Dear Rec Room,
I do hope you are reading through these forums from us creators and actually considering what the community is recommending. 
I do appreciate Rec Room for keeping us informed of changes happening within Rec Room while explaining the hows and whys. Most games don’t go to that extent to keep us in the loop. I just hope that Rec Room will extend the same common courtesy and listen to some of our concerns and genuinely consider the right choices for them and their community who still care about this game so deeply that they still fight to continue creating in a somewhat broken game and generating revenue from their builds that helps keep Rec Room afloat. It’s true that Rec Room wouldn’t be what it is without its creators and creative community. 
With that in mind, I’ve seen so many creators fed up and dropping out of the contest simply because Rooms 2 is completely unstable. It’s all over in these forums and discord and you don’t have to go far from your rec room friend circle to see whole teams that have completely given up on building due to the many issues and bugs with Rooms 2.
We’ve also lost a lot of builders from the previous “rhythm and rooms” contest simply from the lack of appreciation Rec Room had for us creators. 
A lot of our biggest competitors who placed high in the same quest category we were in, have cashed out their winnings and left the game completely to go build elsewhere. Our team however (we call ourselves “The Misfits” due to being the last ones picked for a build team so to speak), received “rising star” for our room ^GoldenNotes and still continue to create rooms and play in a game we call our 2nd home while still eagerly awaiting for the next contest build that didn’t happen until 2 years later.
With that being said, I really think Rec Room should consider extending the contest and rethink the idea of only allowing Rooms 2 rooms because of how unstable and unreliable the rooms are. I doubt if it’s even possible to get the massive growing list of game breaking bugs fixed in time before the end of the build phase. The only thing I see not being much of an issue with Rooms 2 is if you use Rec Room Studio for the entirety of your build. However if you go for any other category in the contest, your team is in for a lot of headaches and bugs. 
Here is a list of things The Misfits have noticed in our room being an issue thus far:
- The biggest issue: The lag in our room is completely unbearable!
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Anytime that anyone in our room including myself either brings out the maker pen, drops the maker pen, or saves the room while I’m in VR (Quest 2 stand alone) takes at least an entire minute… at least a literal whole 60 seconds… for it to either let me start working in the room (if I’m lucky), or (most likely) it sends me to my dorm and/or sends me out of the game entirely!
For that whole minute, I’m just standing there frozen and praying that it lets go of the lag frame I’m stuck in! It’s awful! I’m a person who works best in VR and I’ve had to resort to building on PC for the final touches in a subroom simply because I was kicked out of the subroom due to lag spikes more than 5 times in a single build session! I’ve lost hours of building just to try to save it and lost it during a lag spike more times than I can count! I’d also like to note that building on PC is practically near impossible for me because I’m so used to the old reliable makerpen interface on standalone VR but it’s worth getting at least something done if it means a little less lag than on VR which constantly gives me migraines. -
I do have a theory that this might be an issue with “grouping” or merging things together. I’m so used to constantly merging all the decoration items together and all the environmental objects together to save ink space on the room but I think in rooms 2 when we “group” things together it makes groups inside of other groups inside of other groups and you think you’re helping out the lag and space for ink in the room, but really it’s just making it worse. When you make groups inside of groups it’s difficult to select the individual group and ungroup it to form a new bigger group… if that makes any sense… but then again I don’t know for certain… that’s just my theory and I’m unsure if I should spend several hours while crashing ungrouping the groups for a potential fix or if it’ll just be all for not! Maybe Rec Room could try to fix this bug by just having the group automatically group together instead of small groups inside of larger groups. I also find myself making groups decorational but a small group within the large group is still environmental. I don’t understand why rec room can’t just allow us to “murge” like the makerpen usually allows us to in Rooms 1.
- Things are moving and shifting on their own.
- Same as we’ve heard from most builders. We have frozen things in the room just to see it spawn on the other side of the map. We built walls around an arena in our map and “grouped” them together, aligned it to world grid as best we could after multiple attempts just to see it move up after we have saved the room. We had a builder in our room spawn in her trees she made in a regular room and slightly move it into place and watched it unmerge from itself and literally explode going all different directions. The trees she made were decorational and it seems as though each individual piece of tube became physical and “un-grouped” itself.
