LOL seriously.....Game not in maintenance mode??

[discosoc]

To be fair, a lot of these have been answered over the course of this expansion, but a lot of people don't bother watching streams, reading notes (when available) or keeping themselves up to date with the information that's out there.

I might be wrong, but I've never actually seen a transcript for any of the streams. Having impaired hearing and limited time means those are horrible sources of information for me (and I imagine other people). I know you do recaps and I appreciate those, but either they only touch on a few high-concept things from the stream or the stream simply doesn't provide very much good information in the first place.

For comparison, here is a recent Q&A from World of Warcraft, with quite a bit of information and answers about reasoning and intentions for various things. I get that WoW's community is way larger, but Trion doesn't exactly do a great job of providing information in a way that's accessible to anyone but the really hardcore people with time to spend watching a live stream. Even then, the information is limited.

One of the biggest reasons besides the first 2 points is that the vast majority of people wanted and needed quality of life changes like balance. These directly affect any new raids that would put out in the first place and those changes are finally being made, but they take a lot of time. Those need to be ironed out first before any new raids are to come. More of those changes should be coming sometime this/next month.

I have a hard time agreeing with the notion that class balance is a "quality of life" issue. Balancing classes should be a basic design requirement. Changing a skill to make it less annoying or something is one thing, but that's a far cry from getting class performance in line.

[Omerr]

Should've stayed, were there signs, I ignored?
Can I help you, not to hurt, anymore?
We saw brilliance, when the world, was asleep
There are things that we can have, but can't keep
If they say
Who cares if one more light goes out?
In a sky of a million stars
It flickers, flickers
Who cares when someone's time runs out?
If a moment is all we are
We're quicker, quicker
Who cares if one more light goes out?
Well I do

[Holyroller12]

Trion doesn't exactly do a great job of providing information in a way that's accessible to anyone but the really hardcore people with time to spend watching a live stream. Even then, the information is limited.

One of thee biggest reasons that they hold information back the way they do is because of how much people would flame and rake devs over coals on the forums and sometimes on personal social media. This lead to a lot of bans and suspensions which only fueled the fires even more. Saying something is coming even with prefacing it with "not 100% for sure coming" and then not having that thing come out at all or gets delayed caused a lot of drama so starting with this expansion specifically, we're given radio silence when it comes to information until they are 100% sure that something will be coming barring any last minute issues. I don't agree that radio silence is better and would rather (also asked for) any information/hints to be dropped in small doses so we're not left in the dark, but as of the recent gamescom interview, their stance on that is still the same.

I think for the most part they've been doing a better job with relaying information through all of the usual means like forums posts, streams and every other social media platform, but there's always going to be a degree of individual responsibility (this is true for any other game) where it's up to people to look at any one of those to find the information.

As you pointed out. WoW does have an overwhelmingly larger population of players which in turn means there's a lot more people who dedicate large chunks of time to gathering up the information that developers put out and getting it out to the masses through various fan sites. MMO champion being one of the biggest examples of that. Compare to that Rift and you can probably count on 1 hand that amount of people that even attempt to.

I have a hard time agreeing with the notion that class balance is a "quality of life" issue. Balancing classes should be a basic design requirement.

You're right, that's a fair point. It's not and shouldn't be considered quality of life, but I think the changes they made in how they calculate the balancing was more specifically the quality of life change so that going forward, changes will be a lot easier internally and will allow for more frequent balancing as needed in the future. The work for that had to be put in sooner rather than later though.

[Bloobottle]

TLDR warning!!1one

A while ago I posted something along the lines of what I’m going to say here, but I feel that the sentiment needs repeating. So bear with me. Or don’t. Whatever – your life, your time.

Trion, thank you. Seriously, from the bottom of my heart. I’m not kissing the proverbial - I don’t want free epixx or anything - but I’m just saying thank you. I know I’m not the only one who appreciates what you guys do.

