Rift: Planes of Telara

Caliane · May 22, 2013

Juvarisx_sl said:
Picked this up via the raptr deal, and had never played it before. It is a LOT of fun, I like the fact there is as many builds as there are. Why did this game die out the first go round?

gamers being gamers. Everyone is chasing that high they got the first time. and most mmos are on a 3month cycle of, race to max level, farm content, get bored. The game itself didn't really die. considering it lasted as sub for this long. But still dropped off the radar of course for the next big thing crowd.

Rift was largely heralded as being pretty fantastic. the best launch to date. Fantastic patch cycle, best to date as well probably. Content was largely great.
Some of the class designs were brilliant. Chloromancer, and tank rogues stand out to me. both just fun as hell.

leveling dungeons vs epic was pretty sweet. epic dungeons with entirely new wings, bosses, etc. really felt like new content, and not just a recycle.

pvp was meh. patches made this worse from what I understand, when they added a pvp stat. World pvp was shit. classes not balanced well for it. Maps were not designed well for it. Fighting over rifts SHOULD have been a game defining thing. but really was just a pain in the ass.

Much of the games faults can be placed on, the brilliant parts of the game, outshining the mediocre ones. and making really making them stick out.
Crafting was just a cut/paste from wow. which, really stood out as disappointing.
Rifts in general. level 1-10 and the constant war of attrition of rifts (camps being outright taken over, high level npcs running down roads))was brilliant. made a fantastic game hook. But this did not carry on into max levels well. Especially when you stop playing in the world, and start doing instances. Rifts should have been the end game content. and been developed with pvp in mind, with town/camp control in mind.
2-3 end game zones. that are fully 60-60.

I did quit just before shards, or whatever those were called again. before the water dragon raid. so can't speak exactly how it shaped up after that. I quit due to work though, not dislike of the game. wasnt going to pay the sub for a game I could only play 1 hour every 2 weeks. the forum guild died during a period I got hit with work, before I fully quit.

iannis · May 22, 2013

Rift was pretty fun but there was PLENTY of retarded shit to come out of Trion development / customer service / community relations.

I played it, I enjoyed it, I didn't expect too much out of it. I would have quit much, much sooner if I hadn't found a decent Guardian guild. I probably would have stayed longer if I'd played Defiant.

Partitioning a pve game into 2 factions is just a bad idea. I haven't seen it done well yet. The standard response of "Alchemy is working as intended" to technical problems didn't help the cause a whole lot. A lot of things killed Rift.

Gecko_sl · May 22, 2013

Rift's release was very well done and the game was delivered in a fairly good condition. It was fun and had a good amount of polish.

I initially really liked the the class system as it was pretty innovative, but at the end of the day it also homogenized things way too much. They spent way too much time nerfing and tinkering with a boring as fuck talent system instead of trying to expand classes due to trying to keep things equal. That was a mistake, a la Mythic and their handling of classes and nerfs.

The Rift system was fun for a few months, but really didn't add enough to a new game to differentiate it. PVP was meh, but the game was very good PVE wise and the world was well designed if a bit generic. I was gone before they got rid of the two faction system, so I'm curious how that's playing out. I like Caliane's suggestions for PVP, but I think just allowing for a Frontier's area focused on small teams combat would work, also. The problem is Rift's classes are built for PVE, and even with the PVP Souls it still felt watered down to me.

I played it for three months and really enjoyed it. I honestly can't remember why I quit, except my sub lapsed and my guildmates were playing another game. I know it wasn't due to the endgame being absolutely terrible a la SWG. I'm curious about Storm Legion and my biggest problem right now is I have too many good, free choices of MMOs to play. Now that I've gotten the expansion and 30 days of gametime I'm sure I'll get a free week of WOW soon, too.

bixxby · May 22, 2013

It was fun for the first month, then you realize the combat consists of pressing 2 buttons with 50 macros and the end game is exactly like warcrafts. It suffers from being another wow clone that came out of the tubes deformed and half retarded.

Draegan_sl · May 22, 2013

The class system started off as awesome, the the devs have systematically made it really shitty. They nerfed all the interesting combinations to the ground. Then with the expansion the just made all the "talent trees" higher.