- Animation is completely broken.
- I’ve spent hours animating for it to save and work and then the next day loose all the slides inside the animation for no reason at all! Not to mention animations in the room seem to create more lag. We’ve been reading in the forums and saw that people were having issues animating and I was just thrilled that I was able to save the room with the animation still intact. I left it there for a day or 2 and worked on other projects so I wouldn’t loose it and when it came time to use it, all the slides inside it were gone! Our room relies heavily on animation in our PvP because we want the environment the move and shift half way through the battle to create more interactive and enjoyable gameplay. But with animation slides mysteriously disappearing and unhooking from objects we may have to come up with a new idea for our room if this doesn’t get fixed soon!
- Cloning and mirror cloning especially doesn’t work!
- Sometimes it does if you create a separate subroom with nothing in it and try to clone and not mirror clone, it might work for the most part, if I try to clone in our main room we are building in, all the pieces grouped in the item cloned get moved and shift around and you are left with a deconstructed object that looks cursed. (See the provided image) It also sometimes doesn’t clone or move while cloned on a straight plane in which it should be cloned. This clone tool is especially important to have in our room as we try to clone 2 halves of the map for an evenly distributed map for a PvP.
- Rotators don’t work.
- We have rotators connected to wind turbines and sometimes they work and sometimes they aren’t even on when the event receiver tells them to be on.
If they are on like they are supposed to, they look jittery and create more lag for the room. Again, we need things to be animated and rotating for things to function correctly for the PvP. Wind turbines are a huge asset for the solar punk theme to show it moving and being used for powering things.
- No smart ruler to measure and help level things out.
- One of our builders especially relies heavily on the smart ruler to make sure things are measured out and placed in the correct place. We simply don’t have this tool in rooms 2.
- Voice roll off and other customization features in the settings are not present in R2.
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In R1 you have a slider in the settings that turns up and down the rooms voice roll off. This is incredibly helpful while building because I can still communicate with another builder on the other side of the map all around, this makes building much more enjoyable and go more smoothly… but because R2 does not have that feature, we have to join a voice call which is buggy and can kick you out of the voice call if you lag out of room. Sometimes the voice call won’t allow you to join.
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R1 also has customization options for how fast you want players to move, how high you want them to jump and so on. Why are these customization options not available if R2 is the most optimized room? That doesn’t make sense! I know you can edit these options with circuits but what if your circuit knowledge is limited?
- The move and rotate tool doesn’t move or rotate correctly.
- There’s no way to make sure that things are aligned and moving on a smooth plane. Sometimes I’ll move something and it seems as though it’s crooked and I’ll lose time trying to make them straighten up.
- You wanna spawn in an invention from the store for ideas to make your own but better, well that’s just TOO BAD!
- I’m glad that they have allowed us to finally make and save Rooms 2 inventions but this just barely became a new feature! Clearly if you want something specific, chances are they aren’t gunna have it in the store. The misfits prides themselves on making sure that everything in the room was built by someone working on the room. We don’t want to just spawn in something from the store and call it ours or just use AI to build things for us but that doesn’t mean that we don’t wanna look at previous inventions made by others to get an idea for our own! This has left us to going to rooms 1 and then converting builds to rooms 2 which moves me to my next point…
- Everything is broken so why not build in Rooms 1 and bring into Rooms 2?
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Although I’ve seen from recent posts from Rec Room devs that this isn’t recommended and conversion of rooms 1 inventions into rooms 2 is unstable. However, seeing this growing list of huge list of issues with Rooms 2 what other choice do we have??
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Only thing that seems to be stable in Rooms 2 is Studio but even with the limited knowledge we have, having taken a studio class to learn it as a team, our knowledge of studio is still very limited and so is rooms 2 so because we don’t wanna get disqualified, The Misfits are doing thier best to not use much of any studio and use strictly makerpen.
- How much is too much rec room studio?
