History of Loathing (2003)

From A KoL Wiki

These pages shall contain the history of the Kingdom of Loathing.

For an annotated list of changes to the game, see Changes.

Table of contents
2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

January 2003 | February 2003 | March 2003 | April 2003 | May 2003 | June 2003 | July 2003 | August 2003 | September 2003 | October 2003 | November 2003 | December 2003 | See Also | External Links

January 31, 2003

  • As of today, there are no old announcements. Except for this one. And this one doesn't count.
  • This is where announcements will go. Isn't that announc-e-rific?

February 10, 2003

February 14, 2003

February 17, 2003

  • Courtesy of Bjorn's mad haiku skillz and El Perezoso's diligence, The Haiku Dungeon is now open to reasonably advanced players (power >= 50) -- come get your goodies. COMING SOON: (probably tomorrow...) The Flea Market -- sell stuff to each other! Buy stuff from each other! A player economy is us!

February 19, 2003

  • Some slight rearrangements of things, and some new graphics. Now I can add new zones without crowding up the main page so much. And new zones I will add, believe you me.

February 20, 2003

February 21, 2003

  • Lots of new stuff today. Read the post about it in the forums.

From the Forums:

  • The Spooky Forest is now fully populated, with loads of adventures and a bunch of new items.
  • The Hidden Temple now exists, though it requires some effort to get there. Search the Forest for clues.
  • It is now possible to construct a Meat Golem, which, when installed at your campsite, will prevent other players from stealing your items (redirecting them to a dignity attack.) How to summon the Golem is left as an exercise to the player. Some other campsite furnishings can also be constructed from things found in the forest.
  • There also now exist magical weapons, hats, and pants, which boost your stats when equipped. So far, only the Epic Weapons for each class are enchanted, but I'll be going through and adding some minor magic items to each zone before too long. I'm also going to beef up (so to speak) the Meatsmithing recipes, to allow you to craft your own magic items.

February 24, 2003

February 27, 2003

  • Sorry 'bout that, kids -- daily script didn't run last night because I forgot to set up the crontabs on the new server. I gave you a couple of days worth, by way of apology...

February 28, 2003

  • And verily did Bjorn smite the wicked, the unjust, the legion of scofflaws and cheaters, and lo, were their campsites rent asunder, their bodies left powerless, and their sacks left empty. And Bjorn saw it, and it was good.

    Cheaters never prosper.

February 29, 2003

  • The stuff that was happening last night was NOT due to Bjorn. It was at least partially due to a recently-introduced bug in the campground code, which was fixed (after Bjorn noticed it and called me to tell me about it) last night. I'm working on stuff today.

    Changes/fixes so far:

    You can now change your password from the top menu.

    I added the much-talked-about non-PvP item to everybody's campsite. Participation in PvP combat is, as of now, completely voluntary. This should slow down some of the griefing and feuding for a little while.

    I created the Bugfinder Blade. This is, for now, the most powerful weapon in the game. It will be bestowed upon anyone who finds (and tells me about) a serious bug or exploit in the game. This includes, mainly, infinite-meat and infinite-adventures bugs, and item duplication bugs.

    Okay, by popular request, there's now a primitive profanity filter for usernames, messages, and graffiti.

March 3, 2003

March 4, 2003

  • Another Bugfinder Blade was awarded today to the finder of yet another infinite meat/stats bug.
  • You can now attach items to messages. You can also delete unused player accounts.

March 6, 2003

  • Another feature, another bug. The clover/sewer adventure is up, and the infinite adventures bug it introduced is band-aided up for now. I'll figure out something better to do when I get home from work.
  • Epic Hat Quests are now implemented for each class. The Toot Oriole will start you down the path. Also, it looks like the Clockwork Maid is finally fixed.

March 7, 2003

  • New accounts now require e-mail activation, and new users are limited to one account per e-mail address. This should cut down on some of the recent exploits.

