2003 January - March April - June July - September October - December

2004 January - March April - June July - September October - December

2005 January - March April - June July - September October - December

2006 March

-> Back to the History home

July 2004

Sometime in July
Rumors begin that the Reset will no longer happen.

Alliance from Hell collections every tradable item in the game. Mr Skullhead awards them all a Consolation Ribbon for their efforts.

Additionally, discussions intensify over bugmeat, exploiters, and inflation. Ironically, it would pale in comparison to the hacks that would come in future months.

July 1
SeveredToe starts Radio KoL, which eventually becomes the official radio station for the Kingdom.

July 2
Whatthedeuce and PsycicPsyco find an item duplication bug which is left open for several days over the weekend.

July 4
The burrito bug from yesterday has been fixed -- thanks to everybody who reported it.

After duping sober pills on the 2nd, HotStuff runs a wildly popular (and controversial) contest to distribute the pills to those who find (via haiku riddle) and pvp the character 'SoberPill.'

Anthrax101 finds an exploit that allows skills to cost negative meat, giving him an insane amount of meat.

July 5
Started striping commas from offer Meat amounts.

July 9
KoL is no longer a nights-and-weekends hobby as Jick quits his job to work on the game full-time. Donations are coming in fast enough to pay for the technical aspects as well as a small salary for Jick and Mr. Skullhead.

July 10
Muzzy introduces his third-party tool that improves upon the in-game PvP search.

July 11
Fnord7 introduces ChatBot to the community. Later on he also creates the popular Escrow and Chef bots, the former of which is eventually made obsolete with the addition of an official, in-game item-for-time trade system.

July 12
Muzzy goes live with his website that offers free buffs to any player.

July 13
While not the first person to do so, Jayo becomes infamous for openly selling Mr. A's for $6.50 in real cold hard cash.

July 15
A bunch of little changes and improvements were [made] today (and yesterday):

The gourd quest now requires 5+x items, where x is the number of times you've done the quest.

A bulk price-management feature has been added to Mall stores.

You can now search for only the cheapest X instances of a given set of items, in the Mall.

Some places (The Shore, the Hedge Maze, etc.) have been given "Last Adventure" functionality.

Familiars will no longer act in combat if you're running away, or fail to select a skill.

Einekleine finds a mall pricing bug. Xkript becomes a notorious abuser of the exploit until it's patched on the 18th.

July 16
BoozerBear has some 500 Mr. A's and shooting for 1000.

Riff begins his infamous riddle contest. It continues on for weeks and is the first forum topic to reach 20 pages.

July 17
Qrrbrbirlbel, with some initial capital and autoselling, buys out all of BoozerBear's 66 meat salty dogs.

150k accounts have been created.

July 18
An exploit/scam involving mall price changes has been plugged up. Shame on all y'all who abused it, and know that The Eye is on you.

In other news, /exit will now let you leave the chat.

In other other news, the player search feature has been modified a little. It now shows win/loss records for PvP-only searches, and if you leave the name field blank, it'll return 100 players in random order. This should make PvP a little easier on the players whose names start with A and B...

July 19
The message system has been revamped. There's now an Outbox, and the interface for managing messages has been enhanced quite a bit.

Elarrina and Belgarion's original Clan Looters list is handed over to Lacey and Pimonkey, where it remained until it was accidentally wiped off Pi's server.

July 20
The Daily Dungeon is randomized so you don't necessarily get the same legend item each time.

July 21
UPGRADE! The new servers are all online, and stuff seems to be working quite a bit more quickly. The way it works is that when you go to www.kingdomofloathing.com, it figures out which of the three web servers has the fewest people logged on, and redirects you to the login page on that server.

Apart from the speed, it doesn't matter which server you're on. Everybody's still in the same world, the same chat, etc.

The dev server is set up for testing features before they're publicly released.

July 22
BoozerBear turns over leadership of WarClan to Inari and begins Mahi, a clan he stuck with until October 16th. That day he also brought cheap salty dogs back to his Casbah once more.

July 23
GodOfLoathing performs the most malicious attack on KoL yet. Chaos is unleashed upon the Kingdom in what is the beginning of the 2nd Blackhat Era. BoozerBear is a key figure in catching the hacker and restoring security. His account of the events is here

Elsewhere, HotStuff steals a Mr. A via PvP and becomes instrumental in getting Jick to eventually flag them as unlootable items.

Chefbot, also from Fnord7, goes public and enables all classes to cook any item.

July 25
KoL at Coldfront goes online and by early November is the official KoL fansite.

July 26
The Clan interface has been revamped. There are a lot of little enhancements and improvements, designed to make your clan administration day just a little bit brighter. The Clan Application and Clan Administration webpages are created; it was previously one long page.

July 27
Minor change: Stat requirements for zones now check against your modified stat, rather than your base. This means you can now get temporarily powerful enough to adventure in places you otherwise couldn't.

