Runes of Tragic - The Dire State of Runes of Magic [MMOPINION]

game forge are not going to like this video ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drives and this is mmopinion a bite-sized show where i talk about the world of mmos and we discuss happenings within the mmo landscape today i want to talk about a game that i subjectively love but can objectively see as immensely flawed the mmo runes of magic this video is half love letter two and half absolutely scathing takedown of the latest runes of magic stunt the boosted servers before we begin please remember to drop a like on the video or subscribe to the channel for more mmo stuff ring the bell so you don't miss a single future video and a huge thank you as always to all my supporters on patreon and twitch who make all my content possible right let's begin i'm making this video because runes of magic recently released some boosted servers with 300 experience gain and talent point gain and increased drop rates so it seemed like the perfect time to return to the game but i might have been wrong and i want to take this time to examine the positives and the negatives of playing the game so grab a drink and settle in because this is a detailed video i have a rather strange relationship with both the game and game forge as a company and i want to be as transparent about both as i can be i'll also be calling out some tweets from the game forge corporate account that i believe need to be addressed we'll also be looking at the state of the game in general and then the state of the specific boosted servers and asking if you should be playing on them while discussing things they do right and the massive mistakes they still to this day are making let's start with the beginning many years ago back in 2006 i started playing runescape i had a close group of friends at school that also played and we eventually formed a skype chat that would all talk on after class it was great as the runescape clan we were in grew more people joined the chat and it got to a point where the skype chat was never offline we covered every time zone it was routine come home go on runescape go on skype then unfortunately in 2012 runescape had a major update called the evolution of combat which fundamentally changed the game and divided the player base it also split the skype chat right down the middle and eventually we all agreed to move on to a different game our choices were world of warcraft or runes of magic and after researching price differences class differences and general states of the game i voted for runes of magic mainly because it was free and naive young me didn't yet know about the predatory cash shop the choice was made and i played runes of magic along with some friends for quite a while unfortunately they probably for the best quickly dropped it and went on to world of warcraft but i persevere with runes of magic i met enough people on the game to have a good time we did some dungeons crafted some stuff generally had a pleasant experience so about a year and a half ago i made a youtube video called the world's most underrated mmo is runes of magic and i stand by that video for the positives but in the years since making that video i've learned a thing or two mainly about making better videos talking quicker and not having white text everywhere but mostly about what makes mmos objectively better so when gameforge advertised runes of magic boosted servers as an exciting way to get back into the game i was genuinely hyped a chance to replay a game i enjoyed and a chance to get my discord on board too so with new servers on the way we actually began discussing all starting together and forming a guild which we now have in the game by the way and playing it through then i even got an email from gameforge they'd seen my old underrated mmo video and wondered if i was willing to return to the game maybe advertise it a little for them i told them that while i was super excited to return myself and i will personally be playing i wasn't sure if i'd be able to make an advert video for them or to twitch stream it because i'd still need to see the state of the game first to make sure it was worth it they even provided me a content creator code to get free stuff in the game and you can use it too you enter rom challenge josh strife into the item redeem and get some free stuff so if you want three big angel size there you go it's free but everything i've told you so far in this video the split in the runescape clan leading to runes of magic the late nights grinding dungeons the fun the excitement i felt that is all subjective that's just my feelings it's not relevant in any actual review so it's time to be objective as i played the reality of the new servers became apparent everything that was wrong with the game back in 2012 the bugs the crashes the extensive pay to win the hideous power creep the whale baiting it's all there and in some ways it's actually worse now than it was then now truth be told i was fully willing to ignore this and just move on keep playing myself personally finding what fun i can have ignoring the bad bits neither advocating for or against runes of magic but then i saw this tweet from game forge you want to know what makes up our corporate culture our values show you what we are integrity we not only say what we think we also let our words and our deeds speak for us we are true to ourselves and we aim for every one of us to be a role model for others and it was that middle segment we let our words and deeds speak for us that really got my attention your deeds you let your deeds speak for you look i know and you know that this is a nothing tweet it's business it's empty niceties meant to sound deep when in reality it means absolutely nothing no one is reading this and going hmm maybe game forger a good company this is ego stroking whoever wrote it and the boss of whoever wrote it but what if i did take this at face value what if we assumed they actually do value integrity okay then i guess we are doing this let's see what your deeds with these new boosted servers have said about you and i'm not gonna pull any punches let's go on the journey of playing runes of magic from download to inevitable crash and explore everything we will face in the interest of fairness let's start with the good runes of magic is an mmorpg very similar to world of warcraft it's similar in visuals gameplay quest design dungeon and raid design the holy trinity combat mechanics and inventory management this similarity isn't necessarily a bad thing it just means they've seen a very popular system and decided to adopt it when i say i play runes of magic people go oh that's