Read More]]>

Hail, Ascended!

A busy six weeks have passed since our spring update letter, and while it’s not quite officially summer, the Rift team is full steam ahead preparing for long days and too-hot weekends where you can escape the heat outside by playing Rift! (If you’re in the southern hemisphere, clearly you should also bundle up in a blanket with some Rift in the chilly evenings, just saying.)

Grab your sunglasses and a cold drink and let’s get to it – and don’t forget your towel!

Latest Balance Updates

The recent work on soul balance picked up speed with a significant set of ability updates in 4.4 Hotfix #13, published live on May 16th. This first pass brought a lot of focus on Warrior souls, with the goal of bringing them up to a more competitive state and more fun to play. If you were considering a new alt, now would be a good time to try a Warrior! Additional fixes went in for Clerics, Rogues, and Mages, as well as overall buff stacking groups between callings.

These balance changes are definitely not considered the end of ongoing soul work, but so far appear to bring us to a more even baseline for soul performance from which more targeted changes can be made. High on that list are Legendary Abilities, additional Warrior improvements, and a look at Clerics for both healing and DPS.

We’d like to offer great appreciation to those players who joined us on PTS Omega to review, parse, and give feedback on the combined changes prior to them going live! You can expect some more future patches to roll out in a similar manner, where a set of changes gets compiled over time, sent to PTS, then reviewed before integrating into the Live and Prime update schedule.

Speaking of PTS and content testing, we’re about to have the ability to run both PTS Alpha and PTS Omega at the same time with the same patch, with the shards running different (Live and Prime) rulesets. When we get ready to enable them, we’ll be taking PTS offline for a couple of days for behind-the-scenes work. It’ll be worth it to be able to get both types of testing at the same time!

Latest Content Updates

The Seeker scavenger hunt event started on May 16th, and to be completely honest, there’s some pleasant surprise at the collaboration we’ve seen! You’ve been teaming up to share coordinates and discussing the hunt on the forums – Rift players are the best. 🙂 Good luck to those still working on the collection, and to those awaiting the challenge results!

Over on Prime, Greenscale made his grand appearance and many of the Ascended rose to the challenge – some of them even met with victory. If you’re not quite raid-ready yet, don’t fret! Additional changes went in to adjust overpowered Sliver boss abilities, and to smooth out the Prime experience curve. The update also reduced the platinum costs of expanded Role slots for those of you who prefer to have a spec ready for every situation.

The Near Horizon

While the recent hotfixes have a strong balance focus, on the mid-term horizon we have folks already working on some really great summer events and laying the groundwork for some of our longer term content goals for Live as the Prophecy of Ahnket storyline continues. More frequent bonus events, like this last weekend’s bonus experience on both Live and Prime, are also in the cards. It’s hard to talk details on some of these until the patches get closer to complete, but there are definitely some beans to spill. Not too many, though – don’t want to spoil the picnic!

Summerfest approaches with the promise of relaxation in Telara – who says an Ascended can’t take a vacation from saving the world? New art and dimension items are rolling in, and this writer might be biased, but our artists are killing it! There’s also some cleanup work being done to improve the event experience this year.

Summerfest isn’t the only world event on the horizon. We’ve mentioned previously that the team is working on the prelude event for River of Souls on Prime.  While these events may not be in the timeline for Live, they’re going to be fun and challenging content that we’ll be looking to release on all worlds! In that process we’ve uncovered other events from Rift’s past that were not tied to specific holidays or raids, and the team is working on bringing these back for an encore on both the Live servers and Prime.

Live

We have more than balance updates and events planned for Live servers this summer. The team is committed to improving the overall experience on Live servers, and some of the short- and mid-term focuses are:

• Bring more exciting rewards to the Daily Reward Calendar on Live, more in line with the Prime rewards.
• Add rare mount drops to Expert Dungeons and Raids on Live.  These extra rewards for play have been great on Prime, and this one is an idea that’s definitely worth taking to all servers.
• Revamp and reduce the credit store on Live. We’re looking keenly at player feedback, especially some recent well-presented player discussions, to improve this area. While we view the store as a place for cosmetics, convenience, and some amount of ability for newer players to catch up with their friends, we don’t want it to be perceived as gameplay replacement, so we’ll be making upcoming changes with that in mind.
• Some may have noticed the recent trend on the Rift store to offer the latest mounts without releasing them inside of a lockbox, and you should expect more of that.
• As an advanced Soul Balance topic, revisiting the Eternal Weapons and their impact on builds.
• Planar Fragments, addressing their level of RNG and costs to upgrade.
• Warfront queue level banding is going to be getting a look in an upcoming test.  The more level bands and warfronts there are, the longer queueing takes.  Our goal here is to speed up the queues while keeping gameplay fun.