Speaking of places, there's a new one. The Limerick Dungeon has been added to the Dungeon full of Dungeons. It's appropriate for levels 3-4, but there's some new stuff that I'm sure the higher-level players will want to see, as well. "One of those new items was the Basic Meat Fez, an item largely created for BoozerBear. Later on he would get his very own personalized one, modeled after a real-life fez Boozer owns."

Begrudgingly, Jick semi-implements containers, though they're still useless.

August 1
The McLargeHuge event got slowed down a bit by some hardware failures on my end. Everything's back up and running now, though, so expect more happenings on the peak starting tomorrow.

In other news, I think I fixed the problem with chat messages dropping out randomly. Please use the "report bug" link if you see this still happening.

If you click on the name portion of a message notification, you'll now get the sender's profile rather than the messages screen.

July 27
The Warehouse 23 bot is born.

July 28
Hippies everywhere! Protestors at Mt. McLargeHuge!

Muzzy creates a Hell Ramen Price Watch to track market fluctuations to help speculators and economists.

August 2004

August 2
A new batch of chat moderators are appointed: Inari, Trog Dor, BioHazardMan, Birdy, Bragi, NovusOrdoSeclorum, and Vida Londres.

August 3
You can now specify a per-item price when making offers.

August 4
The Penguin Mafia has reportedly sent scouts to the Icy Peak, hoping the recent turmoil will make it easier for them to set up a base of operations there.

In other news, August 4 is only one day later than August 1. Seriously.

BoozerBear, with the help of many, currently owns 1125 Mr. A's but gives 1k of them back to Jick, permanently taking them out of the economy. He, and several others, promptly retire from the hitherto lucrative Mr. A market.

August 5
Player names in your message boxes are now clickable.

The clan Warehouse 23 unleash their bot to automatically sell cheap ramen to the people. Much joyous celebration (and some weeping and gnashing of teeth) ensues.

August 6
Multiple copies of the same accessory now show up correctly when you view another player.

Jick adds "temulency" to the list of drunkenness synonyms on the character pane.

August 8
The most widespread exploitation of bugs occur in what has become known as "Black Sunday." A plethora of infinite meat and item duplication bugs are found and widely detailed so that even non-hackers obtain billions of meat. Despite cries for a game-wide rollback, Jick and Mr. Skullhead opt to use creative meatsinks to attempt to restore meat levels to pre-exploit days. [MORE TO COME HERE.]

As the result of a serious bug Gigs and Bashy find, meat limits are now capped at 4.2B meat.

After the cap is re-introduced, there is roughly 1.5 trillion liquid meat in the economy.

I'm still reviewing my options as far as what to do about the massive influx of bugmeat and duped items. Thanks to everybody who has offered suggestions, and please know that I'm trying to figure out a way to solve this with the least possible negative impact on the innocent. It might be a few days before I arrive at any conclusions about what to do, but I feel that the current economic problems are not too high of a price to pay to avoid making a hasty decision that might have horrible unforseen consequences.

Rest assured that one way or another, things will get squared away.

UPDATE: Mall Store owners can now specify a daily per-person limit on individual items for sale. This should make it a little easier to lower your prices without having to worry about being completely bought out by people reselling your stuff at a profit.

In unrelated news, the Penguin Mafia has begun ramping up their operations in other areas of the Kingdom. Tensions are running high as the council tries to come up with a plan of action.

August 9
Even as the Penguins are driven out of the Hole in the Sky, their operations increase in scope. A shady-looking antiques store has just been built on the Wrong Side of the Tracks...

UPDATE: In an event ostensibly completely unrelated to the economic turmoil, Clan Armies all across the Kingdom abruptly came to the realization that they haven't had anything to eat in months. Luckily, they found a couple of days' worth of oatmeal before anyone was forced to desert. Gert Slacarach, A La-Z Archer spokesman, said of the situation: "Wow. This oatmeal makes me feel approximately twice as powerful as I was yesterday..."

Those with excessive meat (obstensibly bugmeat) have it automatically removed:
From Don Pygoscelis (#176862)
Date: Monday, August 09, 10:50PM

Hello, and allow me to introduce myself: I am Don Pygoscelis, and I represent a group I'm sure you're familiar with, known as the Penguin Mafia.

It has come to our attention that you have recently come into significantly more Meat than you need. We are here to help you, and as such, I have taken the liberty of instructing my associates to relieve you of a portion of this superfluous wealth.

There is no need to thank us. Your cooperation in this matter is thanks enough.
You lose 100000000 Meat.

Bashy begins selling Hell Ramen for 10 meat each. It eventually, among other things, is a large reason Bashy becomes an extremely popular 'celebrity' figure.

