What are your problems with RotMG as of current?


#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 Indie games just have really good art direction nowadays, and RotMG is just outdated visually.Indie games also sound really good nowadays.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.


#22

Lets imagine an average redstar with 1-2 8/8s and can complete most dungeons but struggle with void/shats/o3
they only have 2 8/8s and haven’t gotten any whites from the aforementioned dungeons due to difficultly completing them.

If i want to bring the aforementioned warrior with WC tops, i will need at least a t13 sword, which yes isnt hard to obtain bc you can trade, but will still require a decent amount of grinding for life pots. Say I want to bring a wizzard, at the minimum i will need t13 staff, para spell, and either a endgame dps ring or a t15 robe. the theoretical player cannot bring his wizard to farm o3 because you need either a ring or a robe from o3.

In fact most classes are like this for null, pretty much pally and warrior are the only exceptions, but they still require at minimum t13 sword.


#23

No they don’t? You literally can bring t12/t6/t13/t5 or esben and meet reqs perfectly well. Yes you’re going to loose 8/8s learning o3/shatts big surprise? I can’t dictate what anyone does, but learning a dungeon on wizard is an incredibly stupid idea. And no warrior and pally aren’t the only exceptions, samurai can meet with wine cellar tops + doku + esben ring, bard can meet with leaf/concertina/esben and if you want to push it, priest can meet with fungal and mlab. All of these sets are easily farmable in mass and the likely hood of you dying in a null run is far lower than in an osanc run. I started this game backwards in which the first dungeon I learnt was o3 and then I did all the other exalt dungeons and harder godland dungeons and even with 0 experience of this game outside of snake pits, I managed to get my first osanc complete after 2 deaths so if someone with 0 experience of this game can do it with wc tops + 2/8 in life and speed then I’m sure an 8/8 warrior can do it perfectly well. I’m bored of arguing and I kinda made that pretty clear in my other replies so please don’t respond and if you do, don’t expect a reply.


#24

not wc tops, t12 sword is wc tops

not hard to get

you can use esben’s wedding ring, an omni you grinded for, e.t.c.

no new players farm o3s with wizard.

no? only wc tops, which is t12 sword.


#25

hmm, it’s been a while since I really talked about rotmg issues in this forum. where to begin? I suppose the best thing I can do for now is mention a very broad point that I can provide some justification for.

(tl;dr just read the last paragraph)

rotmg is neither a good roguelite nor a good mmorpg.

rotmg doesn’t have particularly good combat
if we take a look at the micro-gameplay, in the form of dungeon crawling shoot’em up content, rotmg simply doesn’t perform nearly as well as its peers in the “bullet hell” department- some of these issues take the form of tenured designs such as a simplistic aggro-based design, and others take the form of more mechanical/technical debts such as the presence of a highly exploitable instant nexus, lack of invulnerability frames, or the game’s general inability to lock the player to a specific playspace without a highly involved map design. there is a lot of skill involved in rotmg still, but anywhere else you look in the genre- you have a faster, purer, and just better executed version of combat.

rotmg doesn’t support the speed of roguelite progression
beyond level 20, rotmg struggles to continue its roguelite model of a nimble, skill-heavy progression. maxing is a greatly time-consuming process that involves grinding much of the same content in the same spot in the game. there’s not a lot of upward mobility through skill or random chance- a rare roll in a godlands dungeon might entail getting 2-3 stat potions instead of just 1. knowing that there are roughly ~200 potions required to max, this is an absolutely sluggish point in progression for any roguelite standards. in the early wildshadow days, the concept of maxing was added simply as a band-aid to give players something to do when they had mastered reaching level 20. does this sound familiar to… say, pets? exaltation? forge? everything is a band-aid. progression has no foundation and thus we continue changing the game state and rendering much content subpar or even completely useless to progression when we move to the next layer. Each of those layers adds some level of stability to the average player’s runs but reduces the probability of random windfalls that improve your run, or skill-based challenges that boost your run.

rotmg is punishing for the wrong reasons
it’s due to the same technical crust and poor design mentioned in the first section that rotmg ends up adding many sources of unfair loss mechanics- whether that comes in the form of many near-instakills that technically aren’t instakills, but are still general singular mistakes that lead to a run reset. similarly, the punishment scales with the time/effort needed to get back to the same point in progression, something that doesn’t scale very well at all. a lot of times it can feel difficult for a player to take ownership over their own loss.

