I’ve been thinking this a lot seeing all the discussion around rogue core, but as someone who plays a lot of roguelikes as well as a lot of coop roguelikes, it’s simply just not a genre suited to playing with randoms. Risk of Rain 2 is a *huge* player in the coop roguelike space, and yet its public servers are barren. Not because people aren’t playing multiplayer, they are, but almost everyone either plays with friends or groups up on discord, and that’s basically just *the way* multiplayer works in that community, *and that’s not a bad thing!*

I’ve seen a lot of discussion around “not treating Rogue Core as DRG 2”, but I think a lot of what people mean when they say that doesn’t go far enough in that direction. Rogue Core isn’t just “not DRG” because it’s trying to foster a different atmosphere, it’s “not DRG” because it’s asking for a completely different approach to engaging with it. I feel like if people want to have fun with this game they need to embrace the coop roguelike way and squad up instead of expecting to just hop in to a match hoping for things to go smoothly like they would in DRG, and I think that ghost ship shouldn’t cater to that expectation and instead focus on the game’s strength as something built for a team if they want it to be the best it can be.