What are your problems with RotMG as of current?

#116

how lol

#117

Either they played the game a lot (hopefully because they had so much fun) or it really is what they said and the login rewards gave a large boost.

#118

This is a very good idea, but the problem is when to start advertising. If we advertise an incredibly flawed game, or the RotMG that was left by Kabam years ago, people would just see it was that one boring MMORPG bullet hell only boomers like. There’s quite a few problems with the game, so while advertising can solve some, it can also be heavily restricted by it. To give an example, the new player experience. If we advertised the game now and lots of people tried it, so many would be turned off by how directionless it feels that they’ll get bored and ignore the game again. There’s new generations and maybe some older people who are willing to retry the game, but we have to make sure that the RotMG we promise is the one that they get to play. The RotMG that has an engaging (or at least viable) tutorial. That way, new players who do join will have a higher chance of staying on the game.

My main point is that advertising can work, but there’s issues with the game we have to solve first, mainly the new player experience, before we can safely say we’ll receive and keep those new players. Otherwise, the new players will get bored, leave the game, and be much less likely to retry it, regardless of what they may hear about it again.

#119

Care to elaborate? I’m not sure if you think that is funny because two months is too long or too short. What’s the standard time for that to happen?

Edit: I can’t imagine it would take very long. Log in gift gave me an uncommon pet. Maxed them and fused them to rare, from another uncommon egg I found. Maxed my new rare pet. I actually found three rare pet drops but unfortunately none of them were heal/mheal. Finally 2 weeks ago I found an uncommon mheal/heal/electric penguin and quickly fused it with another uncommon penguin I already had. Now it is at level 65, so pretty close to max. I just spent fame upgrading my yard to house legendary pets. I’m guessing I need about 10K-20K more fame to pay for fusing and maxing, and family switching. That’s pretty close, right?

Do you think I should swap penguin to exotic or exotic to penguin? Just curious. Penguin seems kind of a narrow family so I am leaning towards exotic.

#120

Probably both. I typically played about three hours a day during the week. Except the last two weeks I’m ashamed to say I was playing an excessive amount, closer to 6-8 hours. Now that the season is over I’m going to take a small break and return to a more healthy play-time.

#121

I doubt advertising would be cost effective. The biggest problem advertising a 10+ year old is that so many of the people who might be interested are well aware of it. Many of them will be ex players, or at least have given the game a go, especially when it was a web game and you could do so by just following a link.

So advertising in obvious places, such as forums of similar games, just won’t work. They can’t send out free copies to reviewers like you can with new games, hoping they’ll review it. There are reviewers and streamers who review/play old games but they have many to choose from, no particular reason to choose RotMG, and again are very likely to know about it already. Every once in a while one might have a look at the game but there’s not much that can be done to make this happen.

It’s far too small a game to use blanket advertising to reach the few people who might be interested but haven’t yet tried it. Only very large games, like e.g. Fortnite, can justify that.

Is there anything they can do? The biggest opportunity is finding players who might be interested but can’t play. There are more of them now as you can no longer just load up the game in any web browser, you need to be able to download and install it and many people are unwilling or unable to do so.

That means launching it on new platforms. But it’s already on Steam, which about covers PC platforms: others like Epic’s game store, the Apple app store might reach a few more people but not enough to justify the effort.

The only thing that would work is put it non-PC platforms, i.e. consoles + mobile devices, where most casual gamers who used to play Flash games have ended up. That would put it in front of large number of new players, as well as some ex players who no longer game on PC, making it easier to advertise to new and returning players. It would be a story (“ten year old web game finally makes it to console/mobile”) so should also get lots of free press coverage. And it would benefit existing players too, especially those struggling to find time to play on a PC for various reasons.

#123

Ya dead wrong for thinking that “It’s far too small a game to use blanket advertising to reach the few people who might be interested but haven’t yet tried it. Only very large games, like e.g. Fortnite, can justify that.”
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Tesla almost went bankrupt, most companies are balancing debt and how you use your time, and energy wisely is important.
The answer to all your unhappiness and discontentment with the game’s growing stale is that there’s next to no new playerbase. With a large playerbase and a bunch of noobs flyin around. its pretty entertaining. right now its just old hats runnin end game shit and no noobs clearin realms so thats how u feel about the game. like it’s being power-mined.

The way to gather new fans is by putting the mf iPhone in front of their faces. You dismissing that RotMG Devs can’t is more a show that YOU can’t. There is strength in willpower dog, once determined one is unstoppable.
Even OSRS is doing advertising and likely garnering new players from said ads.
If you wanna invest smart… End of summer people are more indoors and having free time inside.
Percentage wise population i reckon the average gaming hours rises by atleast 1hr during winter.
That’s a lotta potential, over a couple million people.
I got love for RotMG just like you do as well.

