zOMG!

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

zOMG! is a browser-based MMORPG on Gaia Online where users battle monsters and go on RPG-style quests. The game utilizes special rings to activate abilities, such as throwing fireballs or conjuring up a defense. Users did not level up the traditional way via experience points, but instead, through collecting Charge Orbs and empowering their rings with them.

zOMG! was made public and open to beta testing in November 2008, and a number of updates were made to the rings and flow of the game from 2008 to November 2014, when its servers were shut down.

On March 13, 2017, zOMG! returned from the dead and existing users can pick back up where they left off.

Tropes used in zOMG! include:
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Barton Sewers, which are also the game's Noob Cave.
  • Action Girl: Blaze.
  • Affectionate Parody: The entire Old Aqueduct area is an extended parody of the Aliens and Predator franchises, with other scatterd homages to other Sc-Fi franchises such as Men in Black, Stargate, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Dying in the Hive Mini Game results in a "GAME OVER MAN!" Message, and even mentions nuking the place from Orbit. They even have Face Huggers and Chest Bursters as items!
  • Anchors Away: Anchor Bugs and Sea Anchor Bugs, which can launch their anchor heads at you. You can also get a recipe to make an anchor for your avatar to wield too.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Null crystals. They fuel your weapons and teleport you from place to place. One quest even charges you with bringing an Animated-influenced item to the Null Chamber in order to revert it back to normal.
  • April Fools' Day: The OmniDrink-sponsored quest and new area. The game crashed when you tried to travel to the new area, after the Loading Screen mocked you for five minutes.
    • Can't forget Airshark can we? It's practically what made the event.
  • Ass Kicks You: The Bump ring, according to flavor text ("Turn that hip around and bump your enemies away!").
  • Bee-Bee Gun / Gosh Hornet: Hornet's Nest.
  • Beehive Barrier: The Improbability Sphere.
  • Berserk Button: Go to the forums and ask how to sell rings. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Big Freaking Gun: Guns Guns Guns, mostly as you use 3/4 to all of your rage with it.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Otherwise known as "those damn Masks". The early October 2009 update made Masks of Death and Rebirth extremely dangerous to fight due to their spamming of three status effects depending on its current state. The first pins you to the spot, the second puts you to sleep, the third makes you lose all control of your character and rings while it is free to chip away at your health. Woe to you if you have to fight one (or a group!) alone without the willpower to resist those effects.
    • Mother Fluffs may also qualify, since they can incite other usually-docile fluffs to attack you as well.
  • Bonus Boss: Landshark.
    • And Jack in the Halloween event of 2010. In Otami Ruins, he has 250,000 HP. CL of 15.0 AND every single attack of yours only takes off 1HP. Even if you use RR 4 HACK. He took an average of two hours to beat even with over a hundred players attacking him.
      • Nerfed recently, now his CL is 11.9 and takes less time to beat.
  • Breast Plate: Played straight by Lin.
    • Averted by the female members of the Barton Guard, who wear the same armor as their male counterparts. This CAN lead to Viewer Gender Confusion since some of the male faces can look very feminine and the female faces can look very masculine.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Power-ups are primarily bought with Gaia Cash, which requires real monies. Though they are also allowed to be resold on the Marketplace, inevitably for high amounts of Gaia Gold. Rings also used to be allowed to be freely sold, before the massive backlash of this trope.
  • Call Back: Pay attention to the intro, it will be on the exam. While you're at it, read all the old comics too.
  • Character Select Forcing: In Dead Man's Shadow, a Grue can randomly attack your party. This is not an actual enemy encounter, but a rare scripted event. If you are not carrying Solar Rays when the Grue strikes, you are instantly KO'd.
  • Cloning Blues: Labtech X has a bad case of this.
  • Cognizant Limbs: Sealab X. It's got the tail, the body, the left arm, the right arm, and the head.
    • The body-and-arms phase of the fight is probably the best example, since you fight them all at once. Note that the phase ends when the body is destroyed, whether or not you've killed the arms, so most crews will just aim for the body.
  • Continuity Nod: The True Believers and the GIB at the Old Aqueduct were both originally founded by players.
    • Air Shark, originally a fan elaboration on the April Fools' Day joke, has become an actual Animated monster that occassionally drops bombs on Barton Town.
    • Not to mention the Chyaku Norisu Clan, which was named after a Monthly Collectible scarf. (Which was named after... You know...)
