Rift: Planes of Telara

[Falconeer]

Me and a friend were watching the server down screen for 10 minutes. All of a sudden they came online and we started shrieking in Teamspeak. I am pretty sure we clicked about 5 seconds from each other. I got in, while he got 2700th in queue. 5 seconds from each. Max.

[Wasted]

Bleh, rushed home from work to log into a 2 hour queue.

[Merusk]

Facebook spam says they've already added 6 more servers to the 33 that were originally slated. 4 PVP 1 PVP-RP and 1 PVE.  Looks like the PVP crowd likes this one.

[Abelian75]

I wouldn't read too much into the time estimates.  Looks like they are increasing capacity in chunks (probably as peeps spread out and such).  The estimate is overly optimistic in that it assumes people will actually log out, yet pessimistic because it doesn't know capacity will increase (these are assumptions, btw).  Pretty much the only information the estimates convey is either "fuck that's a lot of dudes!" or "that's a fairly decent number of dudes, but not quite at the 'fuck that's a lot of dudes!' level."

[Threash]

Yeah my estimate went from 3 hours to 15 mins to 2 hours in a span of 5 minutes.  Its been one hour and i went from around 850 in queue to 150 in queue though.

[Abelian75]

Yeah my estimate went from 3 hours to 15 mins to 2 hours in a span of 5 minutes.  Its been one hour and i went from around 850 in queue to 150 in queue though.

Man, even before you get into the game they're already getting you invested in the time-travelling plot elements.  Clever work!

[Simond]

The official forums allow people to embed images in the background of their player profile pages.
This will end well.

[Ard]

( or really poor server capacity ).

Server capacity is one of the problems they don't actually have.  They just have an insane number of barbarians at that gate at the moment.

[pxib]

I think this sort of thing is very dangerous. It's exactly what got WAR in trouble.

While the audience for "OH GOD ANYTHING EXCEPT WOW PLEASE" is huge, it's fickle. I hope this team is smart enough to capitalize on it without putting their eggs in too large a basket.

[Nebu]

I think this sort of thing is very dangerous. It's exactly what got WAR in trouble.

WAR is a very different game.  It depended not only on population, but on faction population as well as level-based population. 

Rift won't suffer a problem of opening too many servers and consolidating them like WAR did.  It's not a PvP-first game.

[Falconeer]

I can only speak for one EU server. The first hour went smoothly, then lag started to build up steadily, making the experience less and less pleasant. 2 and half hour later the game is completely unplayable with lag ranging from 5 to 15 seconds. I am writing this after having been killed for the 10th time in a row. A vespide stopped caring about me and went back to its business, and while I was trying to understand why, or why I couldn't hit it anymore, about 15 seconds later, I died.

EDIT: Now I've been disconnected and I am 2800 in queue, estimated waiting time keeps changing between 3 and 10 hours.

[kildorn]

I can only speak for one EU server. The first hour went smoothly, then lag started to build up steadily, making the experience less and less pleasant. 2 and half hour later the game is completely unplayable with lag ranging from 5 to 15 seconds. I am writing this after having been killed for the 10th time in a row. A vespide stopped caring about me and went back to its business, and while I was trying to understand why, or why I couldn't hit it anymore, about 15 seconds later, I died.

EDIT: Now I've been disconnected and I am 2800 in queue, estimated waiting time keeps changing between 3 and 10 hours.

So either it crashed, or they don't have a system to put people who were logged in to the front of the queue <3 <3

[Abelian75]

I have a bit of a suspicion that it's a timeout for server/character select that may have forgotten about, y'know, the one case where you want to allow someone to spend hours selecting/creating a character.  If so, whoopsie! :)

[sam, an eggplant]

1 million preorders seems likely to put Rift right at the front of non-WoW western MMOs. WAR peaked at around 750k months after release-- 1 million at prerelease crushes that threshold.

Of course it's growth and retention that matters.

[Abelian75]

I don't think it's actually a million preorders, though, just a million accounts registered on their site pre-launch.  Like, if you signed up for a chance at beta a while back or whatever.  It sort of sucks they did that marketing spin trickiness, since I suspect they actually will get a million accounts and it'll sorta lose the oomph since they already tricked people into thinking it had happened.

[Modern Angel]

Servers are coming down at 4:50 Eastern for a quick 15min performance fix, presumably with a fix to the queue timeout issue.

