Hi. OG player here. 2 of my favorite games from my youth were Runescape and RotMG. Both of them, to me, are pretty much dead. Both of them have the same cause of death: more.
The appeal to this game for me and my friends was that it was fun. I know, these days, saying that videogames are fun is an edgy, extremist position, but I’m of the sort that believes that good videogames should be fun, even if it means they aren’t “good” by whatever standards.
RotMG, when I first discovered it, about a decade ago now, was so, so fun to play. From the moment me and my buddies picked it up we were engrossed in the interesting, yet simple and intelligible world of Oryx’s Realm. The goals were straightforward: level to 20, max out your stats (if you could), and take on the hardest bosses in the game. We were motivated to do these things because they were fun.
When Wildshadow sold the game, I was worried, but understood because those guys created something too big for them to manage. When Ammys were removed and pets were added, though, I knew immediately that we were headed in the wrong direction: the grind.
Manufacturing an item/status grind in a game is a great way to create content, but content for the sake of content isn’t good. When Realm shifted it’s aim from “enjoyable challenge moment-to-moment” to “dungeon grinds for loot/fame/pet levels,” the game began it’s steady decline in value. These days, as far as I can tell from my revisiting the game on a new account (Lebigpp) and reading these reviews/complaints, I can see I’m not alone in my thoughts about the game being a mindless grind. I do believe the cause of this was the appeal to more.
Here are my points of contention that I think, if changed or removed, would restore the game to its former glory:
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Permanent account buffs (pets and coins, namely). Removing pets and erasing the “vital combat” metrics would work wonders for the game, as far as I can tell. Also, P2W is always, always bad.
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Player powercreep. If we get stronger, content should, too. Adding more, seemingly random endgame stuff doesn’t fix that.
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Untradeables. When you make the most sought-after items untradeable, the in-game currencies become less useful. I think the forge for UTs was neat at first but it kills a lot of the natural chase innate in the game before it existed.
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Item acquisition. I’m not too sure what I mean to say, but I know I dislike that so much content is skipped because items in them can be found elsewhere, easier or better. When I was maxing my earliest characters, I remember going from dungeon-to-dungeon, event-to-event chasing the potions I needed that could only be obtained there. Now I just hop on and kill random things and suddenly I’m 8/8.
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Grouping as a steamroll tactic. I’m not going to touch on sweaty Discord culture, as I’ve exclusively played solo or with my buddies in public server contexts. I think that merely scaling content hp when group sizes change doesn’t actually make content more enjoyable, because dps isn’t the only thing that changes when group sizes change. Players have more survivability and share the brunt of tanking when more bodies are in the way. I think content should actively respond to group size with mechanical changes. “Buffing” world events like ents and liches through dps is a shallow example of this idea.
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Class specialization. The coolest part about playing this game in WildShadow days was how useful each class was in it’s own right. Without pets and powercreep, I think this returns in a notable way, but I think some class UT ideas have blended some class specializations together, making the unique gameplay experience of a certain class less unique. It would likely be beneficial for the health of the game to commit to metrics/mechanics that make a class what it is. I think of making knights even tankier but slower, wizzies more dps but even squishier, Rogues even faster, etc. in tandem with difficulty changes, would revitalize the game greatly.
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More is not more. This is the crux of my argument and where I will come to a close. Like Runescape, RotMG was (and still could be) a game that succeeded because it was unique and interesting, NOT because it was huge and engrossing and complex and flashy and mechanically impressive. Runescape had a beautiful formula: hop on, click, grind, get off. When changes to the core of the game (combat overhauls, changes to engines and game stylings), the game died. The same happened to RotMG, imo. When you make changes that shift the culture, soul, and direction of a project, you’re bound to do damage to it. Pets, items, buffs, more, more, more… is actually less.
Thank you.