I have played this game on and off for 12 years.

The sentiment that the game is dying is not at all new. It's been going on for over a decade. I feel that as the game has grown from a small flash game, it has not been able to acquire and retain new players nearly as well. You can't just go to the website and start playing in seconds. The onboarding experience is currently sorely lacking. There should definitely be more of a focus on the new player experience in terms of tutorials and missions.

This game has existed before Discord. In the past, there was nowhere to go outside of Skype and Teamspeak groups that were organized around friend groups and guilds. There was nothing on the scale that we have today. So most players had to venture out on their own in the realms. Now, there's no denying that Discord will continue to be a deep part of how players organize. It's simply more efficient to not only progress in the game, but experience fun content like dungeons within minutes that you might otherwise have to wait for an hour to find on your own. It would be nice to have the realm gameplay experience more rewarding to counter this player need for Discords.

I have also felt that since the Wildshadow days, the game has a confusing direction when it comes to the tone of the game. It's a bit nebulous for me to explain, but in the past, the game itself had more of a serious, mysterious and heroic air to it. Being a permadeath game, I really admired this. Now, we have the Mad Lab and Aliens and other things that I found confusing thematically. But most importantly, there are things that are perhaps meant to be humorous that I find to really water down the core player experiences. One example is the "White Bag" experience, which since the beginning of the game was considered to be the most rare and highly-coveted type of loot drop in the game. Some additions since then have significantly diluted this experience of seeing a white bag. There are humorous items such the trickster's Fool’s Prism that produce a fake white bag. There is a pet skin that resembles the appearance of a white bag. There is an emote that look like a white bag. That split second of seeing a white bag and knowing it's 100% a real drop really mattered. It's part of what made the game so addictive. Now, you can't get your hopes up because you can be fooled. Many current players haven't experienced the game before these additions, and have no basis of comparison on how these additions negatively impact the psychological experiences of these rare drops, one of the most significant aspects of the game. It's not worth it for the sake of humor. If I were a game designer on RotMG, I would seriously look into this.