In a system that promotes synergy and flexibility and tries to create a system with 100s of combinations and creative freedom, the devs went stupid and made the majorty of the builds "61 pt" builds, though it may be different now. Instead of expanding the tree horizontally, they did it vertically. Dumb. They really should of created a Path of Exiles or FF14 type of development process.

Oh well, missed opportunities.

They also had this awesome rift/dynamic event content that is currently set at Level 2 when they need to amp it up to 10. Beta was amazingly fun when they let it run rampant. Now it's just "meh".

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl · May 22, 2013

Agree with you Draegan. Rift is an object lesson in gaming mediocrity. You could watch the game digress from something unique and interesting to something stale and tepid. It had awesome ambitions when it was Heroes of Telera. Combat and non-combat class cards, massive dynamic events. Then the switch to Rift. Beta has some awesome dynamic moments. Granted they were testing its limits, but you could see the potential it had. Developer comments were toned down and features retracted.

Things like quests to obtain your class, and training were removed and while yes they needed improvement, instead of interating upon them they just cloned the WoW model and removed them. The dynamic content was continually toned down; Rift's used to be interesting enough I could level an entire zone just doing them.

Massive, endless nerfs. Interesting class combinations went the way of the dodo and like you said, went vertical.

And then, the grind. Ramping up the grind to over 9000.

All the while customer service went downhill, as well as the speed and quality of the patch updates. Although I do want to be fair and there was some really good additions like the Ember Isle patch and the housing is pretty interesting. Nonetheless, the change has been a steady downhill slide to the safe and easy all the way to now having landed in the F2P box.

Gecko_sl · May 22, 2013

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:
It had awesome ambitions when it was Heroes of Telera. Combat and non-combat class cards, massive dynamic events. Then the switch to Rift. Beta has some awesome dynamic moments. Granted they were testing its limits, but you could see the potential it had. Developer comments were toned down and features retracted.

Things like quests to obtain your class, and training were removed and while yes they needed improvement, instead of interating upon them they just cloned the WoW model and removed them. The dynamic content was continually toned down; Rift's used to be interesting enough I could level an entire zone just doing them.

Massive, endless nerfs. Interesting class combinations went the way of the dodo and like you said, went vertical.

And then, the grind. Ramping up the grind to over 9000.

This begs the question: Why? Draegan, get your boy Hartsman on the horn and get some answers, stat.

I can relate to the bolded part, as that's what I recall. Did the game just have too many technical issues in beta? I was extremely disappointed in how they repeatedly nerfed class combos over and over, but the game sounded like it went from great in beta to ok at release then moved downhill.

zzeris · May 22, 2013

I really liked Rift. Great class combinations, great new hook, and really well made . The problem was that the even though they were really good about giving lots of content, it was more and more like WoW with every patch. You have Rifts but you never really push them after release. That's the name of your game! You dumb down awesome class combos in the name of PvP balance when that subset of gamers is really demanding, finicky, and most importantly, nomadic. Your new content is good, except for the damn dailies which automatically remind people of WoW (in a very bad way). I played the first three months, took a leave of 6 months for work, and then came back to an even bigger WoW clone that hadn't really improved anything that made them unique. Didn't take long to look elsewhere.

RobXIII · May 22, 2013

Yeah they definitely upped the grindage by about 9000%. In retrospect I feel stupid for paying a monthly fee to do daily 'work' (aka daily quests) just for a +5 to this stat enchant or whatever.

Some things I did have fun with right after the expansion was released:

* Making money crafting with brand new recipes(got all my blacksmith recipes from a bug of all things, infinitely respawning adds in one of the flesh dungeon thingies)
* Building housing from scratch, making and playing other people's jumping puzzles (WHY THE FUCK WAS THIS NERFED VIA HEIGHT RESTRICTIONS?!?! Seriously, its not a balance issue, why nerf fun?)
* Exploring, trying to find the new puzzles, collecting artifacts (until I realized this was also hit by the OVER 9000 grindage nerf. Good luck even doing one puzzle without finding/buying ultra-rare artifacts)
* PVP with new level 60 builds (until I realized the pvp gear was a downgrade from the blue shit I got while leveling)

Do they still have the reverse grind, aka conquest point decay? Realizing that I could no longer go on vacation IRL if I wanted to keep all my stats was actually the straw that removed my CC info from their game.