  • Cosmetic Award: More specifically, often as not quests are rewarded with a "recipe" that you can take to the local tinker to make into some spiffy item you can wear or carry around, but doesn't actually affect your stats.
    • Done for a reason - they didn't want to go through every single item Gaia Online had and add stats to it.
  • Collection Sidequest: Not as rampant as in some other MMOs, but still there.
    • The repeatable quests include quite a few of this nature, edging into Twenty Bear Asses territory.
    • The badges. The main site will track the ones for killing certain numbers of each type of enemy, but other flavors (such as finding a certain location of the map) aren't hinted at. There are also the holiday-only badges, which may or may not be Lost Forever depending on whether the same type of activity is repeated next year.
      • Also with a hint of Guide Dang It: The Tiny Terrors at the Old Aqueduct and the Anchor Bugs on the Buccaneer Boardwalk do NOT count toward their respective kill badges.
  • Cool Airship: Captain Crescento's airship, which appeared for the April Fool's Day event.
  • Critical Annoyance: A heartbeat sound if you're low on health, heavy panting if you're low on Stamina, both bordering on Most Annoying Sound. And they don't get muted if you turn off game sounds or turn down the volume in the options menu.
  • Cute Monster Girl: The Water Spouts, which are all extremely curvaceous humanoid females formed of Animated water.
    • This is played up to 11 with the pictures of them that are shown on the loading screens. This troper can never go through SS without commenting on Lorelei's sexiness.
  • Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Getting KO'd by Animated, of course. In a more meta example, Word of God is that the death of Johnny K. Gambino in the comic will not keep him from being involved in zOMG! Though this may be a Half Truth, since his clone is plotting to take over Gaia with the Animated, which means he's already involved.
  • Derelict Graveyard: Deadman's Pass.
  • Development Hell: Now officially on the back-burner due to lack of interest (read, revenue).
  • Developer's Room: The bar in Barton Town.
  • Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: The Taunt ring is a literal example, at higher rage ranks your avatar will perform mosaic'd hand gestures and even shout bleeped obscenities at the Animated.
  • Duct Tape for Everything: The Duct Tape ring allows you to bind your enemies for a short while.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Averted. Once you reach a high enough level, the NPCs handing out the repeatable quests go, "I should stop wasting your time here, you probably have better things to do. I'll handle the rest myself." Then you can suppress your level and they'll conveniently forget that you have better things to do.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: The Animated. Bet you never thought you could get killed by a horde of lawn gnomes. This is a case taken to the extreme: if it isn't naturally sentient, chances are it is now and is trying to kill you.
  • Final Boss: Labtech X and his living mecha, the Mechlab Bot.
  • First Town: Barton. Also the first town to be created on the site in general.
  • Game Breaking Bug: It seems there's always one quest giver or another that glitches up and won't talk to players, preventing them from turning in a quest. Especially irritating when it's part of a quest chain and thus forces the player to grind another way to become strong enough to continue on.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Manages to be averted and played straight at the same time. Nearly every gameplay aspect of zOMG is explained in the plot itself, from the Respawn Points, to the Socialization Bonus, to the rings themselves. However, the massive changes to Gaia's world that have appeared in zOMG are rarely (if ever) mentioned on the site proper. NPCs can travel from town to town with ease, despite passage supposedly being impossible. The Animated are almost never mentioned, and everyone can still find time to attend Prom, or Summer Camp without having to worry about monster attacks.
    • Then, there is also a case of Gameplay And Gameplay Segregation. As Gaia's main site revolves around avatar customization, players can dress up their avatars however they like. However, none of your items offer any bonuses. A player walking around in Powered Armor is just as susceptible to damage as someone wearing nothing but a loin cloth. An Alien with sticks for arms is just as effective in combat as an Orc capable of lifting a car on his shoulder. Vampires can run around in the sunlight and kill Animated Garlic. Basically, players receive no advantages or disadvantages based on appearance.
      • Which was, of course, lampshaded in the intro comic to zOMG. A hotshot guard, idolized by everyone else, announces that he will slay the Animated easily with his Ancient Katana!!... The mundane weapon proves totally worthless against the Animated, and judging from the subsequent Gory Discretion Shot, so was his armor. It has to do with Ghi.