We’ve got a jam-packed summer ahead of us, Ascended. We hope to see you well and victorious in Telara over the next few months!

– The Rift Team

Want to chat with us about this dev letter? Head over to the official forum discussion thread here.

Read More]]>

Friday, May 4th: We have SO much to talk about! “The Seeker” challenge, Greenscale’s Blight on Prime, the Holy Grail of BALANCE, Planar Plucker and more…

We’re working hard toward our May 16th update: Brasse has corralled Archonix, DeadSimon and Icarus to talk about all your favorite topics:

• Planar Plucker spotlight (Live)
• Rogue Pet skins spotlight (Live)
• Balancing underway across the board (Live & Prime)
• “The Seeker” challenge (Live & Prime)
• Prime Challenge III coming up (Prime)
• Prime: Greenscale’s Blight and the Slivers (Prime)

YES, we are taking questions in advance, and will fit in all that we can.  As with previous streams, we will endeavor to answer leftover questions in a post on the forums afterwards!

RIFT LIVESTREAM

Fridays, 11:30 AM – www.twitch.tv/trionworlds

As usual, we will simulcast on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – also as usual, due to technical limitations, prize draws can only be entered by folks who are in our Twitch chat channel.

Read More]]>

Hello Ascended, and welcome to our Friday the 13^th lightning round of Dev Q&A!

We had more questions than we could tackle live on today’s livestream, so we wanted to follow up to reiterate what we did cover, and provide additional answers here! The questions are loosely organized into categories and largely paraphrased, due to the number that overlapped. We’re definitely going to be honest – sometimes we have to say no, because there are gameplay, logistical or resource limitations on what any game team can do. Everything is subject to change in game development, though.
~Brasse

LIVE

Any plans for increasing Rift team member counts?

Yes. That’s all we can say here. It’s never going to be as large as the launch team, but we are getting some additional resources and some that are on loan to other projects will be returning. Live games typically peak at launch, to ensure that a huge load of content and support is available. Reducing the team size over time is normal. We generally transfer folks to other games/projects within the company as needed; it’s one way that Trion avoids the usual cycle of hiring and layoffs that many game companies resort to.

Do you think upcoming changes will be satisfying both the hardcore and casual community?

As Amary said on the livestream, “No. I’ve never seen that to be true in 13 years of working on MMOs.” We have a great many playstyles to cater to and it is impossible to make everyone equally happy. Raiders, PvP, Crafters, Dimensioneers, roleplayers, explorers, puzzlers, adventurers… we do our best, doing what we love best, for everyone!

New content for Live:

We are NOT done with the Comet of Ahnket, and definitely NOT done with the tale of Telara! We are aiming for three more content milestones this year. There are live systems and balance needs that we want to give love before discussing what a next expansion looks like.

The Planar Fragment system:

This is definitely on the list of “features that need love,” as soon as we can clear some schedule space for them.

Updates to the Guild system:

These will not be in the form that was previously. The Guild system is on the back burner for the time-being, simply because we’ve got so much else going on that takes priority.

Intrepid Greenscale’s Blight:

This will not have a simultaneous release on Live and Prime. We’ve talked about the possibility but we would have to hold prime GSB even longer. IGSB is currently intended to be Tier 3.

Will Twisted Artifacts come to the Celestial Lands?

According to DeadSimon, the order of new artifact introduction is likely Poison/Burning/Nightmare artifacts in more Mathosian zones, and then Twisted in celestial lands.

Can you add new rewards for Lucky Coins gained from Artifact Collections?

Amary said that we should! Note the lack of ETA… but the idea is great and we like it! [Note from Amary: I love artifact hunting, so clearly I have some bias toward this… but I have to treat it fairly!]

Are there plans to develop new souls?

This is not in the docket currently; we have enough balance concerns on our plate that we want to focus on before considering additional souls.