August 10
In an effort to test out the new clan army mechanics, and stir things up a little bit, clans are now allowed to attack every 3 hours, instead of 12. This will taper off after a little while.

There's also now a "Most Clan Warfare Wins" table in the Hall of Records. As always, don't touch it.

Also, thanks, everybody, for your patience, suggestions, and words of encouragement. We're getting through this.

The Villa chat channel is created and made accessible through purchasing a Villa Document for .5B meat.

August 11
Fairly significant change to the Mall: Price caps have been raised from 99,999 to 999,999,999.

Closet and inventory raids begin to clean out the millions of items some users have stashed away as a result of the recent series of bugs.

Pachelbel receives a BBFB for finding 4 or 5 different item duplication bugs.

August 12
The Penguin Mafia appears to have introduced a new kind of booze (rum) into the Kingdom, and the pirates of the Obligatory Pirate's Cove seem to be involved in its trafficking.

August 14
Like thieves in the afternoon, the Penguin Mafia have infiltrated every last nook and cranny of the Kingdom, and have stolen every last sober pill that occupied those nooks and crannies. In other words, sober pills are now permanently deleted from the game.

August 15
Muzzy's wildly popular buffbot goes offline as part of some sort of protest against in-game inequities.

August 16
The recipe for Ghost-Pickle-On-A-Stick is disabled, further cementing it's rare item status.

August 17
You've probably already noticed that Trophy Hut went up on the Right Side of the Tracks. Trophies are like tattoos, only shinier. Initially there are only nine trophies, but over the next few weeks more are added make up 14 total.

Also, the stat gains from booze have been adjusted, slightly, to more closely correlate with the quality and rarity of individual booze items. Fermenting powder has also been made available in the Demon Market, since nobody ever bothered with it when it was at the Hermitage.

Fixed the minor bug whereby alcohol had temporarily stopped doing, well, anything.

Muscle and Moxie classes join the Mystical ones in having a PvP potion to balance out all stats.

August 18
Okay, so I've done the same thing with food that I did with booze. Some food items got worse, with respect to stat gains, but most of them got considerably better.

Also, you may have noticed the pre-rollover downtime. I'm trying to reduce the amount of time the rollover and the backup (the thing that causes the hour or so of downtime in the middle of every night) take, and the best way to do that is to kick everybody off while it's running.

After the weekend, there'll probably start to be a period of about 15 minutes every night where you can't log on. I realize this is somewhat annoying, but it's a lot less annoying than what happens to all of the Europeans when they try to play between 4 and 5 CDT now.

Gigs finds a bug in the Hall of Legends that removes the daily meat cap (thus allow many more stats).

August 19
Mystery Raffle #2 went off with very few hitches, and tickets are on sale for the third one!

Also, you can now attach multiple items to a single message, up to (you guessed it) 11. Hit the little plus sign next to the item dropdown to add another dropdown.

Also also, I finally fixed the Cobb's Knob Lab Key bug. Y'know, the one where you'd adventure and adventure, but never get it? Yeah, sorry about that.

Darguz Parsilvan, with Jick, comes up with the Golden Mr. A for special donors. He is the first owner and it isn't widely available until the advent of the Mr. Store in early October.

August 22
Okay, so Mall Stores now have a link at the bottom which will repeat your previous search. Sorry for the goofiness while I was rolling that out.

The Reset FAQ is taken down, further cementing rumors that Reset plans have been scratched.

August 23
KoL is featured in the UK gaming magazine PCZone.

August 26
As you probably noticed, a new dungeon was added last night. Thanks are due to Xenophobe and Ayndin for their creative input.

Third raffle down, fourth one ready to start.

To anybody who's gonna be at PAX: See you at PAX.

The leaderboard drunkenness cap of 255 is removed.

August 27
HotStuff accidentally mentions on the forums the new-and-improved Cake-Shaped Arena, which isn't publicly unveiled until September 9.

Rollover is now referred to as "nightly maintenance" and from this point onward everyone is booted off the servers for 15 minutes while the Kingdom updates and starts a new KoL day.

August 28
Someone gets on NovusOrdoSeclorum's account and bans most of those in Villa before another moderator stops the spree.

August 29
200k accounts have been created.

There are 5,000 registered members on the forums.

September 2004

Sometime in September
SolarFlare secretly duplicates over 1000 Mr. A's before Jick catches on and removes them.

September 1
Guest posting and editing is finally disabled in the KoL Discussion forum.

September 3
Chat text limit has been increased to 200.

The Spectral Pickle Factory re-appears for the 2nd time, again only for 24 hours.

Aelfrhian is made moderator of the KoL Help forum.

September 4
Per Pachelbel's suggestion, White Canadians now give Canadianity. The effect lasts three adventures and Canadianizes your chat (adds eh? and changes "ou" to "oo").

September 5
HotStuff begins selling huge quantities of AT buffs (ex. 10 million advs of Ode to Booze).

