This mud has some very interesting features, the quest tokens that you can use to buy quest equipment or create custom gear, the socketgems and moxes that can be added to equipment to increase their stats, runestones with specific attribute bonuses etc, and runic equipment that levels with you. There is also a decent remort system using tiered classes, and race evolution when you max out your stats.

There are also quite a number of special weapon flags that can result in awesome weapons. The only problem is that if you are starting as a new player, you are never going to catch up to the power of the people running around with full sets of custom equipment. And against them in a pkill situation, you have no chance.

The mud has a small player base, which is dominated by one group of extremely well equiped people who all seem to owe allegiance to each other, so unless you want to jump on their bandwagon or just avoid them all together, you are at a disadvantage as a new player.

Some of the players will call this 'roleplaying', but it is a thin excuse for some to be able to bully and murder new players they have a disagreement with.

Some of the other drawbacks in the mud: The mobs of the realm are also not 'intelligent.' You can attack, flee, come back and most mobs don't remember you.

Items become 'owned' by a character, which prev2ents you from giving them to somebody else or auctioning them off. This is only for runic equipment, but in the end when all the equipment you want to end up having is runic, it results in characters not being able to lose any equipment. This means that even if you are able to pkill one of the super-equiped people, they lose nothing but some gold, quest tokens, and stat points that they can easily regain. In my opinion this really takes away from the fun of pkill, which is competition between people and occurs where you are at risk of losing something you had to work hard to get. In KOTL, there is no risk.

Another drawback is the inability to get things identified except by mage classes. This makes it very hard for new players of other classes to try and figure out what equipment they should keep. It also ends up again benefitting the older players giving them even more advantage since they have most likely created a mage just for identifying items as an alternate character, or have made a mage class their main character (this seems to be the dominant class, since mages can 'gate' to mobs, which allows for easy questing and the accumulation of quest tokens to buy quest/custom eq).

In the end this is an enjoyable mud for some of its unique features, but I found it lose it's luster quite quickly because of the lack of a good player base with balanced sides in pk. Most people sit around questing for the majority of time once they have gathered a decent set of eq.

The best thing that could happen to this mud would be a reset of the player files to level the playing field, otherwise I don't see the player base growing because it is already dominated by a group of super equiped players.

Sylke