Lately these days, everybody’s been complaining about ROTMG being stale. And the truth is, it is pretty stale, grinding Lost Halls or event dungeons over and over again. A few issues contribute to this:
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Trading
I want you to think back when you first started the game. Remember back in the days when you had to grind for those T9 armors and T8 weapons? Remember when gearing yourself was a challenge? It may have been a little boring those days because you never improved, but imagine you were put back in that situation today. You would know where to grind for those WC tops, but certainly it wouldn’t be as easy as sitting in USW2 and buying an Acrop for 1 life. Now fast forward to when you discovered trading. If you were like me, then you stopped using anything below old tops. You spent 20 minutes every day sitting in USW2, buying and selling so you could buy that armor you wanted. And you forgot about those days, when you valued anything above T6 weapons. You probably haven’t even entered an abyss or a sewers in 2 months, because you can just buy def and vit for life. Now I want you to think: Was the grinding more fun or was the merching more fun?
Trading also has many problems in itself. I’m going to create an analogy to our current world. The items you can trade are like stocks. However, ROTMG lacks the single most important thing in an economy, and that is a stable currency. You cannot truthfully say that there is a stable currency in ROTMG, because the truth is, there isn’t. Also, the “stock market” of ROTMG creates a few jobs that should never exist, like merching (stock speculators). How many times have you seen light blue stars, who have never entered a realm save for after they finished the tutorial, walking around with a pixie, oryx shield, fplate, and a deca? This is an example of a problem that trading creates. The current form of trading that ROTMG has is akin to bartering. And we all know what happened to bartering. A stable currency would solve many problems in ROTMG, but sooner or later people would complain that the currency doesn’t do anything, and they would want to buy more things with the currency. Fame is already a good example of this, as people are already demanding more fame boxes, decreasing the demand for gold-based boxes. You can see what would happen in a capitalistic society such as ours, where the admins have to make money to feed our children. They are never going to make that stable currency a thing, because that would decrease their earnings, which means their children starve.
Solving this problem would mean eliminating trading to an extent, maybe even completely. One way to seeing this is eliminating all trading except trading pots. It would certainly work, but it would still be very unstable. It still doesn’t stop people from forgoing tedious dungeons like abyss and sewers. The only true fix to this is to eliminate trading altogether. There are certain problems that might result from this, such as the problem to storing your pots. Pots take up much more space than gear, especially when you need to store much more pots than you need to with gear. Solving this problem would mean implementing a pot storage feature, where you can store a certain amount of pots and increase the amount of pots you can store with a little gold or a lot of fame (similar to the pet yard upgrades). Also, implementing this would make buying tops in the nexus more common. DECA simply needs to reduce the price of nexus tops. Trading has become a way of life of ROTMG, and I understand that removing trading will take away the experience of trading for pots and such for new players. DECA’s only good choice would be to implement a new currency system, but that would cause players to complain about the lack of items the new currency could buy. People would be asking for more mystery boxes, unlockers, skins, and more, and in the end, DECA loses income because it is such a small game. So, you must ask yourself, is trading really that important? -
Fame and Gold
Fame is one of the two currencies that DECA has implemented into the game. Currently, the amount of things you can do with fame is extremely limited. In fact, I can list them: Arena, Pet Yard and Pets, and the rare fame boxes that do come out from time to time. Things like this make you ask, why does DECA even have fame in the first place? Adding more uses to fame would certainly solve the problem, but it is a delicate process. Adding more uses to fame would reduce the amount of money DECA gets, so it is important to balance this carefully.
Making cosmetics buy-able with fame would certainly make people a lot happier. As of now, the only way for an F2P player to get the cloths and dyes they want is to endlessly grind event dungeons for mystery cloths and dyes. Implementing fame prices in the cloth bazaar would make it easier for people to get the cloths and dyes they want. To make sure DECA stills earns money from cloth and dye sales, these fame prices should be relatively expensive, like maybe a small cloth going for 500 fame. Also, DECA needs to reduce the gold price of the things they implement a fame price to. Spending $1 just to make a warrior pink doesn’t make sense, which drives people to completely ignore cloths and dyes in the bazaar and instead grind them in events. Also, DECA should make 2-3 skins for each class buy-able for fame, should they choose to remove trading. Those would mean the previously tradeable skins, excluding the slime skins and Oryxmas skins because those are still dropable. They should be available for around ~10k fame each.
Gold is certainly one of those currencies that has limited uses because DECA makes all other things so expensive. A top that would normally take you 10-20 mintues to find should not cost $4. If DECA were to lower their prices on certain items (Nexus tops; Cloths, Dyes, and Skins) and raise prices on high demand objects, like Lost Halls keys. This would certainly increase income from gold sales for DECA.
Part Two will be in another post because I ran out of space.