RIFT Team Letter - November 8, 2018

[Islesi]

QoL stuff I'd love:- cross-shard mail and AH. Lowbie WF balancing and incentivising so they're not dead anymore.
QoL stuff I'd hate:- actually merging shards. More forced mentoring for zone events (when you're the only one in a zone with a ZE going on and you can't stay max level to solo it so you have to watch it fail - that really blows).

I have a -LOT- of characters, mostly EU region but a few US region too (mostly for when EU is down). If there are mergers I'd have too many to squeeze into 1 or 2 shards. I also really love having the option of staying on the currently default login shard for populated zone events, but then being able to hop to a much quieter shard for quest mob hunting and artifacts. It's this choice and all the options available to me that I like the most.

[aphoticrogue]

Premades are okay when there are dedicated avenue for them. This is a proven concept in almost every game since the early to mid 90s- RTS, MOBA, MMOS, FPS etc. Trion is one of the few companies that still allow premades to constantly be pit against random players many with lower gear scores or noobs over and over and over again. This is basically developers allowing players to grief others for hours on end and have ruined PvP for years. They have never once tried removing premades from grief-ing other players in instance PvP. They should try it just because of that.

However, I always advocated that premades need their own niche of PvP and like others have said they should create incentives for premades to face eachother where Participating in it is rewarding enough not just winning. I know how awesome it feels to premade for hours vs. noobs especially late night and keep getting win after win after win. It feels great. I have been in PvP guilds and I have even said this would feel awful if I was on that side. Even logged in the middle of matches since I felt dirty doing it to friends. I have had my rogue up pass 68% in rate after 150 games played at one point after premading late nights. It is a horrible concept that I will never support. I didn't like doing for conquest either especially because of the way conquest was designed but at least there were some times when it was challenging during peek hours. During off hours it was a complete joke though..

I haven't heard of a single successful RTS, MOBA, MMO or FPS, taking away the ability to play/party with your friends.

Maybe a solo queue only mode would be a better avenue or a ranked system(mmr/elo) to better pit teams vs each other with better balance, but what you are advocating for is ludicrous and not going to make pvp any better as its not the core problem with pvp.

Hell even a leader board for highest mmr/elo for each Ranked category if competitive and balanced would be a hell of a thing for pvpers sprinkled with some cool rewards for hitting mmr/elo milestones like other games.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves, class balancing comes first.

In your version, if someone wanted to party with their friend and have some fun on limited time they would have to cross their fingers and possibly queue multiple times for that one RNG moment. Enough with the RNG please.

[Baelger]

I really thought over this post a certain time...cause i doubt that any given idea will come to life...neither early nor late...

This team letter seems to be a gamigo order like: "tell 'em nothing, but do it friendly"...

Anyway as i DO have concerns about the game i'll post some suggestions as keywords:
(...and hell yeah...i do know, theres much more to change and improve...but regarding QoL...this things may help)

1. reduce the amount of currencies in the game or better give us a npc that changes old to new in a certain rate - it's so annoying to grind for all the different currencies...

2. FIX all those stupid bouncing mounts...it feels like beeing a gummi ball...even the slightest tip or click makes us fall of edges, peaks and walls...

3. related to the mounts...rework the placing of artifacts...it so damn annoying if you climb the highest peaks or down to the smallest crack and find nothing (or worse a white shiny)...players want rewards for exploring - saying that...replace the unreachable artifacts to reachable places - matches the mount problem!

4. rework and increase the drop rates/spawn points for epic artifacts and thieves - and rework this really stupid shared rnd system for artifacts

5. reduce the requirements for upgrading equipment, essences and fragments...and also reduce the affix/suffix madness

6. reduce aggro ranges especially in celestial lands and implement a system thats avoids beeing dismounted by low lvl mobs - i mean "we are mostly lvl 70 heroes - how can a lvl 10 mob push us off the saddle" ?

7. give some compensation to the communtiy for all the inconvenience of the last weeks...

and last but not least...KEEP UP ONGOING COMMUNICATION with US

oh and maybe one last - personal thing...buff the ranger so it's a competitive soul again

Greets

[Scavenius]

While a great many things could be done, i'm going to start by asking for one of the easier ones.

Please fix the Guard tooltip, not knowing how much damage reduction i have can be tedious.
and then have someone doublecheck that all the stat tooltips are in working order - just so we can be sure that there aren't missing something from them.

It would be nice if we could get leaked some of the math involved in calculating the percentages from the rating for stuff like crit / crit power / dodge / block / guard / armor / resist / etc - so we can plan for the future by calculating when we will hit softcap / hardcap.