Holy shit, rereading my points; I'm either a Debbie Downer, a jaded MMO recovering addict, or RIFT just has that many issues.

Goldenmean_sl · May 22, 2013

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:
Things like quests to obtain your class, and training were removed and while yes they needed improvement, instead of interating upon them they just cloned the WoW model and removed them. The dynamic content was continually toned down; Rift's used to be interesting enough I could level an entire zone just doing them.

I was so excited when they mentioned getting souls from questing pre-release. Pictures of EQ epic weapon quests were dancing in my head. And then we got release and it was just a level 10 grind of "Pick up quest. Go kill a rift. Return to city. Repeat until all souls unlocked". That was so mediocre, I barely even minded when they removed the pre-reqs, and I'm generally a huge supporter of attunements and other methods of rewarding doing content with more content.

Two things really killed Rift for me though:

1) The shift from their initial position of all dungeons coming in 10/20 man versions to having separate 10 man and 20 man dungeons (with the first 10 man not releasing for a couple of months). I just no longer have the patience for dealing with a dozen random mouth-breathers and the bureaucracy that goes with them, and while I can generally muster up a 10 man raid from people I know from other games and my RL friends, I can't field 20 by myself, and finding a group of competent strangers who want to play on my PST schedule in some sort of hardcore casual manner is just a nonstarter. I'm afraid this is why Wildstar probably isn't going to keep my sub for all that long (despite really, really, really liking most of what I've seen)

2) The steady removal of interesting builds. I really loved my archon/chloro at launch. I felt bad ass when I single healed the early experts on that. I was a one stop healing and support shop. Twisting tons of different buffs in between keeping everyone topped up. Was a ton of fun to play, and it felt like it took some amount of skill to play it well. Then chloro got "fixed" and pretty much the only thing you could do with it is go all in. Blech.

Ambiturner · May 22, 2013

Devs had too much "that's not what we intended for X class, nerf it" and not enough "we didn't intend that, but it's not unbalanced and they seem to enjoy it so F it". There were some some awesome souls, too. Riftstalker and Saboteur as a rogue were fun as hell.

That and all raid encounters turned into if 1 person screws up once, everyone wipes fights that I just don't have patience for.

Outside of those 2 though, I enjoyed it more and for longer than any other MMO outside of original EQ. I haven't played since the expansion though and I heard it turned into a crazy grind which is disappointing.

Sidhe · May 22, 2013

From what I've read, the game was basically killed by focus groups.

Trion team recognizes that ridiculous overwhelming RIFT events where your entire zone is overrun are awesome, and implements them. Focus groups go to these zones to complete some boring quest and cry that their quest NPC has been killed. Do they get a group to go and clear the hub? Of course not. Do they enjoy the fact that they're living in an unstable world? Hell no, they have a quest objective sitting in their log and nothing else matters.

Kedwyn · May 22, 2013

Rift was WoW lite. Lots of cool ideas that got watered down into a final product that looked cool on the surface but really was meh once you got into it.

I remember maxing out in Rift inside of the head start weekend, raiding GS or whatever it was called during that week and having it mostly killed or maybe all killed before the game even released to the public. Then there was a half ass rift event grind for like 4 factions that had some shitty accessory. Terrible PVP and no reason to do world PVP.

Reason to keep playing? Zero.

Draegan_sl · May 22, 2013

Not to mention that Planar Attunement was completely awful and the mother of boring and awful grinds. When I quit not many people cared about it, but when I came back to level a cleric to 50 during the expansion people were grinding that shit.

Yay lets grind for hours to get 1% weapon damage. Jeezus.

Goldenmean_sl · May 22, 2013

Draegan_sl said:
Not to mention that Planar Attunement was completely awful and the mother of boring and awful grinds. When I quit not many people cared about it, but when I came back to level a cleric to 50 during the expansion people were grinding that shit.

Yay lets grind for hours to get 1% weapon damage. Jeezus.

