Whil I’m sure the WS era was great, imo the way people are starting to hate on DECA and, to a lesser extent putting Wildshadow on a pedestal is just the effect of burnout over time. Progression is gated, but the very fact that it was gated was what hid the fact there wasn’t much of it. At the end of the day, this game is an open world game (or at least suffers from the issues of one - lack of goals) The very fact that progression isn’t as gated anymore (a relatively easy to obtain rare or even unc heal pet rendering most of what used to be the midgame cheesable) is responsible for burnout. There is really no reason to run the midgame or early game outside from events, which are balanced around a horde of maxed players steamrolling everything at maximum efficiency. Keys and boss only dungeons only capitalised on them, and gave them even more efficiency. In the end the only thing to blame is human nature. Our greed is what ultimately made this game boring, with duping to gain wealth destroying the value of items, and rending the items that were originally valued valueless, players constantly calling for nerfs, and the tiny portion of players who want to make the game harder are all united under one banner, to make the game more fun again.(fuck that sounded like trump lmao) Whether it’s veterans motivated by nostalgia, or newbies who only want to play, whack the pinata to feel themself feel good, and eventually don’t care after they find that everything has lost because everyone alwas caves in and ends up whacks the pinata by doing events.
Sorry for the rant, I got a bit carried away 
Why Realm gets boring
also, writing that on an ereader was HELL (wanted to see if re would work on my ereader and ended up writing a post~)
Keys are the most pay to win that you can get in a video game i have ever seen (not counting those idle cell phone games. Those are not games. Raid Shadow Legends is not a game. I consider realm a game because it can have actual gameplay). Its like saying, hey instead of playing our game, why don’t you just pay to play the best parts of our game. Its like the fast lane to amusement parks except if they provided a portal so you didn’t have to walk all the way to the rides.
If you wished some unsolicited feedback the post is a bit difficult to read because of no formatting/no paragraphing, don’t know if it blocks double returns but some spacing would help.
This bit I’d want to argue though, it’s maybe true if you’re comparing Deca with Kabam, that things like events and reskins and free pet food helps progression towards ‘winning’ Rotmg. But the pedestalling of WS is usually tied into the loot being unsb in those days, so there was nothing barring us from instantly remaking a dead character using stored wealth, the only loss was starting the fame again, and a knock on your wealth. The endgame was running whatever you wanted to, and trading to try out the items you hadn’t used before. This tied into the game being essentially a sandbox with no real win condition.
Retaining the enforced PPE-style “you must loot your own UT items” is the gate compared to these times that turns today’s endgame into a grindathon that players get sick of, or feel compelled to join in the hamster wheel of the events.
I was just seeing if it would work on my e reader (its got a primitive browser) and ended up posting
I feel like it’s just pets. But then as SOON as you try to talk about anything even REMOTELY close to changing pets, all the white stars come and start shitting on you for being a “noob” even though they haven’t ever played in an era where no pet was the norm and maxing a character was actually DIFFICULT because EVERYONE had no pets. You couldn’t just rely on the 8/8 divine pet knight to carry your ass in dungeons and oryx, or the priest to permaheal, or the warrior/pally to permabuff.
In Henez’s video, when he said “hp” and the pally said “mp”, that actually meant something. Now? Just permabuff, permaheal, let people carry you OR be the unstoppable carry once you get your divine pet and GG.
TL;DR “permadeath” my ass, the whole game’s been powercreeped.
Truth be told, Kabam was trash but WildShadow wasn’t good either. Realm isn’t a good game ruined over time, but a bad game built on bad code with bad mechanics like purely rng based loot, bad earlygame like Sprite World and Snake Pit, a bad P2W mechanic that makes your character near invincible while also being able to spam their ability, with badly balanced classes like priests who can turn entire groups into near indestructible gods when there’s enough of them spamming their tomes and warriors who can easily reach 120 defense with a jugg.
So in summary, events are IRRELEVANT to the state of the game, people who refuse to acknowledge the root cause that is the overpoweredness of mass healing and buffing like to scapegoat events and put the blame on DECA, but in reality all they do is make getting loot quicker, but not easier, without the steamrolling caused by WildShadow making priest a god and Kabam creating pets, events wouldn’t make the game easier at all, personally leading me to believe while they haven’t truly fixed anything in this regard yet, DECA hasn’t really contributed anything major to the game’s low quality it has had since the beginning either, and they’re our only hope of fixing it with things like In Combat and Out of Combat.
Events don’t make the game easy and boring, steamrolling makes the game easy and boring, pets and priests cause steamrolling, not events.
perhaps not, but events and their associated keys make steamrolling happen more frequently because of people mobbing together and grinding them nonstop for hours and hours on end, which intensifies the effect of steamrolling. it’s the game having both of them that makes the game so fucking garbage atm.
additionally, while pets and high power player mobs remove all challenge from the game, it’s the keys and events that remove all meaning from the game. you could put the challenge back but as long as events make items so piss-easy to acquire the game will still be entirely meaningless and just about as boring as before.