March 8, 2003

  • Lots of new stuff today. Two new zones (power 400+) in the Lair, a new shop, and a new trade skill. Bunch of items, too, some of them not fully implemented yet. I can't stare at this screen anymore tonight, so there'll be more stuff tomorrow, too. Oh, there are now Item Sets. And by Sets, I mean Set. But someday it'll be Sets.

March 10, 2003

March 12, 2003

  • Quite a few small changes over the last day or two -- check the trivial updates page for details. This is where I'll continue to post most of the changes I make -- I'll only post new announcements when new zones open or really serious changes happen.

March 16, 2003

  • Drunkenness now prevents you from adventuring (and drinking more.) The Arena is revamped, and has 10 progressively more difficult version of a single monster, for testing of the new and improved monster combat system.

March 20, 2003

  • Okay, I finally found the typo in the code that made alcohol limits not function the way they're supposed to. Now you should never be able to exceed 17 drunkenness...

March 27, 2003

  • Alrighty. New map area, new adventuring zone, 20 or so new items, some new effects, a bunch of new cooking and meat paste recipes, and quite a bit of whatnot. It all starts with The Hermit...

April 8, 2003

  • New area, new stores, new tradeskill, new items, blah blah blah. Hit Points are now implemented, too.

April 12, 2003

  • NOTICE: In a few days, I'm going to start autodeleting player accounts after 30 days of inactivity.

April 15, 2003

April 19, 2003

April 21, 2003

  • You now have the option to disable inventory images -- I encourage you to do so, especially if you've been playing for a while. It'll make the inventory page load a little faster, and help to conserve bandwidth.

April 25, 2003

  • Please note that there is now a listing fee of 100 Meat to sell an item on The Flea Market. This should cut down on some of the useless clutter.

April 30, 2003

  • The Daily Dungeon is now in place. It's a randomly-generated zone that refreshes once a day.

May 4, 2003

May 13, 2003

  • The "Forgot Password" link is now functional again -- forgotten passwords can be reset using your activation code.

May 14, 2003

May 31, 2003

  • As a result of the recent clan bug, I'm going to need to wipe all of the current clan records and start over. This will happen on Wednesday night. Please get everything that you want to keep out of your goodies hoard, and formulate plans for reforming old clans. I've restored peoples' clan memberships and status as well as my most recent backups will allow me to.

June 5, 2003

June 13, 2003

June 17, 2003

  • The Kingdom of Loathing Store is now up and running. Buy groovy merchandise, and be the envy of all your friends. There are only a few items up for sale right now, but there will be more (including class-specific T-Shirts) in the coming days.

June 25, 2003

  • My desktop machine is now officially dead, so updates for the next week or two will involve even more recycled graphics than usual.

    Also, I put the Voluntary Level-Reduction Booth in Seaside Town. Check my post in The Forums for more details.

June 27, 2003

From the Forums:

  • By popular request, the maximum turn limit has been raised from 120 (40 turns * 3 days) to 200 (50 turns * 4 days.) With the next batch of items I add, you'll be able to get a total of 50 turns per day not counting food and booze.

June 30, 2003

July 8, 2003

  • The transition to the new host is nearly complete. The only thing missing is the messages, and I'm working on that...

    The clan logs are not there, but that's too much data to feasibly transfer across, so they'll just start over as of today. Sorry 'bout that.

July 18, 2003

  • I'm changing the way some of the persistent stuff is stored in the database, so you might encounter some weirdness over the next few days whereby quest statuses (stati?) get reset. On the bright side, you'll probably get to fight the Boss Bat again soon. Whee!

July 24, 2003

  • All weapons, pants, hats, and accessories now have level requirements associated with them. Anything you had equipped is now in your inventory, and needs to be re-equipped.

July 29, 2003

  • Whenever you get an item or a quantity of Meat attached to a message, the message will now contain a picture. This should make it impossible to scam people the way some unsavory types have been doing. If anybody figures out a way to fake the new way, please tell me.

