Upon release, RotMG shook the gaming world. It was innovative and fresh for the time, mixing elements of bullet-hell, permadeath and MMO elements all into one, along with a crisp 8×8 art style. The game boasted the importance of teamwork and solo skill, from dodging bullets, pumping DPS, and coordinating between players to take down tough enemies. But over time the game became less about teamwork and more about greed. This can be attributed to a number of reasons.

Natural increase in skill

First and foremost, any new game will be a mystery to its players, its information and techniques a mystery, and naturally over time, players will get pretty darn good at the content. What is the point of priest healing you if you know the patterns well enough to never get hit at all? Many of the class abilities lose their effectiveness (except for a few niche scenarios), and dungeons and bosses become less about working together and more about your own, personal DPS. One of the best examples of this is in the Shatters dungeon – one of the most difficult dungeons for its time. At first, players struggled to kill the three bosses, but it became apparent that many of the phases and attacks can be ignored by standing in certain location, thus destroying the need for cooperative play.

Pets

The single most important thing in this game is your health. If your health reaches 0, your character dies and you will need to start back from square one. Pets made the value of health disappear significantly, creating a pay to win mechanic and a long term investment for players, where they can improve the strength of their pet to give themselves progressively more health and mana per second. The introduction of pets made many of the bosses so easy that what players once struggled with could be killed within a matter of seconds.

Loot

Many players of RotMG play for one reason and one reason only – loot. It is the prize at the end of the tunnel, a silver lining for every dungeon. If you didn’t get a drop after a boss, well, the boss was a waste of time. That line of thinking is what ran through many players’ minds. Soon enough, players didn’t care about working as a team, they just wanted the loot to return back to their grinding.

For a game that was released in 2011, the game has long since sailed by its golden age, and what left is a hive of selfishness and greed. The MMO of the MMORPG is missing. Despite this, RotMG is still a thrilling and enjoyable game, which you can play here.