At this point, DECA perma banning all hackers would kill the game


#20

i agree.


#21

There’s literally no excuse to keep hackers roam free within the game, Deca has simply became too lax about the situation thus bringing things like players who donated to the Unity Campaign and gotten the purple names, or even further to get the purple glow, using hacks and Deca not doing anything about it.

Also there’s the Maximum Efficiency LH discord, that really most of the community should know of their hacking shenanigans, and not only that, the RLs openly encourage their members to use hacked clients, which is absolutely ridiculous that Deca hasn’t done anything about it yet.

At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone were to report 2 hackers, one has spent a considerable amount of money on the game and the other one is completely F2P, best case-scenario, Deca would ban the F2P player, because regardless of that, you can’t count on Deca to ban hackers because of their rather crappy, automated “support” system.


#22

This is like, basically the most common “argument” cheaters have (tied with “i hack because of the lag”) to try and justify their cheating to not only themselves, but to other people. It’s arguably the scummier of the two because the end goal is to normalize hacking in a blackmail-ish way; “if I’m going down, I’m convincing you you’re going down with me!”

Let’s pick this apart.

First of all, we don’t have any specific numbers mentioned. We even have a completely made-up percentage, as these claims tend to include! We are supposed to take the OP, at face value, that “[hackers] make up way too much of the player base now and too many people rely on hacks to play”. If you believe that without any numbers, then I can literally tell you the same; the only reason you should not believe it is because of your own bias, because I have also not provided any numbers:
“Legitimate players make up a significant portion of the player base, and very few people are terrible enough at the game that they are dependent on hacks to make progress.”
What are the actual numbers? That, I can’t say for sure, and it would be silly for me to try and make up numbers based on anecdotal evidence because I don’t know the actual numbers.

Unfortunately, this is basically the entire argument. Because OP claims some numbers he made up, these numbers are fact and therefore if these numbers are fact then death of playerbase will happen. I have already refuted that, so uh the picking apart is done.

So instead I’ll talk about the benefits of action against hackers and other ToS-violating actions (notifying, RWT, duping, etc). I will use “cheaters” as a shorthand for all of these actions. Apologies if this comes off as rambling, I’ve tried to organize it but this is largely impromptu.

Sebchoof’s video has already gone into fair detail about why he believes getting rid of cheaters is beneficial to the long-term health of the community and playerbase. My beliefs are fairly similar.

RotMG is an MMO(massively multiplayer online); it’s a game where you can interact, play, do dungeons with people from all over the world. One thing MMOs tend to have in common is upping numbers, whatever they’re called (levels, ranks, skills, tiers, in our case, fame!). This can come with some sort of fancy leaderboard. Another thing MMOs inherently provide is the ability to show off your fancy gear to everyone else playing the game. We also have this in RotMG! (both in displayable skins, and in the actual gear you have on your character).
RotMG is also a permadeath game, which means that unlike many MMOs where all you have to do is grind long enough and you’ll have unlocked/obtained that gear forever, you can die with the gear you’ve grinded for and lose it.
This brings extra value to the equipment one can obtain, and in fact ties in quite well with the fame aspect of a character; you have to play to increase that fame, but if you play on a character, you may also die on it. There’s a risk vs reward dynamic going on here.
In-game, there is a leaderboard basically only for the highest fame on characters that have died. However, through RealmEye, we have many more leaderboards, for even the silliest of things such as most Pirate Caves completed! Additionally, fame obviously has in-game uses as well, and I don’t think I need to go in-depth on that here :slight_smile:
All in all, a decent system set up for a permadeath MMO.

But what happens when we introduce people not dying into the mix?
I don’t hack, so apologies to any hackers who are like “this person does not know what they are talking about in regards to hacks” because all my knowledge is second-hand and heard through the grapevine. From my understanding, a certain feature hacked clients have has greatly… improved in its function over the years. Therefore, it’s very much possible for a hacked client user to never die as long as they are using hacks.
The obvious result is that these players easily reach the top of the leaderboards, both in-game and on RealmEye. It’s not very feasible for a legitimate player to challenge them as long as the hacker continues to play, as the game is designed around permadeath and no one, no matter how skilled, plays perfectly.