Steamrolling still happens without events and keys, almost everything in a full realm gets steamrolled because of mass buffs and heals, just look at dwarf miner’s main fight.
Steamroll mobs do remove the meaning of the game by making permadeath almost irrelevant, the main strength of the game has always been permadeath and the thrills and uniqueness it can bring, not loot farming, the loot addiction of most players is just a direct result of pets and priests crippling the challenge and permadeath leaving nothing else to do but get addicted to white bags. (Albeit the mediocre to atrocious bullet hell design of most WildShadow and Kabam era bosses did make this thrill and challenge live up less to its’ potential than it should have)
PS: Have you ever considered showing someone at UGC or DECA one of your major dungeons like Nores?
I am in UGC, but because I have zero faith in the game whatsoever at this point it’s extremely unlikely you will ever see anything from me other than Feargus who’s already done and implemented.
What would it take for you to atleast try getting it in, pets being nerfed, and/or priest being nerfed and/or UT exchange or something else? Just curious because it sucks to see an amazing dungeon that could be implemented with Unity code go to waste
if you scroll up and read my first reply on this thread you’ll get an idea for just how deeply rooted the issues I have with the game are. I do not think anything could ever realistically “fix” it to the point where I’d find it enjoyable ever again. the biggest glaring issues with the game are either core to rotmg’s identity for better or for worse, rooted in the spoiled brainless playerbase who couldn’t even grasp the concept of not cramming 100+ people into a single dungeon, or in the way deca’s been mismanaging the game in recent years. heck, even some of the testers are starting to grate on my nerves a bit. none of those can be meaningfully addressed in any realistic scenario. I even had an idea for a small gimmick to force the game’s hand to change for the better, but after seeing how well people adjusted to the dungeon cap change, I’ve got doubts as to whether it’d make much of a difference. it’s just not a game for me anymore, assuming you can even call it a game at all.
I wouldn’t feel bad for “wasted effort” though, biggest reason being that it was my effort and I’m okay with not putting my work towards a lost cause. but also because it wasn’t really wasted, clock tower and the stone caves of nores were both flawed on several levels but it was still part of my overall learning process. I have a much, much stronger grasp on what is and isn’t good game design. rotmg as a whole has not only been a learning process of what not to do, but also much much more importantly why. I may recycle some characters for future projects (Lordeus is a character I think would be fun to properly flesh out some more), though it’ll never resemble anything intended for rotmg as I have no intentions of making a pserver and bragging about how much better I am than the original (cough cough).
also if you have any additional questions about me not related to this topic, “Why Realm gets boring”, ping me on the General Chat Thread in #off-topic to keep this thread on-topic.
I can imagine pets were added with total disregard of the game’s longevity, but then again, other than keys, how was the game generating consistent revenue and by extension profits at the time? Its still no excuse for how parasitic it has become to the game.
Speaking of what you said about white stars and their pets, I know online games comes with its fair share of toxicity, but the amount i’ve witnessed nowadays, i feel, might be driving new players away since a lot of higher ranked stars like to thrash on lower ranked ones. Its not like this is a competitive game, its a team-based mmo so seeing the players you are working together with be so toxic can be discouraging. But idk, nothin you can do about that.
I think that one of the main issues of the game (okay, there are a lot of main issues, but this is the main-main issue imo) is that nobody has ever had a real idea of what it was that they were doing. What do I mean? I’ll explain.
When the game was first brought into existence, it was an exercise in game development by a couple guys who wanted to hone their abilities. No plan for the future, just a base game that might entertain a few people for a little bit if they got bored. But then it got popular, popular enough that it was worth continuing to update and change, bit by bit. But the devs still weren’t planning anything extreme; the number of encounters and dungeons was small enough that Realm’s CO-OP MMO RPG RNG-based permadeath bullethell traits suited the atmosphere the game provided. No fight was too complex, players worked together, and the process of maxing was difficult enough that players could be kept engaged for long stretches of time without the game becoming stale; there was always more for a player to do, and losing a character that was the summation of countless hours of work was easy. The game was working perfectly, more or less.
But then things started to change. As the player base grew and the game changed hands, new ideas from new developers were added to the mix. There were new encounters, items and goals, and this made the game far more complex than it was earlier; still for the best, many would say, but it was different in a way that would become far more apparent as time went on.
There also became a greater need by the developers for income; this of course ended up with tops being sold in the Nexus and useful pets being a thing. Both things, many would argue, were detrimental to the game’s well-being and stability, but they filled a need the developers had, and it worked.
