Converting kuro5hin into a MMORPG (Meta) By richarj Sat Oct 22nd, 2005 at 07:29:45 AM EST
	After many hours of playing the worlds best MMORPGs progress quest ,hearing rumours about some game called second life and reading that article about the new abuse reporting system, it occurred to me that kuro5hin could be turned into a MMORPG.

What is a MMORPG and how does K5 become one you ask? MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Massively means that there are at least um 200 or more players in the game at the same time (normally it means thousands). I believe that after conversion K5 will accommodate this many players, assuming of course that rusty upgrades the server from a 486. Multiplayer and Online K5 already meets these criteria. Role Playing Game This is where the real meat is. Players start out by choosing their class. In true fatalist style there is only one choice "nullo". "nullo" players then are given their first quest, to post a comment, diary or article (articles must be posted to either section or the front page). Once a "nullo" has posted something then that player changes class into "troll". There are only two other player classes "Meta Troll" and "Bot". Players can't be "Bots" because the are computer programs that autopost with no originality e.g. k5 weather. I'll get to "Meta Trolls" later Guilds Like other MMORPG's K5 will have Guilds but they will be rather nebulous in nature. Each Guild is in fact a viewpoint, such as "The American Government Sucks", "Intelligent Design is a Fraud upon Science", "I will become immortal by my memes", "Kitten Sucks" etc. In fact a player can be a member of any guild at any time, the way it works is like this: in order to support their guild a player must post a comment, diary, story with that viewpoint as a major focus. Flamewars can now be renamed to Guild Wars. Unlike other MMORPG's there is no structure to a Guild, no leaders, no rewards except for the glory of fighting for the cause, and you can leave and join at any time. Gameplay So what will we expect from K5 MMORPG play? The most important part of any RPG and thus any MMORPG is content. K5 as a MMORPG is about player generated content i.e. comments, diaries and stories. All fighting is about that content whether that be modbombing or just plain trolling comments. Players' stats So far I have only fashioned one stat and that is understand-ability. Understand-ability is wether people understand your content in the way in which you want them to. Bad grammar, spelling etc don't affect Understand-ability as much as sentence structure so be relieved that mispelling a word does not decrease your stat. Player alignment Unlike the typical Good-Neutral-Evil of most RPG's I believe that on K5 a player must either be crazy or insane or somewhere inbetween. You can make your own mind up as to who is more crazy or insane, because they already have made their mind up about you. "Meta Trolls" The ultimate goal of any player is left up to them but I decided that having a few unique goals is the best way to encourage play. Since all content creating players are "trolls" how does one distinguish which players are better than the others? This is where the "Meta Troll" comes in, a player transcends trolldom to become a "Meta Troll" when their content creation cease to look like attempts at trolling. You might say I'm not a "troll" but frankly we all are, just get used to the fact. The other goals are to leave the game. This involves creating content in the diary section about how much the game sucks and you want to leave. This must be repeated over several weeks until you decide to either leave for greener pastures (Husi is just astroturf anyway) or stay on. Whining is not a goal but rather a subgame. It can be played both ways, causing a player to whine or whining yourself. The most common whines are I got modbombed by [insert name] My story got voted down you bastards [insert name] crap flooded my diary/story/conversation Why do people zero my comment then reply to it? It's stupid. While standard whines are ok, repeating them is boring. I believe we need more creative ways to whine. Player Killing or pking Althought it is impossible to kill other players (they have no health stats) it is possible to harass them to similar effect. Players do not own physical property in the game so the only real thing you can attack is their comments. The mean cruel people who do this can choose to either Crapflood a players Diary by filling it with inane comments or ModBomb them which involves rating as Zero as many of the victims comments as possible. Now with the abuse reporting additions this can reach greater heights, I am just not sure wether those heights are annoying the administrators or the other players. Conclusion There are many other subgames which can be played but that is getting me away from the conclusion. Once K5 has been turned into a MMORPG it will be more popular than before and more players means more fresh meat for trolling. So let the conversion begin.

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Is K5 a game? Yes 27% No 2% It Soon Will Be 17% That's a Troll 34% Only to losers, I will continue intelligent conversation. 19% Votes: 47 Results | Other Polls

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Scoop Kuro5hin progress quest k5 weather Husi More on Humour Also by richarj