Once you’ve done all there is to do in a video game content-wise, you generally have to give yourself some player-made challenges to continue wanting to play the game. These can be as simple as just maxing out all your characters (to one’s own definition of maxed out), or creating challenge runs for one to play and complete. In a F2P game, it is vital that there are still many feasible reasons to continue playing, because a F2P game’s livelihood is dependent on people buying services or items in-game, and you don’t want to lose a frequent customer because they got bored of the game.
Cheaters basically trivialize one of the major sources of replayability in RotMG, the leaderboard, because it’s just not feasible for legitimate players to play catch-up.
Before I go on any further, I’ve experienced many cases where I’ve brought this point up, and the response is “but I don’t care about the leaderboard!”. I don’t think it’s too hard of a stretch to realize that while you may not personally care about the leaderboard, other players do, and so for them it is a major issue that they cannot feasibly reach certain heights in the leaderboard because someone else is cheating, and sidestepping the challenges the game naturally extends to a player. (there’s also nothing wrong with not playing for the leaderboard! everyone has different goals in the game, what matters is that you have fun without taking away others’ fun. also it’s really not ok to tell someone “well maybe you shouldn’t play for x (eg leaderboard)” just because it’s not how you play, be considerate)

So one of the reasons players that have hit endgame continue to play is made an absolute joke because of cheaters (and I absolutely mean, an absolute joke; look here for literal bots that do nothing but run along highlands roads, but are actually on the RealmEye leaderboards for wizard/priest characters because no action by Deca has been made to actually stop them). Not a great outlook. Sebchoof has already mentioned in his video that there were multiple players he knew that spent big bucks on the game that have quit because of the cheating problem.
He also mentioned in his video that only a very small number of players on the all-time leaderboard in-game were legitimate. Getting into the top 10 on any of the in-game leaderboards gives you a red glow for however long of a period that leaderboard stands for. It’s another thing players can work towards, but is so much more difficult for players to achieve legitimately because of cheaters. (you might be thinking, but if these players don’t die naturally, how can they plague the death leaderboards? there’s nothing stopping them from intentionally suiciding the character once they know they’ve reached a certain milestone…)

We can cross fame leaderboards out of the picture for things to reasonably achieve for endgame characters, and likewise, we can also cross getting cool gear out of the picture for the same reasons. If players don’t die, then it’s just a grind to get the items then put them on display on your characters, not a grind to get the items then a challenge to keep those characters alive.
Okay, but there’s still challenge runs people can do, right? There’s PPEs/NPEs, except cheaters can get so much farther in those than legitimate players… we can still put that down as an option. There’s speedruns; there was a community for dungeon speedruns after all, maybe that will be another option to increase variety in the endgame!
Enter Lost Halls speedruns. Voids are impossible at the current moment to do solo, so that already blocks out solo speedrun records from happening. Additionally, the community appears to be most interested in speedruns of Lost Halls/the Void in groups.
…and the cheaters ruin it again. I’m not up to date with which group has achieved the most recent speedruns, but the speedrun world records for Shatters, Cult, and Void have each individually been claimed by a Discord group I shall not mention but that Sebchoof’s video mentioned that promotes hacking so much there are multiple screenshots within their afk check channel of blatant hacked client usage. Oh, and if you want to say that their speedrun isn’t legitimate because of all the known hackers in them, they’ll blast you with all sorts of colorful language. Great community!

Speaking of which, the whole concept of “known hackers”. Literally, there are players relatively involved in the game community at large that hack, and many other players are aware of this. That’s so ridiculous. To a player not in the know, they look really skilled, because I mean just look at their character page. Probably even looks a lot better than a legitimate, incredibly skilled player’s page. It’s hard not to feel a sort of anger with this, because you’ve been playing for so long and gotten so good at the game, but your account just doesn’t look as good as the player who can never die, and the player who can pay for services that end up putting like 10 omnis on their account.

What happens if you don’t take action against these cheaters? Legitimate players leave. That’s what will kill the game. A healthy game community has never been raised by players who hang out on sites where email/password db leaks are commonplace and players who abuse exploits in the game to make money off of it, money that the actual game developers never see. I’m sure not convinced that a healthy game community can be fostered by players who take down Youtube videos of content creators by abusing the system! Healthy game communities are raised by players like the ones we see on this forum: the UGC/closed testers that work to create and finetune new content for the game; the mathematicians who make whole papers on the most optimal ways to feed in-game pets; the artists who make amazing fan-art for the game they love; the coders behind such services like Muledump and Pfiffel; the players that oh gosh there’s too many things to count. Sorry if that might have been overly cheesy.