- As a build team going for the #Game category, or any other build team not going for the #RecRoomStudio category, this question gets asked several times, but the answers we get from Rec Room developers are very vague and doesn’t really specifically exactly what it ok or quantify how much. I do think rec room studio deserves its own category like they have it set up because makerpen cannot do the same as studio can and if we were to allow both to compete with each other it would be an unfair advantage to win with rec room studio when only certain few lucky creators have access to it. Either Rec Room should state specifically what we can and can’t use and to what quantity as ok to use from rec room studio or better yet, just make it to where we can’t use it at all unless we chose #RecRoomStudio category to make it fair. We also wonder with all the bugs going on with the maker pen in Rooms 2, should we just try to add some rec room studio instead??? Is it worth the risk of possibly getting disqualified though???
- With the addition of AI what does that mean for us as builders?
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At the height of the announcement of the contest, Rec Room announces that they will allow you to buy access to use AI in rooms 2.
I’m sorry Rec Room, but why must you disrespect the creative community who have dedicated themselves to learning the makerpen! I feel like this is a complete insult to us creators to ask AI to build rooms for those without any prior knowledge of how to build… all to make a lousy buck! I realize that AI can only spawn inventions that other creators have already created and can only create AI generated images on the canvas but you are advertising this right at the height of the contest! -
I was under the assumption that for the contest, you and your team are supposed to make all the things in the room yourself, not just spawn inventions from the store! Anyone with half a brain can make a room with stolen inventions. It takes great skill and hard work to build a room from the ground up and the creators who do so, should be awarded, praised and respected! If this is allowed for the contest, what’s the point of creativity? If creativity isn’t necessary to build a room for the contest, then why even have a contest??? I feel that this was poor decision making on rec rooms part and if someone uses AI or just spawns inventions that are not their own to create a room for the contest and they don’t even take the time to credit who made it, it should be disqualified!
What should Rec Room do to fix these issues so that we don’t have another contest 2.0 disaster worse than Rhythm and Rooms??? How do we stop creators from leaving and creating elsewhere??? I believe rec room should definitely extend the build phase for this contest (if they don’t, there won’t be much of any completed rooms for the contest to judge) but they also should allow us the option to use rooms 1. I can understand that this might upset a few minority of people, considering that some have already put in the effort to only building in rooms 2 and there’s no way to convert R2 inventions to R1 but I think they should at least give them the option to if they feel inclined to make the switch. If they extend the build phase with enough time to recreate something like they had in R2 without the headaches and bugs, I think you’ll find that more would be happy to do that rather than just quit.
Why not just fix the bugs in R2 and extend the build phase??? The problem I see with bug fixes down the line is that it takes a lot of time and effort for Rec Room to find and fix these bugs. Also with every bug fix that gets fixed, something else always breaks. Bug fixes come with lots of trail and error. Not saying they shouldn’t be fixing these bugs as well because they do need fixing but also give us the option of R1. Maybe rec room could make sub categories for each of the hashtag choices. We could have awards for #Game #R1 be separate from awards for #Game r2 if it means giving more attention to more creators and keep people from quitting. If anything, this will allow more players to feel appreciated for the work that they’ve done while giving them time and more options!
Rec room also needs to either specify how much is too much rec room studio for those who are not in the #RRS category or just not allow #RRS at all for these category of builds. Also going back to the issue with AI, I don’t think AI is completely a bad idea but I don’t think it should have any place in a creative build contest. If you’re a creator competing in a contest with a team to show your creativity and building skills, the items in the room should be built BY YOU AND YOUR TEAM ONLY and certainly not generated by AI or spawned straight from the store!
I know I’ve said a lot in this post and I really do hope Rec Room is listening. Some of us are still here trying to build for this contest while the majority have already quit. The Misfits are still here, despite all the issues, bugs and headaches. Some of us may have gone a little crazy but we are still here, continuing to give it our Rec Room best! The creative community is getting smaller each day but those that are still here, are the ones that really care about the future of Rec Room. Rec Room is more than just a social game or a cash grab to us, it is our community and our home. I hope deep down that Rec Room still feels the same.