Why Realm gets boring

#21

I was just seeing if it would work on my e reader (its got a primitive browser) and ended up posting

#22

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.

#23

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.

#24

wtf

#25

Events don’t make the game easy and boring, steamrolling makes the game easy and boring, pets and priests cause steamrolling, not events.

#26

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.

#27

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?

#28

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.

#29

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

#30

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.

#31

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.

#32

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.

#33

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 :frowning:

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

#34

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.

#35

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)

#36

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…

#37

I deleted a (yet-another) rant about The Hive from my post. :rofl: :honeybee: Also Bleeding is so OP vs newbs.

#38

it was an exaggeration, most ENDGAME enemies kill you in 8-16 hits actually (not counting ice sphere and fungal spider because fuck those two, especially the fungal spider).

they still get melted, it just takes 30 more seconds for them to die, or 3 minutes if they have invulnerability phases.

ah yes, bullet hells in the sense that they spawn closely knit together streams of bullets that take more effort and time to dodge, which if they fire rapidly like crystal worm mother can catch you in an infinite loop of dodging but not being able to hit (its really bad if you’re a melee :< ). Also, I’ve only done One lost halls colossus run that was public (and I don’t mean a discord server), every other one has failed miserably because of the small size of them. Not to mention how long they take, as a typical clearing run can take 40 minutes to an hour+, with the chance of failure of course. Which is why I said zerging was necessary to complete end game dungeons.

I was gonna put a 50 page essay rant here, but I’ll just sum up my persunel feewings in one sentence: I don’t bother with endgame content anymore because it disrespects my time and energy put into them, and at this point making them piss easy wont make me come back to them because I don’t care, the allure over the stupid UTs and the soulbounded tops that should’ve been tradeable a year and a half ago has waned, and so has my patience.

[YoU’Re WElCoME tO DisAGreE ThOuGH]

Yuge edit

to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my ass I decided to waste my time clearing some of the endgame and late mid-game dungeons, here’s my shitty results on an equally shitty 7/8 wizard:

Did some solo clear runs of LH, it indeed does take 40 minutes to clear out halls for a cult run, and even though I failed when I got to the cultists because they immediately shot at me, I would say from experience it would’ve taken 20-30minutes tops (10 minutes clearing, 10-20 minutes taking them out), so its around an hour of time at best.

Tomb run took 18 minutes to clear (counting a troom that gave me a para wis ring :o) for bosses to start, and 11 minutes to take out bes, nut and geb. totaling to 29 minutes.

shatters I can’t do because of my lack of skill when it comes to solo-ing the sentinel (the part leading up to it is fine), but it took me around 10 minutes of clearing, so I would presume it would’ve taken me 15-20 minutes taking out the guardians and then the sentinel. from experience the twilight mage portion (both switch section and the boss itself) takes 30 minutes at best. final area with the forgotten king can take 30-40 minutes if you can damage him consistently. So 1 hour and 25 minutes at best

thicket killed my wizard, and wastes 18 minutes of my time, so fuck it and the shitty loot it gives, waste of my fucking time and the lost loot because of it.

and that’s it. in summary, fuck thicket and lost halls, and a little bit of shatters too. for what they give at a minimum they aren’t worth it, and the risk involved with thicket and lost halls especially makes them not worth running outside of events. tomb is somewhat fine, but that’s about it.

ocean trench (which while I don’t consider it endgame its on par with very late mid-game content), took me 5 minutes to clear to boss, and 3 minutes to take her out. 8 minutes total.

anyway, im gonna quit realm again for another month because I lost shit tons of valuable UTS (like parasite jadestorm and tablet :> )

And no, I’m not grinding for those again.

#40

There are no excuses for RotMG being a boring game. Almost all of the content in the game is constantly crippled by a needy fanbase who demands end-game content then cries when the end-game content is too hard (see Halls, Epic Bee, etc etc). And then at the same time the players cry that the risks of running an end-game dungeon outweigh the rewards of running said dungeon, and then the devs make the dungeon easier and the items you can get from it even stronger. All this just results in everyone who cares enough about the game to play end-game content to easily max 8/8s and end up with the best gear in the game, and then it becomes boring because there is nothing to try to go for.

#41

TBH the only real reason I stick around is because of the char slots.

Before DECA, one char slot was hell. After DECA, free char slots galore. I didn’t even claim all of them cuz of a 2 year break, but I’d imagine free players got upwards of 10+ slots for free by now.

So it’s kinda like a luxury I’ve always wanted, but now the game’s just being steamrolled and the economy is PLOOOP

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