Rift: Planes of Telara

[Raguel]

Help me out here, what's the point of the rifts? Yeah, I go around whack generic mobs for a while, then get some generic loot... what's the leverage? What's the twist that supposedly makes this fun for more than a week? Because I'm seriously not seeing it, no matter how much people keep telling me "it's awesome!"

I'm assuming that if players don't put down rifts, mobs will quickly take over hubs. I don't know how true that is. The fun factor is mostly from the randomness of them, but it was cool to roam around with 40+ other people. I also like the fact that I don't have to worry about ksing or ninjas; everyone is working towards the same goal.

Now, if I were playing the game regularly as opposed to 2 - 4 days with a few weeks in between, I'd want to play against a more fleshed out enemy, but I don't think that's going to happen in Rift.

[Malakili]

Help me out here, what's the point of the rifts? Yeah, I go around whack generic mobs for a while, then get some generic loot... what's the leverage? What's the twist that supposedly makes this fun for more than a week? Because I'm seriously not seeing it, no matter how much people keep telling me "it's awesome!"

I'm assuming that if players don't put down rifts, mobs will quickly take over hubs. I don't know how true that is. The fun factor is mostly from the randomness of them, but it was cool to roam around with 40+ other people. I also like the fact that I don't have to worry about ksing or ninjas; everyone is working towards the same goal.

Now, if I were playing the game regularly as opposed to 2 - 4 days with a few weeks in between, I'd want to play against a more fleshed out enemy, but I don't think that's going to happen in Rift.

Yeah, if they are left alone invasion armies will start marauding towards a quest hub, and when they destroy the stone, they take it over until you clean them out.  With the entire beta popuation basically within spitting distance of each other (in level and in space) most of these things just get shut down immediately.

[Threash]

Well i've played through three of this things already and i still have no effing clue what i want to play.  I am paralyzed with too many options.

[SnakeCharmer]

Help me out here, what's the point of the rifts?

From what I can tell, it's like developer sponsored community RP events.  They spawn a big bad through a cool graphic, players beat on it for a while, get some shiny, and done.  But an entire game is built and marketed around it.

[Draegan]

Probably my biggest problem with the game, as well. I don't like WoW.

LOL

[Ashamanchill]

PvPers never change.  If a game allows so much as a duel they think it should be the primary focus of the game.

Lol thats going in the sig.

[palmer_eldritch]

Do the Rifts have the same problems as WAR's public quests (which they are very similar to)?
Will it be possible to defeat a rift once the server is matured and you are the only player around when it forms?
Are the rewards shared fairly, so that the person tanking the mobs has as much chance of getting something as the mage blasting away at them?

[Modern Angel]

Potentially the same problems but they seem to have some plans to deal with it. The number and difficulty of rifts seem to be something that the devs have complete and total control over. So when you get to that point where the game's mature and the noob zones are far less populated they can presumably just make them solo rifts and lower the numbers.

[Hartsman]

Potentially the same problems but they seem to have some plans to deal with it. The number and difficulty of rifts seem to be something that the devs have complete and total control over. So when you get to that point where the game's mature and the noob zones are far less populated they can presumably just make them solo rifts and lower the numbers.

Yep.  The system knows exactly which players are where and is making decisions accordingly, even right now. 

Beyond that, we can override a few dozen different things it pays attention to in runtime - either globally, or on specific servers.

That said, a smart system isn't really going to solve everything for everyone 100% of the time (and probably shouldn't even try, otherwise it's kind of just the game playing itself). 

On top of that, there are gameplay elements people can use if they find themselves potentially overrun. 

For instance, if you're at a wardstone you'd like to beef up because you see an invasion coming and you're on your own, there are ways to upgrade both its "health" and its active defenses.   

Conversely, if you're at a foothold that you want to take back from invaders, there are ways to summon faction defenders from your side to assist.

There are also emergent behaviors between different factions of invaders that you can take advantage of if you know to look for them and get a little lucky -- e.g. An enemy faction invasion that's heading toward the fire-controlled foothold. Great, let them fight it out a while, then mop it up and get credit for defeating them both. 

In past generations, we probably would have called that exploiting risk-vs-reward, but in our case, we're intentionally treating it as valid gameplay.

The idea really is to make this part of it a game on top of game.

[Xilren's Twin]

For instance, if you're at a wardstone you'd like to beef up because you see an invasion coming and you're on your own, there are ways to upgrade both its "health" and its active defenses.   Conversely, if you're at a foothold that you want to take back from invaders, there are ways to summon faction defenders from your side to assist.

