What are your problems with RotMG as of current?

#1

So recently, I’ve been thinking about making a critical video about the DECA era of RotMG, mainly focused on P2W mechanics, why the game feels so stale now, why so little new players are coming into the game, and how DECA has become complacent with the way they run the game.

I’m trying to bring up as many point as I possibly can, so I ask of you all, what you think has caused the current state of RotMG? I want to focus more on the action of DECA themselves and the mechanics that they added to the game that were detrimental, rather than core problems with the game since the beginning.

I would appreciate any responses given in this thread, even if its only one or two things.

#2

I have mentioned this few time on The Elite Dragon Discord:

Firstly, lack of vault + character slots for new Realmers. There is an one-time offer for buying them using fame but it ain’t going to be enough for F2P/new Realmers to sustain themselves.

Second: Endgames dungeons are seriously too limited for public runs. The only way to consistently raiding such dungeons are of course… Discords.

Third: Forge… IDK if it is still problematic or not after the recent rebalance.

Forth: …

#4

The new forge update unfortunately didn’t change mini boss forging, and midgame forges are still broken.

I tried getting my friend back into the game (he introduced me to it lol), and he quit very early because he couldn’t get another char slot or chest, people like to make the argument that the $20 to buy some char slots is cheap, but in reality the early game experience is such dogshit that no one in their right mind spends money before blue star.

#5

This, is what I’m talking about. Deca seriously need to cater F2P realmers a bit more. Catering too much on veteran player…

#6

discords have and will continue to be the largest problem with rotmg, they create this barrier to entry for mid game players to access endgame due to their gear reqs. Pretty much you either have to buy keys and farm runes to pop for endgame players so they will let you in their runs so you can learn the dungeon, or deal with pubhalls/osanc and then you get a bad taste in your mouth due to how slow and inefficient the runs are. The faster the run, the less time you spend dying.

#7

Hey, I have a quick rundown of some general problems. I think that part of what I wrote addresses legacy issues, but in my opinion ignoring problem areas is a form of actionless action. Deca has added content for years, so a lot of what I say which seems like legacy problems were exacerbated by Deca adding things that did not complement what already existed.

•Poor Nexus presentation, tutorials, tool tips:
No Nexus tutorial, very poor Grand Bazaar design, inconsistency between mystery shop UI and Grand Bazaar. Not enough/poor information to help players understand pets. Veteran players constantly teaching new players how to play the game.

•Stale meta:
Overall imbalance and limitation in pet abilities. Abundance of non-viable items such as most tiered rings. Many ST sets are too rare to complete, underwhelming, quirky, and have low exp bonus. Inability for new players to profit from trading mid tier gear.

•Effort vs. Reward ratio poor for much content:
Many crucial items for reaching far-late game drop from early game or end game content, but are inexplicably scarce from mid-late game content. The mark requirements for Standard Quest chests are way too high for the poor rewards. Low tier drops in O2.

•Limitations to social features:
Guild progression does not grant features the player did not previously have access to. No Guild item sharing or Guild soul bound loot mechanics. Few Guild only keys. New members cannot contribute meaningfully toward Guild progression, especially for old guilds. No in-game Guild to Guild networking.
Locked players on mini map more difficult to see on Exalt than Flash. No unique player name/dot color for Friends.

•Stability and scaling:
Large congregations of players causes lag and high scaling, which generally deters new players who seek a smooth experience. This lag causes input delay which prevents successful nexusing. New players generally opt to play early game content exclusively, which there is very little of (less than 1/5th of the dungeons). Oryx castle is a standout example with up to 85 players.

#8

I hate this argument. No discords haven’t ruined the game at all if anything they have shaped what the game is today.

Let’s take one of the most notorious discords, null. Null reqs can be met in normal o3s with a wine cellar tops warrior, a paladin with esben ring/wc tops and plenty of other sets that are easily accessible to new players.

Pubhalls/osanc are more clean than pub runs by far. So if I reword what you have said so far, it would go something like “I hate discords I like pub runs because discords make you bring good gear but I dont like the bigger discords because you dont have to bring good gear so its not clean”. You also have the added benefit that pubhalls/osanc rls are incredibly good at what they do and are arguably the best rls you’ll find. They can help you complete a dungeon with fair ease as long as you don’t panic and listen to their calls.

This couldn’t be more false. There are plenty of discords that are vcless/reqless and you can join without any sort of verification but people still bring good items to their runs so they aren’t horribly scuffed. And these discords run regularly (not long ago woland was running by far the most o3s daily). Endgame players aren’t these gods that dictate what happens in the game, they are no more than regular players just like anyone else that plays this game.