Even if for some reason, the cheaters were in much greater counts than the legitimate players, I would prefer that the game died a dignified death, rather than it slowly wasting away as all the legitimate players leave and it becomes some weird front for exchanging money or what have you. (hey, this isn’t completely ridiculous; Mike Sellers mentioned on his reddit AMA that he saw RWT as a stepping stone to services like money laundering, and given he’s a game design professor I’m inclined to agree, it does make sense) Personally, I don’t believe that the cheaters outnumber or even match the legitimate players. But I won’t force you to believe the same thing I do. Make your own observations.

I’ll uh end the post there for now because making long posts in the spur of the moment is kinda hard and I’m pretty sure it’s tangled up enough already.
For what it’s worth, I’m not playing the game until Deca takes tangible actions against cheaters. The recent events that have happened relating to Sebchoof’s video being copyright striked, and the response from the cheating community when it happened, is clear evidence that these people are not healthy to the game. Words are just words, so I’m not letting up even if the written response comes out, until I see things actually being done; actions show what you really mean.


#23

RECONNECTING HAS NOT BEEN FIXED. I SAW THIS F@#@#ING NOOB KEEP RECONNECTING TO AN ORYX CASTLE LIKE 2 DAYS AGO lol.


#24

Here’s a straw poll about a year and a half old which gives somewhat biased data that is accurate enough for you to get a pretty good idea of the situation atm:


#25

Notifying, RWT, duping, and hacks such as autoaim / no debuff and fullscreen I completely agree with in terms of their removal and enforcement of such, but there is something that particularly bothers me about the core idea of Seb’s video, and likely in your comment as well, this being “RotMG is also a permadeath game, which means that unlike many MMOs where all you have to do is grind long enough and you’ll have unlocked/obtained that gear forever, you can die with the gear you’ve grinded for and lose it.” Of course this is just a statement, but you both appear to approve of this idea and believe it should be upheld when it is by far the worst mechanic in the game and something that should certainly be dealt with as the cheater problem will likely be soon (and would coincidentally actually make a large portion of cheaters quit hacking, as your average cheater is not a max eff boating duper). *EDIT, I am aware that Seb’s video was about highlighting recent events regarding cheating and exploiting and how DECA refused to take action or was not nearly heavy handed enough, but the video operated on the premise that this was all harmful to the core of the game which he claimed was good, and this in my thought is wrong and the mechanics that have persisted for so long are ultimately harmful to the game just as the activity portrayed in the video is.

As I suspected you ended with “All in all, a decent system set up for a permadeath MMO” when this is far from the truth. Whether you forgot to mention or purposefully left out the risk I am not sure, but you have either not lost a character with significant base fame, a large array of rare items, items that were released for a limited period, etc or both, or you have and do not understand how most players feel when incidents like this happen. If we want to talk about what makes people quit the game, the number one reason is easily permadeath. Time and time again, whether it is the Farewell thread, my friends, or just an average realmer, over my many, many years of playing I have witnessed the death of a most beloved character being the reason one quits more so than any other reason. Is this anecdotal? Perhaps, but the only realistic competitor to it would be that the game has just lost its appeal, which is most certainly fueled by the disillusionment players feel towards the game after the death of a beloved character. What makes them beloved, though, is the investment. The reason that every other MMO does not say you can suddenly instantly lose your character is because players have invested (not exaggerating) hundreds of hours into them, and often times in realm it is no different except you can lose it all in a matter of seconds, or even less than a second. This is not a defensible feature, it is inherently terrible game design but this community has put up with it for so long that it has become accepted and commonplace, something that has never been truly questioned as a problem in the wide scale, but I encourage you to look around. Find even a single successful game besides Realm that punishes the player so severely for investment into it, I can guarantee you it doesn’t exist. Even Gachas, which are cash grabs completely devoid of gameplay, still offer a pity rate for something you are trying to acquire and it cannot be lost once it is obtained. For far too long the denizens of the realm have suffered under this system without ever asking why, and with the winds of big change blowing in with this debacle and the Unity port I believe this is a very serious conversation that needs to be had. This being said, of course death should not just go unpunished as Autonexus currently sets it up to be, but our current system tells you “literally never take your good items out of nexus where you can actually use them or show them off unless you are ready to immediately lose everything without compensation”, leaving you with the real risk vs reward you mentioned, do I actually get to play with the items I worked so hard for, risking them vanishing away in a second, or do I just keep them in vault and never truly see the fruit of my labor? There are of course multiple solutions to tackle this, but I have seen almost no mention of this in any way as a serious problem the game has by Sebchoof or anyone and it is genuinely deeply disturbing to me. My recommendation would be the character losing stat maxes and X amount of fame, which progressively increases as your character dies more often until the point that the character is on its effective “last life”, but this of course would be a topic I myself would have to think more over, but that cannot be done until the concept of permadeath actually being horrendous game design is considered and accepted. Apologies for the rant/ramble, but I believe this is more urgent than anything currently happening and it would coincidentally give much more incentive for players to not hack when paired with the crackdown that will likely happen as a result of this.

