The Many Tales of the Shatters Discord

As we all know, Discord can be home to both some of the most interesting and simultaneously low stakes drama apart from possibly RP forums, although both platforms do seem to have many similar traits and ideals going on. Likewise, video game communities in general, especially of the MMORPG variety, also tend to be hotspots for both pointless and intense drama themselves. Combining both in a pot would obviously spawn an unholy writeup in and of itself, but the ingredient X that makes me want to really catalog some of the brain-numbing tales of a pixel-based gaming discord? Yes, that would be the internet authority gained by being a Discord Moderator™. While this is the point in time that I usually would say grab a snack and drink, it really isn’t the best kind of phrase to use as this writeup is going to be more of a 9 course meal due to the many similar, but not exactly concurrent or even directly related dramatic situations, instead of one big course. Think of a music festival; different bands and performances at different times just with the same stage.

A quick disclaimer as well, I was very involved in this community so while I will be trying to be as unbiased as I can, the majority of these tales are from my viewpoint and there are always two sides of the story. Furthermore, to preserve privacy, I will be using placeholder names in sections and censoring names in screenshots. It’s easy to find out who said what, especially if you are part of this community, but let’s respect the privacy of everyone for the sake of this writeup and keep these tales for what they are, entertainment. If you know any of these people or want to do any digging about who said what, nobody can stop you, but I will be keeping it to myself as should you.

Realm of the Mad God

Some background information to start with; what is the Shatters Discord and what is RoTMG? A quick summary would be that it is a “raiding” Discord server for the roguelike game Realm of the Mad God, and I’ll break down all this terminology so that the average internet user can understand, and even comprehend the degeneracy I’ll be describing.

Realm of the Mad God of a 8-bit style, bullet-hell MMORPG, where you take your character in a world called a realm, where you must defeat monsters and bosses in order to face down the “final boss” Oryx, who has 3 different fights of increasing difficulty. Death in the game is permanent, with your character and the items held being gone forever on death. You do have the ability to have multiple characters at a time, and a vault to save valuable items, and upward progression is determined by maxing out a character’s stats through potions and higher tier gear, both obtained through completing dungeons. There are many other factors to learn, but key ones to know would be that stat increase potions only affect the character they are used on; progress starts from 0 upon death; with there being 8 stats to farm, hence the terms 0/8 to 8/8. The only other way to permanently increase stats would be to complete certain end-game dungeons using an 8/8 character, with one called the Shatters being the one in question today. This information is obviously a gross oversimplification of the game and how to play, but it should help you understand the many bites of drama in question.

The Shatters

As one of the very first endgame dungeons, The Shatters was originally designed by a player on the Wildshadow Forums (The original developer of RotMG), and was for a long time, one of the most difficult dungeons during that time period. It should be noted however though that this version of the dungeon was easily cheesed, and players of RotMG know that once the game transferred hands to the current owner, DECA Games, many of the content updates featured reworks of many original dungeons as the overall skill level of the players rose alongside new items and classes available to play. Keep this in mind when the terms “Old Shatts” and “New Shatts” are mentioned, as the old version was objectively broken, easily cheesed, and fairly boring compared to the reworked dungeon. Despite this, many veterans, such as myself, have fond memories of the old version.

The Shatters Discord

The Shatters Discord, created in late 2018, follows the format that most RotMG raiding discords for this game do and while other servers may vary slightly, I will specifically describe the hierarchy of this server for clarity’s sake. The Owner of the server appoints Admins, who then appoint both a Moderation team and a Raid Leading Team. The Raid Leading branch of the server Consists of Head R(aid) L(eaders), Veteran RLs, RLs, and Almost RLs; users who want to try their hand at leading raids are Trial RLs. With HRLs being the most senior with the most authority and (supposed) experience, Raid Leaders will start a discord voice call that other players join and give callouts for the rest of the players to safely beat the dungeon boss(s), and collect their loot in an organized, efficient manner that is generally not seen in the general game, and is far safer for players learning a new dungeon. The ease of this is due to DECA allowing players to purchase “keys” to certain dungeons for real money, both serving as a way for discord servers to host private dungeon raids, and as a cash cow for DECA themselves. On the moderation side, are the Officers, Securities, and Helpers. These people generally “verify” users, forcing you to link a username to a discord account to help prevent bot spam, and make sure the users in the current dungeon are also in the raid’s voice call. It should be said that nobody gets paid for any of these positions, but drama brews easily when terminally online people get any kind of perceived authority, so on to some tales from the crypt.

Staff Meetings from Hell, European Style

One thing to note that is pretty common among any large player base video game, is the ebb and flow of active players, which is very noticeable in games that have a large population specifically in one country or region. RotMG, at least based on Steam’s player tracking database, is one where there is a spike in players in the evening when players in the North America region play, and a spike in the morning where the European players get online, which of course from my perspective. Anyhow, Shatters Discord was, and is largely based in the US time zones, with another smaller faction that plays during European peak times, creating a bit of two waves of raids that would happen, however the server would always be far more active when the US players got online just due to basic lack of raid leaders in a european based time zone.

Staff meetings also were a thing, and generally would be used to discuss upcoming game events, changes to promotions, new staff rules, and general housekeeping matters pertaining to people involved; this sets the stage for our next course of drama, which also happens to be the first one that I happened to be involved in, so it’s very near and dear to my heart, especially due to the absurdity of it all.

A certain Raid Leader by the (fake) name of B lived over in Europe, forgive me for not remembering the exact country, but he was very outspoken about the lack of Euro RL’s and would continually ask for changes to be made for it easier for Euro based RLs to be accepted. It really wasn’t a bad suggestion, as it was tough for him in general to get feedback for his runs due to the lack of online higher staff members, but the fact of the matter is trying to push through a change, no matter how beneficial it could be, does not work if you come across as abrasive about it, and B was very, very passionate regarding this issue. And so, when the next staff meeting in question happened, the issue was again brought up, and dismissed; the crux of the issue was really that the people who wanted to be a raid leader in the timezone in question simply did not have the chops, and the admins were firmly against a specific euro raid leader role. In all fairness to the server, the application process for staff roles was very thought-out and effective in weeding out people who wanted the role just for power’s sake and the admins and members who designed it knew this. So when the immovable object of “my way or the highway” upper staff meets the unstoppable force of a determined European boy, what happens? Why, a over two and a half hour voice call of back and forth nonsense that I was told boiled down to “You’re wrong and I’m right” from both sides.. After the dust settled, B eventually stepped from his post and started a new RotMG raiding server; which was moderately successful for a period of time before being nuked by another admin for the fun of it. Ah, the circle of life.

The Drunk Bus

A relatively drama free section, but important for the next one, would be the inception and quick downfall of what the staff members at the time called the Shatters Drunk Bus. As the majority of the staff members at the time were college students in the 21-25 …

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[Video Games] The Many Tales of the Shatters Discord