I also hate the fact you assume that midgame players are crippled and can’t do a fucking wlab without drinking 22 hp pots. So what do you mean by midgame players? Players that can do every dungeon apart from exalt dungeons? Players that can do every dungeon apart from o3/shatters? Players that can do o3, but have to leach in every phase? Either way the runs are very accessible to anyone and aren’t as stingy as people like you make them out to be.

#9

correct. raiding discords are largely responsible for the current state of the game. however, that being a good thing depends on you liking the experience they offer in the first place. I and many other people who have quit the game hate it.

I hate the bland efficiency of it all. I hate the unengaged braindead nature of perfectly clean, highly efficient, very easy raiding runs. there are no stakes, and there is no challenge. I hate being just another drop in an ocean of bullets and drones. I hate not contributing anything meaningful to the end result of my experience. I hate being a nameless nobody in a crowd of nameless nobodies because no one cares about each other because all that matters is loot and slurs. I hate that the most popular format of playing the game is a setting where I can’t see or experience any difference in my equipment so I might as well only care about and use trash.

but most of all, I hate that this is so standardized I cannot play it the old way anymore because there are no people outside of that domain to play with. guilds are only symbolic, and most of the guild chat revolves around things that happened inside a discord not related to the guild. gone are the days where you can meet some random person called Mowdogz and form a brief but unshakable and personal bond with them as you just play the game together because you two happened to be farming the same content. if I happen to enter a toxic sewer and a second person shows up, they will either do nothing while I rush or rush so effectively that I might as well have done nothing myself. all glory to the name of efficiency and nothing else. it makes me sick.

so have they ruined the game? clearly not for everyone, and clearly not for you. but absolutely for me and for countless others who have all been forced to move on. I can never play the game I once loved again, not because I refuse to but because it doesn’t exist anymore. it was taken from me and replaced by something much worse, something I cannot stand and must avoid for my sanity and mental health.

apologies if you feel this as an attack, it’s more of a convenient springboard to discuss a major “problem with rotmg as of current” in my eyes. the mindset these raiding discords bring is incredibly destructive to the experience of the game even outside of the discords themselves, and it will never change because it’s efficient for players and profitable for deca.

#10

make a auction house or a trade sever.

remove some of the servers, since most of them are dead anyway

#11

Okay, RotMG essay time.

For me, Realm of the Mad God just really lacks an identity in its presentation. IMO, this is caused by DECA having most the art for the game being done by outsiders with no clear or coherent vision, and just not showing any interest in the game (as an artistic work).

Say what you want about the WildShadow sprites, but they create a cohesive visual style together. The sprites were crude, flat and darker colours were the most used. This gave it a weird ancient and archaic, Atari feel. A good comparision is Minecraft pre-Microsoft imo, with is semi-realism and dark-shaded sprite work.

The DECA sprites… just feel off to me. They look too detailed and too shaded to be in this game. I have said this before, but visual effects, like lighting and filters would fit very well with the more detailed spritework DECA has added over the years. The game just look so odd, and the Unity port made it worse IMO. DECA and UGC make these bright, highly-detailed, anime-insprired sprites but it looks like a flash game with the ugly shadow border and the flat brightness on everything. You look at a games like Terraria, Katana Zero, Stardew valley or even the pilot for Star Fetchers, and realize that RotMG looks like a mobile port to PC. Indie games just have really good art direction nowadays, and RotMG is just outdated visually.Indie games also sound really good nowadays.

Alot of people seem to quite like the OST made for the game, but I find it underwhelming. The Original OST was upbeat, energetic, awe-inspiring and weird. It fitted perfectly with RotMG’s bullethell gameplay and the archaic, powerful feel of Oryx castle and Tomb of the Ancients, as example. The current OST has boring insturmentation, and fails to make you excited. The Josh Strife Hayes review made note of this by saying how the realm overworld music clashed with the combat happening in game. It feels poorly tought-out, like how a mobile game assumes the person playing it has no audio. It is just not up to the standard for the game OST’s currently out there (See the games I listed earlier for examples).

The lore that DECA has tried to make for the game is another element that does not work. In Hollow Knight, there are all these mysterious locations and characters in the game, just like in Realm. The difference is that Hollow Knight has a story, but also tiny details and elements from one area of the game appearing in another area of the game, seemingly with a history behind it all. DECA has tried to give realm characters and secrets to uncover, but the player has no emotional interest in it as the presentation makes it seem unimportant. Hollow Knight is super-detailed and has cutscenes and dramatic music to make you care about stuff. RotMG has nothing to make you care about its content besides the adrenaline-rush from the bullethell gameplay.

Those are my toughts on a problem with RotMG, that I don’t see discussed at all here. I hope I made my points clear trough the text.