exactly like warcraft and i go yes yes it is they're both fine it does however have several elements i feel it does better than other games i adore the card drop system where every enemy has a chance at dropping their collector card and adding that card to your collection provides tiny passive buffs it's a great way of making even mob fights exciting the idea that you might get the rare card drop then there's the dual class system and i love this instead of being one class you can level up multiple three by default with the ability to buy more and then you can combine your leveled classes into any two-class combination of primary and secondary and depending on the combination you pick you get access to different skills and elite abilities and i mean there are a load of builds in this game want to be a warrior mage sure a warlock priest okay how about a scout knight yes that's also in it the dual class system is a brilliant bit of game design and it's a shame it's not been used by more games and the third and final good point it's free you can download and play right now there's no monthly fee it is in all essence a free-to-play game there's no premium zones and you can with enough time gain every item in the game by grinding but how much grinding don't worry we'll get to that so there are some good things it's a free third person fantasy adventure mmo with classic chunky graphics thousands of quests lots of dungeons and raids a complex crafting system and pet collection system player housing a monster card compendium and terrific versatile dual class systems allowing for many types of party composition with all that said let's look at the rest of the game specifically the boosted servers they've just released two new servers one german and one international with triple gain on experience and talent points you use them to upgrade your skills and double drop rates from bosses and enemies in theory a great little boost to help new players reach the fun raids and dungeons and if that is all the server was i'd have been totally happy with it a nice chance for people to join fresh and skip some of the very arduous grinding but then they announced the boosted servers would also have several exclusive one-time only world first titles up for grabs there would be 93 world first titles and they spanned things from be the first level 55 mage to be the first knight to clear a hard dungeon to be the first master smith on the server and these titles had powerful passive buffs attached to them so for example if you were the first warrior on the server to clear the dungeon new pantheon on hard mode you would receive an exclusive title that would grant your character permanently plus five percent strength five percent physical attack one thousand physical crit hit rate and five percent physical accuracy and as numbers in runes of magic go very high a five percent buff is a lot so the powerful would get even more powerful and then it was announced that if you wished to transfer your new character from the boosted server to another in the future you could but you can't transfer back meaning we are now looking at the potential of hardcore players making new characters on the new server racing to server first to get the titles then transferring back to their old servers with the exclusive titles this annoyed the hardcore players the most because while runes of magic may be a free-to-play game it has an immensely expensive cash shop at higher levels including the gacha style mechanic of gems that might upgrade your items or might downgrade them and a gambling spin wheel or just straight up selling super powerful runes or items that remove your death debt oh yeah you lose experience when you die so older players with characters they'd invested hundreds thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in now needed to start new characters get the exclusive titles and then spend thousands more on gearing those guys up to max because a new character with the title would ultimately be so much stronger than an old character without and oh the new boosted servers they've got the same cash shops oh they definitely had the same cash shops experience orbs talent point boosters item upgrade gems backpack spaces it was all there in some ways you could say it's worse because there are specially designed armor sets only on the boosted servers available in the shops from level 35 to 80 to make sure you are always wearing the most efficient equipment you can just spend real money and get the best gear for your level as you go through the game these world firsts were not ever going to be claimed by a new player or even a casual player they are whale bait in the mmo world a player who spends a lot of money is known as a whale even chatting in the ruins of magic discord channel one user boasts about how they spent almost ten thousand dollars in six months and still don't have maxed gear these titles were always going to be impossible for players like you or i to achieve because they were never ever designed to be achieved by us so before i even log in i know because i wasn't planning on spending any money i know i was never in with a chance at the titles because when i did log in all the old issues returned to play runes of magic you need to set both an account password and then a secondary password this secondary password is tied to a specific server you choose to login to so you have different passwords for each server and if you forget your secondary password or enter it wrong five times in a row you get locked out of your character for one hour and if you do forget it there is no way on the screen to go back you have to just hope you remember it within those five tries because if you force close the game it counts as five failures to reset your secondary password you must be playing on the game forge launcher and you must contact support through there if you are playing on steam like i do you cannot reset your secondary password the only way to gain access to the support you need is to download the game again through game forge and then contact support through there and this steam launcher not resetting secondary password issue this is an issue they've known about for at least three years because you can find steam help requests from 2018 and it's still an ongoing issue so let's assume that you've made a new account you've got your secondary password setup and you're in the game and oh that's annoying pressing t doesn't make me auto run it opens the title menu but i love it when t makes me auto run that's the great thing about pc games you can remap the keys you can make every key on the keyboard or button on the mouse do