lose the stickers off the weapon after combat, therefore just like fun dip you'll have to reapply the flavoring to the sword and continue on. Kinda expected that. However the fact that you can't apply stickers to any of your other weapons is just sheer idiotic. Thus will probably drive the prices on the bottle rocket crossbow down a bit and possibly a lot depending on whether or not the bland sword/crossbows can be dual wieldable. Overall, I give it a sideways thumb. It incorporates a lot more tediousness than the snowcones for less effect value with the constant reapplying of the stickers, but the general consensus will probably be like a kid in a candy store with the 25% enchantments. Really would like to see this be applied with other weapons but I'm sure they'll provide a "we don't know how to code that" excuse of some kind. (Would've been funny if they pulled a bait and switch and made something completely different for this month's item and made this thing the reward in the swamp content. Hey, it'd at least provide an excuse for the crappy content down there.)

CDM is up to his crafting ways again. This time around he made it so that you can eat drink buff and use stuff from the chat pane. Ah yes, nothing supports the "All KoL players are lazy" theory than by making every goddamn function available in the chat pane. Some of the hobo outfit skills were made accessible in the auto attack section in the "Who gives a fuck?" category of changes. And then there's the last change that was done half-assed by the great CDM. There was a tweak regarding buying stuff in the mall. Instead of being a complete buffoon when entering someone's store, the game takes you directly to the item wherever it's located in the mess that that player may or may not have. The intent was nice, but the change is crap cause you still have to scroll all the way down to the number box. I've played many games all over the place and wonder why some form of it wasn't in KoL. Well this idea comes from Neopets. Before you scoff or roll your eyes, may I remind you that KoL is the same game that rips shit from World of Warcraft constantly. Yeah, thought that would change your tune. So yeah, the other day I was trying to find something in neopets and I stumbled across the exact same underwater content from KoL:

...or maybe it's the Wizard Action Figure....or is it an Accordion Thief.....Bad Moon? Either way, I wanted to see if other people had there own Yuletide Troll so I did a search...

...And not only did I find a bunch of stores that had the item that I wanted...

...but it took me directly to the item along with how many I wanted of it (depending on how many times I clicked the picture.)

So this leaves the question of, why isn't there something like this in KoL? Why isn't there some sort of thing in place that takes you to the item of your choice along with how many of it that you want? Oh who am I kidding, they'll never go for that. Especially when you can buy stuff from the mall with the /mall command that they're probably working on.

Here's last week's poll results:

Comments:

Depravity:
we knew there would be new penguin stuff soon when the Grimacite site and the raffle house changed text. So let's see where Grimacite radiation leads us. Can't be any worse than Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Teh Rattlesnake:
Well, logically, there HAS to be some new penguin content soon... I mean, not only does the Grimacite site hint at something, but more importantly, the raffle house is down, and Jick is not about to get rid of that magnitude of a meatsink suddenly and for no reason. And definitely not indefinitely.

I was kinda hoping to see something on Halloween itself but it appears that we got hoodwinked out of content. So now the question is, WHEN will we see the interaction with the Penguin Mafia? New poll is at the bottom, leave a comment and you might be featured here next week.

Just like that, we've reached then end of another post by yours truly. Anyone else under the suspiscion that this month's item is in range of a possible nerf? I don't want to think about a nerf seeing how they needed extra time to test it, but like it just seems a little too good to be true sort of deal. I'll try to be here tomorrow for another entry while I secretly work on a side project for a friend of mine. I'll also try to show some attention to YouTube now that I have some extra time. That's it for now, I'll try to see if I can gather another ICYMI for you this week. Until then, Go Obama! See ya.

November IotM

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:45:21 GMT

The moment we've all been waiting for, the November IotM:

It's been almost about 3 years since we've seen a tome in Mr. Store. This time around we've been greeted with a treat...sorta. As an item of the month, it gets a sideways thumb. As for an item that beats the snowcones, not in the slightest. I'll explain this in a new entry coming up in just a few moments....

>>CLICK HERE FOR MY THOUGHTS ON THIS ITEM<<

Midweek Update Stuff - MP3 REMIX INCLUDED

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:45:49 GMT

Few things to update you with mid-way through the week seeing how nothing much is going on:

-Moments after I posted the previous entry I got a kmail from someone about how I supposedly forgot about Talk Like A Pirate Day and its random occuring monsters. The thought didn't cross my mind because for starters, TLaPD is one of most stupid holidays that anyone has ever come up with for an obscure holiday. Second the previous TLaPD did have the aforementioned random appearances of monsters which, possibly just like this halloween week, could be and chances are will be a one time thing. If it does occur more than once, it'll be "Talk Like Feast of Boris Day" or something. Seriously, it would be a little nitpicky to include it if it's just a one time thing.

-Second, I'm not entirely sure if I'll be here in time to keep track of the IotM. For those of you late sleepers or those on the EEEEEAST SIIIIIIDE of the hemisphere, I'll gather what I can and formulate a graphic and initial thoughts on the new IoTM in the wee hours of morning (1AM'ish possibly). I'll be busy on Halloween seeing Saw 5.