[ezrast]

I got DC'd and kicked back to the server select screen, but didn't seem to lose my place in queue. Maybe the timeout is very short, or maybe the queue really did just shorten up a lot.

Fake edit: Or maybe everyone is just logging out since the servers are apparently coming down in 3 minutes.

[Merusk]

I can only speak for one EU server. The first hour went smoothly, then lag started to build up steadily, making the experience less and less pleasant. 2 and half hour later the game is completely unplayable with lag ranging from 5 to 15 seconds. I am writing this after having been killed for the 10th time in a row. A vespide stopped caring about me and went back to its business, and while I was trying to understand why, or why I couldn't hit it anymore, about 15 seconds later, I died.

EDIT: Now I've been disconnected and I am 2800 in queue, estimated waiting time keeps changing between 3 and 10 hours.

So either it crashed, or they don't have a system to put people who were logged in to the front of the queue <3 <3

I'd go with Falconeer crashed and there's no way of putting him back at the front.

Falconeer:  What you describe is exactly what I saw stress test weekend and the first day of open beta.   It seemed like the system strains a lot under masses of people in a concentrated area, but only on the pumping info to and from the client side of things.  The Mobs were rubber banding around and killing players just fine.

[Abelian75]

I got DC'd and kicked back to the server select screen, but didn't seem to lose my place in queue. Maybe the timeout is very short, or maybe the queue really did just shorten up a lot.

Fake edit: Or maybe everyone is just logging out since the servers are apparently coming down in 3 minutes.

There definitely is a grace period, yeah.  It does seem to be fairly short though.  Not sure how short, but definitely seems to be less than "minutes."

Irrelevant anyway, cuz yeah, I imagine they are fixing it.

[ShenMolo]

1 million preorders seems likely to put Rift right at the front of non-WoW western MMOs. WAR peaked at around 750k months after release-- 1 million at prerelease crushes that threshold.

Of course it's growth and retention that matters.

I think if it had been 1 million preorders they would have said 'one million preorders". That would be something to brag about.

[Threash]

My computer overheated and rebooted 5 mins after login in, i was able to restart relaunch the game and log back in without waiting in queue again.

[Azuredream]

Just my experience so far; logged in the second servers came up, have played with zero issues or lag (although rifts are spawning like crazy), got to level 11 before they brought the servers down for upgrades or something. I just hope I don't get stuck in the hueg queue when it comes back up.

[sam, an eggplant]

I don't think it's actually a million preorders, though, just a million accounts registered on their site pre-launch.  Like, if you signed up for a chance at beta a while back or whatever.  

Ahhhh yeah, I'm sure you're right.

[Chimpy]

You should've gotten an email telling you to run the patcher once before uninstalling to fix that bug. If you didn't, you probably should still do that. I'm not real happy about having to patch from the end of January just to uninstall the fucking thing.

It was just the patcher that needed updating, not the actual game.

Took me all of 2 minutes to patch and uninstall (I had totally forgotten about it being on my machine until the email) after I got the email.

1 million preorders seems likely to put Rift right at the front of non-WoW western MMOs. WAR peaked at around 750k months after release-- 1 million at prerelease crushes that threshold.

Of course it's growth and retention that matters.

Pretty sure Aion sold more than 1 million boxes the first month it was available in NA/EU.

[sam, an eggplant]

Preorders are different than sell-through in the first month.

But it's not 1 million preorders either, so I don't know why we're having this discussion. Here's a different topic: bananas.

[Stabs]

Bananas have been traditionally weak as far as pre-orders go, but they've done magnificently at retaining their customers. Some species of customer have been eating them for millions of years.

I think we can consider bananas a success.

[pxib]

WAR is a very different game.  It depended not only on population, but on faction population as well as level-based population.

Rift won't suffer a problem of opening too many servers and consolidating them like WAR did.  It's not a PvP-first game.

I'm arguing a different risk. WAR (and Conan and Aion) attracted a lot of people early on, and those people eventually got turned off and returned to WoW. The realization that "everybody is leaving" was just as contagious as "everybody is trying some new game" and WAR's proliferation of servers meant that everybody was looking around their individual server and asking "where did everybody go?"

The fact that Rift is more similar to WoW than WAR it actually likely to make such a tide of disappointment more extreme.