Crafting feels a bit unloved. I got crafting marks coming out of my ears. During Storm Legion I remember new recipes being released after T2 raids had come out. Any chance of new crafting recipes other than amenders?

Yes, we can confirm there is a chance of new recipes coming. No details yet!

Are we getting a 7th anniversary mount?

Done! That would be the plumpy Greenscale balloon mount on Live. We didn’t paint a big 7 on the side, which may have led to some confusion, but he is pretty darn awesome!

I see Demon Wings in my uncollected wardrobe tab… where can I get those?

Those are still a work in progress and not yet released. We released a sneak peek at them on a livestream a while back and they are certainly scary looking; like something that may appear around Halloween!

When are the Shiny Shenanigans and Artifact Pinatas coming back?

We are not sure yet… but they will reappear at some point.

PRIME

What’s your definition for success on prime? Is it only sub counts or any kind of measurement you use on satisfaction of players and their feedback?

Our definition is simple: are people enjoying it? To date it has been going very well and we’re all still having a blast with Prime ourselves. We do not release specific numbers for business reasons, but it has been a success on all sides.

Have the progression plans changed? Initially it was discussed that all content of RIFT would be served in a year, but with current pace even vanilla doesn’t look like will fit in 1 year span.

You’re correct – we’ve slowed down from the initially planned pace after seeing both the rate of player progression and in order to tackle the lag/exp/balance concerns.

Can we get progression schedules on the website like AA fresh server has?

Nope! ArcheAge has launched several fresh start/progression servers and they have established a cadence based on that experience. Vigil is our first Prime server and we are still learning how our audience adapts and grows there. We will update information as often as we can.

Will you be adding individual loot to the raid rifts on Prime?

No, but we are using individual loot for upcoming raids.

PRIME CONTENT

What loot system will raids such as Greenscale, River of Souls, etc. be using on Prime?

Individual loot!

Will Greenscale’s Blight be a 20-man raid?

Confirmed, there will be LFR (Looking for Raid) to 20.

Will there be a schedule or release time posted for the raids as before they are released?

Yes, right now, the ETA for Greenscale is 4/25 and we’ll get more specific times and an official date announcement post as a build is locked in for publishing. We do not currently have a date set for River of Souls, but it’s well underway – ROS is in development and undergoing internal testing as we speak… err, write. We are not ready to address Hammerknell yet, sorry!

Will mage tank gear drop from raids such as Greenscale’s Blight, either in an updated loot table or from some sort of raid currency vendor set?

Unclear at this time, we’ll have to review this more. Worst case no, medium case for raid currency, best case for individual loot rewards.

Similar to the above, but this time for Crit Power gear, will that drop from raids which were previously released before the stat was introduced?

We have no intention to do so at this time.

Will we be able to make private channels on Prime for raid organization?

Nope, we are not returning private channels to Prime.

SOULS/BALANCE:

Considering the top DPS spec for Warrior has been a healing soul for the last 6 months, why were the damage boosts to the Paragon or Champion souls applied to Prime but not applied to Live?

They were done using a prime-specific damage override to view the effects in a more aggregate form before tearing up the actual ability code on Live.

What is the plan for Warrior DPS adjustment on Prime: Vigil? Can Warriors look forward to further minor tweaks for next week?

Yes, and the adjustments are ongoing. As with the previous question, we will continue to emphasize that we are taking a careful and gradual path with ability balance.

Will souls that are sub-par mainly because of the 51 soul point cap such as Archon receive buffs before Storm Legion?

Honestly not likely, if the issue is due to the point cap, because that’ll become a non-issue quickly; that Dev time is needed for more urgent balance issues.

What are your plans for Clerics? Will they receive the same love warriors did?

Yes. Let us get Warriors into a better place first!

Will we see other mage souls competitive in DPS without needing to use Mystic Archer?

Notice how Live doesn’t have the same issues with Mystic Archer as Prime does? The core of that power difference is specific to MA on Prime and that’s been difficult to address, and we’re not done with it yet.

Archon was revised recently to quash -chon hybrids by pushing Flaring Power to the top tier 61pt ability. This has the unfortunate effect now of making Archon entirely undesirable for level 50 endgame content. Is this intended or are there plans to adjust Archon to be roughly equal in support capacity to Beastmaster?

