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Is Rift heading for a bleak future?
strangiato2112
Member CommonPosts: 1,538
in Rift
http://ascendedchronicle.blogspot.com/2013/02/is-rift-heading-for-bleak-future.html
Not my blog post, it belongs to Synovia, whose normal posts on the Rift forums can be classified as fanboi-ish. Its a pretty unbiased look at what has been happening at Trion since Storm Legion release.
Comments
good and interesting read , thanks for posting this . I personally think this has been a long time coming myself. People just gotta face it rift is just a niche game and has never really took off . What it did about what warhammer online and age of conan did at release? then fell off pretty fast over the first year. I know they have more players in general but I cannot imagine they have all that many playing rift still but the hardcore fans and trial accounts.
Personally I see Trion cutting down to a smaller team , releasing defiance and kinda just giving up on Rift myself in the long term. They have Archeage and Defiance , plus end of nations so I see them more or less doing the entire publisher thing with pushing some of their talent on defiance to see how that goes. Rift has kinda already done everything they can to bring in a mass influx of players and they dont seem to keep them when they come so i just do not see it being all that profitable to keep a big team on rift much longer.
Not bleaker then its past, unless they discontinue the service. Rift was a good first attempt at making an mmo. I am sure they learned alot from their mistakes, but they have never showed any attempt to repair their mistakes in Rift and just carried on with their vision. The failure of Rift is a result of lack of vision imo, and when Scott Hartman is a visionary his impact on the game must have been very minimal.
In other words the blogger is not just a Rift fanboy, but a Scott fanboy too.
It takes one to know one.
Actually it's funny as initially (even after launch) it looked like they do have a vision of how Rift should be like however then it appeared like they suddenly lost it. Too many instanced stuff to do, artificial ow PvP (PvP quests), nerfed zone events. Also it's funny cos from what I remember this wasn't what players were asking for before launch
I think Rift's vision was frequent patch updates, but I am not convinced they ever had a clear vision on what Rift should be at all.
When 3 months or so after launch it was clear that retention was an issue and people were leaving rift faster than they were coming in, Trion started throwing shit up against the wall to see what would stick. Thats why you have so many poorly developed features in Rift. Planar Attunement, Chronicles, Master Mode Dungeons, Conquest. These are all things with pretty minimal implementation. IA is the only thing they ran with, and when it launched it was small too, like they were dipping their toes in the water.
I don't know what's going on with Trion finances, but it seems that the blogger missed a major piece of information in his post.
Trion has recently partnered with XLgames to publish Archeage.
Archeage is a higly hyped MMO in the west, and I believe Trion will put all its resources behind this project.
Having said that, because Archeage is already fully developed and tested, Trion won't need a big team to westernize and localize the game, hence the need to lay off all those employees.
With a casual MMO (Rift) and a Sandboxish game in the making (Archeage), Trion has the whole MMO market covered and it doesn't need to develope another one.
My 2 Cents.
I Played Rift for well over a year and in that time I felt that Trion wobbled in it's vision and what they stood for, based on patches for the game. Example, when they came out with the 3 faction PvP arena and added lore from that. It was disturbing because the original 2 factions, now could actually be playing together and support each other. It was one of many little things where the lore ball was dropped in place of expediancy to keep money coming in.
I also feel they now want to be a publisher only, as they are going to be the NA outlet for ArchAge (I am not sure if they are going be publisher any place else). This points to a shift in how the company works and the article the OP has listed, points to that as being done.
I liked Rift, but the inconsistancies in the lore, for the love of money, really did drive me out of the game.
don't see the price really being a huge issue overall.. To me think its more and more games offering good content and no sub fee.. Makes it hard to justify paying $15 a month when I could play a game with equal or even greater content that charges no monthly fee..I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
The key word is "recently". The article focuses on stuff before, and unrelated to, the Archeage deal.
And a company stretching itself too thin and then further extending its resources isn't going to help Rift at all. "Putting all its resources" behind Archeage = death for Rift. Rift can't afford to lose any more people than it already has.
Not to mention any company putting all its resources behind a Korean game is just playing Russian Roulette with 5 bullets. Korea has yet to produce even a moderate success in the west. Archeage has a chance, but history isnt in it corner.
But given as its just a publishing deal, I doubt Trion is allocating too many resources to it. They have Defiance is a more urgent need atm. EoN should hae just been cancelled, like SoE did with The Agency.
The economy has nothing to do with it. At all. Cheap entertainment does well in down times, because there is always a need to be entertained. And 15 bucks a month is absolutely cheap entertainment. Movie theaters had their best year ever in 2012, and thats 15 bucks for 2 hours, not a month.
I dont even think B2P and F2P games have a huge effect. I think its just that most P2P games are either old or mediocre. itgrowls mentioned WoW, but when did WoW lose those subs? After an awful expansion. Mediocre content. Cataclysm and age/burnout are the two factors in WoW's subscription drop over the past 2 years.
It is in Trions best interest to make Rift F2P. There are far greater amounts of consumers out there now in the F2P market that can be turned into potential customers than they could EVER hope to get to buy a copy of their game now. Rift is well beyond the point of bringing in a decent amount of new players so there is zero business sense in keeping a subscription only model as it will do nothing but slowly bleed players away.
As is, players now have a large quantity of decent to A+ F2P games to choose from, Tera to SWTOR to LoRTo to EQ2...and even B2P games like GW2 and TSW...who would chose to jump into a game that has been out for a few years, to start so far behind as well as having to dump all that money on the game and expacs when they can choose from all those games? Few.
And that is why F2P is in their best interest, if they believe in their game, they would believe they would pick up enough of those people into an elite/sub status to boost their revenue.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
neither has WAR
u can macro all those changes and smash the key to the fullest.... and thats why im not playing rift
, the game is fun , the content is there, lots of souls ect , but what? , playing any soul is the same , smash 1-4 macros to victory... even as tank 
I never post to comment on a game (and why start now?) but I feel that this game had a lot of unique features going for it in the beginning. At first glance w/out playing it seems like a WOW/EQ clone w/ less child-like & better graphics but it did things WOW has lately been unable to do. It had a fun world environment where you didn't know if you were gonig to be caught up in a massive struggle against a PVE event or a PVP brawl. PVP itself isn't flying down out of the sky to kill a low-level player but teams of geared & skilled players struggle to dominate a zone.
Don't get me wrong I like WOW and some of it's features are superior (and some other MMO's) but it didn't have the same dynamism for world play.
Then the expansion hit and some things about it are cool but it seemed like SL lost a lot of it's attention to detail and it just wanted to rush the xpac out to compete w/ MOP (& leveling w/ MOP was much more fun than SL). I'm hoping RIft turns around but until then I'll hope for a dynamic game I can play and that keeps PVP interesting comes out. Maybe that game will be ESO, who knows.
Actually, Storm Legion is one of the greatest expansions I've ever encountered, even with the slight amount of bugs it had the first few months, most of which have already been fixed. The game is absolutely growing, albeit on a small scale. Can't see it maintaining it's growth after all the new sandboxy and pvp games coming out late 2013, but for now it's more than just stable as far as population goes. Warfronts are notably different in population. At level 50, there are tons of players who are brand new to warfronts, and at first was surprising. The ques pop instantly 24/7 once you hit 50 and stay that way. I made an alt and leveled up strictly in warfronts hitting 50 really fast. Started making friends by answering questions and helping out, hadnt seen new players trying out the pvp since I can't remember.
I'll play until Arche Age, and most likely will try out the other new games that open this year, like Neverwinter, Wildstar, and ESO if it does indeed happen in 2013. I'll remember Rifts soul system as the main reason why I stopped playing LOTRO, WOW, and Age of Conan. MIxing that with pvp is what made warfronts so fun for almost 2 years and counting.
Very glad Trion is publishing Arche Age. Until these other games come out, Rift and Guild Wars 2 seem to be the bigger hitters concerning recent games.
Hmmmm, I tend to be in the other camp entirely. The departure of Hartsman means that the game will head in exactly the wrong direction. Now I know where you are coming from but after all the original game and its first year has to have been substantially Hartsman's guidance.
From what I have seen Storm Legion was the result of a rush job to put all of the content in development out the door before they gutted the team. I said that at the time and even suggested that Hartsman was on the way out as early as November. Well Hartsman's departure has been and gone and his parting comments suggest he lost control way before the announcement.
Some Rift players love the recent changes, perhaps even a lot of the current players. But I know that 14 out of 24 people in my (now defunct) guild left the game because they did not like Storm Legion and/or the changes. I was one of them.
I'm sorry to hear about core players leaving the game, but I still find Storm Legion to be one of the best expansions ever. The housing alone, albeit not as easy with the UI as everquest 2, is possibly the best I've ever seen, with housing leaderboards partly solving the argument between instanced and non instanced. The bolstering changes to pvp means that instead of twinked out players decimating newer players and turning them off from warfronts, we now have lots of first timers at level 50 asking what to do at the Codex since it's their first time. (am surprised by how many times this happens now actually)
It's hard to imagine Rift being viable after 2013 with all of the new games coming out later this year. But for now, most of the changes and the expansion itself have been wonderful and has grown the games population undeniably.
I am curious though, which changes caused you and your guild members to leave?
Some of them simply never logged in again. A couple despised the changes to Clerics and found the sacking of the cleric dev to be disheartening. Some found the rep grind to extensice to bother with, many had problems with the expert mode dungeons lots of reasons.
For myself: Account wide PA, the "mini games" where you become a mech. The change from a balanced approach to Magitech to a much more tech centered environment. The heavy emphasis on particular roles being focussed on one aspect within a class, compellng switching of roles on a much more frequent basis. Too many fishing bots and the idiocyncratic way that they attempted to handle it. The presence of "Conquest Perks" and the trinket that made doing Conquest (PvP) a requirement for raiding. A significant drop in the performance of Customer Support after the departure of Walsingham. The gutting of the development team for Rift. Other things but this is turning into a rant.
You seem to know a lot about the game, and i agree about fishing bots and drop in customer support. In fairness though, fishing bots have been handled and was hampered a lot by the Holidays and the two week vacation for Trion employees.
I also hate Conquest and forced pvp for raiders but like it much more now since its been tweaked/fixed . . . although it still needs more work. (There are other trinkets now to get besides the conquest one) I also love the PA account wide, was happily surprised by it. And as far as switching roles in warfronts/raids, i think it's one of the best examples of why lots of people enjoy Rift. I love being able to master more than one role and switch as needed. It takes more work, is more of a challenge, and provides a lot more flexibiility.
I still feed Rift needs to be more immersive, but not sure what qualitites can fix that, and is something fairly subjective. Hope you and your guild can at least rejoin in another game you enjoy, and still sorry to hear you all go.
BTW my own feeling is that Conquest was an Elrar project from go to wow and as an example of his project managment skills does not bode well for the game.