I started playing Rift about 6 years ago when my life circumstances changed and I found myself jobless, homeless and broke. But I still had my PC and a friend took me in, so that was cool. Sadly, I would no longer afford a monthly sub to the widely popular MMO I’d spent the previous decade playing, so I looked around for something cheaper and found Rift. Not just cheaper, but free.

To the complainers, if you’re subscribers/patrons, than I get your frustration. You pay for something, you want results. Fair enough and completely understandable. But for us who have paid a negligible fee (basically to access the auction house) and have had six plus years of free QUALITY gaming since then, Rift is something rare - a gift with no strings attached.

A few years ago I met my new partner and convinced her to try gaming – Rift, of course. She is now as addicted as I am. We’re in a two-person guild, so no dungeons or raids for us, but we still log in every night and find something fun to do. When we’re not questing together on our various characters I collect shinies and she does the dimension thing.

Reading reviews and suggestions for good MMOs, Rift is seldom mentioned, and I always try to get a word in. It’s well crafted, well designed, very playable aside from a few annoying mechanics (the two of us STILL haven’t finished Rhen of Fate hard mode or the Maze of bloody Steel!). Rift is, by and large, just brilliant.

A few small things I could suggest for extending the game’s longevity in the short term:

- Still no twisted shinies in PTW or the Comet. I realise it takes time to create these, but possibly not as much as a full xpac..?

- Still on the shiny front, an extension of poison/burning/nightmare in other regions?

- And... er... still on the shiny front: how about more rewards/achievements for collecting more than 1400 sets? Or new mounts/whatever for tokens (maybe something nice for 1000 tokens, similar to the squirrels for acorns idea?)?

- What about adding a few ultra rare random spawns that can’t be camped that drop mounts/pets/unique loot (RNG stats)?

- I’ve sat in LFR I don’t even know how many times, often for hours, and no luck. Any way to get this to work better? Instances too, maybe, for the lower levels.

And that’s it, really. A few small things that might keep people busy for a bit longer while the cogs of that content creation machine grind away.

So again, thank you Trion for giving me (and now my girlfriend) so many hours of enjoyment. We’ll keep buying credits as and when funding allows, I promise.

B

[aileen]

This year's theme has definitely been one of addressing QOL (Quality of Life) issues on Live, as Dev has explained in previous letters. That has been the case to date, as promised, and will continue.

We appreciate feedback and track it carefully. Development teams have the challenge of balancing personnel resources, player wishes (for many, many different playstyles) as well as the needs of the game progression and evolution. Games, like people, have a life cycle. Some might claim that I am in maintenance mode too, but I plan to carry on for another 30 years or so, albeit at a slower pace. =P

Every player will evaluate the fun and challenge of a game and will act accordingly. Stay, or explore another world instead. Repeatedly posting the same thing will not add to the quality of feedback for Dev.

Brasse

Well scheming your focus on QoL for an "AAA+" MMORPG would easily point game is not taking enough attention from company itself, means new content development is on halt so let's fool our players by adding QoL stuff which has been asked for years and release them 1 by 1 every month...

You know what's ironical and sad same time? You guys referred PRIME won't cause any development problem for LIVE and will not delay anything for LIVE, will not take attention from LIVE at all but now you saying whole team working for SL launch on prime and things for live won't be done until it's done.

This is truely unprofessional and backstabbing to your playerbase, I do play both prime and live same time and as personally warned you guys about prime launch and schedule you set not only prime is dead because of problems and not serving what promised, you also let your live players get hurt from that double edged sword and completely forced it to actual MAINTENANCE mode.

Reasons like dev tools not working after data-type change for HP pools (converting them to 64-bit variant) is another unprofessional reasoning for tech company. If that's the case and you don't have enough resources then don't develop planar disciples and let your engineers recode entire development tools.

If that's not possible then do stat squish which is actual problem we have to get huge HP pools on NPC units, do item level inflation so you can get normalized values on everything from stats to dps and HP values for players and npc units etc.

When things are not planned very well but rushed results will be same what ever you do.