September 6
PsychoPop re-creates KOL using the byond.com system.

September 8
Sorry for the long period of announcementlessness. We got back from PAX, at which point I immediately got sick just as every single electrical system in my house shot craps.

I'm back on track, and a number of minor things have been accomplished in the last couple of days.

Due to popular demand, the offer system has been changed to allow item-for-item trades as well as item-for-meat trades. It even allows multiple-items-and-meat for multiple-items-and-meat trades, in case anybody wants to do that. It's now a two-step process: offer and respond. The offerer can include a note telling the offeree what he/she wants in response. Note that the system only works for hermaphrodites.

All items that were floating in the old system have been returned to their original owners.

Jick accidentally deletes everyone's meat. Fortunately, a two-hour old backup is available and everyone's meat is restored.

September 9
Okay, so the Cake-Shaped Arena is now available in the plains for your familiar-battling pleasure. In a related note, there is also now a class of familiar-equippable items. Good stuff!

Unlike the original Cake-Shaped Arena that went up in March 2003 (and removed at an unknown date in '03), this one is for familiars only - not your stats.

Jick gives BoozerBear the Mahi Fez, modeled after Boozer's real-life one. Xenophobe is given the one-of-a-kind "especially homoerotic frat-paddle."

Bartenders-in-the-box now explode after they've made a certain number of drinks.

The Untinker will now work his magic on all copies of an item.

September 10
Some repairs have been made to the flea market code. Nothing you'd notice, gamewise, but it should operate quite a bit more quickly now.

September 12
The Contests forum is created and Philanthropist is appointed moderator.

September 13
Cynn's Boys of Loathing Calendar is now up. Everybody thank her. Clan Leaders can switch between the Girls and Boys Calendars on their administration page.

Fixed the problem with rings of aggravate monster whereby they didn't do anything at all. Also made them a little more effective (5 instead of 3.)

September 14
Jick creates the "fetus-bashing club" just for Bashy.

September 15
You can't use the Arena if you're drunk now, and you're notified when your familiar gains a level there.

September 16
There was a problem with the daily script today that caused people to not get their extra 3 adventures from Clan Calendars.

I went ahead and gave everybody 3 extra, whether they were in a clan or not, because... well, because it was easier.

The problem with player store favorites still taking up space even after the stores were deleted should be fixed now.

Prices set when managing Mall inventory now ignore commas.

If both you and the player you're viewing are active in PvP, you'll now have a link to attack that person when you're viewing their profile.

September 18
Kinky_sex_mace, hAZ and others break into two new areas, Outskirts of The Logging Camp and Canadia, before Jick unveils it. They openly post how to get there (especially in Villa) and Bragi begins selling hacked items in the mall.

September 19
hAZ (#15143) is banned for 1000 days from chat for hackassery (he protests the ban here). CrazyAnnie is banned for 10 days, but her sentence is later reduced. Sealh8r is banned for 31 hours.

September 20
The (count) in the sell stuff dropdown has been moved to after the name of the item, to make it easier to use keyboard shortcuts.

The picture of the Hellion has been edited, since it apparently wasn't an ion at all, the way it was pictured. Thanks to Mantaar for noticing this.

Also, the Dice have an accessory now. Thanks, Fnord7!

A moderators forum is added to the KoL messageboard, visible only to those given access.

September 21
The Council has finally ended its fund raiser, and handed out 8 bottles of Time Juice to each and every player. The bottles give 1 adventure each.

In completely unrelated news, there are a couple of new items for sale at the Bugbear Bakery (rolling and unrolling pins).

The chat no longer automatically does a /who when you first run it. This should make the busier channels easier to deal with.

Rolling pins and unrolling pins (thanks, Xenophobe) have been added, to facilitate the mass processing of wads of dough and flat dough.

Forum members from EHOWA make an attack on the KoL Forums, spamming the board with porn and flames. In the aftermath and clean-up Lacey/Carter is made a forum moderator, only the second person (behind Spikey) to be both chat and forum mod.

September 22
The secret, hidden mod forum is temporarily and accidentally made public (it's unknown how many saw it and read, but at least half a dozen posted).

September 23
Okay, I've implemented the escalating ban system.

First ban = 1 hour.
Second ban = 2 hours.
Third ban = 4 hours.

And so on.

September 24
Havoc Jack begins the Church of Reset.

September 25
Firestorm Zero starts the KoL Weekly Magazine.

Four new "ultra-rares" enter the Kingdom (Hypnodisk, Talisman of Baio, Dense Meat Gem, and Crazy Bastard Sword). EyeSpeculum announces their existence on Radio KoL; the hypnodisk is the first one found (by Tweeky).

September 27
The bug where /w and /? would screw up the scrolling of the chat in Mozilla (and its ilk) has finally been fixed.