Yeah, those cosumable magic items you can use for that sort of stuff.  Can you tell if there are being heavily used yet?  A lot of the rift battles seem frentic enough that i dont know if any sort of coordinated "you buff the stone, ill summon defenders, etc" is actually happening beyond just dogpile zergs.  There were so many rifts active last night that for about an hour you couldnt really do regular questing with all the invasions happening and overlapping.  Fun though.  Also, need more hot bars and bag space asap: tons of abilities and items to lug about.

There are also emergent behaviors between different factions of invaders that you can take advantage of if you know to look for them and get a little lucky -- e.g. An enemy faction invasion that's heading toward the fire-controlled foothold. Great, let them fight it out a while, then mop it up and get credit for defeating them both. 

Saw some of that behavior too last night, but the vast majority of rifts seemed to be Death ones.  Things did quiet down after that hour of frantic activity after the players had mopped up the open rifts.

[Hartsman]

Yeah, those cosumable magic items you can use for that sort of stuff.  Can you tell if there are being heavily used yet?  A lot of the rift battles seem frentic enough that i dont know if any sort of coordinated "you buff the stone, ill summon defenders, etc" is actually happening beyond just dogpile zergs.  There were so many rifts active last night that for about an hour you couldnt really do regular questing with all the invasions happening and overlapping.  Fun though.  Also, need more hot bars and bag space asap: tons of abilities and items to lug about.

Exactly like you suspect -- With the current overpopulation levels (100% of the server population in 2 zones) they're not getting a ton of use.

That, and the fact that they're obscured by being largely a part of the merchant/item system right now isn't helping.

And that they're largely an inventory hog isn't at all lost on us.

That's going to be one of the big beta3 takeaways:  "Yes, there's cool stuff there.  It needs to be presented a lot more cleanly, and not take up bag space."  We need to integrate it quite a bit better.

[Draegan]

I need more bag space.

So I was just running the Relam of the Fae instance as the healer.  And I was a mage.  It's pretty awesome.

Terrible thing about it?  My ress is at level 20, and I'm level 19.  That ress should be knocked down a few points to match the entry level of the dungeon.

[Modern Angel]

And this, really, is what has me excited. I hate to use the word "potential" because that's a word so entwined with failed or mediocre games but the potential of the rifts is what has me excited. The quests offer a framework the modern MMO player can relate to; the ship's sailed, that's the standard for a new game with a few notable exceptions. But here's this layer of emergent, random, open world stuff slapped on top of the narrative. For one, technologically it's impressive. Mainly, however, it's a throwback to unpredictable behavior in MMOs or, at least, offers that potential. And in that sense they're not taking WoW head on. WoW's now the most predictable, self-referential, in love with its own story game on the market. There's none of that here. The quests are just the skeleton.

Now, it may very well be that I get sick of rifts after a couple months. I completely grant that. But for now? This is great stuff and a really good foothold into something new. Don't think this isn't a watershed because I know for a fact that there are designers at a couple other companies who are going "Holy shit!" at the rift stuff even if the totality leaves them a little cold. They're seeing what they can do about adding in their version of "rifts" too.

ENDNOTE: I have a hunch that GW2's systems are going to be far more similar to Rift than not. Just a feeling, for what it's worth.

[Hawkbit]

I really, really like the fact that there are sometimes moving invasions that I can't simply kill by myself.  In fact, with three other people we couldn't get coordinated to do it.  That is awesome; if a force is invading it should be damn tough to beat it up.  I was level 12 and a tough lvl 9 invasion was working towards the refuge.  I died about 8 times to it, trying different tactics.  Never did beat it and I think it despawned, not sure.

Seriously:  There's an army in the open world that is tougher than I am.  And it moves.  And it consumes.  

While I hope some of the questing gets fleshed out a bit, I'm officially drinking the kool-aid.  

I hope they offer the game for sale digital download through Trion, but at least Steam has it listed.  Though I'm considering a boxed collector's on this one.  

[Draegan]

There were two or three Defiant NPC warband invasions just roaming around the zone randomly.  And killing me since they were all elite.

I wonder if Rift Footholds will be able to be upgraded by the NPCs like Wardstones can if they are left alone for a while.

[waylander]

I really hate not having a mount until level 20 because the character movement is so slow.  I see they put up a mount vendor near King's Retreat (defiant side) so hopefully there will be a level 10 mount available at some point.