Comparing Planar Focus should automatically either compare focus itself to focus itself, or focus + essences to focus + essences - currently it compares other persons focus itself to your focus + essences.

A more tedious wish is an overview to see how much you gain from all your fragments together.

While i cannot say i know enough about the game to comment on balance, but drop rates of fragments can be difficult, despite looking for Crit power on Death and Fire fragments for ages i've yet to encounter a single one - granted i might not be looking as hard as i could, but still, i feel like T1 and T2 fragments are difficult to get your hands on - even for those who play for a while.

EDIT -----------------

To add to the list, a way to 'collect' all reusable toys - so they dont take up all the inventory space and you having duplicates etc.

Also, a way to see what daily quests you've completed, because i constantly feel like i am getting cheated out of the last daily - specifically when you can turn the last daily in via the thingy in the side (as you do with all carnage quests) it seems to update the daily quests completed by 'completion' and not turn in, thus leaving me with the annoying thingy in the side all day. - better check that to see if i am right too actually.
Specifically i'd recommend testing with 29/30 dailies (that's what i am running with mostly) and doing the daily carnage quest form Lana in Alittu - upon completion it seems to update to 30/30 and you can't turn it in.

also please take a quick mount and run around a bit in Alittu - specifically imagine you need to rush to use the porticulum coming from outside Alittu. you'd notice you have a tendency to... bounce? not sure how to fix it, but it is tedious.

[Letobrick]

This letter acknowledges that they aren't going to summarily close down the game, but we have to have more information before we lose the rest of the small population that we do have.

Please, Gamigo, please give us more information as soon as possible! This letter doesn't give us anything to hold on to.

110% agreeing with this.

[PlagueWolf]

Greetings Ascended,

We appreciate your patience as we take some time to solidify plans moving forward. There are a ton of moving parts involved in the transition from where we were to where we want to go, and it’s going to take us a bit of time to navigate all of the changes required to keep Telara and its denizens happy with the world we’ve called home for so long.

With our smaller team we’re still working out the details on what future content updates will look like. While plans are being made for the future, we’re going to be focusing the team on implementing Quality of Life improvements for RIFT in the short term.

We can’t share specifics yet because there's still work being done behind the scenes to build a strong foundation for the future. It’s on this foundation that all future updates will be built. This includes examining the health of our shard populations and looking at ways to make sure all of our players have the best possible experience in game.

If you have specific feedback on the kinds of quality of life changes you’d like to see, be sure to share them with us! It would be very helpful to get a sense for what you feel are your main pain points.

We just wanted to take another moment to thank you for your patience as we’ve been working behind the scenes to get things stabilized. More news will be coming down the road so please bear with us a while longer.

-The RIFT Team

Give us more content, even if it is old stuff. Making old dungeons and raids scaled with the same loot table would be nice or even loot tables spread apart. The same few raids and 4 dungeons are a killer. Some of us never got to fully immerse ourselves in the old content. Thanks.

[Holyroller12]

Give us more content, even if it is old stuff. Making old dungeons and raids scaled with the same loot table would be nice or even loot tables spread apart. The same few raids and 4 dungeons are a killer. Some of us never got to fully immerse ourselves in the old content. Thanks.

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...ml#post5367793
I think most of us would rather have nothing at all so they can focus on something new rather than them taking away any amount of time away from that to rescale the same old raids/bosses/dungeons we've already done (in some cases twice). Every now and then is okay, similar to timewalking dungeons in WoW, but recycling content has been a go to staple for them for several years now and that's not okay anymore and hasn't been for a long time.

[Flashmemory]

Hell even a leader board for highest mmr/elo for each Ranked category if competitive and balanced would be a hell of a thing for pvpers sprinkled with some cool rewards for hitting mmr/elo milestones like other games.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves, class balancing comes first.

In your version, if someone wanted to party with their friend and have some fun on limited time they would have to cross their fingers and possibly queue multiple times for that one RNG moment. Enough with the RNG please.

Rift already tried MMR/ELO. It failed miserably. Not only that but when it worked it actually caused premades to wait in queue for a long time for a pop. It was only when they broke the system by resetting ELO premades were allowed to queue endlessly vs. random players with very low queue times.They have never done exclusive premade vs. premade with incentives that evaporate without participation. They attempted a 5 v 5 arena but with 0 incentives because it would have been abused.. Trion has never balanced classes right in pvp. The most they ever attempted to do was make underpowered classes OP for sometime and switch between making classes OP in some way. They basically gave up on this since all the one button specs back in NT. If they did it right with the right incentives people will premade vs. premade and GvG etc. Honestly if you want to party with friends immediately against random bots they can do that too.. since that is exactly the only way I think they can make all types of players happy. The way it is now is terrible.

