What are your problems with RotMG as of current?

#214

… and it’s getting worse… so I’ll take a break.

#215

A few thoughts about that:

  1. The sprites: I actually love the new sprites! If anything, the REALM needs to be resprited and the DUNGEONS left as they are.
  2. The lore: Yes… It stands to be improved. Fundamentally, though, the game has never been about the story or the lore, so I wouldn’t call this a top-priority problem.
  3. The OST: My happiest day in Realm was when I got on the Unity port and FINALLY, a new song played in the Nexus. I would say keep the old Realm theme for mountains areas, but keep the new one for the beaches. Then compose a new one to go in the highlands. Other than that, I would just say finish the OST! There are still plenty of dungeons without unique music that could really use it.
    I’m also a Hollow Knight fan, and I would say that comparing the two is a bit of a stretch, since Hollow Knight is a single-player story-centric game, while RotMG is an MMO and gameplay-centered.
    Appreciate the thoughts though!
#216

I’ve noticed a lot of people complaining about Discords. I agree; I haven’t done a ton of endgame content, but I definitely think doing it publicly is more fun than doing it in a Discord run.
Here’s one idea for a solution: new rules for keys and portal openings. Here’s what I mean: all portals have a max of 15 or so players, except for keys popped in guild halls. If a portal is dropped by a monster or opened with a key anywhere else, it drops several portals instead of one, enough so that everyone can go in… but in separate dungeons. Just like for the Nexus portals, each dungeon portal would say how many people are in it out of its max (e.g, 4/15). Keys popped in guild halls would ignore this new rule entirely, and Oryx will still summon everyone in the realm, as normal.
This would demand a much higher percentage of players in Discords to become raid leaders, and would demand that a higher fraction of people involved in any dungeon to know what they’re doing for the dungeon to succeed. It would also encourage doing dungeons as guilds, since if enough guild members log on at the same time, dungeons can be made just as easy as Discord runs are now.
What do you guys think?

#217

To start, the early and mid game are non-existent and dead, the godlands are basically the mid-lands now from when I started years ago and the realm music makes my ears bleed. And the st sets, and the endless amount of new items added replacing the old items for no good reason. Tell me I’m wrong :slight_smile:

#218

OK :grinning:

It’s not so much the early game is dead. It’s received a lot of attention with massively improved dungeons, in-combat changes benefitting early game players most, and events like Seasonal chars + missions accessible even to early game players. There’s never been a better time to start playing. The problem is not enough people are starting, compared to when it was a Flash game available on many sites.

Your other points are even less valid. Almost all game music sucks, and even the best gets repetitive after a while. Do as I do and mute it, play your own music or listen to sports radio.

As for items I really welcome the many new items. They both give you many more options for the classes you like, and give you incentive to play classes you don’t, to try out items for them. More generally they keep the game fresh and interesting so there’s always some item or set you’ve not got yet and want to try. With a handful of exceptions nothing’s been replaced, the old items are all still available.

#219

To be honest, just with putting vault chests (pot storage too!) and character slots in the pass and events may do it, also reworking the realm or adding new biomes and mobs to find while exploring, maybe some lore with a not hostile mob to find in the realm, as I´ve been playing for almost a decade and not know any of the lore.

#220

Seasonal is great, but I feel like the realm music is a physical attack against me and a mental torture that drives me insane, the music was 50% of my enjoyment of the game back in the day. There is no point to replace items that serve a purpose already with flat out improved items. It leads to so called powercreep that destroys the original game design which is stupid. The way I see it the game should be more like it used to be, challenging, short and sweet with a fantastic soundtrack without the item powercreep for no reason at all. Godlands was fun, dungeons were a neat novelty and actually challenging instead of a safe grind to 8/8, the game did not just start when you were 8/8 but it started with you spawning at lvl 1 with everywhere populated. I am old school dude, I miss da good o’ days :smiley:

#221

A majority of the lore can be found from the Realm Eye in the Cursed Library, but you could just read the responses on the wiki. There’s also a lot of lore found in dungeons, such as the shipping logs in Deadwater Docks, research logs in The Nest, and the majority of The Shatters, especially in its hard mode route. There’s even a Discord server specifically dedicated to analyzing lore.

Finding a passive/neutral NPC in the realm that gives lore would be cool, but I’m not sure if it would fit in the context of a realm overtaken by gods and monsters. The few survivors would most likely be in dungeons or in the Nexus. The most likely scenario would be an NPC that isn’t human and travels throughout the realm to hide from enemies.

#222

I think the best compromise would be for items to focus on being useful at their stage of progression rather than being good in the game all the time. Spider Shuriken is a Ninja star that can Slow, but Midnight Star exists, even though they technically inflict different debuffs. However, an early game player struggling with mobile bosses could find use in Spider Shuriken. Instead of Snakeskin Shield being a tiered sidegrade with very slight stat changes, it should do something like inflict Speedy on the user but have no Stun and have a long cooldown. It’d give mid-game Knight players an edge on mobility while sacrificing their main ability and not being too spammable for it to be used frequently by endgame rushers.