One thing that just crossed my mind is, why DECA doesn’t ask Embracer Group for developers and funds to upgrade the game? RotMG has over 40K reviews on Steam, is a niche in the market, and has a super-loyal player base. Can DECA really not make any pitches to Embracer Group to make RotMG more marketable? Or does DECA have no grand ideas for the game? The game is so slow with adding needed content like a Realm and Guild rework, with those two features easliy two years away. Makes you wonder whether the focus of DECA is even in RotMG anymore, but rather in their mobile department (which it is, check Embracer Group’s website).

Some Ideas for Making RotMG More Cinematic
#12

I hear and feel what you’re saying on a deep level, and my guild shares the same sentiment. My opinion is that raid leaders are giant backseat gamers and they’d be teaching us all much more efficiently and cleanly through uploading quality video tutorials with their groups and encouraging players to run the natural dungeon drops with their guilds, friends, and randoms.

#13

How many endgame dungeons do you think people would run if discords and organized runs weren’t a thing? Discords at the most basic level are just a place where you can let people know where to group up for endgame dungeons. Reqs, vcs, callouts and everything else are extra things that are specific to each server. Most of what you’ve mentioned is only true for a select few discords and that is my problem with the argument you’re making; its directed towards 50% of the current discords, the other 50% is nothing like what you’ve described so far.

I myself don’t play this game much, but I’m part of a midgame guild that pops runes for each other consistently and tries to hoard all runes/keys for guild runs. There are a vast amount of people that pop runes publicly for you to enjoy and from what I’ve read so far, it’s not that you can’t play the old way, it’s that you’re scared of missing out on things that discord players have.

I actually find discords really boring in comparison to runs w friends/pub runs however I don’t limit myself to public runs.

This point is the only one I agree on to be honest. One of the scummiest methods deca has used to make the game even more p2w without people noticing is hm shatters. The requirements for a key to be harmode are completely rng and deca know that people will buy keys just to do hm.

However, without discords the rate of progression and level of difficulty of the game would be completely warped from what it is now. Most of the things people complain about such has having these incredible items to join runs, the dungeons being this hard in the first place and plenty of others such as exaltations, exist because of discords.

Sorry if this sounded rude in any way I wrote this at midnight and my eyes are barely working so if there’s any typos that make it wordy or difficult to understand lmk and ill change them later

#14

As a player who has been around for 10+ years I feel a little bitter about the game now,

Rotmg is not what it used to be, a simple flash game, easy to love, easy to play and easy to jump into. With the introduction of the new Exalt launcher, I haven’t felt the same way about this game, I have rarely played it since the update. Personally Rotmg is no longer that game I loved in my childhood.

Something I would love is if they could bring back a legacy server, reload everything pre-Exalt and just let us have fun the same way we all used to. Even if we had to start a fresh I would not mind. I just want my favourite game back. I’m going to try my best to get back into it but I’m scared of losing my Chars who have been living on this account semi dormant for 4-5 years now Sad times.

I love this game and always will but take me back, please.

#15

I have an awful lot of thoughts on this sentiment, but I can’t type them out again because the last time I tried it took me 3 hours. but that’s not fair to you since you couldn’t have seen it before, so I’ll try to give a shorter version:

those “things” you say I’m just scared of missing out on are the entire point of the game. if you’re not getting the rare drops, why are you playing? imagine deca releases a dungeon that gives 4 random pots on completion but has no equips or anything else that can drop, and the boss is recommended only for maxed characters. how popular do you think that’d be? the lair of draconis basically is that already and it’s generally ignored unless there’s an event for it because it’s just not worthwhile in their eyes. “it’s too long”, or “the whites suck”, or “I have everything good from it already”.

the drop rates are tuned to fit the playstyle of those who buy keys and steamroll them with large groups. if you do not fall in that category you effectively get nothing. and if you get nothing, what’s the point? friends? they left for discords or abandoned the game entirely. fame? leaderboards are full of no-lifes and hackers, you will never compete. it’s also worthless. fun? I really tried man, but without friends or progression the game is just too shallow.

if you want the full rant it’s here. it’s very long and winding but it ultimately sums up why I find rotmg’s systems to be unacceptable.

#16

I tried clicking on the link and it just didn’t work sadly.

You can play the game without discords and achieve a level of play that is perfectly fine for endgame. I myself exalted priest on an alt account without using any discords other than o3 which I didn’t specifically join the discord to do them I just found them whilst playing.
Yes the game is way harder without them, yes you won’t be able to do most of the things that discord players do but you can easily get all the rare drops without using discords.
From what I’ve seen, you hate discords with passion but you also underestimate the amount of keys popped and runes popped in public such as at the key server, especially during events.

