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
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.