August 4, 2003

August 6, 2003

  • The inventory items that were lost yesterday, as it turns out, cannot be replaced. I've now fixed the code such that this will very likely never happen again.

    Everybody gets 60 turns a day for a while, to give you a chance to reacquire the stuff you lost. Turns also max out at 260 instead of 200.

    I also added 60 turns to everybody today, and 3000 Meat, so you can pick your hammers, ovens, and cocktail kits back up.

    Pimonkey is VERY, VERY sorry about this.

August 11, 2003

  • More bugs, more fixes, and a slow trickle of new content.

    Oh yeah. And an updated login page.

August 18, 2003

  • Familiars are back as of the last backup (6 days ago...) Sorry about any losses.

    Compact mode is now available for those with screen issues, and for those who want to help conserve bandwidth. Toggle it from the Account menu.

August 21, 2003

  • The Mall is searchable. For now. Think of this as a real-time, practical analysis of the economic impact of the feature.

August 23, 2003

  • Clan vs. Clan warfare has been added. I suppose it's in something like a testing stage right now.

    This is where some more old announcements would be if my stupid ass hadn't accidentally deleted them. Ah well. This portion of KoL history will just have to be shrouded in mystery.

September 6, 2003

From the Forums:

Alright, here's what's happening. The site has been taken down by HostRocket because of a crash this morning that they say was caused by the extreme load my scripts were generating. They're forcing me to switch to one of their dedicated servers if I want my account unsuspended, but given their performance in the last few weeks, I'm not going to do it.

They may well be right about what happened, but they were also pretty adamant in insisting that switching to the plan I'm on right now would solve these problems, so I no longer really trust them.

Fortunately, Friday I put in the order for a dedicated server from another, highly recommended provider, but it won't be ready for me until Monday.

So it looks like the site is down until then, plus whatever time it takes for me to get stuff transferred over and set up. Sorry about the inconvenience, but the end of all of this crap is definitely in sight.

September 12, 2003

From the Forums:

  • Alright, I've just made some changes to the way item enchantments work. Instead of giving a flat +X to str/mag/mox/all, items now give +X/level. This makes these items a lot less worthless. I've calculated the effects out (behold the wonders of Excel) and it has some interesting implications due to the exponential relationship between stats and level. Like, for instance, a +3 item on your primary stat is better than a +10% item up until about level 35. It also makes off-primary-stat boosting items a lot more valuable, since your primary stat determines your level.
  • Items that were +10 are now +3, +15 are +5, and +20 are +7.
  • In other news, items can also now be enchanted to give you an Intrinsic Effect, which is like an ordinary effect, but stays on your character as long as you've got the item equipped. This allows the effects of items to be arbitrarily complex, and allows some of the interesting stuff Mr Skullhead has been working on to be possible.
  • Oh, and the enchantments are now displayed on the item description popup in blue. Pretty!

September 23, 2003

October 2, 2003

  • I found and fixed a problem today that I think was causing most of the lag we've been experiencing for the last few days.

November 16, 2003

November 18, 2003

  • The Goblin King has undergone a minor rewrite. You can kill him again.

November 23, 2003

November 27, 2003

November 28, 2003

December 2, 2003

  • Anybody who was carrying a Metallic A will now find a replacement item in their inventory. Oh, and the Beanstalk went active last night, for anybody who didn't notice already.

December 6, 2003

  • The Castle is now available to those who have gone through the airship. Some of the castle items still need to be implemented.