exactly what you want it to do and runes of magic is so kind it even has a very simple to navigate hotkey list in the menu so i remap t to auto run and i press t and auto run forward and life is good there's just one slight problem and i've sped the footage up now so you can see that i didn't cut any of this this is all real if you close and reopen the game pressing t opens the title menu again if you play through steam the game client does not save your custom keybinds if you map a key to do something else it will reset to default every single time you open the game again this isn't even funny this is just unacceptable design but that leads us onto the worst issue the memory crash bug and the reason this is the worst issue is because it's been known about for about nine years and they have done absolutely nothing to fix it and it is the single biggest reason people stop playing when playing runes of magic when the game client process has used up just over one gigabyte of ram you will get a pop-up on screen saying warning high data usage this pop-up will happen around one gig usage regardless of your computer's specs it doesn't matter what processor you're running what graphics card what ram or vram you have this is a game client issue your hardware is irrelevant this is why the footage in this video is me playing on windowed mode not in full screen because full screen mode makes this even worse then when the game client reaches 2 gigs of ram usage it will crash the game you cannot stop this and what makes this extra dumb is the runes of magic game client does not unload assets it's no longer using it therefore cannot free up the memory once it has assigned memory for your play session it remains assigned which means every minute you play the memory is filling up and up and up meaning a crash is absolutely 100 guaranteed to happen eventually it is literally unavoidable i tested this i logged in cranked my graphics to maximum and rode around the main city of varanas a place where the crash bug is extremely common interestingly enough the warning high memory usage box appeared literally the second i logged in the moment i started playing the game in varanas my computer and the game client was already using too much memory and from that moment it took one minute and seven seconds until i crashed 67 seconds until the game client fills up with its own processes and kills itself due to high memory usage and i'm running a quad core i7 32 gigs of ram with eight gigs of vram on the graphics card it does not matter what your pc is the game will crash on you so what do you think the general accepted attitude of the community is for this plug they say oh just play on low graphics that's the answer given by the fans yeah just turn your graphics down and the game crashes less can you imagine any other mmo hell can you imagine any other game offering that as a solution like yeah hey come and play this brand new game it crashes every five minutes unless you make it look like a potato in which case it crashes every few hours and it was this crash bug remaining in the game that made me realize the boosted servers weren't for new players because many of you on discord did join in with me and hey i'm still playing but many of you have uninstalled because the game crashed for you two or three times within the first two or three hours and you know what i can't even say that i blame you game forge have left this bug in for years because they aren't bothered about finding new players if they were they'd have it fixed they'd have found a workaround they would have improved the early game experience but they've left it in and this is the deed that shows me what these new servers really are they're not a great time for new players to start they're a great attempt at making wales pay to race to world firsts so let's talk about the paying aspect i logged in to get some footage of the shop and the warning memory limit high pop-up happens straight away i've not even moved and already the game client is getting ready to crash that is how badly optimized this is so the shop regular viewers of this channel will know that i've covered the how free games make money topic before it's mainly through a process known as create the problem sell the solution so let's have a look at the unnecessary problems gameforge have created first of all your inventory you have six tabs but as a free player you will only have access to the first two tabs the remaining four you need to either rent for real money or pay real money to unlock permanently and yes i did say rent you have to rent your inventory space week by week but what if you're not into renting well you can just buy them so buying all the bags in the shop would cost 1200 diamonds diamonds being the premium currency so how can we buy that many well look the diamond shop is arranged to make 1200 just impossible to make using the lowest selections just look the 24.99 package is 1025 and the 499 package is 170 meaning for 30 quid you get 1195 diamonds five diamonds short so you have to buy the 2200 package for 50 quid to get the best value 50 pounds just for your inventory to be permanently accessible but don't worry there are currently two interesting packs on steam that we can look at as well the scout pack for 20 quid and the dragon pack for 45. so let's examine them the scout pack gives you some cosmetic overrides a mount a pet but uh here's the good stuff it gives you an extra class slot and a title stalwart adventurer and that title grants you incredibly powerful early game buffs you basically instantly start the game way more powerful than everyone else but what about the dragon pack the 45 pound one that gives you a cool red dragon mount that two players can use a pet some cosmetics but ah here's the good stuff in that pack a wearable back item called sword soul now this doesn't have any stats until you upgrade it in which case suddenly it gets a lot of stats and seeing as you get a load of early free game items that allow you to upgrade stuff it basically gives you a super powerful all-classes back slot item that boosts your experience gain and early item find and makes you way more powerful than everyone else oh and the dragon pack unlocks all your inventory slots permanently that means the only things worth buying in these packs the overpowered title and the inventory unlocks are not in the same pack forcing you to buy both if you want the best early game start and you know what i did years ago i bought both i have both the scout pack and the dragon pack and here is why i bought them and i am still angry with game forge for this because on steam it says you can purchase the dlc once