I think what’s delayed ad-development for RotMG. Is from a 30 second snippet i can skip in 5 seconds. The game will likely look cheesy and not taken seriously.

But Oryx 3 dungeon begs to differ, It was beautifully crafted.
Flashy crazy edits will make the ad righteous. picking a really good song is difficult because Sync Licenses (for a published song) can be serious price. Yet both those are crucial.
i’ve never played it but it looks fun, I’ll probably try it.

#124

I stand by what I wrote. By “blanket advertising” I mean the sort of advertising meant to reach a wide audience, whether on TV, in newspapers, in cinemas or in the real world, on billboards and on the sides of busses.

Such advertising is expensive, so expensive that few firms can afford it. I doubt DECA could even if they used all their resources. And they make many games, so spending so heavily on just one game makes no sense. You could spend many times the game’s annual budget easily. If by doing so you could boost the player base 10x it might be worth it, but that’s never going to happen, for the reasons I gave that most people who might be interested in the game are already aware of it.

Generally wide advertising campaigns only happens with new AAA games. Ones that will sell well on their own, but advertising makes sure of it, or generates a few more sales – with games that sell millions of copies at $50+ each, boosting sales by 5% or 10% can pay for the advertising.

Few ongoning games can justify this. Fortnite is the exception, but it’s the most valuable gaming franchise there is. It has not only many more users than RotMG but revenue per user is likely many times higher. And it invests heavily in content, including expensive licenses of other people’s IP, which gives it lots to put in adverts.

For RotMG much narrower targeted advertising makes financial sense. But it’s hard to think of a way to do this that would reach enough new players to make it worthwhile. If you e.g. identify players of similar games and target them chances are almost all of them will be aware of RotMG already, played it even some time in the last decade.

#125

I generally agree with what you are saying. I do think, however, that you overestimate how well known RotMG is. I learned about the game’s existence several months ago through Steam. I generally follow gaming news and am reasonably well informed yet I was never even vaguely aware of its existence. The internet is so vast I am sure that there are plenty of fun games that I have never even heard of and I’m sure the same is true for the average gamer.
Advertising on Steam is already a great (and free?) way for new players to be recruited. Further targeted advertising elsewhere could also be profitable.

#126

i asked because i thought it was very fast,. 2 months to legendary

#127

I’d argue the reason why advertising isn’t an especially viable option for rotmg is because it’s extremely hostile to new players. this has been brought up several times over the years and isn’t very fresh criticism, but most people who experimentally pick up the game quickly put it back down again because it does a very bad job of explaining itself and makes the early game a boring trudging slog because in the eyes of both the players and the developers, “it doesn’t matter”. if a new player spends most of their time playing content that doesn’t matter because it’s all they can reach, they will feel that and get bored and leave. only those who are invited in by existing players who can show them the ropes and jumpstart their progress have a chance at “getting” rotmg fast enough to want to stick around. that, or the players who just very luckily happen to get stuck because they aren’t put off by the boring grind.

as a small tangent I guess now that I’ve said this that’s probably at least one factor into why the community at large is so toxic compared to other similar games. unpleasant people generally have unpleasant friends because they’d be put off otherwise, so if the decent people start leaving one by one then there’s a higher ratio of toxic players. so when a new person gets invited, odds are higher that they’re being invited by a toxic person and are even more likely to become an absolute piece of shit almost instantly. other things like no moderation is of course, a much bigger problem still, but this can’t be helping matters.

given that we have some newer players participating in the conversation I’m confident one or more of them is thinking “well I’m a new player and I’m having fun”, but that’s just survivorship bias. you’re here to explain that you love the game and made it past the hostile new player experience, but all the other new players who didn’t aren’t here on the forum to explain that to us, because why would they be here? I’ve tried roping several friends into rotmg, and all of them bailed, even with my help.

#128

That’s an interesting theory about shit attracting shit, I wonder how true it is.

I swear I’m not here to talk about how much I love the game, I addressed the topic of this post by presenting my critiques of the game.
Did your friends ever tell you why they bailed? I have one friend that I invited but they told me that they had already tried the game and quit as soon as they realized it featured permadeath.
Personally, I play a lot of Roguelikes and some Roguelites, so permadeath is normal to me. I didn’t find the early game particularly grindy but it may be because I am used to such things. In my experience, once I started to understand the game loop and how the Oryx fights work, then I quickly made it out of the early game and into the more interesting content. It just took one good character and some generous log in gifts to achieve.