Moving on to the next section of your post (starting at not dying into the mix), I completely agree with this. My previous statement was also not condoning cheating in any way, merely stating that it is a fatal flaw in ROTMG that permadeath is as blatant and unfair as it currently is, and I do not disagree with most of what was said in Seb’s video. The current Realmeye leaderboards as well as fame leaderboards are primarily dominated by cheaters and exploiters, and actually give cheaters an inherent value over legitimate players (on the whole) as they have more fame to offer a guild, which is something held of high importance due to these visible leaderboards. Cracking down on cheating and fame exploits would begin bridging the gap between cheating and playing legitimately, and a modified death system would allow for legitimate characters with ludicrous numbers to be able to play without such a caution to them (notice how Japan’s fame increase will go to 0 for large gaps of time, as only the backup characters see any play as the risk of a main character for literally anything is not worth the potential cost), allowing for both parties to win. It would also cause less cheaters to quit and encourage them to play legitimately, because as I previously stated the average hacker is not nearly as malicious as the people portrayed in Sebchoof’s video. I see it as a win win for the system to be fixed in multiple ways, not just death but in the cheating problem as well.

I’m aware that your post was primarily agreeing with anti cheater sentiment (and on this end I completely agree), but I think that cheating in its entirety is a complex issue that requires more understanding than what is currently presented (i.e the horrible flaw of blatant permadeath that exists within the game), because just as the majority of players are not hackers, the majority of hackers are also not TrentOwl or whoever you want to list. I encourage any of you to reply to this with your thoughts or comments, and please keep in mind before commenting that I do not support cheating, I do not support anything done in the video or agree with it, and I absolutely agree with a much more active hand in dealing with cheaters as it is unhealthy for the game, but permadeath itself is likely the main reason people cheat (at least I’d think so), and also likely the main reason people quit. Why not fix two problems at the same time? But that just might be me. Responding to all replies


[RotMG] How a Game Developer Let Cheaters Take Over Realm of the Mad God
#26

It would be quite easy to fix, I believe.
Since it is based in graphics (the red hp bar not showing because damage has been taken) you just have to change the graphics to fix it. The hard part is finding a way that does not make it harder on players to see what amount of hp they have. One idea I have is to make the red bar translucent on top of a changing background hat takes up the entire bar. It could just cycle through shades of grey or have a changing pattern. This would make it much harder to create a code to differentiate the two colors for autonexus


#27

It’s actually unfixable without changing the nexus function. Full-screen, to a degree, the server could theoretically show less pixels around you but that would hurt legit players, making them see more black tiles because of a smaller area load. Overall, most hacks right now could be preventable but would require big reworks (really big, like a complete rewrite) of core aspects of the game structure, like for example hit boxes (to prevent anti-debuffs).