Until it didn’t. Pets became a central part of the game, showing a clear point of progression for players which couldn’t be eliminated in a split second like the standard character, whether that progression was in the form of hours of farming and dedication or by simply throwing one’s wallet at the screen until they could permastun. Now players had a clear goal which would eventually make them overpowered, and as more and more players obtained these pets, it changed the game forever. New content could spam more bullets at players and inflict all kinds of debuffs, but pets changed everything.
This is not to say that pets in and of themselves are necessarily a terrible idea; they fulfill a need for developers (remember that events do this as well, even if they harm the playerbase in the long run), and they give players a long (or expensive, if they choose that route) path to allow them to greatly improve all of their characters without risk while also increasing the pace of the game. Had this idea been implemented from the beginning and the entire game been balanced around these pets (perhaps making them less powerful as well or implementing other limits), they could very well be a positive aspect in the game today. However, they were not implemented properly, and as a result have caused a significant amount of imbalance.
The moves by DECA to give out huge amounts of pet food to players for free via the login calendar has helped newer players to get powerful pets more quickly (and somewhat decreasing the pay-to-win aspect by bringing f2ps within range of p2ws far more easily), but this also just means that the game is nowhere near as challenging as it once was. Combine this with discords and events, and the game goes from a technically challenging one, to one filled with algorithms (class composition in raids, stand in certain spots at certain times to shoot the thing when you’re told to do so). Once those algorithms are cracked, the game goes from easy to trivial, and the game that once inspired creativity and expectation is no more.
I think that when people talk about how much they dislike DECA and Kabam and long for the WildShadow days, they are really just longing for balance. Remember that the game wasn’t balanced back then purely due to some sort of genius that only the developers of yesteryear had; instead, the game was balanced because it hadn’t yet had a chance to become unbalanced. This game evolved in fits and spurts, and no one had a clear plan for how the game would progress in the future.
This game is awesome, it really is. I have played it as my go-to game for about four and a half years now, and still enjoy it, even if I am beginning to lose interest in certain aspects; the existence of pets in their current state and constant event spam haven’t helped things. Certainly things will need to change if the game’s current players are to be kept entertained for future years, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Just remember that the current, unbalanced system isn’t the fault of one particular entity; it’s just the result of a bunch of people never thinking that it would make it this far.
I wont repeat why I fucking hate this game in its current state (becauseI already did when I first joined), so I’ll just recap some points I said in my thread:
funi funi, its been almost a year and fame has gotten a little bit of use (being able to buy dyes and cloths with fame :o ), but other than that, no reworks.
this is still true even now 
I don’t have much to say at this point, I’m enjoying the closed unity beta test port launch funfest partytime but its literally the same game with the same problems. hopefully this hellish joke is fixed a month or two after the unity launch happens.
They also better put my Familiar Idea into the game or I WILL BE ANGRY GRRRRRAAAAARf
The early game nowadays is terrible for many reasons. But to the defence of these dungeons they were designed as midgame content in WS era (for players into the cycle of maxing, dying, repeat). SW clearly so with its drop location in mountains. SP more of a hybrid because its minions are great for levelups. I’d maybe call that the “my first stat pot” dungeon so yeah perhaps the top end of the earlygame of its time.
There has been a dearth of things aimed at the early game. Where are the dungeons dropping from Horned Drake or Shambling Sludge? Jungle-tier dungeons where there’s no statpot, and that maxed players really have no interest in, but are great to go in if you are around level 8-10, because they give lots of low XP, or a UT that’s useful if you have no supercharged pet letting you spam spam away, or a guaranteed pet egg.
And also things for the fresh level 20 player who gets pushed onto the same realm quests as the 8/8s. Where is the “no thanks I can’t do a Cube God in this 6/85 realm with my Comet Staff and my level 6 atk close pet” option.
Although these aren’t issues for the typical player who finds realm boring (someone who has maxed and completed much content), they might well cause some players to quit, finding themselves bored walking around the map because they know the quest they’re offered is impossible.
This is the part i hard disagree with, the bosses don’t “murder you in 2-4 hits”, only a single boss even does that much damage (void), bullet sponges? They need to have high hp to not be melted by buffed groups like tomb bosses and O1/O2 do, and you absolutely don’t need to zerg bosses to beat them, because unlike old bosses they are actual bullet hells that can be feasibly dodged, the reason zerg groups are still so prevalent is because they remove this need to dodge, they’re not a requiremenr but a cancer resulting from OP players, they don’t make bosses possible, they trivialize them.
(Sources: Personal experience beating endgame bosses with rare or lower pets and a handful of people, youtubers’ solos, petless solos)
This is what the Hive should’ve been. But nah, let’s just slap 50 damage on midlands-level enemies and make the boss spawn a technically infinite amount of them, it’s not like anyone would ever run it anyway…