December 11, 2003

From the Forums:

  • Okay, I'm in the process of making some changes to the way levels are calculated. It's basically like this. You have three primary stats: Muscle, Mysticality, and Moxie. Your primary stat will eventually max out at 200. Your secondary stats will max out at either 150 or 100, depending on which sub-class you are. For instance:
  • In order to raise these stats, you earn what are basically the equivalent of experience points, but specific to each stat. These points are what you're used to earning from winning fights, using stat boosters, etc. (ie. Beefiness, Enchantedness, Chutzpah) You'll get a notification when you get enough of them to boost one of your main stats.
  • The three primary stats are now equivalent to what used to be your level.
  • The new thing called "Level" is still dependent on your primary stat, but it's much lower. Much much lower. With a base primary stat of 200, you will be at level 15. So 15 is the maximum level after the cap goes into place. There will be titles associated with each level, which will be cool.

December 19, 2003

  • The server will go down for a few minutes today, around 3:00 Eastern Daylight Time, for a RAM upgrade. This upgrade, plus a number of optimizations I've been working on over the past few days, should make a dent in the occasional lag we've been experiencing lately.

December 22, 2003

  • You can now set up secure trades (items for Meat) from the Messages menu. You can also now add and remove clan hoard items in quantity.

December 23, 2003

December 25, 2003

Merry Crimbo!

Crimbo Pressies for all! Check your inventory.

December 26, 2003

  • Happy day after Crimbo! There has been a slight change to the way the "who's online" list works -- lurking in the chat now counts as being online.

December 30, 2003

  • The Shore is revamped, and open for your vacationing pleasure. The reset did not occur last night, because of a mistake I made. It's now fixed.

Unsorted Trivial

Dec 5th

You can now trade all of your furs to the trapper at the same time. Radio button selection is now preserved on the Create Player page. This should reduce the incidence of accidental Seal Clubbers.

You can now look at player info from the "search players" dialog.

You can now see equipment when you look at a player's info.

Fixed a bug whereby you'd get no mana back if you had a pagoda but no tent. Who'd've thought that'd ever happen?

The Show Player now adds "http://" to the front of a link, if it isn't already there.

Deleting a message no longer sends you back to the first page of your messages.

Level restrictions were added for various things: Flea Market: lvl 5 Join a Clan: lvl 10 Mall: lvl 20 Form a Clan: lvl 50 Buy a Store: lvl 70

The twig portion of the Toot Oriole's quest is now easier...

Fixed a long-unnoticed bug with clovers, where a combination monsters/adventures zone would only do the clover adventure if it didn't pick a monster, instead.

The way the Gravy Fairy works has been changed. A level 20 BGF now makes a given item twice as likely to drop, rather than simply adding 40% to the drop rate. Item drops will now make more sense again.

Maxed out gym payoff at level 200. You can now get 40 of a stat per turn, maximum.

Fixed a huge hole in the tr4pz0r code. Thanks again again, boozerbear.

Fixed a huge hole in the Bounty Hunter Hunter code. Thanks again again, boozerbear.

Fixed a huge hole in the clan stash code. Thanks, boozerbear.

Made it so you can only do the Dolphin King's Map once, and it counts as an accomplishment.

Fixed a bug whereby things that were supposed to increase your chance of finding items actually decreased it.

Fixed a bug whereby every monster had one extra hit point. Heh.

The profanity filter now applies to private messages as well as the chat pane.

Clan Item, Flea Market, and Store purchases, and all clan administrative actions, now no longer send messages to the recipient/owner. They instead generate events, which are displayed in the "new events" window on any main map page. This'll cut down on some clutter in the message table.

The odds in the casino are now closer to what they should be. You can stop hammering on it now.

Fixed a bug in the way the moons were being interpreted. The grue should make more sense now. A couple of additional moon effects are also now in place.

The display of new messages from the main map screens is temporarily disabled, until I can figure out some problems I'm having with the message system.

Clan Item messages are now only kept for 1 day. This should reduce some clutter until I can figure out a better way to handle it.

The weekly square-rooting of advertising budgets should now work the way it's supposed to.

Line breaks are now preserved when messages are displayed. Whoohoo!

The message screen is now paginated. This should also also cut down on some wasted bandwidth, also, too.

Character info is now in a separate frame, which only updates when it needs to. This should also cut down on some wasted bandwidth.

