2026 Team Letter

Realmers,

It has been around eight months since our last team letter, and a lot has happened since then.

Some of it has been exciting, some of it has taken longer than we wanted. Some of it is difficult to talk about, but we would rather speak to you honestly than avoid the uncomfortable parts.

Our last letter laid out a change in priorities for RotMG. We said we wanted to spend less time adding new systems simply to keep the release calendar moving, and more time taking care of the game that is already here. Since then, we have been putting that idea into practice.

We are not where we want to be on everything yet. There are still technical problems to solve, systems that need attention, and parts of the player experience that can be much better. But the direction is clearer than it was a year ago, and we want to share what that direction looks like now.

Taking Better Care of the Game

A healthier core matters more than an endless list of new features.

A year ago, we were still caught in a cycle of constantly needing to introduce the next large feature or system. That approach could produce exciting updates, but it also meant that older problems did not always receive the attention they deserved.

We have been deliberately stepping away from that.

This does not mean Realm will stop receiving new content. It means that new content needs to have a reason to exist, and it can’t always come at the expense of everything around it. Sometimes the best update is not an entirely new system. Sometimes it is taking something that already exists and making it more useful, enjoyable, or fair.

The Dungeon Modifiers rework is a good example. So are Steam Achievements. Neither required us to add another disconnected layer to the game. They gave us an opportunity to revisit existing parts of Realm and make them feel more complete. 

The Druid launched in February as Realm’s first new class since the Kensei.

Introducing a new class into a game with this many existing items, abilities, encounters, and class identities is never a small task. We were excited to finally get the Druid into your hands after mentioning it in our previous letter, and we have continued reviewing its place in the game through balancing changes and player feedback.

Our class modernization work has also continued, and most of the roster has now received its update. Only a handful of classes remain.

These updates have helped older classes interact more naturally with modern encounters and systems while giving us room to improve abilities that had fallen behind. We will continue reviewing individual classes after their initial updates rather than treating each rework as the final word on their balance.

That is the way we want to keep thinking, find the places where the game can be strengthened, and do the work properly instead of adding something simply for the sake of having something new.

Building Realm With Its Community

Over the past year, we have been making a conscious effort to bring the development team and the community closer together.

That has included more Public Testing sessions, clearer feedback loops, community PPE events, collaborations with creators, and more opportunities for players to interact directly with the team. We have also introduced Creator Codes, giving participating creators another way to earn income from the audiences and communities they have built around Realm.

Community management has been helping connect many of those pieces behind the scenes. Tiramisu spends a great deal of time bringing your feedback to the team, following up on problems, and pushing for better communication. She appreciates how willing many of you have been to speak openly with us.

We are currently building a proper ecosystem for community-created game content. This means bringing creators into the development pipeline with clearer support, compensation, attribution, and an actual path for their work to reach the game.

We also launched WebHub, giving Realm a new official home for news, event information, updates, lore, and other resources. It has already made it easier for us to organize and share information outside of the game, and we plan to keep building on it.

The Alien Invasion dungeon expansion created with Kiddforce during Season 29 was the first major moving piece in this process. We were very happy to see how strongly most players responded to it. It also taught us a lot about what needs to improve when we work with community creators, from the production process to testing and communication.

The Alien content was the first moving piece, but it will not be the last…

We will share a dedicated blog post later on explaining more details. The program is not just an idea on a roadmap. Creators are already contributing, being supported, and being paid for their work.

Our goal is to make Realm more community-driven than it has been in years, not only in the way we communicate, but in the content and experiences that make it into the game.

Fair Play and Enforcement

Cheating is not a problem we consider acceptable or a finished task.

When we wrote our last team letter, anti-cheat work was still largely described as an ongoing fight. Since then, we have built a much stronger enforcement framework, improved our internal tools, and created a more consistent process for reviewing reports and taking action.

A large part of that progress has come from the Realm Guardian program and from players continuing to report suspicious activity. With that help, we have permanently banned over 700 accounts ever since the ToS Pop-Up update on May 15, and the great majority of the bans have been defended when appealed.

The autododge detection system is now active, and we are working to expand similar detection and investigation methods to other cheating behaviors.

We also know there are concerns whenever a player believed to be cheating returns to the game after an appeal. Sometimes a review shows that the available evidence was not strong enough to justify a permanent ban. Sometimes mistakes happen, and when they do, correcting them is the responsible thing to do. We would rather reverse an incorrect action than defend it simply to appear uncompromising.

At the same time, we know how frustrating it is when someone appears to be cheating and we cannot act immediately. We will not catch every cheater immediately, and we do not want to pretend that we can. What we can say is that the tools and processes available to the team are significantly better than they were a year ago, and they will continue to improve.

This work is now serious, consistent, and permanent. It is not something we plan to ease up on.

Stability, Bugs, and the Everyday Experience

The things that interrupt normal play deserve just as much, or even more attention as major updates.