Level 50 endgame content won’t be the status forever and this meta will change with Prime progression.

Can we please show Dominator some love and make it viable in some form again?

Maybe one day but it’s not at the top of the list at the moment.

I think it’s time to go into the specifics of what a “team effort” means exactly with regard to balance?

We’re not going to discuss specifics of class balance and Devs, other than to say that yes, multiple people are involved already (or learning the system), and multiple people will be responsible for balance concerns. We won’t be identifying them; we all know that RoughRaptors plays as a Warrior and he has a ton of suggestions for the archetype, but he is not making all the calls. In other words, you can thank him for championing the Warriors, but not blame him for things you don’t agree with. We find a team approach helps us all make balanced, measured decisions.

Mages: right now we have a very, very low % chance to get the loot from Expert dungeons and Raid Rifts. We can’t buy any Mage Tank gear or even lesser essences from vendors. Will you fix the drop rate and/or loot table, will you add Mage tank Gear to Expert and Planar vendors, and also for the coming Raid Vendors?

Mage Tank gear is a current topic of internal discussion – at the very least, we’d like to add it to vendors.

EXPERIENCE

Will there be any improvement to level 45-50 questing XP?

Not impossible, but it’s not on the immediate work list.

CRAFTING, GUILD BANKS, MONEY

Will we be get back any/all of the recipes that vanished a couple of weeks ago due to being too OP, for example the Tormenting set for mages?

Yes, they have specific “power tiers” associated with them and are restricted until that level of content is available.

Can platinum costs for various game items be revisited on Prime? Additional roles already being 100 platinum for the 5th or Guild Gank vaults being 1500p for the 3rd. Mounts being 125p also feels steep considering how mounts now drop from dungeons.

Keep in mind that plat generation ability will rapidly start to change at 50+. With that on the horizon, we do not plan to make any sweeping changes. This is why the answer to the following money-related questions is “no.”

Minor Catalysts & Catalytic Essences seem to be available differently on Prime from launch is there any way to get info like this in advance to help guild banks plan?

No.

Can you make craft recipes bound to account?

Nopers.

Can we have more rewarding (at least twice the marks!) craft dailies/weeklies to enable us to buy the recipes we need before we out-level the content!

Nyet.

Would it be possible to change the amount of Plat needed to upgrade the guild bank to fit the current economy.

Not likely.

DIMENSIONS

Dimension Test Dummies – we are finding the only ones we can hit at the moment are Mathosian Practice Dummies BUT a level 38 can hit it. Can we please have correct test Dummies at a lower cost?

Amary noted: this is a bug to be reported; I haven’t even heard of this as a thing! So the answer is no.

Can we please have the Dimension Entry Point item added to the store?

Possibly!

Dimensions were added to RIFT with Storm Legion, Nov. 2012 (20 months after RIFT launched). We are only 1 month old on Prime… and due to possibly expire in as little as 11 months. If a credit option is not going to be added soon for dimensions (items, keys, guild dims etc), can the plat prices be lowered to reflect a brand-spankin-new economy where every silver counts?

We agree the prices on Prime are based on a much more established economy. It’s worth figuring out a way to split those costs from Live and customize them but it’s just not been top priority for the team at this stage. Side note: at this point, we also think Prime will be around for a lot longer than 11 months.

GENERAL

Will Rift prime be a part of the Trion Creator Program?

Prime is already, automatically and absolutely part of the Creator Program! We don’t mind if you play on Live or Prime, it’s still RIFT to us! The big difference is that mount codes that we often give to Creators will not work on Prime. We’re working on an alternative giveaway to make up the difference. You can apply at https://trionworlds.com/creators any time, and tweet directly @TrionCreators.

Whew! That about covers what we can answer at this time.

See you all in Telara… RIFT ON!

The RIFT Team

Read More]]>

We’ve been very busy behind the scenes, under the carpets, in the walls and in the ceiling. We wanted to give you a quick update on Dev Status on some important Live and Prime issues.

While there are events, content, and soul-work going on in development for both Live and Prime right now, we wanted to address a handful of priorities after this past weekend’s play experiences. (Yes, we all play, usually anonymously – we may have been in your group!)

Read all about it and join the discussion on our forums!

Brasse