Adventures are now handled by a centralized document, which stops the map from being displayed every time you adventure. This cuts down on a TON of wasted bandwidth, and streamlines things a bit.

The Typical Tavern has been changed in various ways. Better rewards, less drunkenness. That kind of thing.

Familiars are now clickable-upon in the character pane -- this takes you directly to your terrarium.

Links are now active (after a fashion) in the chat pane and in private messages.

MP is now calculated based on Magicalness, rather than on your primary stat.

That thing I did with the initiative bonuses a few weeks ago is now actually working correctly. You also get a free weapon attack when you win the initative check in combat, so NOW the number of first-turn kills should be really dramatically higher.

I finally isolated and fixed that stupid bug whereby the "active players" list on the chat pane would go blank every once in a while. At 5+ months, this marks the end of the game's longest-running bug.

The ring of half-assed regeneration now does what it's supposed to have been doing for a long time.

Weapons, Hats, Pants and Accessories now have level requirements. This should cut down on the begging and twinking a bit.

Fixed a bug where familiars with apostrophes in their names were being deleted if you tried to put them into the terrarium.

Player-owned shops with empty inventories no longer show up in the mall list.

You now get an initiative bonus when fighting a monster whose level is lower than yours. This should increase the number of "first-turn kills" you get when fighting low-level monsters.

"Regular" adventures can now add effects, and effects are now indicated with a message in the results of whatever action caused it (sometimes.)

Top menu is now in a frame.

Healing items, mp items, and stat boosters can now be used in quantity.

Healing items, mp items, and stat boosters are now in the food/drinks inventory section as well as the miscellaneous section.

Regular attacks and Moxious Manuevers now do a lot more damage to monsters whose level is lower than yours. Any monster who's way below you can now pretty much always be taken out in one hit, which is as I feel it should be.

Arbitrary amounts of meat can now be attached to player messages.

You can now "sell all but one" of a given item in your inventory.

Inventory is now divided up into categories.

All non-normal messages are now deleted after 2 weeks. This includes clan item, player store, flea market, and PvP messages.

Usable clan furniture has been moved to the "clan gym," and can now be used for more than one Adventure at a time.

In an effort to clean up the clan page, and to conserve a little bit of bandwidth, the activity log has been moved to its own page.

Made it so everything carbonated adds MP.

Added the Moxious Manuever to Moxie classes, which uses 1MP to make an attack which substitutes Moxie for Strongness in the new combat system.

Meatsmithing now works the same as cooking and cocktailcrafting.

Your password is now required in order to delete your account.

Clan Leaders can now delete Clan Messages.

Combine / Cook / Cocktail links now appear at the top of the inventory screen if you have the appropriate item.

The bonuses given by stat-boosting items were fixed -- previously, the most expensive ones gave less than the mid-ranged ones.

Items can now be enchanted to increase stats by a percentage.

The hippy camp and Orcish frat house are now easier by 5 levels.

I cut down on the number of prior messages shown in the chat pane, in an effort to conserve some bandwidth.

April 15th

The "forgot password" function will now also send activation codes (if the account is not yet activated.)

Reduced the color depth on all of the images (which I should've done in the first place) -- no quality was lost, and they're all about half their original size now. This'll buy me another month or so of not having to start paying a lot for bandwidth.

Implemented a limited spamming-prevention routine on the chat pane -- you can no longer repeat anything you've said in your last 5 posts.

Made it so the chat pane only refreshes when there's something new in it -- this should cut way down on bandwidth usage (which is becoming sort of an issue...)

The item description mini-page can no longer be jacked up with impunity.

Food items now add fullness. You can't get more than about 20 extra turns per day from food, now.

Items in the Flea Market are now ordered alphabetically.

The Enchanted Eyepatch no longer drops -- a regular eyepatch is in its place, and the Enchanted one is now a crafted item. It was a little too powerful for where it was found.