The quest rewards are very spotty and you either end up with too much gear of the same type, not enough upgrades for other things, or the rewards can't keep up with how fast you are leveling.  On the flip side player crafting seems to take too long in the early levels, and you quickly outlevel your gear before you can work it up to the next level.  It basically creates a situation where you are forging ahead with subpar gear much longer than you should, and that hurts you until you finally get a quest or player crafter who can outfit you properly.

One thing I hate about the Rifts is that they don't seem to drop any gear, and there's only so many things I can do with 200 sourcestone motes.  Another thing I dislike is that the best tanks in the game are rogue tanks, and when a rogue tank is your best tanking class then you have some real balance problems. Lastly there are a ton of pet classes, but most of the pets cannot hold aggro and the pet owner gets wtfpwned. This is especially true with casters, and the necromancer in particular.

Overall the game is fun, but in my opinion they are a ways off from these classes being remotely balanced. Right now for PVE and PVP you should roll a cleric/tank build and a rogue tank, and that's all you need in a group.

[Threash]

I don't really see how your gear can be considered subpar unless you are having trouble with the pve, which really is not the case.

[waylander]

I don't really see how your gear can be considered subpar unless you are having trouble with the pve, which really is not the case.

It is really more about being stuck with the same gear for too many levels prior to getting an upgrade. 

[Draegan]

Yeah Rifts need to drop more gear.  Or I need more things to do with motes.

---

So.  There was just a zone wide raid/invasion/wtf!/ / / / event.  Raid targets, raid defenses, zone wide quests.  For winning you get a purple token where you need a few to get some purple gear from the vendor.  It was excellent.

Essentially the whole zone got invaded by 50 rifts and invasions.  We had to fight back raid mobs and make our way to the center of the map to win.

The center of the map was ezmode though.  They need to tweak that.

It was fucking amazing.

I'll have video and stuff up sometime soon of the whole thing.

[Lantyssa]

The outlying areas were brutal if you were under level though.  Thankfully people started gathering around the Kelari Refuge and despite being a warrior I had three ranged attacks so I was fairly safe, but early on I was a lone level 10 surrounded by level 15 raid footholds in King's Refuge.

It'd be nice if the force that invade outlying areas would scale themselves a bit so those at the lower range of an area can feel like they're participating.

Also, level 20 golems with 700k health suck.  Thankfully they either kept us up long enough to beat it, or we got luck and took it down right before the server was shut off.  I would have liked to see what loot I got for it though.

[Ghambit]

All that sounds like a helluva good time.
I wonder though, is more fun to be had if one purposely waits a few weeks after release when the starter zones are /crickets, so that one might be able to reap the rift defense rewards for oneself or a small leveling guild? Seems like a well organized low level guild purposely behind the level curve could have a helluva good time and get quite kickass gear after the release-hordes die out.

Feels good to have a whole zone to yourself every now and again.

[Threash]

Something wow needs to steal from this game is having to loot a pile of corpses just once.

[Hawkbit]

Yeah Rifts need to drop more gear.  Or I need more things to do with motes.

---

So.  There was just a zone wide raid/invasion/wtf!/ / / / event.  Raid targets, raid defenses, zone wide quests.  For winning you get a purple token where you need a few to get some purple gear from the vendor.  It was excellent.

Essentially the whole zone got invaded by 50 rifts and invasions.  We had to fight back raid mobs and make our way to the center of the map to win.

The center of the map was ezmode though.  They need to tweak that.

It was fucking amazing.

I'll have video and stuff up sometime soon of the whole thing.

I have done a lot of cool things in my roughly 13 years of PvE mmo playing, but the Battle for Freemarch quest is just about the coolest.  That event was awesome, and guaranteed a box sale out of me.  I'm not sure I can convince my dad to switch from WoW, but I will be playing RIFT a LOT. 

My paladin went from lvl 12 to 17 just by /raid with 19 others, running from rift to foothold.  If they retain the fun, loot items and small XP gains from these events, I would be very, very surprised if this game isn't a runaway success. 

[Modern Angel]

I'm worried that the trap of too little gear while leveling may be imminent. I get the idea. Something a little grindy to keep people funneled to what the devs deem important. But seriously, just give out the gear. It doesn't matter. There's no time sink there. They're getting xp, they're still leveling. It's not even a speed bump to hold back gear.

[Malakili]

I'm worried that the trap of too little gear while leveling may be imminent. I get the idea. Something a little grindy to keep people funneled to what the devs deem important. But seriously, just give out the gear. It doesn't matter. There's no time sink there. They're getting xp, they're still leveling. It's not even a speed bump to hold back gear.