#28

Well one of the main things deca said they were going to work on for the unity port is untangling all the spaghetti code left behind by kabam. So hopefully redoing everything will help them find the root of the solution and fix it


#29

Noclip, trade delay skip, connecting to vault, connecting to realms, connecting to guild hall, Auto Aim, Auto Ability, Loot bag spying, Auto Loot, Inventory spying, Spam, Framing other players for cheating, Stealing other player’s passwords, Item duplication, No Confuse, No Blind, No Armor Break, No Bleeding, No Darkness, No Quiet, No (insert status effect here, ad continuum), Realm Notifiers, DOSing, Fame train following, Auto responder to chat prompts, Multiboxing, Self Teleporting for Immunity, Teleport cooldown, Teleporting to the nearest Quest, Teleporting to godlands, Avoiding the Nexus when you nexus, Auto account creation, Quest HP Bar, A hack that only allows you to deal damage to one boss at a time, hacks that change the range of weapons, controlled packet loss which can be used to sit on avatar or ent sit, etc. etc. etc.

Most hacks are not fixed, and are not simple gameplay changes. Hacked clients are directly responsible for the RWT that controls the economy, and dominates the in game chat. They also, simply break the ToS by existing.

You are by all means excused.


#30

Hacks exist more because of flaws in the game rather than players seeking to gain an advantage directly. Obviously you have the extremes where people use hacks to boat or to create huge drags but those are the outliers.

Severe FPS issues with the only relevant dungeon often being played (right now anyways) with numbers towards the 100s meaning you get 5fps at marble - a personal experience - and often times you can’t see your character. QOL updates which don’t seem too difficult to add would easily eliminate a fair % of the hacker population, I don’t need to see your character as much as I need to see my own so some levels of transparency would be cool. I also don’t need to see if you have pally buff, warrior buff or any other buffs mainly. I’m still confused as to why we haven’t had any experimental updates in a long time considering they don’t sprite, they don’t make dungeons, they don’t ban hackers, but that’s for another day.

Onto autonexus, you’ll find that in many servers your nexus is already delayed upon pressing. With the climate of realm right now (atleast for me) where you basically play in event popping server or a bazaar you aren’t often in your home server combined with the player counts easily causes lag. Instapops are frequent and there isn’t always counterplay. This is one of the reasons people use autonexus, it often prevents them from having a lag-induced death. Another reason is because investment and perma-death are not mechanics that go hand in hand. You can spend weeks and months on your character and lose it in a second, sometimes it’s not even your fault and the cycle continues with your next character.

This needs to change. There are many good options to replace permadeath, fame is very under-utilised so something could be done with that. Or like I saw yesterday, Realm could create game modes. You create a character with a set game mode and it would operate like a difficulty setting. Where you have something similar to a hacked client and something similar to the legit client. The legit client would give you multipliers obviously to balance out the difference as the hacked client would be much easier of a game. You could even have ‘hardcore’ mode where your characters take % more damage, cced for longer etc and would receive higher multipliers. Many games have difficulty settings or something similar, Realm doesn’t.

Ultimately, what I’m saying is hacks exist because of flaws in the game rather than players looking for a huge personal advantage (think wallhacking/locking in csgo or scripting (albeit dead now) in league of legends). Removal of these flaws could bring the hacker percentage down. In addition, proper utilisation of realm’s mechanics like fame could take the game from an addictive niche to something relatively decent. Implementation of something like game modes as mentioned previously could even kill a hacker population, taking the control into Deca’s hands. Though for better or worse, realm’s future is looking pretty dire and Deca Games are hard milking it with this two month MOTMG with 5+ events going at once with each chest being pretty terrible.


#31

It is detectable though. If someone consistently nexuses 1 hit from death or always at X% HP it’s very easy to detect


#32

It’s never exact, most times people won’t nexus with a single shot while having low HP. You can see in the several videos we’re shown daily: the player takes an extremely big shotgun or stacked AoE damage and nexuses instantly even if their HP bar is full, before even getting damaged.


#33

I think it was just before DECA took over the game I was so disgusted with the amount of notifiers and hackers that I quit the game. I had many of my supporters talk me back into the game. After a month or so I came back and basically put on blinders. Since then I have tried to ignore the hackers and play my own game and generally that works.

I thought that Sebchoof’s video was awesome as it exposed what many of us already knew, DECA says they are against Hackers but really they are just ignoring the problem. I personally don’t see Unity solving the hacker problem at all. Unity is only about keeping the money flowing because Flash will be dead soon. The Hacker issue can only be solved by DECA actually banning players permanently.

I Know you (@Textbook) said you aren’t playing until the hacker situation is fixed but if you put your blinders on you should be able to enjoy the game with your friends. Either way take care.