As for items being straight up replaced with direct improvements, the best compromise for that would be what devs are doing right now; adding endgame upgrades to already-existing items. Atavistic Soul Saber is a very high damage weapon with a slow fire rate that’s an upgrade of Ancient Stone Sword, a somewhat high damage weapon with a slow fire rate. Reinventing items from earlier in the game to be used for Endgame and forcing players to work for it is a really nice way of introducing new content, putting the spotlight on underutilized mid to early-game items for veterans who can then recognize the potential they have even in those earlier stages, and preventing total power creep. Most upgrades also require the original item, so players are going to have to get the original item regardless of how bad it may be in comparison to its endgame upgrade.

#223

I think Seasonal is in part an answer to this. I mean it’s a response to requests for an “old school” version of ROTMG. Previously they tried Rifts but that petered out after a few seasons. Seasonal is I think a big improvement over Rifts, primarily as it takes place on the same server as non-Seasonal so doesn’t split the player base. The missions and rewards are more interesting and engaging too, while the lack of a leaderboard [that Rifts had ISTR] means no pressure, you can play it at your own pace.

Is it perfect? Not at all. I suspect all old school players have their own vision of how to do “classic” ROTMG, and Seasonal probably satisfies few of them. But it’s a lot better than Rifts, and works very well I think, for both existing and new players.

Existing players get to start from level 0 with no gear and grind their way up to 20. Before Seasonal I had not done this in a long time, having dozens of 8/8 chars already when I died I just switched to another maxed char. But with Seasonal each season I’ve started over.

New players benefit from missions jump-starting access to gear and pots, and boosting BXP for Battle Pass progress. They also benefit from there being far more players in the early amd mid game as existing players start over and level up their Seasonal chars.

Could Seasonal be better? Sure. An option to go petless would be interesting, on e.g. char creation, with a boost to BXP, missions, or additional petless-only missions as a reward. Some way to further boost vaults, perhaps by “borrowing” them from your normal account, would be nice. More seasonal only rewards like the Apple of Maxening would be good, especially if like that they are items that would be OP normally.

#224

I like the new areas and stuff but the base game is dead almost completely. They created some problems and inherited some others but I think a complete realm redesign is in order though I don’t think it would really fix the huge problems that exist today. In gaming you often want to not grind at all so devs may eliminate it to a large extent but a moderate grind that respects your time is what makes it fulfilling in a way and they know this full well. Think of the forge that has eliminated any grind and therefore any value in the items. In it’s modern state it is a completely broken game with the main thing of completing the insanely hard areas like the shatters and orcy 3, which are neat. I like the battlepass thing but I think that it gives so many items that people will eventually not buy it anymore because of that, think of cdirks, oeros, ogmurs of which I have a bp for now :smiley: you know. So the main problem now is that realm revolves around dungeons instead of dungeons revolving around the realm, the godlands are a safe farming area basically and not challenging at all therefore not fun at all, think of the huge godwalls that would randomly kill you but actually made things more entertaining, and as I’ve said the replacement of old items with new ones that make most of the game a cake-walk. I like to play realm and all but these are the things that are no very good, some of which will only allow for a short-term increase of profitability for deca and peter off when people have got 'em done. With all this said though, I have fun still. Also, realm is sort of a joke game, the sh*t lore needs to go :smiley:

#225

While I agree to an extent, DECA has taken measures to reduce how overpowered forge can be. For one, you need marks for certain endgame items, which means that you have to have done the dungeon at the very least in order to be able forge. The other feature that’s probably bigger is the implementation of dungeon pools in which items from a dungeon or group of dungeons can only be forged by using one or two items from the same dungeon or dungeon pool. No one’s going to be able to forge The Forgotten Crown using three Fungal Breastplates anymore.

I’d also like to argue that the forge has brought more value to items in reference to the new upgraded items. Don’t like Ancient Stone Sword? Get a Kogbold Enhancement Core and make it much stronger. Tired of the same Wand of the Bulwark? Beat the secret boss of the Moonlight Village and earn her gratitude, which allows you to not only improve the item’s stats but add a unique proc.

Seriously, how is the lore bad? We have a full backstory for Oryx the Mad God, books showing how The Shatters fell into ruin, and the overarching presence of the Void Entity throughout the realm.

#226

Most of my criticism is just exaggerated fun. I do think the forge system is better from when you used to be able to use the sh*t nest items to make actual good items and all the other stuff but it is a very far cry from when I used to play I think 10 years ago in the wildshadow era, was a different game. I just hate the direct replacement but whatever, the big enemies are a lot stronger so you need better stuff I guess.