#129

WOuld you potentially consider that what propelled fortnite into:
“Few ongoing games can justify this. Fortnite is the exception, it’s the most valuable gaming franchise there is. It has not only many more users than RotMG but revenue per user is likely many times higher. And it invests heavily in content, including expensive licenses of other people’s IP, which gives it lots to put in adverts.”
was simply a high-level manager of ‘Epic Games’ during budget allocation in earlyszn deciding a simple yes vs no?
Invest in yourself
You have no idea the power of your hostility Skandling, playerbase interaction is so small; DECA devs probably read these.
I think your issue with the game is it’s not gripping enough. Pet’s, Consumable 6/6 stacks made the difficulty learning curve way change for how much damage even a tomb would put out because you only had 8 hp pots to sort from and 45/50 vit.
With Pet’s released and now everyone at 90s. End Game is quite easy to manage yet it’s still not much shit of variety to be pickin from. End-game content is o3 shatters void. That’s 3 things. And once completed all and cozy, grinding for all exalts just… cba…

Video games are intended to be enticing to play and if an average consumer has never seen the store. They’d never know of it.

Here’s a hyperbole example. Mcdonald’s you know of because it’s so successful right. But to say a kid who’s completely un-previously knowing of what he deems as dope, Unbiased. He would only know of McDonald’s if he had SEEN a McDonald’s.

Rotmg Youtube scene is whatll make Rotmg pop again, as it did the first time, but there are not many content creators who are inspired to do so. The playerbase is now full of grown folks who are busy doing their own lives and do this for leisure. But generations of new kids keep poppin up every year… so marketing teams definitely losing out on influx of new players via advertising / new end game content.

realize the game is actually good.
Advertising/new content works hand in hand with playerbase mutual satisfaction? But content does also need to be enticing.

My problem with realm is the way realm attracts players. Rotmg is sitting lovely in a niche of the market of players who got love for simply good games, but the only way it attracts any players at the moment is if I literally tell someone word of mouth about it. And that’s a problem. Even though that’s how Fortnite started to get a ball rolling to forge Epic Games, I think what’s of utmost importance is having more customers not getting the most out of each customer.
And Fortnite did that well. By Literally. Going, And Finding, Customers, To Invest, In, My Company. I’m Not Shitting You Dog. That’s how all those ‘collaborations’ happened. Once you get known for doing collabs then they approach you, it’s no shit. Good intentions go far, do it cause you want to.

#130

Not free – to put your game in front of Steam’s existing players, on the web site + in the Steam app, is very valuable and will be very expensive.

I doubt its very effective though. I see adverts every time I use Steam but they seem utterly unconnected to what I’m playing. The Steam app can know exactly what games I’m playing, but it shows me adverts for totally unrelated games, probably the same games it’s showing everyone else.

As such it only makes sense, and is only used, for new games. New games are the ones best able to reach a large number of potential players who were previously unaware of the game. Also an initial advertising campaign can drive initial pre-orders and sales, so push the game up the charts which further drives interest and sales.

Maybe if Steam were better at recommending games based on ones you’ve bought and/or play. But right now it seems a bad place to advertise, unless you’re trying to make a big splash with a new game.

#131

Weird, Steam advertises really well for me. I know getting a front page splash costs a lot, but it is free to get your game recommended. And RotMG was repeatedly recommended to me because I was playing another bullet hell, Hyperspace Dogfights. So in the sense that Steam recommends the game to people who would probably be interested in the game, it is free advertising.

#132

Expanding on this idea. Make a way to trade that is like realmeye trading, but in the actual game, Make it so that the players don’t have to switch servers and stuff to trade. Make it so that you can put up an offer, and some one can look at that offer and decide they want to trade with you, and it will either give a popup when some one has requested to trade with you, and the new items go right into your vault.

Also, the only thing 90% of the servers are used for is discords. Take away some servers, take away discords somewhat. Also, take away the function of being able to kick someone when you pop a key in a bazaar, if they did this, it would make it so discords wouldn’t just go into a bazaar and kick the people that followed them in there. Of course, if this happened, people would buy less keys, which deca doesn’t want, sooooo won’t happen, but some ideas lol.

#133

The cause is probably that the game is free to play, instead of being subscription based.

#134

I agree with you. I don’t think rotmg even has a marketing plan. Even if they had a mkt team, they’re not working on rotmg but on their other games. Also skandling has no idea what he’s talking about.

Deca doesn’t even sell any game merch

#135

i get on the game realize i have to get into a discord run to play and log off

#139

Cem final boss damage feels illegal; the paralyze and confuse shots can pop you from one hit