I was thinking about this myself.  I wanted to see how viable it would be to more or less just ignore quests because the XP while decent isn't quite as huge a % of the total exp as in some games, but I quickly realized I was going to have no avenue for upgrading my gear

[Hartsman]

I'm worried that the trap of too little gear while leveling may be imminent. I get the idea. Something a little grindy to keep people funneled to what the devs deem important. But seriously, just give out the gear. It doesn't matter. There's no time sink there. They're getting xp, they're still leveling. It's not even a speed bump to hold back gear.

I was thinking about this myself.  I wanted to see how viable it would be to more or less just ignore quests because the XP while decent isn't quite as huge a % of the total exp as in some games, but I quickly realized I was going to have no avenue for upgrading my gear

On a live server, you should. 

By then the economy around the items bought with rift currencies (currently portrayed as zone based event tokens) will be more balanced (they were just plain too expensive in B3), and servers would have a crafting economy, letting you keep gear up.

If you played that right, you'd likely come out ahead of solo questing in terms of most gear.

[Modern Angel]

I'm glad to see you guys are in agreement that the gear via rift tokens was too expensive this event. I think you've got to work out how long it'll take to go from zero tokens to N tokens, how much xp you get in that time and bring it in line so that you get the gear while it's an upgrade at the appropriate level. You level fast and how long are you actually going to use gear in something you level fast in?

[Ratman_tf]

There are also emergent behaviors between different factions of invaders that you can take advantage of if you know to look for them and get a little lucky -- e.g. An enemy faction invasion that's heading toward the fire-controlled foothold. Great, let them fight it out a while, then mop it up and get credit for defeating them both. 

In past generations, we probably would have called that exploiting risk-vs-reward, but in our case, we're intentionally treating it as valid gameplay.

Bravo. As long as the risk/reward doesn't get completley ridiculous, taking advantage of enemy 'situations' is fun.

[waylander]

That's nice to hear Scott, but your tank classes are broken when people want a rogue/tank over a real warrior class tank. You need to fix that asap or you'll have howling masses of unhappy warriors on your hands come retail. On the pet classes, how hard would it be to make sure all pets can hold aggro as well as the ranger's razorbeast pet? Too many pet users complain about most pets being unable to hold aggro, and that's downright deadly for a pet based caster since most of their dps is tied up in the pet.

[Ghambit]

Warriors dont have energy right?  They do have mana though.  One would think a tired Rogue would have a harder time holding aggro. than a full-manaed Warrior.  It's the initial burst damage that's probably the issue until the rogue runs out of Energy.  Also, the third soul early on should've made it easier for tank-specced warriors to properly spec as true tanks if they wanted.  (shrug)

Warriors always seemed like Masters of the Battlefield rather than simple "Tanks" in this game anyways.  Game is more built on having multiple off-tanks and situational buffs (based on elements/attacks) rather than a single main.  For fuck's sake you can build a tank-mage real easy also.  And there are indeed threat generating abilities in the rogue trees, which is actually kinda cool imo.  So you're saying they should take these out?  

So given all the classes abilities to "tank," (and the gameplay options this provides) praytell how you'd balance the game well enough to make your standard faire warrior-tank happy.  A gold star awaits a viable answer.

Also, as for pet users... I never once in any of the betas had aggro. issues <lvl15 with any pet class I played.  By the time I pulled aggro. from my pet (which was usually 'cause the pet died) the enemy was either mostly dead, about to die from DOTs, or I had a slew of burst damage in waiting.  For casters wherein the pet is their primary source of dmg., well... aside from that being kinda gimpy to begin with, how does one even PULL aggro. from the pet if the pet is the primary dmg. source?  Healing??

[Threash]

Warriors use uh... power i think.  It's not mana, it seems almost exactly like energy actually.

[Ghambit]

Warriors use uh... power i think.  It's not mana, it seems almost exactly like energy actually.

Bah, you're right.  I just remember it rarely being used up (I never even looked at it really), unlike my rogue who was constantly out of energy.  At least the warrior has mana-based abilities to fall back on though.

[Kejjan]

Just pulled down a functional VIP-Key from FilePlanet. Linking if anyone is interested.
No subscription needed.

http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/rift/

[Threash]

Woo, thank you!

[Modern Angel]

That's nice to hear Scott, but your tank classes are broken when people want a rogue/tank over a real warrior class tank. You need to fix that asap or you'll have howling masses of unhappy warriors on your hands come retail.

"Real" tanking is relative. It's a real tanking class if the devs say it's one, doubly so if the game's not even out yet. WoW druids are real tanks. So were EQ2 monks.