You should no longer be able to end up with the login page in a frame.

The text box in the chat pane now limits itself to 100 characters (only the first 100 were displayed, anyway.)

Campsite items are no longer wasted if you already have one.

The Hall of Records now shows the top 20 players instead of the top 10.

You can now transfer leadership of a clan to another player.

You can now discard zero-value items. Worthless items are now zero-value, due to exploits.

The new monster combat system was rolled out to all existing monster encounters. This should make certain areas easier for lower-level players.

The new PvP system is now in place at the campground. Battles are resolved in a completely different way, and the outcomes are no longer entirely non-random. You can also now attack whoever you want (except a player who is much much weaker than you,) and only 10 player attacks may be commited in a 24-hour period.

The Arena now has 10 difficulty levels.

Tents (and cottage) now reduce player power by a percentage (plus the original flat value.)

In the main message screen, messages are now ordered by date. Sorry they weren't before.

Ordered clan listings at the recruiter by number of members, and removed the zero-member clans from the list.

Added the ability to disassemble and reassemble clovers.

Added item grouping to all of the drop-down lists for selecting items.

Improved the inventory interface somewhat. Items now stack, making the page a lot smaller, and can be sold all at once (but not used all at once, yet. Once the drunkenness is implemented, there should be little call for this.) You can also unequip stuff for the first time ever. This needed to be done for the accessories, mentioned in the previous (following) item.

Added a new class of items, Accessories, of which you can wear 3, and which can carry enchantments. There aren't any actually in there yet, but the functionality's there. Also, items can now be enchanted to add +X to ALL stats.

Added drunkenness meter. Not certain what effect this will have on gameplay, but there's a new entry in the hall of records for it, and it resets when the daily script runs.

All food items are now zero-value, and zero-value items can no longer be transferred to other players by any means (that I'm aware of.)

Added a reply function to messages, and a bug report mailto link to the top menu.

Added "Effects," which stay with you through a certain number of adventures. It'll work like this -- [use] on a candle (or whatever) will give you the "Light" effect for 3 adventures. Maybe some zones will require light to have an adventure there. This will pave the way for temporary stat-boosting potions and stuff like that.

The forums popup link isn't all screwed up anymore.

Added an individual set of flags for some adventures, so that they can get more complex. This will be demonstrated in the next few things I add.

Made it so if you've already got, for instance, a crusty l-shaped piece of metal, you won't find another one. This should make it less likely to have 20 copies of half of a recipe and none of the other half.

Noodles eliminated (for now) due to potential for exploits.

You can now sell zero-value items in the flea market again. This may change.

Added foties to the list of items purchasable by a clan leader. Equivalent to three beers.

Added "Outfit" functionality -- like Item Sets in Diablo II.

Added account limit (1 per e-mail) and e-mail activation.

Fixed the message function such that messages are now actually limited to 1000 characters, instead of just pretending to be.

Set up the daily script to automatically delete PvP messages older than two weeks.

Added The Dark and Dank and Sinister Cave, the Council of Loathing, and Epic Hats.

Fixed the Spooky Scarecrow recipe. And by fix, I mean added. I had forgotten to put it in the combination table. My bad.

Fixed a bug whereby if you tried to go to the sewer with no adventures, it'd still take your gum. Also, if you had a clover and tried to play an adventure when you were out, it'd take the clover. Here's hoping too many people didn't get screwed by that.

Added the ability to delete player accounts (from [account] in the top menu.)

Added the ability to attach items to messages. FedEx!

Made it so monster combat favors your primary attribute in determining stat rewards.

Fixed an item duplication bug, as well as another player-caught infinite meat/stats bug. Dammit.

Degrassi Knoll, a bunch of monsters, a bunch of items, and a bunch of new recipes were added.

All item lists are now sorted alphabetically, rather than by itemid.

A bug that prevented the Haiku Dungeon from showing up was fixed.

See Also

History of Loathing 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
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