Ugh. I had completely blocked that out, probably because I was only very casually playing at that point. Least inspired AA grind ever. Didn't help that most of it didn't even seem to stack with various pots/enchants.

RobXIII · May 22, 2013

Ambiturner_sl said:
That and all raid encounters turned into if 1 person screws up once, everyone wipes fights that I just don't have patience for.

Holy hell I forgot about this. Was anyone here in the FOH guild after the expansion hit? I remember fighting twin giants for like 20 minutes, then right after they're at 5% there was some shitty mechanic that didn't always work, and would wipe us. 10,20 times a night. Blargh.

Draegan_sl said:
Not to mention that Planar Attunement was completely awful and the mother of boring and awful grinds. When I quit not many people cared about it, but when I came back to level a cleric to 50 during the expansion people were grinding that shit.

Yay lets grind for hours to get 1% weapon damage. Jeezus.

Yea they could definitely stand to improve that uninspired mess. Even the pvp AA tree was like +0.005% damage reduction per level gained(aka 1 valor), sillyness. On the other hand, I enjoy a *good* AA system, and love having a bar fill up and level

Gecko_sl · May 23, 2013

Speak of the devil

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/05...-and-distribu/

Massively: Your tweet raised a few eyebrows, even after people clicked through to read the whole convo about soaring costs/expectations/etc. For those who didn't get a chance to read it, can you elaborate a little bit about what you meant by the industry being "fundamentally broken"? Do you mean the way MMOs are being pumped out, the free-to-play craze, the way employees are treated disposably, or something else entirely?

Scott Hartsman: I don't know of anyone who's hired with the intent of treating people disposably. No one ever wants that, even the companies frequently perceived as "evil." The industry is generally full of good, smart people trying to create the best entertainment they can. I think what's become broken is the traditional AAA style of development and distribution, MMO or otherwise.

We're approaching the point at which AAA projects need to be blockbusters just to sustain everyone in the ecosystem: the developer, the publisher, the manufacturing and physical goods cost, the distributor, the retailer, and in some cases, the platform/console owner.

The movie model worked when companies could absorb missteps and teams could hopefully learn from their mistakes to fight another day. As the absolute costs go up, fewer and fewer companies are capable of doing so. That's what's broken. When it comes to who pays the piper in that list a couple sentences ago, it tends to get paid left-to-right, beginning with the developer.

More product creators realize that, and more are choosing to step out of that ecosystem entirely.
Stepping away gets easier every day in a world that now contains things to help you operate independently at a far lower cost, faster than ever before, from funding to accelerating your development, helping you host, helping you bill, helping you distribute, helping you analyze, and so on.

Beyond those stepping out of AAA, take a look the biggest games startup success stories over the past few years. Which ones operate outside the old AAA ecosystem (Riot, Mojang, and SuperCell come to mind), and which are inside of it? (Have there been any inside of it?)

With any luck, we'll see more endeavors where the balance of power returns to the product creators and the audiences they're trying to serve in the most direct relationship possible -- where everyone involved is a "product person" whose sole mission is to best serve the customer. That's powerful and exciting.

Massively: You've said before that F2P wasn't a good match for RIFT because the game wasn't designed with it in mind. How much work is involved in retrofitting a game like RIFT for a totally new business model?

A lot of work -- far more than I imagine most people realize. If you can come up with a model that fits your audience, put a sufficiently sized team on it for enough time, and implement it very well, it absolutely can work. Most companies aren't in that position, however.

My commentary back then was more about F2P conversions that alienate existing customers and end up being counterproductive to the long term health of a service -- the ones where content or level gates get added as quickly as possible, advancement rates get slowed down, a store gets added, and developers hope enough of their problems get solved in the precious little time they have to do the job.

Over the last year, we've also seen a lot wider acceptance of free-with-genuine-value-add models in core gaming, where players are paying for enjoyment or as a way to say thank you, not paying to remove pain, like the original free models were. Model, game, and audience have to be a good fit. The customer has to feel he is getting a genuine value for his dollar, no matter the model. That all has to work together. That's the important part.

rhinohelix · May 23, 2013

Draegan_sl said:
The class system started off as awesome, the the devs have systematically made it really shitty. They nerfed all the interesting combinations to the ground. Then with the expansion the just made all the "talent trees" higher.