We can easily call this live won't receive any new raid until 2019 and best call if all stuff you guys planned for prime about SL done smoothly unlike vanilla release on prime which was actual disaster and unsatisfying. If things won't be done smoothly the release for live can be delayed to mid 2019...

I really don't know but if things continue like this RIFT will face same end like WildStar did.

Another sad thing is whole active prime population is like 40 to 50 end game players and max online you get in a day is 150ish right now.

I hope SL will revive prime and will be launched smoothly but it feels like it's also unlikely and do not think many players who tried prime and left after month or two will come back at all, so you sacrificing live for 150 online shard, most of recent players on prime also people who got free weekly try, so don't think active subs for PRIME is not more than 500...

Anyway hope your management team will realize what they do wrong and start actually fixing this structural problems but first thing they must do is increasing team size, defiance 2050 which is surely having 4x or 5x more active team members is having same online amount as RIFT, same goes for Atlas Reactor…

I'm still appreciated all devs and engineers working on the game since they follow orders from management but please do not ruin this guys works and your game...

[Seshatar]

I don't even understand the focus on Prime anymore. After the rough start and initial problems with the content delivery on Prime I only hear that Prime is dead and player numbers of Prime are lower than just the EU live version. And from those people who still play on Prime many have been Patron before for live anyway. As the subscription is the main source of income from Prime, I wonder how many people are actually just subscribed for Prime and not for Patron on live too. Then comparing to store sales, patron and Maelforge packs etc. from live, I'm pretty sure live makes more money than Prime right now.

I personally can only see a strategical decision behind that. Prime is being used to revisit the old code, to i. e. overhaul old systems and improve mentoring and concat rewards. Parts of this overhaul can later be used for live (make all raids/dungeons with well-balanced mentoring as LFR/LFG to make them partially relevant for all levels again) and also whenever a Prime server reaches its end they could restart a new one and mostly let it run automatically and just set dates when content unlocks. So this first Prime server is kind of the beta of a mostly automated, repeatable progression server model and the overhauled code can also benefit live. That's kind of the only reason I can see why Prime still has this focus, as it's impact is relevant in the long term for both live and also future prime servers. And it kind of is a good strategy.

Only the future will tell what Trion's master plan is, but I see we still have a dedicated dev team working on brand new features, content and more. Let's hope they fix the 64bit HP issue soon and realease iGSB and then come up with brand new raids asap.

[Oliverclothesoff]

Quote Originally Posted by TrionBrasse View Post
This year's theme has definitely been one of addressing QOL (Quality of Life) issues on Live, as Dev has explained in previous letters. That has been the case to date, as promised, and will continue.

We appreciate feedback and track it carefully. Development teams have the challenge of balancing personnel resources, player wishes (for many, many different playstyles) as well as the needs of the game progression and evolution. Games, like people, have a life cycle. Some might claim that I am in maintenance mode too, but I plan to carry on for another 30 years or so, albeit at a slower pace. =P

Every player will evaluate the fun and challenge of a game and will act accordingly. Stay, or explore another world instead. Repeatedly posting the same thing will not add to the quality of feedback for Dev.

Brasse


If you guys appreciate the feedback so much than why don't you at least let us know that you are actually paying attention to anything we have to say so we would stop repeating ourselves hoping at least one of you is paying attention lol. Communication for ANYTHING is a plus for a game even if it is just to let us know you hear what we are trying to say and maybe take that into account for any future updates!

I agree with Holyroller about being careful about what you say for anything but not even responding to anything we have been posting about for years just makes matters worse. It's like you're ignoring everything we are trying to tell you and whether you know it or not we are trying to help you so we don't lose anymore people which at this point you literally can't afford to lose.

You said yourself maintenance mode is when the server just resets, um isn't that all we have been getting for the last like 4 weeks, including downtime more than once a week?? If I'm wrong about this than I apologize but fixing text in game for a quest or doing dimension stuff is not a big deal as far as I'm concerned and I'm sure most people would agree with me on this.

It's nice to see that Prime didn't mess with live like you guys said it wouldn't and it wouldn't take anything away from live and they were two pretty much separate games oh wait.....nevermind.

I do appreciate everything the devs do and I wish you guys the best of luck with the small team that you have working on rift but yeah it's time to look elsewhere like Brasse was so thoughtful to suggest. Have a good weekend everyone!

[Refuge]

This entire game is boring because we have had nothing new in forever and it's the same stuff every day. I do use my own eyes and that's how I judge Trion on what they do and don't do.

Lol repetitive nonsense, of course it is because people are trying to get Trion to understand where most of the playerbase is coming from and hoping against hope that they actually pay attention to what we have to say which of course they haven't. What difference does waiting for a livestream do, it's going to be more info on prime and maybe igsb which most of us don't care about but will take cause at this point it's better than nothing and if Trion paid attention to our REPETITIVE NONSENSE they would know that.

The only reason people post on here most the time is because we love the game and want it to succeed and hope that some of our ideas or wants for the game get taken into consideration somewhere along the road which again they don't. Nice to see people like you though that tell us to give it a rest when you yourself have stated that you're just a casual player and prolly have no idea what most of us are concerned with. GG and have a nice day lol!

Wow you're amazing. Just like that you've explained to Trion that actually adding new content and fulfilling player requests makes a game good! Mind ****ing blown. I owe you big time, I would have never thought actually adding content would make the game good, thanks for straightening that out for all of us.

[Oliverclothesoff]

Wow you're amazing. Just like that you've explained to Trion that actually adding new content and fulfilling player requests makes a game good! Mind ****ing blown. I owe you big time, I would have never thought actually adding content would make the game good, thanks for straightening that out for all of us.

More than happy to help, you're very welcome, anytime you need me to help explain things to you I will be happy to do that, you know maybe you should work for Trion I hear they are looking for people lol

[Clowd]

This year's theme has definitely been one of addressing QOL (Quality of Life) issues on Live, as Dev has explained in previous letters. That has been the case to date, as promised, and will continue.

Brasse,

I appreciate the communication from the dev team, including both dev letters that have come out this year. They have been informative, and given the playerbase some insights into what to expect.

However, with all due respect, I do not believe that the theme of a "QOL Year" has been communicated clearly by the dev team in any official capacity. To add onto this, it is also clear that the team has had to pour far more time and resources into balancing and tweaking Rift Prime content this year than was both originally planned and communicated to the playerbase.

That being said, things like Planar Disciples, Planar Dungeons, the revamped Call to Action events, and some other upcoming content that I won't spoil here should be welcome additions to Live. I'm not 100% positive if it will be enough to sate the appetite of the playerbase for Live.

[Refuge]

Brasse,

I appreciate the communication from the dev team, including both dev letters that have come out this year. They have been informative, and given the playerbase some insights into what to expect.

However, with all due respect, I do not believe that the theme of a "QOL Year" has been communicated clearly by the dev team in any official capacity. To add onto this, it is also clear that the team has had to pour far more time and resources into balancing and tweaking Rift Prime content this year than was both originally planned and communicated to the playerbase.

That being said, things like Planar Disciples, Planar Dungeons, the revamped Call to Action events, and some other upcoming content that I won't spoil here should be welcome additions to Live. I'm not 100% positive if it will be enough to sate the appetite of the playerbase for Live.

They can't communicate it, if it never existed. Nothing noticeable for the player anyway.

Planar Disciples was clearly banked for a potential future expansion but now heading to Live, for reasons I'm sure we can figure out.

The max health problem has caused some serious problems. Weird that, because Archonix a while back on a stream said they had a fix for it. Oops. It's caused so much of an issue it's the very reason we haven't seen IGSB come to Live yet, and probably won't see it in November, and probably will never see it at this rate if 64 bit change is that hard to work with.

Hence feeding us with a bit of fluff might help, if the fluff actually ever comes.

I'm just stating the facts here why we may have hit a brick wall. I'm not one of those claiming Trion need to sort their act out and give us more content like that isn't blatantly obvious.

[Waseem2k]

I have come to accept the fact that Rift live won't be getting any relevant content until either Prime is closed down or it catches up to live.

Trion has never been known to actually listen to their players (Only on rare occasions they have). While they say they listen, it really doesn't feel like it.

Prime is only one of their latest escapades. Many of us said that it was a bad idea. It would split the player-base. It would divert resources from live. Live needs more content. etc. They still went ahead with it and exactly what we said is what's happening right now.

Planar Disciples will happen, whether we like it or not. There's nothing we can do about that. It's another waste of time and resources especially now as we desperately need a new raid.

There is still a lot of class balancing to be done. We should have been well into t3 farm, waiting for a new expansion by now (which we definitely don't need right now). Dev team needs to focus on releasing a t3 raid and then on fixing all the issues that are preventing people from reinstalling the game. There is still time to salvage what's left of this shipwreck.

[BMX]

To be fair, a lot of these have been answered over the course of this expansion, but a lot of people don't bother watching streams, reading notes (when available) or keeping themselves up to date with the information that's out there. There are all official answers that have been given at one point or another. Whether or not people like the answers is a different story of course. To be clear, I'm not defending their decisions and share most of the frustrations that others have, but just relaying the information that's already out there.

That is in part what this forum is for. So peeps can pop in and catch up on one URL and not have to go to 15 different places.


The main reason was the team size at the start of the expansion. This was discussed upon the release of BoS on a stream where Icarus was present. While it was specifically more about raid size, it still applies to the rest of the expansion in general.

We had a much larger team at the launch of 4.0... Many team members either moved on their own accord or were part of layoffs.


Roughraptors admitted that certain systems like Fortress Sieges were rushed out too soon and that was mainly because people need/wanted something to do as there wasn't anything besides the 2 dungeons at the time. Personal Note: Not having content available at the level cap was likely due to the first point above.

This is unfortunate however, bad decisions are made frequently in terms of content and rollout timing.


One of the biggest reasons besides the first 2 points is that the vast majority of people wanted and needed quality of life changes like balance. These directly affect any new raids that would put out in the first place and those changes are finally being made, but they take a lot of time. Those need to be ironed out first before any new raids are to come. More of those changes should be coming sometime this/next month.

Balance is a basic component of and title's expansions and cannot be shirked whatsoever.

It's also no secret to any of us that Prime (as many predicted early on) took a lot of focus away from Live and while that has been a little better, it still seems to be the case in a smaller degree. Storm Legion is on the horizon for Prime so getting that up and running is one of their priorities as of 9/14/18 via the live stream. More notes:https://www.thegharstation.com/2018/...ember-14-2018/

Prime should have had its own dedicated team, period.


Again, the vast majority of people have been asking for store changes since it's introduction really. The issues and drama around the store were heavily escalated last year with the Dragon's Hoard pack and the $100 random mount box released in December. The battelfront 2 debacle also contributed to those decision to make changes as well I'm sure.


Personal Loot - Their attempt to allow people to grind to their hearts content as you can continually get marks and loot (specifically from dungeons as it doesn't apply to raids) so long as you have the IRCs to spend. The issue of course is that unlike prime, you either have to wait on a weekly basis to get more charges or you have to buy them. They really should've been ways to farm them in game like there is in Prime.

Eternal Weapons - Their answer to not have to wait for weapon drops in order to keep progressing through raids. Obviously attaching such major procs to the weapons contributed to the terrible balance problems we had seen even up to this current point. Either way it was something they tried and hopefully learned from as they said that they plan to do things differently if they continue with the idea of eternals in the future.

Personal Story: In vanill Hammerknell, I had a lot of warriors and the only relevant weapons were from Grugonim and Akylios. We killed Grug for several months and never saw a single warrior weapon to the point where we contacted a Dev and were told that we had really bad luck. Some of the warriors had to spend a lot of extra time grinding out PvP weapons (which wasn't easy back then) to get that little extra hit in order to be ready for Infernal Dawn. In that sense, Eternal weapons are great, but just implemented poorly like a lot of other things.

