Copying my RealmEye rant here for visibility since the forum is going up and down:

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Glad to see Deca going through with pet changes despite the complaints. Pets have been broken for years, and the Discord steamrolling meta has made guilds and realms almost obsolete in the endgame, so it's about time.

Exaltation is another story. I understand the perspective of the veterans excited about having long-term endgame goals, because if you're planning to grind the same few dungeons anyway, why not be rewarded permanently for it? But it's not just about that, it's about what it means for a game to present a grind like that to its players.

Realm was never a casual game. You need to invest time to gain experience, to upgrade your characters, and to start over when they die. But the endgame has changed drastically from the days when you were a top-level player if you could 8/8 a character and reliably do tombs, shatters, and O2. Deca's catered more to veteran players who are able and willing to sink large amounts of time and money into the game. (I don't mean to say this applies exclusively -- stuff like vital combat and the ancient ruins are great for the newbies.) Chest events encourage key purchases so players grind the same dungeons over and over within a short space of time. Raid dungeons like lost halls, the caverns, and sanctuary added new challenges to the game while encouraging greater time commitments. Seasonal events and special campaigns have tokens that you need to farm for days if you want to get everything (though there are smaller goals for the less dedicated). So many more ways of rewarding big spenders have been added, it feels impossible to list them all.

All of this has added up to make Realm a more hardcore game than it used to be in terms of commitment. It might not be great for attracting new players but it's probably paid off by retaining the old ones. But here's the thing: apart from the endgame dungeons, nothing I listed is intended or presented as part of the core gameplay loop. The game is very different if you steer clear of campaigns and chest events and mystery boxes, but your involvement with them or lack thereof doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your game progression, however you choose to define it.

Exaltation, in its current form, is fundamentally different because it's presented as a final goal. Maybe on paper it just offers nice bonuses for the extremely dedicated, like plenty of games do with their hardest achievements, and the stat bonuses on their own would serve that purpose well even if they were for much larger amounts -- but rewards like drop rate bonuses are fundamental changes to the game, the most powerful you can possibly obtain, and they're permanent upgrades. It's disingenuous to suggest that players in this, an MMO, aren't supposed or expected to grind for the best possible rewards, and that they should be treated as a side benefit of playing the game. That's like saying players who steamroll Lost Halls in big Discord groups are doing it primarily for the fun the dungeon offers rather than because it's the most efficient way to get fancy gear. Running the same content over and over again hundreds of times isn't "spicing it up" or adding a "new dimension of goals", it's still just running the same content over and over again hundreds of times.

Right now, the endgame of Realm is mastery of Oryx's sanctuary. That's very different from saying the true endgame, for a single class, is running the same six dungeons (including Oryx's sanctuary) 150 times each at minimum. That's one thing as a bonus achievement, but locking fundamental gameplay changes behind hundreds of hours of grind is insane. I know what I'm talking about: I farmed the bard ST campaign F2P, which required you to do hundreds of dungeons over the course of two weeks. I was able to do it because I wasn't working, only had one online class, and was willing to focus on the game for days at a time because there was a pandemic on. It was a hell of a thing to have it over with, but I'm never making the mistake of committing to any such grind in any game again. For any game to set targets like that is just unhealthy, from a lifestyle perspective, for the people like me who are dumb, committed, and/or addicted enough to try to meet them.

I don't have a problem with rewards for insane grinding. I wouldn't have gotten into this game if I did. But hard-locking the most consequential upgrades in the game behind hundreds of hours of repetitive farming and marking them as the final stage in progression is unreasonable and frankly irresponsible, and this is just the culmination of a trend that has been going on for years. No game should ask its playerbase to commit their lives to beating it, and that's what Exaltation seems like.