[Sobelius]

Played from Noon - 10:30pm with only the brief server downtime. Everything seemed to work without a hitch - rifts, warfronts, quests, all seemed to be working. Until the client crashed in the middle of a rift fight. (Left me wondering if I hit a memory leak. But was able to log right back in with no queue.)

Got my Guardian rogue on Sunrest up to just shy of 17 and enjoyed the near-instantaneous warfront action. We got thrashed quite regularly in Black Garden, though in one run we did the thrashing.

Best PvE moment was when level 15+ invasion took over the school and argent gate and people qq'd that "the GMs were being too harsh" by having such a high level invasion when most folks were still barely level 10-11. Sheesh. Give them dynamic content that might force them to have to get off the quest rails and they feel it's "unfair". 

[Zetor]

On my server we didn't have anyone over 11, so it took 30 mins to take out the big 150k hp lv20 vindicator that ganked the newbie area. I think in the end we had about 60 lowbies beating on it, and a level 11 tank holding aggro (nearly dying every two seconds). It was definitely a different experience, but imo it was more tedious than fun (unlike the 'normal' rifts and invasions, which were enjoyable).

OTOH, this is only really a problem on the very first opening day. Even on day2 you'll have enough high-level people to deal with this stuff quickly.

[Nebu]

OTOH, this is only really a problem on the very first opening day. Even on day2 you'll have enough high-level people to deal with this stuff quickly.

This is my concern with the Rifts system and new players.  After servers become established, the low level areas will be filled with lowbies and a level 50 friend destroying the Rifts.  The concept will lack the intended "punch" and players new to the game will be immediately reminded that they are insignificant until they reach the level cap.  I almost wish that they could gate content such that players above a certain level couldn't backtrack.  It will really ruin my replay fun if every rift I attempt on a second or third play through is dominated by someone two-boxing with their level 50 main.

Beyond that, I'd say it was a pretty impressive launch.  The game ran smoothly and the quests seemed pretty clean.

[Merusk]

OTOH, this is only really a problem on the very first opening day. Even on day2 you'll have enough high-level people to deal with this stuff quickly.

This is my concern with the Rifts system and new players.  After servers become established, the low level areas will be filled with lowbies and a level 50 friend destroying the Rifts.  The concept will lack the intended "punch" and players new to the game will be immediately reminded that they are insignificant until they reach the level cap.  I almost wish that they could gate content such that players above a certain level couldn't backtrack.  It will really ruin my replay fun if every rift I attempt on a second or third play through is dominated by someone two-boxing with their level 50 main.

There's Ascended abilities to be able to summon NPC help w/ the Rifts, and minor rifts are clearable by folks in the proper level range, so I'm not sure this is too big a concern.   Now, lack of knowledge about those Ascended abilities IS a problem.   Hell, I know about it and I never tried it out in Beta so I'm not sure how effective they are.. hopefully very.

[Sky]

The summoned defenders (last I knew, it's old knowledge) had to travel to get there. So it took a while as the ran the roads, and they'd aggro on everything and have to fight it. Once I had a single defender show up five minutes after I had taken out a foothold.

Nebu has valid concerns. The rewards system for rifts is based on dps, a lvl 50 AE dps can ruin everyone's day.

[Vinadil]

I have yet to kill anything grey... but I am assuming they can make it to where grey mobs give no XP/loot?  Seems like that would remove much of the incentive for a lvl 50 to hang out in level 15 rift areas.  Even their own alt would get no credit/loot really.

Other than the queues (which are back today...) the evening of play was enjoyable.  The population was so much different from beta, but the quest areas all seem to be able to handle it which is very nice. (ie plenty of mobs/sparklies to pick up)

[Nebu]

I have yet to kill anything grey... but I am assuming they can make it to where grey mobs give no XP/loot?  Seems like that would remove much of the incentive for a lvl 50 to hang out in level 15 rift areas.  Even their own alt would get no credit/loot really.

Did you play WoW? Ever see people running quests with a tethered, ungrouped level 85 healer following them around?  Drop a hot on the lowbie and they can solo a rift.  If things get out of hand, the level 50 steps in and kills everything.  Rinse, repeat. 

[Rendakor]

And you really think that's going to happen enough to ruin the game for you? Fuck man, you're just LOOKING for shit to hate.