Anyways this is kinda boring now I’m not going to change your mind and you’re not going to change mine and in the nicest way possible I don’t really care about rotmg related arguments.
Have a nice day :heart:

#17

Current problems with rotmg. Adding from what Xaklor said perfectly, about steamrolling content, which I agree fully.

  1. Dungeon keys exist;

  2. ‘Token item’ retrieving and marks for quests suck ass, at least code a proper automatic token quest thing. Count our bosses killed automatically; Give us rewards automatically; Make quests decent, give us rewards automatically, make progress satisfactory and remove the need for us to endure 10 loading screens every time we do a quest for an irrelevant reward

  3. Endgame content takes hours or days to access as a regular player with no discord (kill 30 oryx minions, kill guardians, oryx, oryx 2, gather 3 rare as hell keys and only then enter the boss you want);

  4. Endgame drop rates, white bag drop rates, are balanced around no-lifes and whales;

  5. Players are encouraged to either solo or steamroll content;

  6. Players have no way of grouping in a party system except for guilds, which are a very outdated and impractical system with limits;

  7. Friend list and guild system sucks; Bazaar system sucks; Buying STs (which are just UTs) with cash sucks.

  8. Quest system sucks (marks);

  9. Finding relevant quests (that arent useless and ridiculous time wasting quests like LICH/ENTS/GHOSTkings) takes a lot of killing or realm hopping, none are viable, so we just quit the realm. The realm is seriously 10 year old piece of content that’s never never been touched.

  10. Realm maps could be generated on the spot, or add more variety to them;

  11. Vault slots are expensive as fuck while simultaneously being possible to bypass the cost simply creating mule accounts for free storage. This makes no sense and is why storage should be cheaper, or to a certain degree possible to be bought with fame - same for some amount character slots too.

  12. The game has way too many loading screens, that are way too long;

  13. Deca is bad at project management…

There are probably more things I forgot. These are the things that annoy me the most.

#18

ah heck. I know you’re trying to wrap up and are tired of the back and forth but I think this is an important thing I’ve neglected to mention. in my frustration it’s way too easy to just say “raiding discord” and have everyone know what I mean without really addressing the full picture. it’s not a very effective way of communicating to be honest and you’re right to call me out for it.

I hate using those random key pop hordes even more. in fact, that was the very thing I was doing when a lot of these ideas properly materialized.

yeah, big surprise, I seem to just hate everything and I can’t blame you for thinking that of me. I also can’t blame you for thinking my issue is with the social elites standardizing gameplay and stifling player dissent since my link to the full explanation was improperly formatted and I haven’t touched on the pro-key anti-discord experience.

it’s a shame the link broke because my real issues aren’t rooted in those things: what I can’t deal with is the hyper acceleration of the gameplay loop to the point of self-sabotage. key binging with a horde of unstoppable players rendering the entire challenge loop meaningless is just as destructive whether it’s discord endorsed or free-formed in the nexus. there’s still too many people for an endgame set to be meaningfully distinct from a midgame set, there’s still too many heals flying around and players to take the hits for you, and it’s just not fun. and because this meta is so cemented in place, you cannot viably walk into a realm, beat up some baddies, and actually expect to get loot out of it. because the drop rates must be catered to the people running 1000 dungeons per day and not the ones running 10 per day.

I don’t expect you to reply, and I’m gonna try real hard not to reply back if you do. I felt this needed to be put out there is all.

also I fixed the link.

#19

Yes I agree, Discord raiding is a cancer to RotMG. However, nothing but the ‘amount of players’ has changed from the previous 10 years.

Old RotMG is still there. Go to a trading server where people still run sprite worlds, abysses, and other early game dungeons. You would still do an o2 and sometimes a very messy o3. That is the true RotMG experience.

But lets say you have an hour to play the game. I bet, you would rather sit in a discord to do 6 fungles, rather than clear a whole realm to duo 1 fungle.

#20

The sense and feel of the community has lowered, and it feels less active and tight-knit.

For the record, I do both discord runs and play casually in realms, especially trading server.

The community “feels” more dead and negative and these days. This is a combination of seeing the same active players constantly, more people complaining, seeing more and more players quit, and less new players join and play actively. There are still new players though, and interacting and helping them out are gemstone moments.

#21

Ok I just wanna say one thing about raiding discords: I am not going to try and demonize them but at the same time I’m not going to try and ignore the fact that they have accelerated the general progression of the game and have completely changed the meta. I want to stay as unbiased as I can as one sway into the wrong direction can lead to me getting thousands of comments explaining why I am wrong and I want this to be something that everyone can agree with for the most part.