This game has ruined my life and will continue ruining it until I die, I miss my wife and kids.

2000 hours later I figure I should write a real review of this game. My account is over a decade old although that is not an accomplishment in this game, most people have either been playing for 1 year or 10 years, there is little in between.

Realm of the Mad God has past through many hands, from Wild Shadow, to Kabam and now Deca Games. Despite what some old heads will say about the Wild Shadow days being the best, the game is honestly in the best state its ever been, with a long overdue realm rework that really breathes life into the game that was missing outside dungeons. Deca Games despite their many short comings and shady business practices has in fact, improved the game dramatically over the years.

PROS
The game is inherently fun. It has a unique gameplay style that hasn't really taken off in the same way that it has despite many attempts from games like Steam Bird Alliance and Darza's Dominion. These games have seen temporary success but nothing like RotMG has. It has tons of replayability and an end game grind that will keep players busy for quite some time. The game receives regular updates and while dungeons or dungeon reworks are rare, they are often massive successes and people enjoy the new content a lot. The communities the game foster can be very good and personally I have met plenty of seemingly life long friends using this game as a medium through the guild system. Though the game has a lot of incentive to pay for things such as vault storage, character slots, and pet food, its still very possible to attain all these things for free.

CONS
- This game has a plethora of cons that ultimately stop me from recommending it. The progression system used to be awful, the realm rework has fixed a lot of that but the game lacks any meaningful goals aside from growing stronger and completing harder dungeons. This could be fixed by a quest system, they have one in place currently but it has no story elements and simply consists of farming marks out of a dungeon to obtain more loot. This lack of direction probably kills the game for people looking for more substance than grinding to be stronger.
- The progression system for similar reasons is very dull. The whole goal of the game really is to reach level 20, max your stats, reach 8/8 maxed stats, and then do end game dungeons to attain exaltations that permanently level up your stats slightly. Exalting each characters takes a monumental amount of time and I don't think its a bad end game goal, but I also don't believe it should be the only end game goal. Some people don't want to do a thousand voids to get +25 mana across all their characters as the only motivation to continue playing.
- Another problem is the steam achievements. They have been broken for years. You cannot 100% this game, if you see other people with achievements, they got them years ago, this has never been fixed and seemingly never will be.
- The game's tutorial is a relic and does little to prepare new players for the actual experience.
- The majority of the end game content takes place through discords. The dungeons are quite difficult to learn alone, I wasn't sure if I was going to include this because personally I believe discord communities are a good thing, but there is no doubt that some of the end game content requires great coordination or a ton of time invested into learning it before you are capable of doing it alone. This wouldn't be such a problem if again, exalting wasn't the only end game goal and players weren't forced to pick between these two options for motivation in the end game.
- Real World Trading bots flood the nexus and the realms spamming their ads, you can ignore them but the ignore isn't permanent and theres always another bot anyways. Deca Games have added so many chat filtered phrases to combat this over the years and it hasn't impacted the bots at all. If anything it makes it harder for the players who can't even say "Oryx" the main antagonist of the game in most sentences without being silenced by the filter system.
- One of the biggest cons is the hacking problem. Hackers have plagued this game for over a decade and we've seen the highs and lows of the impact in things like multiboxing, auto nexus, auto aim, blue tooth, hacks that crash the game, hacks that insta kill bosses, there is even the famous SwatSec moment where a player spawned an at the time, end game boss in the nexus. These problems have only ever grown over time. I have run an anti hacking guild for a long time and used to vet players for hacks a lot harder and anyone could tell you that AT LEAST 50% of the community actively uses hacks. More have definitely hacked at one point or another. Some content creators and discords have made massive stances against this over the years but these days, the sentiment surround hacks is an air of defeat. They're here, they've always been here, they will always be here. What makes this a truly despicable con is Deca Games raising over 2 million dollars for the Unity port with the promise that this would greatly impact hacks, I myself donated with that main reason in mind and nothing changed. There were new hacks the moment unity dropped and in unity, we've seen some of the most destructive hacks to date with far more server and game crashing hacks than ever in flash.
- Deca Games themselves have done plenty of shady money grabs in the past, all the usual stuff like fake discounts that were called out, not paying or crediting artists and music composers, introducing battlepasses or new ST item content that are locked behind a pay wall until a later date. I do believe Deca has been the best developer so far by a large margin but they are not an innocent company and we have seen plenty of awful things come from them.
- General server issues are very common and bugs such as "10 minute dc" where you are locked out of the game for seemingly no reason are still here after 10 years. After entering oryx's castle you still get a massive lag spike as the game creates another server which to this day, still kills new players who don't know about it. server related lag deaths are still not rectified in a perma death game and many more bugs over the years like items disappearing, too many to count.

All these negatives leave me with a bitter taste about the game but if there is one thing that's true, it IS in fact, a fun game. I don't recommend it, I'm not gonna stop playing though. If you decide to play anyways, there is plenty of fun to be had and I hope you have a good time.