-Speaking of IotM's, no real speculation as to what it'll be (and hopefully no thread to go along with it.) is that it's going to be the "Sticker Tome". Which means that chances are it'll be a new skill under the tome category that will possibly be very good.......only to get molested by the bookshelf.

-Hey, did you know that there aren't that many very good sites to host mp3's on? Megaupload didn't want to upload the file for some reason and I'm sure as hell not using RapidShit, therefore, I had to resort to other lowly methods to find an mp3 hosting site to host the "KoL is consistantly not shitty" remix. You can download by clicking here. If the link goes dead, lemme know and I'll switch to another source. I'll post it in the YouTube description later. (Kirby's Air Ride + Jick's phrase = Win)

-Also, as mentioned here about the recent consumables from the halloween week content. I possibly blasted them a little too hard. They're not as bad as I made them out to be, but at the same time they're still not all that great. I think that the adventures on them can be upped a little bit on them but they're just not worth the effort in obtaining. I guess I was in the heat of the moment or something.

That's it for now, I'll try to have some kind of an entry up Friday, Saturday or Sunday. If not, Monday! Until then, have a great and safe Halloween everybody.

Halloween...Monsters? - Poll Results - Wrap Up

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:28:51 GMT

More exciting than announcing the secret ingridient...

(Video provided by YouTube)

...and then making a goofy face, it's another entry by yours truly, xSmootx.

What's scarier than the average Halloween antics in KoL? No, not They Might Be Giants performing in game. No, not JLE becoming an admin. No, not even Mr Skullhead sounding coherent. What could it possibly be? Well in honor of the 20th Halloween event, the admins decided to ramp up things a bit. How much you ask? Get this, they added MONSTERS THAT SHOW UP RANDOMLY WHEN YOU ADVENTURE! How great is that!? I mean it's not like this idea hasn't been used for that one holiday:

or that other holiday:

Alright so apparently they thought adding random monster encounters would spice halloween up a bit. However where this special event differs from both FoB's is, that's right, "How hard can we dick the players!?" You see recently, asymmetric can't seem to pitch an idea around without adding an element of dicking people. Whether it be run-of-the-mill content, Mr. Store items, and as of now....holidays. The dicking element is (and you may wanna keep score at home) when you face one of these monsters, you're greated with an equip piece. Depending on what equip piece you get, you can go trick or treating to get a consumable. As of right now according to some of the data on the wiki, some of the consumables not only have consumable caps on them but they're also not even in the ballpark of useful or good. However, some are speculating that from evidence from the monster text of the mutated monsters. It's possible that this will segway into something with the grimacite area again and/or the penguins. Which leads to this week's poll question: Do you think that we're soon going to see new stuff with the Penguin Mafia? Submit your vote as well as letting your voice be heard by checking out the poll at the bottom of the screen. Your comments could be featured on the results entry. So what are you waiting for, Skully and the coherent sentences (sounds like a nice band name). Vote already.

And from last week, I asked.:

COMMENTS:

anonamedude:
Sure it's good to see oversights fixed. Mr Items are supposed to be the only powerful no requirement equip in the game so this was overdue. The only people this hurts are those who were rich enough and fanatical enough to use the Portals strategy. Mostly though I'm really curious what project CDM is working on that requires items to have equip requirements.

OccasionalJD:
Eh, I'm not terribly fussed. There's trivial updates, and then there's these.

Even split across the board. I personally saw no problem with having some equipment that wasn't shitty to be equipable from the get-go. Take the chintzy stuff for example. Those accessories were just fractional taste of a Mr. A to some (talking about the +12 aspect). As a complete list is currently unavailable for the time being (doubt it ever will), if you're suddenly surprised as to why you can't be able this will be why. The way I see it if it's not broke, don't fix it.

Before I go, I want to mention that the recent ICYMI video has been a big hit amongst some of you folks. (Hopes someone sends it in on the radio show tonight) I appreciate your kind comments and I hope to have an MP3 at least available for you guys to download and listen to on your leisure sometime relatively soon. It's possible that I could be busy this week. I got to get some graphics up this week, hanging out to do, and of course some games to check out. What games? These:

Strong Bad Vol 3 - Today (Predicted)
Bejeweled Twist - Today
Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst - Coming Soon

I'm excited for all three. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some trick or treating to do in game. I'll see ya folks soon, have a good one everybody.

In Case You Missed It - 10/16-10/20 2008 Non xSmootx Edition

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:52:13 GMT

Take several hours of sleep deprivation + a little creativity = what hopefully will be an entertaining video. It took me about all week but here it is. Enjoy!

In Case You Can't See It:(Alternative Link) (Fullscreen) (YouTube)

Oh and one more thing. Turns out a motivational poster came out from all of this. Might have to hang it up around here whenever something new comes out in the game. (Click Here)

Anyway that's going to do it, I'll have something this weekend/Monday. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a coma

Video Update UPDATE

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:36:42 GMT

In the last stages of putting this damn thing together. It should be up and ready for viewing late tonight. Thank your for your patience

5:30 AM FRI EDIT: Hey I'm finally in the process of putting the slides together. Therefore the video will be pushed back later to sometime this afternoon/evening. Hope you folks will like it when it's all said and done, otherwise I'll know what it'll be like if I was either Jick or Skully . See ya soon.