  • Gang Plank Galleon: Buccaneer Boardwalk.
  • Genre Blindness: After you defeat the Chapter Boss the NPCs you've helped through out the game congratulate you, and are under the impression that Labtech X has been killed. ...Even though it's been established that a visit to the Null Chamber makes you functionally immortal. Labtech X has been studying Ghi longer than anyone, and is surely aware of the Null Chamber's existence. Not to mention the fact that he's a clone of the man with the lowest score on the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness in the history of Gaia. Seriously, if he wasn't dead before, what makes you think he's dead now?
    • Provokes Genre Savvy from the players, as most of them don't buy it, either. Most of the Labtech X fanthread simply believe that Labtech X teleported to a safer place upon the robot's defeat, just like Labtech 123 did earlier.
  • Green Hill Zone: The Village Greens, a golf course inhabited by psychopathic gnomes and killer plastic flamingos.
    • Get far enough into it, and you can get rained on by Gnomish flak cannons.
      • You have to. You're not allowed to get those mushroom tops any other way. I've tried.
  • Guide Dang It: The beginning in-game tutorials have been altered so much that they no longer tell you much of anything about how to play the damn game.
  • Holiday Mode: For quite a few major holidays. It gets hectic.
  • Humongous Mecha: The Mechlab Bot. X plans to create an entire army of these.
  • Improbable Weapon: To be sure, all of the weapons are pretty much Applied Phlebotinum Rings, but some of their effects are a little... unconventional. Picture lobbing wasp hives at your enemies or coating yourself with a protective coat of Teflon.
  • Item Crafting: Yup. The items you craft are only for cosmetic purposes, however.
  • Jungle Japes: Otami Ruins.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Averted hard in the comic. One of the guards boasts that his Ancient Katana will destroy the Animated... and then it gets sawn to bits by one of the Buzz Saws. A Gory Discretion Shot suggests that the wielder was quick to follow.
    • Played straight by the Mantis ring, though. Short cooldown time, and a very low Stamina cost.
      • Debatable, since it doesn't deliver the punch Hack does. Still one of the best melee rings, mind.
  • Killer Rabbit: Gramsters (killer hamsters) and cherry fluffs. Sweet Joan, the cherry fluffs... After attacking them once, they (and any other cherry fluffs nearby) descend upon you and kamikaze attack with an explosion that can take half the life of a low level player easily.
    • Also, don't forget the Grunny Subs (Killer Rabbits in submarines)
  • Lethal Chef: Leon's mother. It's stated that one of the cookies is apparently concrete, the other is poisoned from batteries, and the other... well, you get the deal. Subverted, since Leon not only eats but enjoys his mother's cooking despite apparently being a good cook himself.
  • Level Five Onix: An OMG jumps out at you about the time you cross the bridge in Deadman's Pass... but he's a remarkably wimpy little OMG.
    • Now these wandering encounters each consist of an OMFG with two Bootsnakes. Still not much of a threat due to the recent universal nerfing of enemies.
    • And in the (current) introduction, you find yourself facing three OMGs who all go down in one attack. The OMFG you face immediately afterward goes down in two.
  • Level Grinding: Orb farming is the term used by most.
  • Limit Break: Rage attacks.
  • Limited Move Arsenal: You can equip up to eight rings.
  • Living Statue: Most monsters in the game - the cause of a panic in the storyline.
  • Loading Screen
  • Luck Stat: Affects item drops.
  • Medium Awareness: Your character can, at one point, make a reference to only being able to see one screen's worth of scenery at a time.
    • Another point at which this happened was during the April Fool's Day event, where your character tells a confused Crescento that the airship "crashed", meaning the game refused to load the area (because it never existed in the first place).
  • Monster Is a Mommy: Plenty. Kat's Kokeshi Doll originally had some lines suggesting that it considered the lesser Kokeshis its children. Then you have the Shewolf, Papa Saw and his wives, and Mother Fluffs in Bassken Lake...
  • More Dakka: The more rage used on Guns Guns Guns, the more dakka is produced.
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: A Wish Tree in the Zen Gardens is inhabited by Animated written wishes with a Hive Mind. Since it has been imbued with the goodwill of humanity, it is benevolent.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Ghi powers the Animated. By using the rings to fight the Animated, you're releasing more Ghi into Gaia, creating more Animated.
  • No Fair Cheating: For a while, it was possible to exploit a glitch in the final area to gain rings with a level higher than 10. When the devs removed this, they added one of two new rings to the inventory of everyone with Level 10 rings. Those with glitch-obtained rings were given the ring Abuse, which afflicts the wearer/owner with a multi-stat debuff.