In a system that promotes synergy and flexibility and tries to create a system with 100s of combinations and creative freedom, the devs went stupid and made the majorty of the builds "61 pt" builds, though it may be different now. Instead of expanding the tree horizontally, they did it vertically. Dumb. They really should of created a Path of Exiles or FF14 type of development process.

Oh well, missed opportunities.

They also had this awesome rift/dynamic event content that is currently set at Level 2 when they need to amp it up to 10. Beta was amazingly fun when they let it run rampant. Now it's just "meh".

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:
Agree with you Draegan. Rift is an object lesson in gaming mediocrity. You could watch the game digress from something unique and interesting to something stale and tepid. It had awesome ambitions when it was Heroes of Telera. Combat and non-combat class cards, massive dynamic events. Then the switch to Rift. Beta has some awesome dynamic moments. Granted they were testing its limits, but you could see the potential it had. Developer comments were toned down and features retracted.

Things like quests to obtain your class, and training were removed and while yes they needed improvement, instead of interating upon them they just cloned the WoW model and removed them. The dynamic content was continually toned down; Rift's used to be interesting enough I could level an entire zone just doing them.

Massive, endless nerfs. Interesting class combinations went the way of the dodo and like you said, went vertical.

And then, the grind. Ramping up the grind to over 9000.

All the while customer service went downhill, as well as the speed and quality of the patch updates. Although I do want to be fair and there was some really good additions like the Ember Isle patch and the housing is pretty interesting. Nonetheless, the change has been a steady downhill slide to the safe and easy all the way to now having landed in the F2P box.

zzeris_sl said:
I really liked Rift. Great class combinations, great new hook, and really well made . The problem was that the even though they were really good about giving lots of content, it was more and more like WoW with every patch. You have Rifts but you never really push them after release. That's the name of your game! You dumb down awesome class combos in the name of PvP balance when that subset of gamers is really demanding, finicky, and most importantly, nomadic. Your new content is good, except for the damn dailies which automatically remind people of WoW (in a very bad way). I played the first three months, took a leave of 6 months for work, and then came back to an even bigger WoW clone that hadn't really improved anything that made them unique. Didn't take long to look elsewhere.

OMG yes. All of these above. An amazing game in beta. Once it went launched, though, the tone was decidedly different. At the time, it seemed like Hartsman disappeared and a different team took over for Live. Over the course of the first six months, they seemed to slowly sap all of the enjoyment out of it for me. The endless nerf cycle, adding in the massive grind, etc. did me in as well. I enjoyed playing to characters to max but then really didn't want to get into the endlessly overtuned boss raid cycle. So much promise and great for what it was but it feels like it should have been so much more. My Justicar/Shaman/Sentinel may be my favorite MMO character ever.

Grim1 · May 23, 2013

Rhinohelix_sl said:
OMG yes. All of these above. An amazing game in beta. Once it went launched, though, the tone was decidedly different. At the time, it seemed like Hartsman disappeared and a different team took over for Live. Over the course of the first six months, they seemed to slowly sap all of the enjoyment out of it for me. The endless nerf cycle, adding in the massive grind, etc. did me in as well. I enjoyed playing to characters to max but then really didn't want to get into the endlessly overtuned boss raid cycle. So much promise and great for what it was but it feels like it should have been so much more. My Justicar/Shaman/Sentinel may be my favorite MMO character ever.

The over tuned raids wore me down as well. I didn't mind them cloning WoW's other features too much. But I never liked WoW's style of raiding. Don't really like the instanced dungeon thing either but they were fairly easy and fast. With a good group of friends they weren't too bad. Liked leveling, exploring and rifting though. The open world PvP was a failure but their version of battlegrounds can be fun, especially in the lower tiers.

Faranor_sl · May 24, 2013

I never minded the overtuned content much; tbh i had a lot of fun figuring out the mechanics. I am really having a lot of fun again after my break. The levelling from 50 to 60 was quite enjoyable and smooth. Not sure how long I'll stick around now though.

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