Server performance and stability remain among our most important priorities.

Some players have already noticed improvements, and our internal numbers are moving in the right direction, with fewer disconnects occurring overall. However, there is still a lot of work ahead of us, and we know that statistics do not make an individual disconnect any less frustrating when it happens to you.

As we have mentioned in the past, many disconnects are caused by code exceptions. These can come from a broader game system, but they can also be tied to a very specific interaction, mechanic, or even an individual item. Finding them often requires the team to trace and review those areas one by one rather than applying a single fix that solves every case.

That process is ongoing. We have been releasing stability changes throughout the year, and we will continue doing so as more causes are identified.

The same applies to bugs in general. Bug fixing will remain part of our regular development work. We do not want it treated as something that only receives attention between larger projects or after enough problems have accumulated.

Our release cadence has also changed to better support this. We currently plan around one release per month and two main releases during each Season. The first can carry broader content or system updates, while the second gives us more room for quality-of-life improvements, balancing, follow-up changes, and bug fixes based on what we have learned since the Season began.

There will always be difficult decisions about which issues can be handled first, especially when several areas of the game need work at the same time. What we can commit to is continuing to make bug fixing, stability, fairness, and the everyday player experience part of the plan rather than an afterthought.

Better and More Consistent Communication

We have been working to communicate more proactively over the past several months, whether that means addressing an issue directly, sharing smaller updates between releases, maintaining the public bug board, or being more open about what the team is investigating.

We have also invested more into the processes that help information move between players, community management, support, QA, and development.

There is still room to improve. We know there have been times when players waited too long for an answer, or when we could not provide the kind of update you were looking for. Sometimes we genuinely do not have a confirmed answer yet, but even then, we want to do a better job of acknowledging what is happening.

We want communication with the community to remain closer and more consistent.

A Difficult Update on Awakening of the Primals

Many of you will have seen Stella’s farewell post. Some of you may know her better as Nano.

We wanted to take the time to address her departure properly.

Stella was part of this team for years. She contributed meaningfully to projects including the Realm Rework, Equipment Rarity, White Snake, and Stromwell. The people who worked alongside her here genuinely care about her, and her departure does not erase the work she did or the relationships she built with the team. We wish her the best.

The Grave of Eden and Awakening of the Primals were projects that Stella led and believed in deeply. With her departure, we have had to look honestly at where that work currently stands.

The vision being developed was closely connected to her direction and her ownership of the project. Continuing it in the same form without her is not something we can responsibly do right now. We are not going to pretend otherwise or continue presenting it as though nothing has changed.

Awakening of the Primals will not be released. It needs to be reviewed, reframed and evaluated to see how to move forward if we decide to do so. But it won't continue in the present shape.

We know that is disappointing. It is disappointing for the players who have been waiting for a meaningful expansion to Realm’s endgame, and it is disappointing for the team as well.

The endgame has needed more depth for a long time. We still have talented designers within the team, and we will continue creating content internally. At the same time, Realm has something that very few games have, a community full of people with a deep understanding of its combat, art, history, and identity.

There are creators in this community capable of producing content that genuinely feels like Realm because they have spent years living inside the game themselves. That is an enormous strength, and we have not made enough use of it in the past.

Craig’s Master Builders Program is part of how we intend to change that.

We are creating a proper structure for community creators to contribute to the game with compensation, attribution, development support, and a clear path for their work to reach players. The program is already active, and the first pieces of content created through this approach are already in production or in the game.

How far this ecosystem grows will have a real impact on what Realm looks like in the years ahead.

The endgame expansion this game deserves is not something we expect to build through one person, one update, or one isolated project. We want to build it through the combined work of our internal team and some of the best creators this community has produced.

There are many of them, and we are excited to finally give that talent more room to become part of Realm itself.

What Comes Next

Month of the Mad God 2026

This year, Month of the Mad God arrives in September, and it carries a little more weight than usual.

RotMG turns 15 this year. It is also ten years since Realm became the game that began DECA’s journey.

When DECA first became part of Realm, the relationship between the team and the community was much closer and more direct. As the company and game grew, some of that closeness faded over time.

This past year has included a deliberate effort to find our way back to it.

MoTMG 2026 will be the first point where many of those efforts come together at once. You can expect more community-created content, significant quality-of-life and balancing changes, the first steps toward competitive features, and something for the players who have been around long enough to remember where Realm came from.

We are not sharing all of the details yet, but there will be much more to talk about soon.

See You in the Realm

We know some of what we shared in this letter is hard.

The past eight months have been about giving it a healthier direction, fairer enforcement, more attention to stability, closer communication, and more care for the experience players have every day.

There is still a great deal to improve. We are not asking you to ignore that, and we are not declaring the work finished.

What we can say is that the direction is deliberate, the work is ongoing, and the second half of the year has things to look forward to.

Thank you for your patience, your reports, your ideas, your criticism, and the time you continue to give this game.

We will see you in the Realm.