Description: You didn't think your questionable behavior would go unnoticed, did you?

  • No Self Heals: You can't use Wish, the strongest and most Stamina-effective heal in the game, on yourself.
  • Non-Lethal KO: When your HP reaches zero, you are "Dazed." Someone can bring you out of it with a "defibrillator ring," or you can wake up in the null chamber.
    • Or you can just bring along a relatively new powerup known as Revive. Saves you the trip from the null chamber and even unlocks your other rings immediately.
  • Noob Cave: The Barton Sewers.
  • Mineral MacGuffin: Null crystals.
  • Parental Bonus: More like a Grandparent Bonus at this point, but there's a parody Burma-Shave jingle on the garbage cans in the Bassken Lake area.

To kiss a mug / That's like a cactus / Takes more nerve / Than it does practice / Burpa-Shave

  • Playing with Fire: Fire Rain and Hot Foot. And possibly Solar Rays.
  • Polyamory: Papa Saw in the Bassken Saw Mill apparently has two wives, "Big Mama" and "Little Mama". (This might only be true for the harder difficulties.)
  • Power-Up
  • Practical Taunt: The Taunt ring is used to draw enemies' attention.
  • Randomly Drops: Lots of random drops. In fact, even the items that allow you to level up are random drops, which makes the entire level system a Luck-Based Mission.
    • The devs have attempted to mitigate this with repeatable quests, since nearly all quests feature the level-up items as rewards. Also, the further you are in the game, the more of the item you get when a monster drops them or you complete a quest. Now the problem is stopping players from farming the items to grind past the game's content...
    • This problem is still in full force when it comes to quests in the vein of Twenty Bear Asses. Gramster Goo, Mushroom Tops, and Iron Ore seem to be the items that cause the most frustration on the forums.
  • Read the Freaking Manual: ALL YOUR RINGS ARE SOULBOUND. YOU CANNOT SELL THEM ON THE MARKETPLACE/GIVE THEM TO YOUR FRIENDS ANY MORE. Half the threads on the zOMG! forum are STILL people who don't understand this. (This is because rings created before a certain date can still be sold/traded until they're equipped).
    • There's also "How do I get stronger?" and "How do I unsuppress my CL?" Though the latter isn't/wasn't readily available in the in-game help, but there are enough existing topics for this to become Search The Freaking Forums or Read The Freaking Stickies.
    • Hell, just go to your inventory. There's a note there, saying "Rings are soulbound and cannot be sold, with certain grandfathered exceptions".
  • Real Men Wear Pink: One of the new "random events" has Zhivago, Axe Crazy vampire Psycho for Hire, siccing ladies' handbags on you in the Zen Gardens.
  • Respawning Enemies: Justified in the storyline.
  • Retcon: You used to begin the game on a train, greeted by a character named Frank who gave you your first rings. They took that beginning sequence out, and now it makes no sense that a labtech with suspiciously similar bandaid and glasses greets you with "Hello again!... I mean, hello!"
    • This also spoils what was probably the most awesome reveal in the game.
  • Sequence Breaking: If you are crewing with people who have defeated the Stone Coatl, you yourself do not need to do so and get the water-breathing ability to go into the Shallow Seas, etc.
  • Shows Damage: When fighting the Stone Coatl, as you whittle down his HP, he slowly appears to be more chipped and overall breaking down.
  • Shout-Out: The writers love these. From Rubella's dependence on the kindness of strangers, to various Guards acting like their namesakes, to a big Stargate stand-in in one area. Not to mention everything Anniedroid says.
  • Shoot the Medic First: Healers tend to garner a lot of aggro in crew play, making Combat Medic builds almost necessary in the absence of tanks. Diagnose is particularly dangerous for this; using it at Rage Rank 4 will result in Everything Trying to Kill You. Averted so far with the Animated, since none of the bosses have Mook squads that are capable of healing (though healing-capable Demonic Spiders do exist, and they are a priority target in most cases for this reason).
  • Shown Their Work: Most of the plot is a huge Call Back to a story arc from 2004. Almost none of the people who worked on zOMG! were around during the 2004 storyline. 'nuff said.
  • Socialization Bonus - The game practically requires you to interact with other players in order to proceed. Several quests require cooperation between players, and the game generally is much easier when in a group. In addition, Ghi bonuses can be obtained by interacting with other players. But if you stay isolated for too long, your bonuses will vanish until you recharge.