Edit addition: I never really thought about the duping of vault chests until I saw this video. It really ticks me off that hacker/dupers probably have maxed vaults completely full of chests and as many characters as they want. This would be the easiest permaban for DECA because they know who paid for what and if people did not buy the chests / character slots then just delete the account.


#34

Wow, I am so clueless about the hacking clients. Never heard of a lot those hacks.

I am so sick of the hackers, I know that many of them are prob good people but still ticks me off. I am generally more upset at Deca for doing nothing about hackers than I am with the actual hacker.


#35

To be fair, I’ve been involved in the discord community for so long you would have to go back to my red star days for that.


#36

@Beah You make some good points about the reasons people choose to cheat.
The game wasn’t originally designed so that good & rare loot was soulbound, which has to be a major contributor to players so afraid to lose their precious items that it drives them to cheaty-protections.

The game’s changed from permadeath being more a temporary setback, that you dusted yourself off from, only a chain of deaths saw you completely ‘dead’, into now where a death might mean you never see that rare item(s) ever again. Or you are compelled to go and run hundreds and hundreds of a single dungeon to get it back. Factor in backpack and you could lose, in a single death, combined items taking years of effort to acquire. I’m convinced the game being more punishing is a cause of cheating, as players take whatever steps they can to protect their gear (autoaim ofc is just lazy/greedy).

:clinking_glasses: I had a similar idea a couple of years back where a ‘death’ would give you the choice of accepting it (like now, you die), or you can pay some live fame or gold to resurrect but you get perma- knocked off 5HP/5MP and -1 to every rainbow stat (so like losing 1 of every pot drunk) which could never be regained. Dying many times gets you an old/decrepit character only good for hanging around the nexus. The game still has permadeath, just watered down some. You could experiment at rushing LH/new content/whatever without cheats, as if you die you’d only lose a little bit instead of all or nothing. Better than now where cheaters don’t have any permadeath.

And if keeping soulbound loot system, they could make it so looting something puts it permanently onto your account. You can’t insta-respawn it, but could liquidise other UTs to regenerate it at the Tinkerer. Basically crafting, or something like this, instead of only having the RNG route for most every item.

There’s many things they could do, but being paralysed into keeping what we’ve got, as if it is some wonder of game design when it’s a hotchpotch of decisions over the years, is probably the worst option!


To OP: a ban wave wouldn’t outright kill the game, as I think a lot of hackers would make a new account, if only to stand there shouting “I was banned it’s not fair!” :smile: There’d possibly be some short term dip, if % of players hacking truly is so high as it seems, but nothing that would threaten the game, since a cleaner/better game would replace those lost players fast enough.


#37

In short, perhaps you would also agree that Amulets should be brought back?


#38

Imagine all the forums posts on 1 day old accounts claiming they got banned and they dont even know what the word client means


#39

Glad you agree. There seems to be an almost cult following of permadeath just because it is a mechanic that has existed since the beginning of time, without the consideration of the game’s evolution and how the mechanic has not at all, where in the past the only items you could not easy obtain were all tradeable and consumables for the most part was what truly mattered in terms of what you are carrying, but now we have items that require hundreds of dungeons to acquire, items that will never come back again or etc with no compensation in terms of punishment. It’s not just a cause, it’s the main cause and the reason I discuss this now is because there is a lot of discussion around the impact of the game, when this mechanic is truly the root of not only cheating, but quitting as well (based on my vast overall experience at least). I’m not sure what should replace permadeath as it would be a large change and something that needs much debate and consideration and I would be willing to form a definitive stance on it then (and players definitely do need some type of punishment for death, I think that this concept is both healthy and necessary). With a more lenient punishment system (as you have said yourself and to this I agree), the gap between legitimate players and hackers drastically closes in all regards, as not only will they be less afraid to play on large fame characters, but they will also be much more willing to participate in dangerous activities such as halls rushing, switch rushing, etc. With permadeath out of the picture, cheaters post crackdown and legitimate players will both be able to reach their true potential, as most of the dangerous options in this game are not decided at all by skill, but by risk. The difference will be massive. Cheating will frankly never be entirely eliminated, you can be as strict as you want but there will be those who do it until the bitter end, so why not fix the reason it is miserable to be a legitimate player before encouraging cheaters to make the switch?