TourGuide is based on a script by Ezandora, a long-time KoL speedrunner who built Guide in 2014 as a way to help advise the KoL community on the best ascension tips and tricks from her Gold Star runs and from her /hardcore friends. Guide was quite actively updated and maintained by Ezandora alone from January 2014 to August 2019.
In September 2019, the world of KoL changed. The creator of the game, Zack Johnson, was credibly accused of physical and emotional abuse by his ex-wife, A.M. Darke. Many, many people left KoL (or drastically reduced their time investment in the game) around this time; while Ezandora did not leave, she did dramatically reduce her investment, and her scripts (largely) became unsupported and unmaintained. She was not alone -- many other KoL scripters backed out similarly around that time as well (Stary, Veracity, Soolar, Cheesecookie, etc). Around this time, players who remained active in the game realized that they would need to fork, support, and update their favorite tools if they wished to continue using them as the game continued to receive monthly and yearly content in IOTMs and Challenge Paths.
Loathing Associates Scripting Society was formed by members of the Ascension Speed Show discord by many such players, who began forking old scripts and building new scripts to rebuild and refactor them into the new KoL scripting world. One member of LASS reached out to Ezandora to request her blessing in forking and using Guide; when no response was received, the LASS member defaulted to Ezandora's public domain licensing on Guide and forked it. He began developing it by adding recent IOTMs and bringing the team along on the development of the tool. Several months after this began and TourGuide's first beta was released, Ezandora expressed discontent with the idea of TourGuide, messaged a few members of LASS noting that she did not approve of the fork, and began pushing a handful of updates to Guide. Ezandora has (sporadically) supported Guide since; it does not cover every IOTM since September 2019, but it covers a handful of them now, and is consistently kept abreast of breaking changes.
There was a significant internal debate among TourGuide developers at how to respond to Ezandora's discontent with our fork. We ended up landing at this: while TourGuide owes a massive debt in intellectual property to Ezandora, the actual script is very, very different than the current vintage of Guide. Despite being built on the same exact scaffolding, with extra years of development and a different team overseeing the proceedings, TourGuide and Guide are very different scripts. The team that oversees TourGuide has a deep and substantial appreciation to the incredible work Ezandora has done on Guide, both prior to and after we began work on TourGuide. But we feel TourGuide -- with additional IOTM resource advice, slightly different quest requests, and increased usage of the script's alert mechanisms -- has an important place in the KoL ecosystem for bleeding edge speedrunners.
We share this here for three reasons. One, we wanted to make sure users are aware of how important Ezandora is to the underlying code that built TourGuide and stands at the script's scaffolding. Two, we wanted to make sure any member of the public who would potentially rather keep using Guide if they knew this history would have that knowledge. And finally, we wanted to make sure to express that while we respect and appreciate Ezandora's work, it is our view that TourGuide is distinct enough and content-rich enough to deserve continued support even with Ezan's Guide updates over the recent years.
Thank you for reading!
In addition to Ezandora (noted above), here are a handful of developers we would like to explicitly credit for their substantial work on TourGuide over the years: