Producer's Letter & Dev Diary - Introducing RIFT Free-to-Play

[Galibier]

Your sub wouldn't have paid for SL either

What are u talking about? My sub did pay for SL.

[Fujitasix]

I fully expect to be able to pay a monthly fee just as I do now and have access to all content. If I'm having to make conscious decisions about pay-to-access / win and get out my credit card for anything less than expansion worthy content, I'm outta here.

If I was offered each SL zone for $2/ea as I progressed, $5 for each new soul unlocked, $5 for a 150% mount, etc I would've told you goodbye back then. While the final price might've been the same $40 and this a la carte pricing could actually be favorable someone not wanting the full expansion, it's not the method I'm looking for. I don't want to have to make real life monetary decisions persistently in the game environment.

I'm afraid this is going to be a sad goodbye to a game I truly enjoy the first time the cash shop rubs me the wrong way. I sincerely hope there's an all access pass that I can fire and forget about.

[Balidin]

I see a number of people latching onto this. There is no required sub. Please understand that. There is no required sub.

In the world that exists today without any transition to RIFT, we are selling you new souls (and new content). Now, in the future we offer you new content completely for free, but still ask for money for new souls folks are getting upset.

After the conversion we are giving you an entire MMORPG for free, all the content, all the quests, all the levels and we are not charging you for that experience. However, we mention that you don't have to sub, and you don't have to pay for content, but you have to pay for an expansion class, and the pitchforks come out.

~Daglar

You are missing the point.

The pitchforks are out because:

You have actual gear on the shop (its irrelevant what 'tier' it is)

You took money for year long subs knowing you were going to free to play

You offer poor rewards for being a patron and stated we wont be getting credits

You drop this on the community without any advance warning (65+ pages of which 95% is negative feedback to this idea hmm I guess they werent part of the surverys)

You give very poor responses or ignore peoples questions on this forum

My personal one here: you also wont bloomin comment on a)whats going on with weapon wardrobe/transmog and b)if its coming do we have to pay for it.

[Merxion]

We'll consider it, we are looking at all of this feedback folks. I won't come out and say "yep based on this thread we are making this change right now to our plans!" - but we are thinking about all of this stuff.

Keep the feedback coming.

~Daglar

That's a fair response.

[Daglar]

That's a fair response.

Been fighting a soar throat all day long guys, I'll hop on more responses tomorrow.

Keep the feedback coming.

~Daglar

[Rodario]

I'm not sure why you associate Free to Play with "no support and no income". Development on RIFT isn't stopping - if we've created a good business model and provide our players with a good value, then we'll have the potential to bring in more income and put more support towards RIFT.

~Daglar

I rather see this as a desperate move by Trion to create more money. You are simply losing subs faster than expected and this is always a fallback position for any struggling MMO. That's my "spin" to this.

[Xynvyctus]

I'm not sure why you associate Free to Play with "no support and no income". Development on RIFT isn't stopping - if we've created a good business model and provide our players with a good value, then we'll have the potential to bring in more income and put more support towards RIFT.

~Daglar

What im saying is the cashflow going into rift is going to decline, you might disagree but I think that's fairly obvious. Time is money in this case money = development time. Storm caller for example has been an absolute joke for 6 months now. With less money being injected into development should we just go ahead and give up on hoping that it gets some love? How about inquisitor and MM?

[deveilblad]

2.3 will not have any raid gear for sale. We are not releasing the entire tier of T2 raid gear with 2.3 -- most of it comes with 2.4

~Daglar

By this logic, you're implying that you will in fact sell T1 gear once T2 is released, in 2.4 ? REALLY TRION... ?

[Flakey]

Mr. Daglar,

In March i bought Rift for a whole year. The reason for that was that i wanted to make sure that youre company would see my cash and think "People are paying for the game we need to make it better" ... And you and youre team doing that...

What i am reading at youre replys basicly. and that is not factual but what i read is :

That for my rest of my 7 months of subscribtion, we make you patron for those 7 months as compensation for youre recieved cash but.. we cannot make patron extra powerfull nor do we want a second ""uber" group vs free players.

To me it sounds, that my 7 months of cash, that i wanted you to have to increase the game (thus also for me personally) is now spend on me recieving fluff items so as a suporter i dont get to powerfull compaired to free players.

It feels to me that i am leasing a car for a year, payed the whole year up front, and after 3 months the car rental company is saying "the car will drive the same speed as you used to but from now on all extra's/repairs need to be paid for but you do get nice looking items to pimp up youre car from us for free for the next 7 months.

Something isnt right here....

Sincerly,

[Astor]

We are not currently planning on including credits per month. As with everything though, feedback goes a long ways

~Daglar

Kind of like the feedback that said, "Hey, go F2P/P2W?" The same feedback that's shooting so much hate at Trion now?

As much as I've loved Trion until very recently, I'm starting to believe that "feedback" is whatever you want it to be to suit what you want to do with your game. It's your game, you can do with it as you please, you don't need to feed your players a bunch of crap and mis- and/or no- information to do it.

If this change has been in the works for as long as you have claimed then Trion has some very shady business practices to keep such info from their players while pushing the long term subs. While it is true, that no one made these players purchase such long term subs, as many have indicated, they would not have done so had they been in possession of certain facts about Trion's planned business model for RIFT.

Letting your players walk blindly into a long term financial commitment without saying anything is just bad business imo.

[dalthium]

Not to the extent I would like -- see how Arenanet handles things of this nature ;)

It has to be painfully obvious that botting and selling plat or REX is going to result in an account (and IP etc) ban.

Banning legitimate players and banning people for their(Arenanet's) mistakes? That is good handling of terms of service violations? They are awful, way too heavy handed.

[lizbot]

There are a variety of additional benefits to having been a previous subscriber, including a one-time award of Credits & Loyalty (we’ll talk more about this later) once the game has converted to Free to Play.

Definitely curious about how this will be done ~

For me, I don't play daily, and sometimes not at all for long stretches, so in that way sub fees have always been somewhat wasteful. When I play in f2p games, I actually spend a lot on cosmetic items, since customizing and personalizing my characters is a large priority ~ so it would really be nice if that sub fee paid somewhat toward REX items.

Speaking of cosmetic items and character customization, I'm going to selfishly hope this switch leads to more development time being spent on them.

[Kiika]

soo are we going to have to pay for the new souls when they come out also in this pay2win version of rift

From what im reading yes, and I don't mind it tbh but if I have an active sub than I dam sure better get a discount. And that goes for things in the cash shop as well. 20-30% off and I wont feel too cheated

[irkiz]

I was just skimming through the dev tracker when I came upon this.



Did I read this right? Does this mean that previous tier raid gear will be sold on the cash shop?
When tier 2 comes out, tier 1 gear will be put on the cash shop and when tier 3 comes out, tier 2 gear will be put on the cash shop?

Could someone answer my question please.

[Merxion]

Things I'd like to see on the cash shop and their personal perceived value. the idea isn't to debate the content of this post but to throw out our ideas of types of things we would like to see in the cash shop. I know some of my ideas would be vehemently hated by some.

Shared Account Notoriety: $20
Additional roles: $5
Instance Lock Reset: $1 per reset maybe 2.50
Clothing that looks good on a Male dwarf? 5 bucks for a full set.
Mounts: 10 bucks apiece any mount you can buy in game
Additional Bag slots: $5 a slot.
Daily Reset: 2.50 for all daily reset.
full set of expert armor: 15
Soul bound unbinder: 15 bucks