Dear RotMG Community, Please Take Off Your Rose-Tinted Glasses

#1

This is probably going to be one of my more critical and maybe even cynical posts, but I need to vent this out. Also, please keep in mind that I am a RotMG Zoomer, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

So many RotMG players talk about how RotMG was better before, and while right in some cases, they’re also horribly wrong in others. Saying that monetization was more tame before is fine. Saying you prefer the artystyle of older sprites is fine. Heck, I’m fine with nostalgia/history videos. It’s when people say older design was better that I get irritated. Yes, I’m aware some posts and the like are made ironically like TopHatBowser, Project BES 4 potion of life, but I get mad when someone says Old Shatters was better than New Shatters, or when someone, for some un-mad-godly reason, compares Old Shatters to Moonlight Village. Of course they’re different, they’re from completely different time periods of the game!

I don’t say this without reason, I’m not just some new kid on the block throwing eggs on the old house down the street. It’s not the fact that it’s old at all, it’s that I feel like it encourages outdated design. Sure, shots bouncing everywhere on the screen from places that aren’t on the boss can seem like a lot, but so can three 16x16 bosses firing every single shot imaginable from themselves while you’re forced to move on tiles that make you slower than a Knight with CShield. Yeah, there’s no safespot on the left of the boss that makes everything super easy, but it’s an endgame dungeon, it’s not supposed to be easy!

All this to say, I don’t burst out at the drop of a post saying that old Realm was nostalgic, but I get both madder than a Mad God and concerned when someone pleads for DECA to un-rework The Shatters. It’s the prospect of nostalgia worsening gameplay that makes me upset. You can debate over RotMG’s artsyle or monetization or that one horny demon skin, but please, remember that what you are saying about the game’s design gets taken into account, and I don’t want to live in the dark ages of Realm where one of the bosses used to literally look like a pile of shit with Excalibur shoved into it, or worse.

Please, just give credit to what modern RotMG does right, and only bring up actually good design aspects from earlier versions of the game that we could learn from to add/iterate on in the future. This was more of a rant post than I usually do, but I couldn’t stand it anymore.

#2

Thanks for sharing Mathician, I see you everywhere on these forums and you are indeed a zoomer!

I agree that most people, myself included, are nostalgic for aspects of the game I enjoyed when me and my friends first starting playing.

I’d agree with your point that Rotmg has evolved and so should our expectations. Of course the game was different before pets, but without pets to financially support the game there wouldn’t be a Rotmg today that people can play for free if they choose. Of course the game was different before discords, but without endgame content that requires discords the player base would have gotten bored and quit.

It’s great to be nostalgic, but that shouldn’t stop us appreciating the game for what it is today!

#3

Rotmg Boomer here. I full heartly agree.

#4

I don’t think it’s that many. It’s certainly a small minority – it seems to be only a handful of the thousands of players who are playing happily. This is how things often work online though – a few loud complaints are unrepresentative of the many more satisfied customers who don’t have anything to complain about.

“It was better before” is a particularly useless observation about a game like this. With a game that’s been around for over ten years there are many points in time that are “before”. Before pets? Before Unity? Before Exaltations? Before Vital Combat? Before DECA took over? Before Kabam did?

And a lot of “it was better before” complaints seem to be not about the game as a whole but particular features. Maybe players want to turn off trading and play as PPE, or turn off pets and play as NPE. Well Seasonal is sort of the first, Rifts was sort of both. So the developers are listening and acting on such suggestions, and seem to have got it right with Seasonal.

I think therefore Seasonal is enough and all we will see, as far as addressing “it was better before” complaints. No. it doesn’t answer everyone’s complaints but as everyone has there own idea about “before” it was never going to.

#5

Yeah, the old “loud minority” thing, it’s just that I’ve been exposed to so many of those posts praising old RotMG that I just couldn’t help but feel irritated and I needed to vent out my frustrations.

#6

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