rotmg is also too safe/stable for the wrong reasons
early-midgame progression takes the form of character progression (pots and items), which are all capable of being stored in an expandable vault system. lategame progression takes the form of pets/exaltations, neither of which lose any progress on death. at some point, stakes don’t properly scale as the ability to store massive windfalls of items softens any real blow that permadeath could possibly deal to your way of playing the game. in short, storage is the permadeath buffer, but as it’s nearly unattainable for F2P and far too reliable for anyone who does have the space, it’s not very good at what it does. with storage buffering all sense of loss, it fails to actually bring out the good aspects of permadeath games- the ability to change your play circumstances at a moment’s notice.

rotmg doesn’t support an mmo progression
it’s due to the same systems that once made rotmg a semi-decent roguelite that prevent it from making it a good mmo. character progression is cut terribly short due to a short-sighted maxing system that stops being relevant beyond godlands tier content, and account progression is lagging sorely behind auxiliary systems that were never meant to hold the full weight of player progression needs. character progression is unable to really flourish due to permadeath acting as a limiter to how much time/effort should be sunk into an individual character. without the broad scale of activities that can contribute to your account progression, it’s hard to really dive into rotmg the same way you can a more typical mmo with better systems designed for large time/effort sinking.

rotmg has no art, sound, or narrative worth remembering by
it lacks an aesthetic beyond just being a “quirky pixel game” that might turn a few bored teens’ eyes when looking for games to kill time with. it’s just not a very memorable game for anything but gameplay. this is deserving of a post in itself, so i’ll keep this one short.

rotmg is actively resistant to change
try as you might to bring the best points to the table, or the most innovative solutions, no one that matters is listening. each valued group of players, whales, lategame raiders, etc. (basically anyone except F2P) each have established their own set of expectations that they are quite difficult to budge on. DECA’s management is far too risk-averse to ever shift the game too far from the expectations of the players that pay for their bottom line. In both Kabam/DECA, there have been many truly talented and passionate developers and designers who wished the best for the game, but the management structure is built against their wishes and often at times the most ambitious game-changers are often the ones who are booted from the team first. Those who stay struggle with a company that literally, not figuratively, does not care for the design of the game, and resists attempts to better the game.

i love realm, which is why it’s sad for me to say that i’m pessimistic things will ever improve from the perspective of realm of the mad god. but there’s better things to stress over and battles that are actually winnable. maybe think about that before placing too much emotional investment in the game’s future.


#26


No, this is just simply wrong


#27

Ive been arguing my point about gear reqs and how they gatekeep against new/bad players from being able to experience the game at a certain level. But i dont really blame discords and groups for these reqs, because they almost have to because of one of the biggest fundamental problems with realm.

Bad players ruin the experience for experienced players.

The reason you wont find a lot of experienced players farming realms if there’s not an event is because, due to a lot of reasons, new players make the game harder for experienced players.

I don’t really have a solution for this besides more fundamental ways to split players by power level being built into the game, rather then players being forced to create these barriers themselves. I remember years ago a pserver I played had this idea where once you got 8/8, you would get access to a new area where you could farm in smaller groups, but it was always publicly accessible, you just had to spend i think fame.

This was, I think, a incredibly healthy thing for the game, because new players didnt have endgame players steamrolling their content, and endgame players didnt have new players slowing them down. Having this publicly accessible meant that it was very feasible for the entire player base to interact with, as opposed to requiring money to be spent like in the current system.

Deca ofc will never deal with this problem, because the problem they have created makes them money, from players feeling obligated to buy keys.


#28

I thought of one way the other day: have the game take account of power level for HP scaling.

Give each player a power ranking. Start with e.g. maxed_stats * equipment_fame_bonus, then refine it by focussing on the stats that most help in combat, giving extra bonuses to the rarest/best gear, perhaps varying it by class also, perhaps taking account of exaltations.

Then instead of counting players to do HP scaling, add up their power levels. So when a 3/8 with old tops joins the group it won’t be problem as they’ll barely affect HP scaling.

It doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough to let chars of different power levels, so with varrying numbers of maxed stats and levels of gear, play together. It could be refined over time based on stats of how it worked.

If it worked well then groups like the publishers of the above graphic could use it instead, either by requiring a particular power level, or by letting in anyone knowing the game’s HP scaling will take account of differing power levels. They might still want players with a certain amount of experience, or to fill particular roles, but they would no longer need to micromanage power levels.


#29

FYI, Null reqs updated quite recently. Old reqs for reference:

Sneaky way to nerf good items if you ask me. Either the items are good/HP and not enough changes, or the nerfing is enough that these items are now just… bad, at least in most situations (making them not really worth it to get).