per account and the key word is account to me account means me as a player all my characters are stored under the same account i log into the account and then i choose a character within it but no it actually means once per character because if i try to claim the dragon pack or the scout pack on my new character i can't because i've claimed it once before it tells me to log into the game and then access the item depot through the in-game item shop and if i do this on my new character the one i started the boosted servers on it's just not there i can still see the item depot on my old character because it's filled with items i've not yet claimed but what this means is that this warning of buying the dragon and scout pack once per account is a lie you buy it once per character and had i have known this i wouldn't have bought it and seeing as you can't get refunds for it i can't get my money back either so i feel absolutely no guilt or shame in saying i believe i was miss sold and lied to by the steam description for this item and i would encourage anyone that buys this to think are you willing to spend 20 45 or 65 for both pounds on one character the item shop also features weapons armor and accessory upgrade gems which have a chance to fail so you need to buy absolutely loads of them and pray and then drillers to add more rune slots to items which are absolutely needed if you want to be competitive in pvp at all and then potions that increase drop rates or experience or remove debt basically runes of magic sells you everything you need to not only make your journey to max level as smooth as possible but then to maximize your power as easily as possible but with just enough gambling that you keep paying it is probably the only game where i absolutely guarantee in a pvp fight between two max level players the one with the bigger wallet will win so remember that tweet we not only say what we think we let our deeds and words speak for us here's what i think and here are my deeds i think runes of magic has a huge amount of potential it has an excellent class system a brilliant collectible card mechanic a vast and expansive world covering many interesting environments a superbly technical upgrade system and i think the actual base game when it works moment to moment is fun it has all the aspects needed to be a great even world class mmo however it's still got a nine year old memory leak bug that caused crash to desktop on my game in 67 seconds it's still not got native steam support for resetting secondary password and the steam client doesn't even remember your custom keybinds which is just laughably bad the boosted servers are fun for casual players to push past the early game grinding but they were never aimed at them they were always always aimed at making the sunk cost fallacy wales pull out their wallets again and race for world titles because once your top paying players have had enough on one server they're gonna stop paying this was an incentive to re-light that fire and get them to compete again because if this boosted server actually was about pulling in new players you would have focused on fixing the bugs that plagued new players day to day and caused people to quit 3 hours in you would have fixed the basics not added in hardcore end game titles the account bound packages you advertise on steam aren't account bound they're character bound as an mmo company i would expect you to know the difference between a count bound and character bound but i suppose if you can't fix a memory leak bug in nine years i might be expecting a bit too much from you so honestly game forge and i mean this genuinely thank you for watching my old video thank you for contacting me and asking me to take part in the boosted serve event which i have done and i've enjoyed and thank you for the code for some free items they've helped me and they've helped several others who've already claimed it i agree with your corporate tweet as empty and vapid as it might be i actually do agree with it saying what you feel is important and so i have and letting your deeds show your true intent is valid so i have your deed was to leave bugs programming errors and a pay-to-win cash shop in your game releasing new servers with super powerful super rare world first titles only possibly attainable by the paying players and my deed is to make a video calling you out on it you asked me in one of your emails if i'd make a video about the game today about the new servers so here you go i've made a video and the video i've made has followed the integrity principle that you as a company value so highly subjectively i still love runes of magic and part of me is still tempted to buy the dragon pack again just so i have my full inventory but i know that's my nostalgia calling and i know if i do they'll never bother to fix the game so objectively ignoring my nostalgia and my deep love for the good times runes of magic did give me you won't get another penny from me until you prove that you are bothered about making it an actual quality game for everyone the new players and the casuals along with the whales the old high-paying players might have already accepted all of the bugs and flaws but new players won't fix the memory leak fix the keybind bug fix the steam secondary password support issue show me you're actually willing to make this game stable and then maybe i'll consider buying that dragon pack again even though i'm still salty about the false advertising when i bought it the first time balls in your court game forge do you care about and believe in runes of magic enough to invest time into fixing it or is it just a whale milking machine why don't you show the players not with your words but with your deeds thank you for joining me in this episode of mmo opinion if you want to try runes of magic and judge it for yourself it's free on steam choose the eu region and server spider to join me that's the boosted one my in-game name is strife leave a comment below if you have any opinions or feelings about runes of magic or game forge or if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss on the next episode of mmo opinion a big thank you to all my patreon and twitch supporters who make my channel possible you can support the patreon from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always have a great day you

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 345,337

Keywords: gameforge, rune of magic, rom, mmorpg, massively multiplayer online, free mmo, free to play, f2p, pay to win, p2w games, mmo discussion, runes of magic discussion, runes of magic 2021

Id: QMmSWOpm-wE

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021