Adventure Land - The Code MMORPG

This game is essentially abandoned by the only developer, who seems to only check in every few weeks to make sure the servers are still up. Bugs are rampant and generally not fixed unless they start to become abused by more than a few players, item/skill balance is non-existent; and the paladin character was a work in progress when I started which is two years a this point. The entire economy is dictated by a group of ~2-3 players and due to the way item upgrades work you will likely never get your hands on any significant amount of some of the best items as you will always be outbid. Multi-accounting is against the rules but is easily bypassed by simply claiming someone else from your house is playing. Many of the in-game achievements are technically possible but would require you to spend multiple years completing the same task. Many of the truly late game items don't even drop from monsters or have drop rates that require 6+ months of grinding. At one point there was no class restrictions for some items but this was changed a few years back; the old items that existed before this change remain with no restrictions as "legacy" versions which you as a new player will have no chance of obtaining. I have had a lot of fun playing this game but it's been in a slow state of dying for several years now and without a significant amount of attention from the developer it's simply not worth investing your time into.

Game is based on gear. Best 'starter' gear is attained via random armor/weapon chests received from gems or boss mobs. Best way to get those gems is via arena which is pvp. That is shut down by high level players.

According to the dev on discord this game will become open source in the next 2 months! :D

I don't think the playerbase seems to have discovered the real potential. This is an old school MMO like "The Realm" except that everybody is playing a stable of interactible characters. The programming might be the dorkiest route to this end but it enables so many dimensions of interaction.

It's an interesting take on the MMORPG genre, making the scripting / botting aspect already present in many modern MMORPGs an integral part of the actual gameplay. It uses a JavaScript-like language with some quirks that will frustrate occasionally. If one seeks to play the game without using the scripting, it is possible to play but not advisable. As a tool for teaching coding and a unique take on the MMORPG genre, Adventure Land succeeds mostly well. The world and lack of lore and story definitely hurt immersion. Over time, the game becomes too pointlessly grindy. Upgrading weapons also has too high of a failure rate, adding unnecessary length to the progression process. This game is a mixed bag and definitely geared towards a specific niche. If you are part of that niche, check it out. Otherwise, wait for a deep discount or avoid.

Now with ChatGPT I am back to coding.

While this game is definitely interesting, I noticed while looking through the discord that they use Pepe emotes a lot. While this may not be inherently bad, one of those emotes is explicitly throwing the OK symbol in it. I asked in this discord why this is here when that cannot be just a coincidence to see a symbol used as a hate symbol paired with another symbol also used to signal to others that they are white supremacists. The response I got from someone with a volunteer role in their discord is spamming of the emote and then claiming it is used for love. I do not believe the community is safe for Trans BIPOC members and I cannot in good faith recommend this game to anyone. Please be careful. Edit: After having a full discussion with members of their community and the "volunteer" in question in their discord, they made it clear that removing the imagery "let's the bad people win" but also that affirming and directly addressing the communities that get hurt was too much because, as the volunteer put it, "This is not an LGBT community". There were people that learned new things there, but the general consensus was that they were going to reclaim the imagery without doing any of the work to address why they would need to, and without acknowledging any groups affected by it. If this is your bag, go for it, but it sure as heck isn't mine.

A great game if you are seeking to entertain yourself with a variety of programming problems. Begin with automating a single character, building on your scripts as you unlock more skills. Your scripts will begin to expand even further when you begin to co-ordinate multiple characters in a party with different classes. The addition of new monsters, areas, and world events ensures that you will have new problems to solve. The extent of your scripts will be somewhat limited by programming ability, however this is an excellent game to develop programming skills and knowledge. A nice bonus is the highly active Discord community, which is very welcoming of newcomers of all abilities. Highly recommended to anybody with an interest in programming.

idle mmorpg for programmers

It's a neat premise, and I do like it for the fact that it helped me learn JS a bit, which is a language I haven't messed with (though I know many others). However, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe it's just not my style, but I don't think that's it. I play idle games, and enjoy them usually. And this is essentially an idle game, since you're using code to control your character automatically. But I don't like this game's progression for a few reasons. 1. Way too grindy from the getgo. I don't have the kind of weeks this game would require. Your character will be extremely weak for a very long time until you manage to get lucky enough to get the right items. You can't buy anything but the weakest items in this game, so everything has to be found, which isn't bad on its own, except that all the players are camping the same mobs, which means high-level players are in the newbie areas constantly spamming all the monsters to death from a huge range and with 5 simultaneous targets, while you're limited to walking extremely slowly and attacking them one at a time, meaning you don't get ANY. 2. No real progression. There are no skills in the traditional sense, you don't level up any abilities and you don't learn any new abilities. There's no skill tree, and no stat points to distribute. You also can't power up your character at all with leveling, as leveling seems to do absolutely nothing except extend your HP and MP pools. Your stat changes seem to make no difference at all in combat. It never took me less hits to kill a monster between level 1 and advancing to level 40. So the only way to increase your strength is to upgrade your items, and this is done at the forge, randomly. Failing means you lose the item entirely (always a horrible mechanic in games where every item has to be obtained as a drop). I would never risk upgrading any item other than the base ones as a result. It would just be a huge waste after the many hours it would take to get one of these extremely rare drops. 3. Monsters level up if left alone for a while, meaning even weak monsters become extremely strong and take forever to kill. I think this mechanic is supposed to increase your item luck, but it doesn't seem to. You do, at least, get more XP. 4. There's an achievements system that's locked behind quests that will be impossible in your first few weeks, and this achievement system is the main source of stat upgrades (not leveling up). The mobs chosen to give you the item that unlocks this system are always the strongest on the server, which means you will never kill them as anything but a veteran. Stuuu-pid. 5. I kind of assumed there would be some kind of story or something but there doesn't seem to be. Just kill mobs, level up, get items. Which isn't necessarily bad, but since I can't seem to advance at all...it's just boring. Maybe I'll leave it running for a few weeks so I can move into the 2nd area though. I don't know; I'm not really into it. However, I will leave a few tips behind for those who do pick up this game. First thing you should do is make your own version of the use_hp_or_mp function that comments out or deletes the last two "else ifs," otherwise your character will use a potion anytime they lose a single point in either stat. Huge waste. Then replace the "use_hp_or_mp" line with your new function. Second thing to do is remove the "|| character.isMoving" or whatever it says in the conditions for the if that cancels the loop. You don't want the character to stop processing targeting just because they are moving. By removing this, your character will be able to retarget while still moving before they've reached their destination if the target is no longer available. Anyway, hopefully the game will get better.