Planar Fragments - Another attempt to answer accidentally vendoring extra sets many people had to carry around, especially tanks: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...bag-ideas.html
While people simply wanted a bag that would just carry that extra gear without having to worry about vendoring, that eventually turned into fragments. It was also beyond expensive for many people in Nightmare Tide constantly stat swapping and have to buy rune removers or make/buy new runes entirely. Fragments were a "level cap them once and be done for good" situation where any actual armor that dropped would just be a straight upgrade if it had higher base stats. Great idea, poorly implemented... especially because you ended up having to spend 10x more plat than stat swapping in NT. This was due to the 1% of people sitting on 100k+ plat in NT complaining that they had nothing to spend it on.

[B]Pfft! Planar fragments... One of the many roulette wheels in gamble to progress. Gear slots could have been created similar to wardrobe slots or frag slots so we would never, ever have to file a ticket cause a gear set was accidentally D/E'd or vendored since items were interspersed with rubbish in bag slots./B]

Spare us with the "It's rocket science" explanations. Peeps are either competent or they aren't.

[Zerofate]

I don't even know what to say anymore about this game.

Saying maintenance mode is just restarting servers... so that means just changing one skin in game is enough content for you guys? Please think of what you say before you type it Brasse. I know you mean well but you come off so condescending that I feel insulted half the time you respond to someone.

The whole QoL theme year feels like an insult to your players. If you can do these things now with the smaller Dev team, why not earlier? Maybe these things should have been fixed... I don't know when you billed us for a "polished expansion?" Take fragments for example, I don't remember players coming out in droves saying they liked the system, all I remember is people complaining it cost to much and had to much RNG. It only took, what, a year to figure out that it annoys your players? This tells me you guys either have Devs that get to do whatever they want regardless of what players report, or your upper management is out of touch.

A lot of us gave good solid feedback, just look at the forums, and you repeatedly ignored it. Then you have the nerve to complain when we don't continue to give you feedback?

That being said there are Devs that really feel like they want to better the game, and I thank you guys. Rift has a lot of possibilities and some really great ideas that could turn it around, but you guys have cried wolf with the quality of your content so long that most people are skeptical now. I know I won't be buying anything else from your team until I see some solid changes.

I think the balance changes are long overdue and I'm happy they are finally being looked at. But come on guys it should never take this long to do this basic stuff. I'm not a programmer so maybe these things were really difficult to change but I also feel that if it's that hard to change then maybe it was coded poorly to begin with.

What will balance look like for the next expansion, that should be in the planning stages now and it just feels like you focus on what's in front of you and not long term (deleting old HK for example). The excuse of "OMG to many souls, so hard" is an insult. You've repeatedly backtracked on your statements (healing classes shouldn't dps-chantion, pet classes are solo -ele) that you've lost the trust of many players. Oh and remember that feedback you didn't listen to? Well those were also your best voices to help balance as well.

Prime not effecting live was a big thing you guys promised, and hell, PRIME was SUPPOSE to be the maintenance mode Rift, content just rolled out with hardly any back end work. But you divided your already small and by your own admission overwhelmed dev team (to many souls, to much work) into essentially 2 games.But again, same as the polished expansions, that isn't what we got.

Please be aware all of this is just my opinion and I do thank you for a game I've enjoyed for a few years, but please understand how disappointed I am in you guys right now.

TL;DR Thanks for AoL instant messenger 2.0

[Balidin]

aileen is really on the money. The fact that tools may break because of code refactoring for 64 bit does appear quite unprofessional. It suggests that development is run on a shoe string and Trion as a company is sparing very little resource for Rift Live.

To me personally a problem like that would need to be addressed pronto.
I mean day 1, 9am, let's get this fixed right now before we do anything else.