    • The developers have confirmed that certain parts of the game, such as the Shallow Seas, are in fact impossible without a group.
      • Very difficult, perhaps, but there is only one part that is 100% impossible to solo. Which, of course, is the part you need in order to get into the endboss chamber.
      • And even then, once past that part, there IS a video of someone soloing the endboss.
  • Sprint Shoes: The Fleet Feet ring gives you a huge footspeed boost for 30 seconds. The Coyote Spirit ring and the Medic ring set works as well.
  • Squee: Rina will teach you how!
  • Stealth Pun: It probably wasn't deliberate, but the Turtle ring recharges slowly. In fact, if I was so bold, I'd say it recharges at the pace of a turtle.
  • Super Prototype: Labtech X's Humongous Mecha, Sealab X, is intended to be the prototype for an army of Sealab Animated, which are programmed to obey him.
  • Throw It In: The first stage of the battle with Sealab X has its enormous tail descend to attack the players, who are randomly scripted to shout lines like "Look out! It's huge!" Enough players replied "That's What She Said" that eventually the devs added that to the script, too.
  • Underwater Ruins: The fallen remains of Gambino's tower are scattered through the final three areas, which are at the bottom of the ocean.
  • Unfortunate Names: Rubella the farmhand. See German Measles.
    • One of the Believers at the Old Aqueduct is named "Hairy".
      • And is conveniently located right next to a Believer named "Dick". Whups.
      • Who is standing beside someone named Tom. So take joke as you will...
  • Unusual Euphemism: In the zOMG forums, expect to see "fluff" used instead of an F-Bomb. Especially in the form of "motherfluffing-!" (Considering how innocent the various fluffs look and how much damage they can do the further you get through the game, this makes some sense.)
  • Unwinnable: The Hive, deliberately so.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Averted. Crowd Control rings and debuffs have a decent chance of working on everything in this game save for a few select bosses, and using such rings is encouraged as you advance through the game. Players are usually very outnumbered by enemies towards the later areas of the game (and by outnumbered we mean 1 VS 3+). Likewise, enemies tend to use the same effects against you.
    • Knife Sharpen and Adrenaline play the trope straight. They used to be good buffs for you and your allies; now they're mediocre debuffs for the opposition.
      • Subverted now with the release of Deadman's Shadow. Turns out Knife Sharpen and Adrenaline are very useful against vampires. Even Diagnose is now useful, since its massive aggro-drawing power enables one brave soul to take the heat off the other players while they kill the monster.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: One minigame has you catching mutant/zombie green chickens and throwing them down a well. The chickens scream when you throw them down the well.
    • Similarly, the living enemies you encounter in the (underwater) last stages of the game visibly drown when defeated.
  • Weird Humorous American Thing
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Causes at least two known Big Lipped Alligator Moments.
    • Early on, one of the quests involving the gnomes in Village Greens includes a mention that the gnomes are learning tactics and behaviors from observing Gaians. The player inquires if they've learned violence from humans, too, and the NPC replies that while that would be great from a philosophical angle, Gaians originally found the gnomes adorable, but the gnomes began "the ankle-biting."
    • When you rescue Marshall from the Sea Spouts, he suggests that they were about to seduce him, drawing a comparison to sirens.
  • Willfully Weak: You have the option to suppress your charge level so you can play in lower-leveled areas. Boss instances now automatically suppress your level to the maximum for that boss.
    • The auto-suppressing for bosses happened because people would take off their rings to have a lower CL then put them back on inside the bosses den.
  • Wutai: Zen Gardens and the forest where the Chyaku Norisu ninja clan dwells.
  • Zerg Rush: Most boss fights usually start like this, before getting to fight the actual boss.
    • Who continues to throw mooks at you even while you're fighting it.
    • The Hive area is basically this: wave after wave of aliens, and it only stops when all your team members are all Dazed.
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