The Mighty Thread for Epic Loot

[Ionbound]

So, I was wondering if anyone here has heard of/played The Might Quest for Epic Loot. If so, what do you guys think about it? If not, does anyone want to try it?

[Winterwind]

I played it fairly extensively for quite a while (got to 1200 crowns at the peak, though I have fallen off to half that since due to not having played in forever - and at that time, those 1200 crowns were actually enough to make me the highest ranked player in Germany and put me at like #35 or so worldwide); unfortunately, my computer has some kind of weird issues with it, and it keeps getting random (and really big) lag spikes, and the problem got worse the bigger the castles were (i.e., the higher I got in level). My computer is kind of bad, so I wasn't that surprised, except I was told by friends who have way better computers that they have the same issues, which tells me it is some kind of problem in their engine. I keep hoping they will sort it out eventually.

I have a fairly mixed opinion on it. It is an amazing concept, and the execution is for the most part really fun; unfortunately, it has a few flaws that frustrate me a lot about it. Nonetheless, I would readily recommend everybody to try it out; it is available for free, and at least initially, it is great fun; how much fun it is in the long run depends on how much a number of issues irritates you or not.

Spoiler: The things that irritate me; please read only AFTER having actually played the game

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- If you have a lot of crowns, you can spend a lot of time just looking for a castle worthy of attacking. Since you only get very little or no crowns at all if you attack somebody who has less crowns than you, you need to keep re-rolling the castles displayed if you happen to get nobody with a comparable or higher amount of crowns than you. I often would spend 10-15 minutes between castle runs just clicking the re-roll button, looking all around, sighing, and then clicking it again, over and over.

- The nature of the game incentivizes a lot of things that are extremely unfun to play against when it comes to castle building. Now, for the record, I am not blaming any players for doing any of those things - everybody wants to win, and doing what helps your chances to win is generally the point of any game. The devs, on the other hand, should really do something against some of those things - and to their credit, partially, they have, but nowhere near enough. The things I mean specifically are, for one, that a lot of castles are literal copies of one another; for a game with so much freedom to be creative, I find the degree to which creativity is lacking in most castles' designs to be nothing short of flabbergasting. Now, it got a lot better since the devs nerfed the goo wall-spring trap-fire mine combo (I was quite good at getting past those, but I sooo welcome the greater variety introduced since), but there's still a lot of copycats. The other thing is that, since you get rewarded for making attackers waste their time, there is an incentive to include vast, empty rooms leading nowhere, which attackers need to search anyway on the off-chance there is a mine there after all. Walking through empty rooms is boring, and there should be an incentive to not have any empty rooms at all, not the exact opposite.

- I am not entirely sure what the reason behind this is, but I see some people having ludicrously better item load-outs than others. I don't know whether this is just them having played for a lot longer or what, but as I said, I played quite a lot myself, and I am far removed from having all-purple items. Which makes me suspect some kind of exploit (possibly connected to the next point). Either way, it makes the game somewhat unfair, I feel.

- Chicken farms. The very thought that, while some people earn their items, levels and crowns by legitimately trying to overcome dangerous castles, while others just get them for free by using this stupid exploit infuriates me.

Those would be the reasons that (alongside my computer issues) have made me take an extended break from TMQFEL for now. Nonetheless, I can only repeat, at the very least initially, and, depending on your outlook, possibly permanently, it is a very fun game, with a community that for the most part (with but a few unfortunate exceptions) is much nicer than in most other online games, and I heartily recommend anybody to try it out.


EDIT: It occurs to me that, if I am recommending for people to try it out, maybe it might be wise to explain here what TMQFEL actually is, for people without the time to spend reading the official website. Basically, it is a combination of Dungeon Keeper and Diablo - on one hand, you have a castle, that you design yourself and fill it with a number of monsters and traps to defend it. On the other, you have a hero (out of several classes), whom you play in pretty much Diablo fashion, walking around, using your abilities to overcome levels - except the levels are, for the most part, not created by the developers or some random generator, but are simply the castles of other players (and likewise, your own castle gets attacked by other players). And, I would say, for the most part, it executes both parts of its design really well.