As for the lore, I personally love the whole orcy was a super good gladiator but then turned evil and his king like went to evil too and now he uses the power of something to like prevent himself and his minions from dying and kill the normal players instead. That is like 10/10 lore, like 10x better than the lore of Lord of the Rings it makes my head spin. How could they think of this masterful story that surpasses literally every lore known to man? Jeez. :smiley:

#227

Holy shit dude you predicted an update like a year in advance.

#228

it’s not fun anymore.

oryx used to be a fat drunk with a god complex and now I’m expected to believe he’s the ultimate unbeatable super mega cool badass with limitless power you can never overcome. wtf happened?

it’s like rebooting pokemon and making the plot a needlessly complicated mess where literally every named character has a distinct agenda from another one and everyone is edgy and brooding and serious all the time and there’s an apocalypse a hair’s trigger away every 15 minutes. I’m sure someone out there is into that kind of plot but it’s sure as hell not what I signed up for and I’d rather stick with the older, non-cringy arrangement, or even no plot whatsoever.

the game’s plot is openly a futile sisyphean struggle where you are doomed to fail and every achievement you make is immediately taken from you and reset. in attempting to explain the necessary mechanics of an mmo style grind, they accidentally said the quiet part out loud and admitted it’s a pointless, endless grind where the status quo can never change by definition. if it’s plot you’re after, just play something else. hoping more lore gets added isn’t going to fix this issue.

#229

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I’m being serious, the futility of it all is what intrigues me. The Vindication event had me excited because it challenged this very concept. If DECA ever decides to continue that or plan another event in the future that follows a similar narrative in which a character/group of characters gets closer to breaking the cycle, I’d be really impressed. Of course, they can’t truly end the story because they don’t want to end the actual game. I just find it fun seeing how in-universe characters challenge these rules. Also I still enjoy the older, simpler lore like the jungle god family dynamic or Oryx being a drunk bastard. That lore isn’t gone, it just gets overlooked by the more meta game breaking stuff.

#230

Its interesting how you didn’t mention the many item descriptions there are that hint at a long history of peoples and happenings in the realm as an example of ‘good’ lore. The description of the Helm of the Great General (T6) calls mention to the great orcish war as a notable event, the Quiver of Thunder’s description states that is was made in a forgotten age by a lost tribe of Dark Elves and the description of the Acropolis armor suggests it comes from a place known as the eastern citadels. Anyone can tell you that this info has no connection to the experience of playing the game. Barely any of these events and places are mentioned anywhere else, let alone seen by the players own eyes. But, for me these brief mentions of faraway, mighty kingdoms and epic conflicts long in the past had a massive impact on how I viewed this world. They made this stock-spritework MMO-world alot more interesting. It gave the crude looking places and enemies alot more meaning, just with the idea that there was more than what meets the eye. The realm as a run-down stage of war, kingdoms and magic, forever lost and long forgotten.

While DECA and UGC members have continued the tradition of having out-there descriptions for tiered items, I couldn’t tell you about any of the item descriptions added post-2017. The interest of the developers and the playerbase has shifted towards the characters of RotMG, who barely existed before they became the play things of a bored community. This flash-game was never made to have character-arcs or anything that could possibly make any sense. In 2015, the Realm was a wacky place with a bunch of three-color sprite creatures living in dilapidated castles, towers and huts. Nowadays the realm was once controlled by differing kingdoms (that would each have been way too small to be their entity how does that work), and Gemsbok destoyed any remnant of realm civilization more impressive than a petty king leading a roving band, trough… monetary policy?

My point is that trying to explain the unexplainable inevatibly leads to a bad explanation and a bad story. Alot of games make this mistake of demystifying their world and slapping on a middling narrative while the player(s) could have done all the work. Terraria made this mistake with the lore-scrolls posted on the community forums. I think Hollow Knight drops the ball a few times where the community-found lore isn’t at all satifying, and Undertale has loose-ends that no one seems to even think about but are so large they could swallow the entire game whole.

Sorry to have bothered you with this opinion piece about a game I stopped playing two years ago, but this topic is close to my heart and my fingers slipped for about an hour and a half. My persective is probably unique in the community nowadays, and I accept mine as niche viewpoint among many.

#231

I honestly forgot about the item descriptions, but they do make up a surprising amount of background lore. Reading item descriptions was part of the fun when I was a new player; I was always excited to get a new piece of gear and read about how powerful it is or where it came from. Nowadays I barely do that either because I’ve already seen or I just don’t care.

#232

well I wouldn’t say it’s an entirely invalid premise, it’s just very exhausting. if you’re into that I guess I can’t tell you you’re wrong.

I actually don’t like those either. they’re so wildly disconnected from anything that actually appears in game one questions why they even exist. the drop locations are also disconnected from the item lore too so you don’t even get that. the realm eye’s item lore doesn’t help either, it’s just more of the same.

#234

oops