[BMX]

Give us more content, even if it is old stuff. Making old dungeons and raids scaled with the same loot table would be nice or even loot tables spread apart. The same few raids and 4 dungeons are a killer. Some of us never got to fully immerse ourselves in the old content. Thanks.

And rehash more to distract from fresh and new content? Excuse me, but how are we to retain players let alone, get new ones?

I thought Trion disbanded...

[Hellishly]

oh and maybe one last - personal thing...buff the ranger so it's a competitive soul again

1000 times this please!

[AtoningUnifex]

Top of my list for ways to get rift up and running again - Communication.

The dearth of communication in the last year or so has almost been the death of Rift.

Get the communication channels working effectively with players and get the engagement process running with the players and that will go a long long way to restoring a bit of confidence in the brand.

Then the rest is really going to be down to how much resource you have available, and with the vast array of suggestions you have already had you could use a series of simple polls..each one with 3 items that you are seeking some kind of priority on.

[Subuster]

Perhaps some kind of promotion too. Free patron for a month maybe?

[Fungi]

First and foremost, you need to look back at the decline of Rift and figure out why. I'll save you some time by telling you what I told you when SL launched. You're listening to the wrong people. The people, back then at least, that were constantly on the forums complaining about OP specs and I should be able to kill everybody else but no other class in the game should dominate another, or I need bolstering in PVP instead of earning my gear and taking the whippings I took to get my gear, and most other aspects of the game were the minority. The majority of people that loved what you produced were busy playing the game, not complaining on the forums or logging on to say how great a list of things in the game were. Most people don't go to the forums to congratulate on a job well done, they want things made easier.

For me, the most important part of Rift that was completely shat upon was the awesome PVP. It was everywhere, open world PVP was prevalent on Gnarlwood, a PVE shard. When you began to hate on PVP all the people I played Rift with began to quit, and when you completely ruined the gear, added the bolstering and the merc system, everyone on my friend list left. Then the P2W model. Call it what you want, F2P I prefer P2W, because it is absolutely a horrible game model. And then there were none, I quit too.

I really missed my cleric, as much as I hate Raids and Dungeons, there was a lot of fun to be found in Rifting, crafting, farming mats and the Zone Events were a blast with as much PVP going on as killing the boss. ZEs aren't near as fun as they used to be with that aspect missing. I was unable to find a game I enjoyed as much as Rift and eventually I came back during NMT. I did not run any dungeons at all in Rift until SFP.

SFP was not an awful Xpac, releasing it before it was finished was a horrible idea. It needs the planar fragments removed. Instead of playing the game and getting the gear I need I have to sort through and recycle massive amounts of fragments. That's not game play, that's work. And clicking infuse for 30 to 45 minutes is infuriating for just one fragment to be max level. I just recently infused my last fragment for a full set for tanking, and I don't even care what the stats are for them and if they are the best or crappiest because the entire system is so convoluted and inane. The absolute worst part of the game currently is that entire system, it needs to go the way of Conquest (Crapquest). The planar fragments need to die. I still have multiple gears sets, I have two versions of the same gloves, one with more endurance than the other, plus the Focus, trinkets, seal and weps. The fragment cores take up more bag space than gear sets ever did. The gear in NMT was perfect. Re-implement that system, no RNG hell, you chose the upgrade path for the stats you needed.

The eternal weapons. Great idea, the only thing you needed to change about them was the cosmic particle quest. The only thing you didn't change about them was the cosmic particle quest. Let's lessen the required game play to level them and keep an un-fun nothing to do with my characters abilities or build quest exactly the same. Again, I just recently got really drunk and did captured the cosmic particles to level up enough to get the shield and tanking wep. It is a terrible quest, exactly what makes PVP so much better than PVE. There is no way the Devs did not see the amount of account information being handed out to get someone else to do the quests, as well as people advertising to complete the particle quests for a fee. If the quest was that bad it was irresponsible of you to allow that to continue for account security purposes alone. The point of the game is to play it and have fun, if players have to get someone else to complete an aspect of the game for them then obviously it was not a good idea and should have been changed.

PVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVPVP! Vengeance, Valor, no more merc system, no more bolstering. Until the merc system is removed and real PVP gear with vengeance and valor are back PVP will remain dead. There is no continuity on teams anymore, as dynamic as PVP is we never needed Vent or any other service to talk to each other. The teams that played well together knew what to expect from other people on the teams. A well fought battle that was lost in the final seconds of the warfront was much more enjoyable than stomping the crap outta the other team (well that's fun too sometimes) and getting merced back and forth and being stomped over and over, or being on the stomping side. I haven't bothered to PVP in two years, it was absolutely horrible. No gear, stupid caches and the merc system.

If something like Conquest and Planar Fragments are introduced and don't work, just kill them. Force people to do something they hate and they will find another game they like in most cases. The buffs from playing Conquest and BIS gear slot from it is what killed PVP. Forcing PVE people into Conquest was probably the absolute worst mistake made. PVE people were unhappy, you pissed off the PVP community by making changes to pacify the PVE people, and wound up pitting us against each other. Just like you did with Prime, you divided the community. Prime would have been a good idea if you had just made Live P2P only and scrapped the store and actually made it Rift at launch. You left all the garbage from Live in Prime and put none of the awesome from original Rift back in Prime. Prime is just Live P2P and stuck at a lower level until you open the next. I made a new character on Live not that long ago and it was exactly the same as leveling on Prime. You wasted my subscription money from Live on Prime, you should have used it to fix Live. Prime is the reason I canceled my sub.

Dimension Items. Instead of wasting time on dimensions, which have nothing to do with playing Rift, again you should have focused on un-breaking what you broke. You tend to target the smallest part of the community when you make changes. I can't even finish leveling my guild because you put the NPC to turn the quests in to in a guild dimension only. That's just dumbassery. I don't have a guild dimension, don't want a guild dimension, don't want anything to do with dimensions. I want you to put efforts into game play, not that garbage, and again you are trying to force people that hate an aspect of the game to do it. I'm also sick of dimension items being in caches and my bags, give me something cool or at least decent vendor trash. Dimension items are so useless they are only worth one silver. Make them gray so I can at least rid my bags of all of them with the click of a button.

Credits. Why did I need credits for essence and rune removal devices when I payed a sub?
Again, the P2W game model sucks. I will never try another game that launches with this model. I don't know how that is anything but P2W, anything related to game play or gear should cost in game currency only. If I ever find a game I enjoy as much as Rift it will be P2P only! What Trion did to ArcheAge was tragic, you hurt AA severely at launch with paying players in Ques because you only had enough servers for a P2P only game, all the non-paying players should have been bumped off the servers or forced to wait until you had your crap together with enough servers online. Then you killed AA in one patch, entire guilds quit in one day. It seemed half the server population quit logging on, there was nobody on. All you had to do to save the game was shut it down until the problem with people unable to log on was fixed and roll it back. Why would you think people that spent weeks preparing for the sieges would be okay with not even having a chance to use all that preparation and loose out on whatever it was they were fighting for (I never bothered with the new area or cared about the new content)? That's called shooting yourself in the head, not even the foot it was so bad.

You have to start caring about retaining players. Trying to get them back with efforts like Prime will never pan out, you've so ruined Rift for me and so many others I'm not sure I, or some of them, will ever be able to get back into Rift like we were even if you fix PVP. I'm not willing to keep giving you money to ignore what I care about in the game and to watch you blow it on the likes of Prime and AA. If you don't get rid of the fragments and put the stats back on the gear I'm not willing to level up anymore of them and I certainly will not fund you forcing awful content on me anymore hoping that you will start caring about player retention and game quality. I've done your dungeons and raids up to TDez, and I have to say everything I hate about raiding and dungeons is still there. The elitist serious raiders really ruin it for people that just want to have fun. They want to PUG but expect you to get good gear from where? PVP was the best system for gear. No rolls on gear ever in PVP, you earned and bought what you needed no RNG hell, no minimum requirements to que. In PVE the LFR will never ever pop, and ques for SPEs are much longer than any que I ever waited for when I used to PVP before the merc system. Essentially, you have to build a group for everything in chat.

[Laeti]

I understand there is very little you can share at the moment about the future of the game (since, I assume, there's not much that the team itself knows for sure) and I appreciate the communication, even if it's simply to let us know that there are still people who care. Thank you!

[Perisemiotics]

Hello is this where we make posts asking for things that most likely wont happen?


I'd like Conquest back.

Oh, and remove those charge things too. If I wanna do 734 dungeons in a day then I should.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

hahaha, I had to login just to like this post. I'd ask for fragment rework myself but I think somebody else already did...